Simon Heffer
In Fagin’s Footsteps
The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens’ London
By Judith Flanders
Atlantic Books 520pp £25 order from our bookshop
We think we have an idea of the Victorian city precisely because so many of our cities still look, in part, Victorian – not just the obvious suspects such as Leeds, Manchester or Bradford, but much of London too. Yet, as Judith Flanders explains in this well-researched and often fascinating book, the London in which the Victorians lived is largely beyond our imagination – and from what she tells us, it is probably just as well.
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