Victoria's Madmen tells the stories of a host of figures who came to exemplify a contradictory history of the Victorian age: not one of Dickensian London and smoking factories but one of little known revolutionaries and radicals.

Clive Bloom mixes extraordinary, marginal voices with famous and infamous figures.

From messiahs like James Jezreel and Octavia 'Daughter of God'; writers such as Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle and Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Revolutionaries and radicals like Karl Marx, Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw and Oswald Mosley. Madmen like Richard Dadd and Jack the Ripper. Worshippers of Pan such as Arthur Machen, Kenneth Grahame and J.M.Barrie, orientalists and guerilla fighters like T.E. Lawrence and occultists like Aleister Crowley, to the Latvian anarchists who killed three policemen in the East End of London.