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

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.

'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...