Although so fact based, the book reads as easily as a novel. This gives you some idea of the reading and research involved here: novels (Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope), contemporary diaries, Mayhew, of course, newspaper reports plus any number of specialist research papers. The whole of the rest of the book is taken up with notes and an extensive bibliography. I wasn’t ready for the book to end, as according to the Kindle, I was 65% of the way through. At this very moment I can’t access the chapter titles, in order to highlight some of the subjects covered.

You want to check a footnote and can’t, you’re stumped by ‘see illustration page 22’ and you can’t flip back and forth as you might want to. I immediately came up against the problems arising when reading non-fiction in e-book form. This book was cheap for the Kindle and as I’d enjoyed other booksīy Judith Flanders, I snapped it up and got stuck in.

Transport, sanitation, food distribution, housing: none could cope with the numbers pouring into the capital every day.’ No wonder that life was lived so much on the streets. ‘Migration, particularly from Ireland during the Famine years towards the middle of the century, resulted in the eighteenth-century infrastructure of London being swamped by the huge mass of its nineteenth-century residents. ‘In Dickens’ own time, the way that people lived was not Dickensian, merely life.’ The city was transforming itself at incredible speed. She means that what we think of as ‘Dickens’ London’, a place full of wildly eccentric people and improbable happenings, was in fact the real thing: ‘Much of what we take today to be the marvellous imaginings of a visionary novelist turn out on inspection to be the reportage of a great observer.’ Certainly, many of the incidents she records seem stranger than fiction. Judith Flanders says that Dickens ‘invented London’. Charles Lamb wrote, ‘I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much Life.’ It’s been exhausting, smelly, dirty, overwhelming but my goodness, it’s been living, in a city that never sleeps. I’ve had to struggle to walk through the human traffic jams, dodged the wheeled traffic, avoided the eager traders and hawkers with their familiar cries. I’ve eaten on the hoof, buying breakfast on the way to work and if I’m lucky getting a chop and a pint of ale for dinner. I’ve gawped at funerals, executions, fires, runaway horses and street accidents. I’ve been almost deafened by the continuous roar of noise around me, half choked and blinded by the sooty, smoky air. For the past few days I’ve occasionally been leaving my quiet, rural retreat to join the crowds thronging the streets of Victorian London.

The victorian city by judith flanders