Review
This delightfully enchanting book is perfect for nestling in to a comfortable chair with now that the days grow shorter and temperatures dip. With its engrossing story, gritty Victorian London setting and endearing characters, the hours will fly by unnoticed by those who turn its pages.
Splendors and Glooms offers 21st century children a peek into a time and place vastly different from their own. Meticulous attention to detail captures two vastly different worlds of 1860s Dickensian London, one characterized by heavy drapes and groaning sideboards, the other by rumbling stomachs and hearths barely lit.
We first meet Cassandra, an old and ailing witch whose death looms close at hand. Her powers grow weaker yet the source of them, the fire opal encased in a filigree locket that hangs from a gold chain around her neck, burns hot with vibrating strength. She lies...
Beyond the Book
In the early nineteenth century in England, parish churches and towns provided relief for the poor, but as the cost of looking after the poor kept rising and the method became increasingly disorganized, the upper classes and growing middle class who carried the burden of this expense by paying increasingly higher property taxes, sought a central alternative solution.
Parliament passed the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which was meant to reduce this cost. The new law stated that in order to receive aid one needed to surrender everything (one's home, processions and most important, one's personal freedom) and move into the local parish workhouse. In return, one would be fed, clothed and given medical care. If this was not agreeable, and one was not willing to leave one's home,...
