Vagabonds: Life on the Streets of Nineteenth-Century London

British historian Oskar Jensen, an expert on the Georgian and Victorian periods, combs through hundreds of contemporary accounts to document the stories of London's poor. What emerges is a buzzing world of the working classes, diverse in gender, ethnicity, ability, origin, and occupation.

There's Susan Mosely, two years old and herself born into poverty, who is kidnapped by an older woman because beggars with small children are treated with more sympathy. There's John James Bezer, seven-year-old son of a drunkard, elated to find a job as a street deliveryman--which requires him to work seventeen hours a day. And there's Joseph Johnson, a Black ex-sailor most likely from the Caribbean, singing sea songs on the grass outside the Tower of London with a model ship balanced on his head, in a performance so captivating that it's written about in several newspapers at the time.

Over the course of the book we meet characters of all ages, participating in all sorts of work, trying to build lives for themselves in the face of a social order stacked against them. We watch as they find and lose opportunities, fall in and out of love, experience great joy and terrible suffering. The stories form a moving picture of people in poverty and a reminder of the strength of community and the power of the human spirit--but also of the suffering begotten by a society divided into rich and poor. Though some of Jensen's recurring subjects find sustained success--Edmund Kean, born of a vagrant who ran away at fifteen, becomes a world-renowned Shakespearean actor--rare is the character who makes it out.

Jensen's assiduous historical work--including quotations from countless primary and secondary sources--results in a book that is not just meticulously accurate but also stirringly visceral, filled with the sights, sounds, and smells of Dickensian London. It offers us the opportunity to walk around for a while, have a chat or two, and recall the oft-ignored vibrancy of the streets and their lives.