Vagabonds
Life on the Streets of Nineteenth-Century London
- 2022
- Duckworth Books
Jensen gives these past lives a monument, a dignity and recognition they deserve ... Jensen is the real deal; I’ve never encountered a historian quite like him ... For two exquisite days, this book was my best friend.
— Gerard DeGroot, The Times
Shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize.
Foreword INDIES History Book of the Year Gold Winner.
A Times and New Yorker Book of the Year.
Compelling, moving and unexpected portraits of London’s poor from a rising star British historian – the Dickensian city brought to real and vivid life.
Until now, our view of bustling late Georgian and Victorian London has been filtered through its great chroniclers, who did not themselves come from poverty – Dickens, Mayhew, Gustave Doré. Their visions were dazzling in their way, censorious, often theatrical. Now, for the first time, this innovative social history brilliantly – and radically – shows us the city’s most compelling period (1780–1870) at street level.
From beggars and thieves to musicians and missionaries, porters and hawkers to sex workers and street criers, Jensen unites a breadth of original research and first-hand accounts and testimonies to tell their stories in their own words. What emerges is a buzzing, cosmopolitan world of the working classes, diverse in gender, ethnicity, origin, ability and occupation – a world that challenges and fascinates us still.
Utterly captivating ... Vagabonds is, just as the author hopes, a book that will be immensely ‘intimate, affecting [and] raw’ for all who read it.
— Fern Riddell, BBC History Magazine
Shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize.
Foreword INDIES History Book of the Year Gold Winner.
A Times and New Yorker Book of the Year.
Compelling, moving and unexpected portraits of London’s poor from a rising star British historian – the Dickensian city brought to real and vivid life.
Until now, our view of bustling late Georgian and Victorian London has been filtered through its great chroniclers, who did not themselves come from poverty – Dickens, Mayhew, Gustave Doré. Their visions were dazzling in their way, censorious, often theatrical. Now, for the first time, this innovative social history brilliantly – and radically – shows us the city’s most compelling period (1780–1870) at street level.
From beggars and thieves to musicians and missionaries, porters and hawkers to sex workers and street criers, Jensen unites a breadth of original research and first-hand accounts and testimonies to tell their stories in their own words. What emerges is a buzzing, cosmopolitan world of the working classes, diverse in gender, ethnicity, origin, ability and occupation – a world that challenges and fascinates us still.
Evocative, personal and moving. This book uses first-hand accounts to evoke the streets of 19th-century London. Richly woven with the voices of the city’s poorest and most resilient residents.
— Wolfson History Prize judges
A vigorous and necessary account made timely by the widening chasm between obscene wealth and dire poverty in our contemporary metropolis.
— Iain Sinclair
An elegantly-written and vivid account of the people that lived and worked in Georgian and Victorian London. Jensen doesn't just present these hitherto marginalised figures on the page; like a delightful sorcerer, he brings them back to life.
— Tomiwa Owolade
The tales in Oskar Jensen’s Vagabonds confirm that the much-trumpeted ‘Victorian values’ were, in reality, little more than the shameful lack of humanity towards the poor ... Rich in research.
— Martin Chilton, The Independent
Warm, vertiginously wide-ranging, and eloquent all at once, with the breadth and intensity of an academic study but the light touch of a skilled, sympathetic writer who lets every character in it speak for themselves.
— Niamh Campbell
Oskar Jensen has coaxed out of the archives a vast range of original voices of the street poor of London. With great sensitivity and scholarly rigour he ensures that once again, we hear the lived experiences of those who lived and died on the margins.
— Sarah Wise
A fascinating look at London street life and how the poor survived in the late 18th to late 19th centuries ... Social history as it should be: fascinating, well-written, passionate, revelatory, and deeply humane. Terrific.
— K. J. Charles
Impoverished nineteenth-century Londoners tend to come to us in the form of caricature or literature; this engaging history seeks to allow them to speak for themselves.
— The New Yorker
