Donald Serrell Thomas Ordre des livres

Here, through the eyes of its inhabitants, Donald Thomas portrays the nineteenth-century underworld - one of 'night houses' and cigar divans, of street people and entertainers. The underworld was sheltered by an underclass, united with it in a hatred of the police. In its rookeries and padding-kens, gin shops and taverns, hard by the fashionable West End, thrived thieves and beggars, cheats, forgers and pickpockets, preying on rich and poor alike. Thackery wrote that the wonders of the Victorian underworld 'have been lying by your door and mine ever since we had a door of our own. We had but to go a hundred yards off and see it for ourselves, but we never did.' Her Donald Thomas pushes open that door to reveal a world at once both strange and strangely familiar.

The Post-Romantics include five major Victorian poets, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Cough and Swinburne, inheritors and developers of the Romantic Revival. Nourished by the macabre, the exotic and the aberrant, their art was practiced on what Browning called "the dangerous edge of things."