London provides grinding poverty for those who live just below the veneer of respectable society. Hunger and disease prevail and the workhouse offers no comfort.
It is 1830 and young, naive, Molly and Reb leave Leicestershire to seek better prospects in the capital. On the road, their dreams are destroyed by those who haunt the highway seeking the vulnerable.
Reb is brutally murdered and Molly, snatched against her will, finds herself in wretched circumstances living with the unscrupulous Batts. Under his tuition, she becomes a reluctant whore. Her new way of life puts food in her belly but threatens to destroy her soul.
An outbreak of cholera finally gives her freedom but it is a lonely existence when the few friends she relies on are lost to her, one after the other. Forced to live on the streets, she must survive as best she can.
Her attempts to become respectable fail, her love for others thwarted and her faith is all but gone. Responsible for her future and now her sister's child, Eliza, she turns once more to the only thing she can be sure of, the skills she learnt in a sordid tenement in Wapping.
Fate, it seems, enjoys playing a fickle game with Molly Crane.