No one would have been more surprised than George Sims himself that posterity should recognize him not as the immensely popular crusading journalist, not as the writer of several highly successful melodramas, not as a writer of melodramatic novels and short stories, nor as the bon vivant and man-about-town--the celebrity lending his name to the promotion of dog food and hair restorer--but as the writer of verse. "In the Workhouse: Christmas Day" is remembered yet, and in its time was rivaled only by Thomas Babington Macaulay's "Horatius" as a recitation piece. Sims with his ballads hit upon a successful formula and used it to draw attention to the appalling conditions of the London slums. But verse played a small role in his busy existence, and he wrote little after his dramatic successes in the 1880s.

Sims was born into a prosperous London family with Chartist sympathies on his...