Author Biography
The author has lived in north London most of his life. He has a long-standing interest in the history of London, the social history of railways and the Victorian era. His working career was in the railway industry, latterly with a customer relations responsibility in London and the South East. He felt that it would be interesting to discover what issues might have faced a railway customer relations manager, had such a job existed, more than a century ago. He hopes that he would never have handled some of them in the way that his Victorian predecessors did! Peter Hodge is an active member of a north London amenity society, which has published two of his books - one a short railway history, the other a detailed account of a Victorian professional middle-class family in Winchmore Hill, where he lives. He also edits and contributes to a local history magazine published in his area. The idea behind The Steam and the Gaslight first came to him as he alighted from a train at Barbican (formerly Aldersgate) Station during a snowstorm a few years ago and was immediately put in mind of the poem by John Betjeman from which the book's title is a quotation.
