An astonishing and almost infinitely provocative work ... it is a rare pleasure to be among those engaged in the salvage of so rich a treasure

One of the most remarkable non-fiction projects undertaken in English

A masterpiece of travel and topographical writing and a miraculous, vivid and engrossing meditation on landscape and history and the sacred mood of places

Reading Tim Robinson on Connemara is almost as good as being there - better in some ways

An imperishable monument to the West

Sarah Wise is too clever and considered a historian simply to give us a lurid, one-dimensional Victorian melodrama. Through painstaking archival work and readable empathetic prose, she has instead sought to evoke the texture of life here

The account is both moving and engrossing, and its tendency in places to become a litany of misery and despair is redeemed by Sarah Wise's light and occasionally humorous touch

As with her previous book The Italian Boy, Sarah Wise is superb on statistical detail... In every respect this is a note-perfect work of social history, thoroughly researched, charitable in its sympathies, and sadly still embodying lessons for today

Carefully researched... a wide-ranging study

Her achievement is remarkable... This engrossing work shines a light not only on a turbulent period in London's history, but on humanity itself. Only the best histories can claim as much

Spilling facts, lives, conditions, intolerable burdens and the spirit expressed by spontaneous dancing in the streets, The Blackest Streets is a little masterpiece

Extraordinary scholarship and rare sensitivity

Sarah Wise mines the archives to bring the local inhabitants back to life, and makes particularly brilliant use of the interviews that historian Raphael Samuel conducted in the 1970s with Arthur Harding.

As in her wonderful book The Italian Boy, she explores a milieu that was hungry, dirty, threadbare and exploited

Sarah Wise animates the horrors in fascinating detail