Buy this book
Henry Mayhew vowed "to publish the history of a people, from the lips of the people themselves — giving a literal description of their labour, their earnings, their trials and their sufferings, in their own 'unvarnished' language." With his collaborators, Mayhew explored hundreds of miles of London streets in the 1840s and 1850s, gathering thousands of pages of testimony from the city's humbler residents. Their stories revealed aspects of city life virtually unknown to literate society.
A sprawling, four-volume history resulted from Mayhew's investigations. This extract focuses on the criminal class--pickpockets, prostitutes, rag pickers, and vagrants, whose true stories of degradation, horror, and desperation rival Dickensian fiction. A classic reference source for sociologists, historians, and criminologists, Mayhew's work is immensely readable. As Thackeray wrote, these urban vignettes conjure up "a picture of human life so wonderful, so awful, so piteous and pathetic, so exciting and terrible, that readers of romances own they never read anything like to it."
Buy this book
Previews available in: English
Subjects
Poor, Prostitution, CrimeEdition | Availability |
---|---|
1 |
aaaa
|
Book Details
Edition Notes
DON546/2007 (copy 2)
First published in 1862.
Classifications
The Physical Object
ID Numbers
Community Reviews (0)
Feedback?March 25, 2022 | Edited by VioletFrost | Edited without comment. |
March 25, 2022 | Edited by VioletFrost | Edited without comment. |
August 13, 2020 | Created by ImportBot | import new book |