The bestselling social history of Victorian domestic life, told through the letters, diaries, journals and novels of 19th-century men and women.

This text is about 19th-century Britain's fascination with good quality murder. Murder during this period was ubiquitous - not necessarily in quantity but in quality. This was the era of penny-bloods, early crime fiction and melodramas for the masses. It was a time when murder and entertainment were firmly entwined.

Full of detail and colour about everyday life in Dickens's London, and leaves you with a sense not only of how hard life was then, but how strange. Even if you've read Dickens and the contemporary historians of the poor, there is still more to marvel at here.' Sebastian Faulks, Mail on Sunday Books of the Year

The 500-year story of how, and why, our homes have come to be what they are, from the bestselling author of The Victorian City and The Victorian House.

Christmas has been all things to all people: a religious festival, a family celebration, a time of eating and drinking. Yet the origins of the customs which characterize the festive season are wreathed in myth. When did turkeys become the plat du jour? Is the commercialization of Christmas a recent phenomenon, or has the emphasis always been on spending? Just who is, or was, Santa Claus? And for how long have we been exchanging presents of underwear and socks? Food, drink and nostalgia for Christmases past seem to be almost as old as the holiday itself, far more central to the story of...

'Marvellous...I read it with astonished delight..It is equally scholarly and entertaining.' Jan Morris 'Delightfully quirky and compelling' The Times One we've learned it as children few of us think much of the alphabet and its familiar sing-song order. And yet the order if the alphabet, that simple knowledge that we take for granted, plays a major role in our adult lives. From the school register to the telephone book, from dictionaries and encyclopaedias to library shelves, our lives are ordered from A to Z. Long before Google searches, this magical system of organisation gave us...