The story of three pickpocketing sisters raised in 1830s Shoreditch, in the heart of London's criminal underworld, and how two of them were banished to England's `thief colony'. Among the girls' Australian descendants are two Supreme Court Judges and a Government Premier, and the descendants of the sister left behind in England are a bin man and a window cleaner.
Two Victorian mothers from opposite ends of the social scale come together due to domestic violence; One desperately tries to feed her six children in 1880s London; the other leaves her lavish home to venture into the slums to help a fellow mother.
Press hysteria and public panic grip 1890s Salford, as it erupts into postcode violence. Rival gangs of youths, known as Scuttlers, clash in pitched street battles. Magistrate Joseph Makinson attempts to stamp out the epidemic of gang warfare by giving the Scuttlers a taste of their own medicine.
The story of an Edwardian family trapped in welfare dependency and a mother accused of a shocking crime against her own child. Did the handouts given to Susan Nelson's family by a prosperous charity visitor provide her descendants with the chance to move up in life, or was it all down to their own hard graft?