This book examines the representation of English working-class children — the youthful inhabitants of the poor urban neighborhoods that a number of writers dubbed "darkest England" — in Victorian and Edwardian imperialist literature. In particular, Boone focuses on how the writings for and about youth undertook an ideological project to enlist working-class children into the British imperial enterprise, demonstrating convincingly that the British working-class youth resisted a nationalist identification process that tended to eradicate or obfuscate class differences.

In his best-selling Darkest England, Idries Shah asserts that the English hail from a little-known place called 'Hathaby', but their roots go back much farther, perhaps to the distant Asian realm of Sakasina. Once a nomadic tribe of warriors, the English fled westward, bringing with them epic tales, traditions, and an Oriental way of thought.Shah charts the genius of the English in adopting and adapting 'almost anything spiritual, moral or material' for their own use - a faculty that has transformed them from warrior nomads into successful diplomats, businessmen, thinkers and scientists.

An exploration of the slums of London's Whitechapel area, exposing its grim poverty and the dire consequences of Victorian attitudes towards the dispossessed. The scenes of slum life ae incisively viewed through the eyes of a young captain in the Salvation Army, whose sense of moral outrage leads him on a journey through the despair of the East End ghetto. In his work within London's netherworld there is a manifestation of both desperation and hope which mirrored Harkness's own evolving vision of Christian socialism. Not only an important social documentary of the times, In Darkest London is also a text in the history of late Victorian ideas and values.

A social documentary of the East End in the 1880s, this work was originally published in 1889, as "Captain Lobe: A Story of the Salvation Army" by John Law, the pen name of Margaret Harkness, an important expounder of social realism in late 19th-century England.