Fergus Linnane: 2 books

At a time when there were almost no career openings for women, a group of intrepid and gifted females scaled the heights of what was literally a man's world—they became brothelkeepers, or "bawds." Mother Clap—women bawds were often known as Mother—ran male brothels, or Molly Houses....

London’s Underworld takes us on the nightmarish last journeys of condemned criminals to the gallows at Tyburn. We enter death-trap eighteenth century prisons, one of which the novelist Henry Fielding described as a ‘prototype of hell’. We walk the crowded streets of Victorian London with its...