evolved into a semi-mythological entity, coloured by images of the 'plucky cockney', rhyming slang and the music hall. For the middle classes, it was here in the East End -- amid the hotchpotch of cultures and races, the smog and the slaughterhouse -- that crime, poverty and sexual deviance, including incest and prostitution, festered and flourished. Working-class neighbourhoods were the subject of numerous articles, investigations and exposs (Gray, p.1) from as early as the 1830s. In London's Shadows, Gray relies heavily on such reports, like The Bitter Cry of Outcast London by the Rev. Andrew Mearns (1883) and East London by Charles Booth (1889), but warns against taking these sources at face value. Instead, Gray argues that these reports should be seen as evidence of a cultural, social and economic chasm that existed between the middle and working classes, characterised by ignorance and notions of superiority. This also manifested itself in the social construction of the working class as a 'different race' (Gray p. 125). If London's Shadows exposes these problems then it is Michel Faber's novel, Crimson Petal, that truly brings them to life. Rightly considered as a 'Dickensian novel for our times' (2) , Faber's descriptions of Victorian London are about as vivid as they come. St Giles, for instance, is described as a place at the 'very bottom' where 'prosperity is an exotic dream' (Faber, p. 8), where hansom cabs are looted by children (Faber, p. 10) and the ground is covered in human and animal excrement.