Uncovers twelve shocking stories, untold for over a century and reveals the darker side of the Victorian upper and middle classes - their sexuality, fears of inherited madness, financial greed and fraudulence - and chillingly evoke the black motives at the heart of the phenomenon of the 'inconvenien[...]
The phenomenon of false allegations of mental illness is as old as our first interactions as human beings. Every one of us has described some other person as crazy or insane, and most all of us have had periods, moments at least, of madness. But it took the confluence of the law and medical science,[...]
In The Italian Boy, Sarah Wise not only investigates the case of the London Burkers but also, by making use of an incredibly rich archival store, the lives of ordinary lower-class Londoners.[...]
In 1887 Government inspectors were sent to investigate the Old Nichol, a slum on the boundary of Bethnal Green parish, where almost 6,000 inhabitants were crammed into thirty or so streets of rotting dwellings and where the mortality rate ran at nearly twice that of the rest of Bethnal Green. This w[...]
Uncovers twelve stories, untold for over a century, which reveal the darker side of the Victorian upper and middle classes - their sexuality, fears of inherited madness, financial greed and fraudulence - and chillingly evoke the black motives at the heart of the phenomenon of the 'inconvenient perso[...]