Sarah Wise

In responding to the needs of working parents and their employers, the Government has introduced legislation which encourages family-friendly initiatives to be determined jointly and voluntarily between employers and employees. Focusing on the key sector of financial services, Family-friendly working? reviews how companies are handling this process. By offering close insights into the dynamics of organisational decision-making processes and practices, Family-friendly working will be of value to policy makers, employers, trade unions and to bodies and individuals who seek to influence family and employment policy and legislation.

Through the early twentieth century, the British Government locked away over 50,000 innocent people. Their ‘crimes’? Being poor and unyielding. This is their story. A HISTORY TODAY BOOK OF THE YEAR 'Staggering… Wise's book bristles with injustices.' Sunday Telegraph, ***** By 1950, an estimated 50,000 people had been deemed ‘defective’ by the British government and detained indefinitely under the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. Their ‘crimes’ were various: women with children born out of wedlock; rebellious teenagers caught shoplifting; those with epilepsy, hearing impairments and chronic illnesses who had struggled in school; and many who were simply ‘different’. Forcibly removed from their families and confined to a shadow world of specialist facilities in the countryside, they were hidden away and forgotten – out of sight, out of mind. Through painstaking archival research, award-winning historian Sarah Wise shines a light on this shameful chapter. Piecing together the lives irrevocably changed by this devastating legislation, The Undesirables provides a compelling study of how early twentieth-century attitudes to class, gender and disability resulted in a nationwide scandal – and how they continue to shape social policy to this day. 'The heartrending stories Sarah Wise has unearthed beggar belief… beautifully researched and truly compelling.' Catherine Bailey, author of Black Diamonds

Through the early twentieth century, the British Government locked away over 50,000 innocent people. Their ‘crimes’? Being poor and unyielding. This is their story. A HISTORY TODAY BOOK OF THE YEAR 'Staggering… Wise's book bristles with injustices.' Sunday Telegraph, ***** By 1950, an estimated 50,000 people had been deemed ‘defective’ by the British government and detained indefinitely under the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. Their ‘crimes’ were various: women with children born out of wedlock; rebellious teenagers caught shoplifting; those with epilepsy, hearing impairments and chronic illnesses who had struggled in school; and many who were simply ‘different’. Forcibly removed from their families and confined to a shadow world of specialist facilities in the countryside, they were hidden away and forgotten – out of sight, out of mind. Through painstaking archival research, award-winning historian Sarah Wise shines a light on this shameful chapter. Piecing together the lives irrevocably changed by this devastating legislation, The Undesirables provides a compelling study of how early twentieth-century attitudes to class, gender and disability resulted in a nationwide scandal – and how they continue to shape social policy to this day. 'The heartrending stories Sarah Wise has unearthed beggar belief… beautifully researched and truly compelling.' Catherine Bailey, author of Black Diamonds

Uncovers twelve shocking stories, untold for over a century and reveals the darker side of the Victorian upper and middle classes - their sexuality, fears of inherited madness, financial greed and fraudulence - and chillingly evoke the black motives at the heart of the phenomenon of the 'inconvenient person'.

In 1887 Government inspectors were sent to investigate the Old Nichol, a notorious slum on the boundary of Bethnal Green parish. The author recovers Old Nichol from the ruins of history and lays bare the social and political conditions that created and sustained this black hole which lay at the very heart of the Empire.

Towards the end of 1831, the authorities unearthed a series of crimes at Number 3, Nova Scotia Gardens in East London that appeared to echo the notorious Burke and Hare killings in Edinburgh three years earlier.