The Victorian city

Excellent book, as all of Flanders' are, focusing refreshingly on the poor and women's domestic lives. Highly recommended.

One of those books that reminds you that the past is really a foreign country. It would never have dawned on me, for example, that people didn't necessarily have kitchens, but would take their food to “cookshops” to have it prepared for meals. And how much manure would be produced by the tens of thousands or horses used in the city (and how much hay they'd need to eat...). And that people wouldn't have any better sense than to drink the river water into which they'd just emptied their chamber pots! Extensively-researched and greatly detailed look at day-to-day life 150 years ago, enriched by many references to Charles Dickens' life and writing.