This alternative tour of Britain offers more than 150 fascinating and beautiful, yet obscure and less-visited places that receive little coverage in more conventional guides.
Stoke-on-Trent was the name given to the amalgamation of six famous Potteries towns, the other five being Burslem, Fenton, Hanley, Longton and Tunstall. This book deals with the entire City, illustrating its wide variety of industries and the way of life of the people in the past. The world-wide reputation of Stoke was secured by the products of the pottery manufacturers. The innovations of men like Josiah Wedgwood, Josiah Spode and the Adams family - who had been making pots since the 15th century - built up a world-beating industry. The author vividly records much of the characteristic Potteries scene, of bottle-kilns, pit-heads and workers' cottages; and of the workers themselves, as they earned their living or enjoyed their recreations. Arnold Bennett, the City's literary giant, would have loved this book.
When beautiful Lucy Graham becomes Lady Audley, her future looks secure. But her past is shrouded in mystery, and the disappearance of a young man sparks an investigation that will reveal her dark secret... This new edition explores the novel in the context of nineteenth-century sensation fiction and the lively debates it provoked.
An in-depth look at the lives of the women murdered by the infamous, 19th-century London serial killer. Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly are inextricably linked in history. Their names might not be instantly recognizable, and the identity of their murderer may have eluded detectives and historians throughout the years, but there is no mistaking the infamy of Jack the Ripper. For nine weeks during the autumn of 1888, the Whitechapel Murderer brought terror to London’s East End, slashing women’s throats and disemboweling them. London’s most famous serial killer has been pored over time and again, yet his victims have been sorely neglected, reduced to the simple label: prostitute. The lives of these five women are rags-to-riches-to-rags stories of the most tragic kind. There was a time in each of their lives when these poor women had a job, money, a home and a family. Hardworking, determined, and fiercely independent individuals, it was bad luck or a wrong turn here or there that left them wretched and destitute. Ignored by the press and overlooked by historians, it is time their stories were told. “Hume presents us with clear and concise biographies of the Ripper’s victims, and while it is tempting to think of them as all being prostitutes . . . their backgrounds, gone into in this much detail, shows them as something completely different. You will have to, you must read this brilliant book, it puts a whole new perspective into the canon of literature about the most infamous murderer of the last two centuries.” —Books Monthly
Mathew Rice's detailed architectural watercolours illuminate a heartfelt, occasionally critical, and often amusing history of Stoke on Trent and the pottery industry.