Used to love the Moomin books! A couple of years ago I read Jansson's "The True Deceiver", which is a cracking (or kraken!) book. Very different from the sort of stuff we normally associate with her, but a thoroughly dark, brooding and absorbing tale. If you haven't read it yet, Kylie, I'd recommend it. I'm sure you'd enjoy it.
I've just started "A Child of the Jago", by Arthur Morrison. Published in 1896, it's a fictionalised account of life in a London slum. The "Jago" was based on an area of Shoreditch in East London called the "Old Nichol", which was notorious as the most squalid and desperate of Victorian London's many slums. So appalling were the conditions that the London County Council was prompted to raze the area and build the Boundary Estate, a model estate of tenements that opened in 1900 and was one of the earliest - some say the first - social housing projects. There's a brief overview of it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_Estate
I'm going on a guided walk of the area next week, so I thought I should do a bit of homework!