In the year 1764, a London newspaper reported the case of a Cheapside haberdasher’s apprentice who had embezzled ten thousand pounds of his master’s money. The apprentice had not gambled with this prodigious sum; he had not spent it wildly; he had invested it in sound stock with the worthy idea of setting up in trade on his own when his seven years’ apprenticeship should be out. Seven years is a long time...

So writes Leon Garfield in his introduction to this dazzling cycle of novels in miniature.

With a Dickensian richness of character and a Hogarthian sense of atmosphere, Garfield brings to life a dozen eighteenth-century fictional apprentices and their stories. Like the lamplighter’s apprentice who poked his torch into places society would rather were left in darkness, Garfield’s sensitive appreciation of the human condition casts its own strong light into one of the most fascinating corners of English social history. He reminds us of just how young and how vulnerable these apprentices were as they struggled for their livelihoods among the fetid houses and sinister quays of old London.

Here are light and dark, joy and laughter, death and disappointment – a magnificent panorama of life served up with style and grace by a master storyteller.