In 1884, an article entitled 'Hospital Nurses', describing the role and responsibilities of nursing staff in hospital wards, appeared in the Leisure Hour. The author, who signed herself simply 'M. E. H.', was Margaret Elise Harkness, who, a few years later, would publish a series of novels on the conditions of the urban working poor under the pseudonym 'John Law'. Harkness had been working as a…
Unsanitary conditions in the Old Nichol were frequently invoked as a threat to public health and a justification for the clearance scheme that the area was undergoing at the end of the nineteenth century. A Child of the Jago follows these contemporary discourses by bracketing together the neighborhood’s insalubrious state with the moral character of its residents. Yet many social investigator…