Victorian buildings still surround Londoners, so we are under the impression we know the Victorian city. But just as Flanders’ The Victorian House revealed the long-lost daily life of the Victorian home, so now she illustrates, through the magical eye of the city’s great novelist. With Charles Dickens in fact and fiction as her guide, Flanders takes the readers past the myriad street-life of the 19th century, bringing to life streets filled with bands, food-sellers and street-children, a city of pea-soup fogs, horse manure, and even gutters running with blood.

Judith's new book "Dickens’ London: Everyday Life in the Victorian City" is published by Atlantic books in autumn 2012. For a glimpse of Dicken's London click here.

In the nineteenth century, murder – a rarity in reality – was ubiquitous in novels, in broadsides and ballads, in theatre and melodrama and opera – even in puppet shows and performing dog-acts. As Punch wrote, ‘We are a trading community, a commercial people. Murder is doubtless a very shocking offence, nevertheless as what is done is not to be undone, let us make our money out of it.’

‘Dare I say it would be a crime not to read this book?’

Donna Leon

‘a book that should be on the shelves of every crime novel reader and crime novel writer’

Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday

In this meticulously researched and compellingly written exploration of a century of murder, Judith Flanders examines some of the most gripping and gruesome cases, the famous and the obscure, the brutal and the pathetic – to build a rich and multi-faceted portrait of Victorian society. The Invention of Murder is both a gripping tale of crime and punishment, and history at its most readable.

The Invention of Murder was shorlisted for the 2011 Crime Writers' Association Prize for Non-Fiction.(more info)