London Characters and Crooks

This selection from Henry Mayhew's mid-nineteenth-century investigations, chiefly London Labour and the London Poor, presents interviews and sketches of people who worked or preyed on Victorian London's streets. Chapters group street sellers and buyers, markets, scavengers and dust contractors, performers, musicians, exhibitors, dockers and transport workers, prostitutes, beggars, and the inhabitants of lodging-houses and thieves' dens. Mayhew records wages, pitches, slang, and how each trade survived. The book is social reportage assembled as a gallery of occupations, not a novel and not a single life. Typical subjects are the casual poor and the criminal margins of the capital.

Bound in grey/green buckram, blocked with a black and silver design by David Eccles. Black slipcase.