This is a record of childhood that reveals in detail the trials and hard-won triumphs of 19th century working class life.

Set in the 1990’s the novel explores how fate can destroy the destiny of dreams. Human tragedies are everyday occurrences and how these are dealt with depends upon factors such as religious beliefs, current responsibilities, support from family and friends and maturity. Jo and Kate are verging on adolescence when tragedy robs them of family and friends. They believe that the only way they can put the past behind them is by running away from it.

A young man in the South falls in love with a servant girl. She is kidnapped and he goes cross country looking for her.

The experiences of children growing up in Britain during Victorian times are often misunderstood to be either idyllic or wretched. Yet, the reality was more wide-ranging than most imagine. Here, in colorful detail and with firsthand accounts, Frost paints a complete picture of Victorian childhood that illustrates both the difficulties and pleasures of growing up during this period. Differences of class, gender, region, and time varied the lives of children tremendously. Boys had more freedom than girls, while poor children had less schooling and longer working lives than their better-off peers. Yet some experiences were common to almost all children, including parental oversight, physical development, and age-based transitions. This compelling work concentrates on marking out the strands of life that both separated and united children throughout the Victorian period. Most historians of Victorian children have concentrated on one class or gender or region, or have centered on arguments about how much better off children were by 1900 than 1830. Though this work touches on these themes, it covers all children and focuses on the experience of childhood rather than arguments about it. Many people hold myths about Victorian families. The happy myth is that childhood was simpler and happier in the past, and that families took care of each other and supported each other far more than in contemporary times. In contrast, the unhappy myth insists that childhood in the past was brutal—full of indifferent parents, high child mortality, and severe discipline at home and school. Both myths had elements of truth, but the reality was both more complex and more interesting. Here, the author uses memoirs and other writings of Victorian children themselves to challenge and refine those myths.

Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815-1848 proposes an entirely new way of reading the transition into the modern. It is the first book in a series of three which will take the reader up to the end of the First World War, moving from a focus on London to a global perspective. Serial Forms sets out the theoretical and historical basis for all three volumes. It suggests that, as a serial news culture and a stadial historicism developed together between 1815 and 1848, seriality became the dominant form of the nineteenth century. Through serial newsprint, illustrations, performances, and shows, the past and the contemporary moment enter into public visibility together. Serial Forms argues that it is through seriality that the social is represented as increasingly politically urgent. The insistent rhythm of the serial reorganizes time, recalibrates and rescales the social, and will prepare the way for the 1848 revolutions which are the subject of the next book. By placing their work back into the messy print and performance culture from which it originally appeared, Serial Forms is able to produce new and exciting readings of familiar authors such as Scott, Byron, Dickens, and Gaskell. Rather than offering a rarefied intellectual history or chopping up the period into 'Romantic' and 'Victorian', Clare Pettitt tracks the development of communications technologies and their impact on the ways in which time, history and virtuality are imagined.