Main menu Post navigation "...a shuddering horror that will thrill throughout the world." Stephen Donovan and Matthew Rubery's unique new anthology Secret Commissions , published September 2012, collects nineteen works of investigative journalism from the Victorian age. The articles capture the frequently stark and sinister social conditions of nineteenth-century Britain, and bring to life the sense of horror and frustration surrounding such controversial issues as poverty, prostitution, and infanticide. This excerpt comes from George R. Sims' "How the Poor Live," an expos on living conditions in metropolitan London; it was serialized in thirteen weekly instalments from June 2 to August 25, 1883 and was widely reprinted in the years that followed alongside appeals for charitable funds and official commissions on housing and poverty. We have reached the attic, and in that attic we see a picture which will be engraven on our memory for many a month to come. The attic is almost bare; in a broken fireplace are some smouldering embers, a log of wood lies in front like a fender. There is a broken chair trying to steady itself against a wall black with the dirt of ages. In one corner, on a shelf, is a battered saucepan and a piece of dry bread. On the scrap of mantel still remaining embedded in the wall, is a rag; on a bit of cord hung across the room are more rags -- garments of some sort, possibly; a broken flower-pot props open a crazy window-frame, possibly to let the