Sarah Wise
   
 
‘A haunting blend of scholarship and period empathy:’ Iain Sinclair, Daily Telegraph

‘The least smug and self-congratulatory book ever written on 19th-century slum life:’ Matthew Sweet, Sunday Times

Winner of the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction

Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction

Hear my talk at the Museum of London here ow.ly/ZR0Jm
  ‘This is a book about the nature of London itself:’ Peter Ackroyd, The Times

‘A brilliant social history:’ Robert Peston, Daily Telegraph

‘This engrossing work shines a light not only on a turbulent period of London’s history but on humanity itself. Only the best histories can claim as much:’ Clare Clark, The Guardian

Shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize

Hear my interview with BBC History Magazine here ow.ly/ZQZ6n
  ‘Deeply researched and gripping...Much of it is also hilarious:’ AN Wilson, Mail on Sunday

‘She has the true social historian’s ability to make her period come alive:’ Dr Anthony Daniels, The Spectator

Shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize

Hear my interview on BBC Radio
4
’s All In The Mind here

and with Guardian books, here http://ow.ly/mNBA30f26Xn


Twitter
You can find me on Twitter here @MissSarahWise


 

Recent Writing

● I've written on Soho's Denmark Street and its 19th-century radical political history for History Workshop Journal
https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/doi/10.1093/hwj/dbx009/3066160/The-Eclectic-Hall-Headquarters-of-Soho-Radicalism

● My essays about Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four are on the London Fictions website http://www.londonfictions.com/joseph-conrad-the-secret-agent.html
http://www.londonfictions.com/george-orwell-nineteen-eighty-four.html

● On the Psychology Today website I have written on:
* whether the Victorian asylum allowed the wealthy to evade justice ow.ly/MWen3
* The earliest days of Broadmoor Hospital/Asylum for the Criminally Insane;
* Charlotte Bronte and Bertha Mason;
* Victorian wives who had sane husbands certified as lunatics;
* Wilkie Collins’s novel The Woman in White (1860);
* the UK’s past and current mistreatment of the mentally ill;
* how religious enthusiasm could lead to an accusation of lunacy;
* and the Victorian diagnosis ‘monomania’.