The Matchgirls of Bow
A Novel of the 1888 Strike

About this book:

In the gaslit gloom of 1888 East London, the matchgirls of Bryant & May don't just work in the dark—they *glow* in it. White phosphorus seeps into their skin, their breath, their very bones, turning seventeen-year-old Eliza and her sisters into ghostly specters who carry the factory home in their pores. By day, they endure fourteen-hour shifts, starvation wages, and fines levied for the crime of breathing wrong; by night, they watch each other's jaws swell and rot, silenced by a company doctor's lies and a foreman's yardstick. But when a child is brutalized for a spilled tray of matches, the phosphorescent dust on their fingers catches a spark—and the women who light the Empire's fires decide to burn down the injustice that fuels them.

*The Matchgirls of Bow* plunges you into the sulfurous heart of the strike that shook Victorian Britain, rendering the famous 1888 uprising not as history-textbook headline but as flesh-and-blood rebellion. Through Eliza's sharp, unflinching eyes, you'll taste the garlic stench of the dipping shed, feel the icy terror of a rent collector's knock, and hear the dangerous whisper that spreads through the packing room: *Down tools.* Meticulously researched and fiercely human, this is a novel about the price of dignity, the mathematics of survival, and the terrifying, exhilarating moment when the invisible decide they will no longer be ignored.