Industrial Revolution

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  London Labour and the London Poor

  Produced between 1850 and 1862, London Labour and the London Poor is one of the most significant examples of nineteenth-century oral history. The collection teems…

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  Jack of Newbury

  Jack of Newbury is an incisive yet remarkably entertaining work of narrative prose—and one that was extremely popular when it was published in the 1590s.…

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  A Child of the Jago

  “Learn to read and write, learn all you can, learn cunning, spare nobody and stop at nothing. … Do your devilmost … for the Jago’s…

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  Secret Commissions

  Lurid, controversial, and vulnerable to accusations of titillation or rabble-rousing, the works of Victorian investigative journalism collected here nonetheless brought unseen suffering into the light…

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  Jack Sheppard

  In London Labour and the London Poor (1861) Henry Mayhew wrote, “Of all books, perhaps none has ever had so baneful effect upon the young…

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  Factory Lives

  Factory Lives contains four works of great importance in the field of nineteenth-century working-class autobiography: John Brown’s A Memoir of Robert Blincoe; William Dodd’s A…

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  Illustrations of Political Economy

  Published in 1832, Illustrations of Political Economy established Harriet Martineau as both a successful and controversial author and a pioneer of nineteenth-century “social problem” writing.…

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  The Communist Manifesto

  L.M. Findlay’s elegant new translation is a work of textual and historical scholarship. Few books have had as much of an impact on modern history…

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  A Christmas Carol

  Emerging from Dickens’s preoccupation in the early 1840s with issues of poverty, ignorance, and cruelty, this classic story of Ebeneezer Scrooge, visited by four ghosts…