How to be Horrid: The Price of Principles

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The Edwardian era: a time when the class divide was at its most rigid and people died at the breakfast table. Peter Price is a terribly nice young lad caught up in a world where everybody’s out for themselves in the race to get to the height of society - even his own father, who can’t stop hating him. When Peter is sent to live with the rich and somewhat unsettling Lockwood family - who already find themselves entertaining guests in the form of the hideously rich Sir Putney Brand and his obnoxious daughter Eliza - he finds himself thrust into the lies and deceptions of the upper classes and all of those who desperately want to join them; a world where a marriage, a murder and afternoon tea could all coincide within a single hour.

Loathed and lusted after in equal measure, Peter struggles to find his own niche in this new social world, hoping to catch the eye of the beautiful maid, Daisy, whilst simultaneously avoiding the advances of other young ladies interested only in two things (money being one of them) and the evil machinations of the men puffing their cigars in the drawing room.

What is George Lockwood trying to achieve? Why do young men keep disappearing when George’s wife, Victoria, is around? Who’s that finely dressed Irish rogue who keeps turning up, and what exactly is depicted in the photograph that he keeps inside his breast pocket at all times? And why is holding hands with somebody a really bad idea?