Stephen Halliday
Eastenders
The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum
By Sarah Wise
Bodley Head 384pp £20 order from our bookshop
Sarah Wise has returned to Bethnal Green, where she was last seen recounting the fate of ‘The Italian Boy’, murdered in 1831 by grave robbers so that they could sell his corpse for dissection. In The Blackest Streets she gives an equally horrifying account of the living conditions endured by those who survived in those dark streets east of Shoreditch High Street, known as ‘The Old Nichol’ or ‘The Jago’. It is difficult to do justice to the squalor, poverty and disease that its residents suffered, but one fact may help. The annual death rate in Bethnal Green in the late nineteenth century was forty per thousand inhabitants. Elsewhere in London it was twenty. It is now six.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
What's the worth of being zen when the icecaps are melting and populism looms? The world's leading thinkers including @ronpurser will assess the 'mindfulness' craze at the world's largest philosophy and music festival, @HTLGIFestival, this May. Learn more: http://ow.ly/STu650ywARQ
'Feminists have been caricatured so often that it’s worth recalling the many obstacles placed in the path of women campaigning for equal rights.'
@polblonde on @helenlewis's new book about difficult women throughout history.
http://ow.ly/Is9c50ywe7G
'Too many historians sneer at our forbears; scolding them if they follow the customs of their own day ... tut-tutting if the poor things are detected having a little fun.'
From the archive, Mary Clive on medieval travellers.
http://ow.ly/yk8a50yrjSG