"On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London's Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin's obsession: the Victorian...

In the 1950s, Jennifer Worth was a district midwife in East London. She worked with an order of nursing nuns, learning how to cope with midwifery in slum conditions. In the course of her training she met many interesting characters, whose stories are told in this book. When the workhouses of Britain officially closed in 1930, there was nowhere for inmates to go. So workhouses merely changed their names and carried on much the same as before.