Shall I continue to write this Novel?

Below is the first page of my novel, "December", which is set in Victorian England. I have currently written only the first 7,000 words. Depending on the feedback to this hub, I will make a decision as to whether to invest time and energy in completing it. Candid but constructive feedback is appreciated. Thank you.

December, grey and bitter, dressed up London in a shroud.

Michael Edwards disembarked at King’s Cross, the train spitting fire and bellowing a cauldron’s worth of smoke. With a last screech of brakes and a lurching judder, the locomotive came to berth in the centre of the known world.

He pushed impatiently out of the first class carriage, striking out amidst the thronging hawkers and riff-raff flocking on the platform. It still revolted him, the acrid and bitter stench of London, the din of this soaring Babel around him. The magnificent station, fifteen years old, had sprung out of the old smallpox hospital like a reincarnation, a form of deadly resurrection. To the modern eye, King’s Cross was a workshop of the gods, a primeval forge from which new and glistening things were made. Mr Edwards had a Romantic eye, and the vision appalled him.

The lawyers were waiting. He could not dawdle. The burden of minutiae, of footnotes, of cases, of obiter dicta weighed like a sack of gravel in his brain. Too much water had passed under the bridge, too many deceptions and evasions, too many wasted years. His birthright had drained away like his father’s blood in the sand. Still, the suit was nearing resolution. The case would reach the Court of Appeals on Tuesday.

A servant jostled down for a cab and a broken horse trudged forward. He could feel it now, the decay everywhere, in the thick crust of soot that encrusted everything like the icing on a black wedding cake. The streets dripped with manure, but it did not smell like home. Advertisements for cocoa powder and carbolic tablets plastered every surface as if they could ward off all the filth. He had seen enough on the journey down, seen the mass building sites all the way from Hampstead, the shock of the relentless building boom. The identical modern redbrick streets were bursting out like plague sores over the meadows of old England. It almost made him physically sick.

He gagged as the cab sprinted out into traffic, a noisy and chaotic ballet. On and on they drove, down to Chancery Lane, where the lawyers swarmed like lice and his own destiny waited. On his first trip, he had fancied himself a young Arthur, come to pull the sword from the stone and claim his inheritance. Then he met the pallid and lean lawyers of Stafford Baillie & Sons and the iron maiden they referred to as their contract for professional services. He realised his mistake as soon as he was closeted with them in their dark, cramped and fusty library and the particulars of the case were revealed.

That is how the illusions of youth begin to die.

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