Product Description

'Spilling facts, lives, conditions, intolerable burdens and the spirit expressed by spontaneous dancing in the streets, The Blackest Streets is a little masterpiece.'

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8585 in Books
• Published on: 2009-06-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Review
'Wise is too clever and considered a historian simply to give us a lurid, one-dimensional Victorian melodrama. Through painstaking archival work and readable empathetic prose, she has instead sought to evoke the texture of life here.' --Sinclair Mackay, Daily Telegraph, 28 June 2008

"Sarah Wise animates the horrors in fascinating detail" --Saturday Telegraph Review

Review
'A brilliant social history... a reminder that our enlightened society was built on an inhumanity only just beyond living memory.'

Review
'... an excellent and intelligent investigation.'

Customer Reviews

A black day for story-telling
I really wanted to like this book. I really did. This sort of social history is just my cup of tea, but I found myself praying for this book to end before I'd reached half way. I was initially excited at the beginning of each chapter and what it promised: the roles of the local authorities, philanthropists, charities, the police, religion, etc. on slum life, only to be buried under a landslide of petty bureaucracy and unenlightening trivia a dozen paragraphs in. The cumulative effect of all these facts and statistics is energy-sapping and distracting. Where is the REAL story? Where are the anecdotes? When will we see what it was like to live in the Nichol in the late 1880s? I finished this book and I still don't know.

I was initially made aware of this book from an article in BBC History magazine, which cherry-picked the one interesting chapter -- "Phantoms in the Fog", concerning the police and judicial system -- and made an interesting article about it. Now I know why they picked that chapter. It would be difficult to select any other chapter to make an interesting article. But perhaps I shouldn't be too uncomplimentary. I DID learn something from this book and I WAS disabused of some common misconceptions about Victorian squalor that I might have seen sensationalised in some costume dramas on the television.

However, this is a much too sober and over-analytical study of a subject that is probably better suited to a more casual and popular approach. Having said that, Wise does treat the subject matter very humanely and sympathetically when she occasionally moves away from facts and statistics. I really wanted more anecdotes, more story-telling. The black-and-white photographs were well chosen and nicely reproduced in the body of the text rather than as plates on glossy paper. I think that was a good decision. I would recommend that this book is taken out of the library rather than bought, as I did, because it isn't exactly as described in the blurb, so the interested reader might be disappointed with his purchase.

What a Book! Social history at its very best
I have seldom read such an affecting book. It is a model of accessible, informative and gripping social history. Through meticulous research, it tells the lives of those people who lived in the area known as "The Nicol" in East London in the late 19th c. there are countless individual stories of heartbreaking poverty, set against the bigger picture of social, political and religious reforms and the history of urban victorian slums. Contemporary photographs and etchings are really illustrative and help bring the area to life. I have ancestors who lived in the area and it provided a fascinating and humbling glimpse of their lives but this book is so well written and informative, in a very accessible style that anyone interested in history will enjoy it. It is a real page turner - I was completely caught up in the day to day lives of the people of the Nicol. Utterly compelling and highly recommended. My book of the year so far.

The Blackest Streets
I am enjoying this book because it has shed new light on my own family's story as they lived in Bethnal Green at the end of the 19th century. The use of personal stories especially those of Arthur Harding is very effective and one of the best things about the book. I have struggled with its over-wordiness in places and the insertion of several numerical facts one after the other but on the whole it's very readable and an important historical record of a largely ignored problem.