The book is a wealth of comprehensive research with a substantial number of areas of interest to family and community historians as well as to those with general interest in social history.
Rosalind Crone is senior lecturer in history at The Open University, author of Violent Victorians (2012) and has written on nineteenth-century popular culture, the history of reading, literacy and education, and the history of prisons. She is Director of the Open University's Centre for the History of Crime, Policing, and Justice and project lead for prisonhistory.org.