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“... Anna Davin has risen admirably to the challenges facing the historian of working-class life in London. Dealing with the documents is daunting enough. To begin with, there are 17 volumes of Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London, published between 1889 and 1903. For all its faults it is the first survey of outcast London that can be described as social science and it remains a unique quarry of ‘statistics of poverty’, recording how much (or little) Whitechapel widows got paid for glueing a gross of matchboxes or how they fed a family of 14 on a few coppers a day ...”

“... of reference. When History Workshop Journal published a Ginzburg essay in 1980, the translator, Anna Davin, explained that ‘this article by an Italian comrade and historian is very different from anything we have included … before. It unselfconsciously draws on philosophy, quotes Latin and ranges across societies and periods in a way which is ...”