‘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 on The Italian Boy at the Museum of London here ow.ly/ZR0Jma

 

 

‘This is a book about the nature of London itself:’
Peter Ackroyd, The Times

‘Scrupulously researched and eye-opening… a revelatory book, tearing the roofs off the Old Nichol’s festering tenements.’  Professor John Carey, Chief Book Reviewer, The Sunday Times

‘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

Adapted for BBC1’s The Victorian Slum series 

Hear my interview about The Blackest Streets with BBC History Magazine here ow.ly/ZQZ6n

 

‘Deeply researched and gripping…Much of it is also hilarious:’ AN Wilson, Mail on Sunday

‘Sarah Wise has used her subject like an axe, to split open the Victorian façade and examine everything wriggling behind.’ Suzi Feay, Financial Times

‘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 my talk to the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh during the Festival 2019 here

 

 

I contributed a chapter to this multi-authored book about
Charles Booth’s Maps, published by the London School
of Economics with Thames & Hudson.

I spoke about Booth and his work on Radio 4’s In Our Time https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000wsxf

and on Radio 3’s Free Thinking
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0009kh0

and LSE archivist Indy Bhullar and I appeared on Robert Elms’
BBC London show to talk about the book https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07t25tc

I teach a 6-week course, ‘Introduction to Charles Booth’ at the City Lit and the Bishopsgate Institute, both in London. Keep an eye on their websites to see when the next course is

 

Talks / Events

Here I am on the Travels Through Time podcast travelling back to 1889 https://www.tttpodcast.com/season-02/london-blackest-streets-sarah-wise-1889

I also spoke on Hallie Rubenhold’s podcast series Bad Women: The Ripper Retold https://www.pushkin.fm/show/bad-women/

Most recent journalism / articles

●  I have a chapter on police brutality in the Edwardian West End of London in Rebellious Writing: Marginalised Edwardians and the Contestation of Power (edited by Lauren O’Hagan; New York, 2020). I wrote a shorter version for History Today in the August 2020 edition

● In January 2021 The London Journal published my article Povertyopolis: Beyond the
East-West Binary in the Late-Nineteenth-Century London Literary Imagination
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03058034.2020.1854499

● I wrote about female genital mutilation in the Victorian era in History Today in February 2020  https://www.maiyro.com/posts/WLtY46

● My article on the construction of the Boundary Street Estate (London’s first planned council estate) appeared in The Planner magazine

● I wrote about Grace Poole – the enigmatic ‘lunatic’ keeper of Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre – here https://hekint.org/2018/01/30/nurse-grace-poole-greatest-puzzle-jane-eyre/

● My piece in History Today about celebrated 19th-century psychiatrist Alexander Morison and his efforts to raise the status of mental health nurses in mid-Victorian England https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/finding-keepers-mental-illness-19th-century 

● 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

● 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

● I have a number of posts about 19th-century mental health, asylums and literature on the
Psychology Today website. My most recent is about whether the Victorian asylum allowed wealthy people to evade justice, here ow.ly/MWen3

My other Psychology Today posts consider:
● 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’.