Vagabonds: Life on the Streets of Nineteenth-Century London

by Oskar Jensen

Dickensian London is brought to real and vivid life in this innovative, accessible social history, revealing the true character of this place and time through the stories of its street denizens— shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize 2023

London, 1857: A pair of teenage girls holding a sign that says “Fugitive Slaves” ask for money on the corner of Blackman Street. After a constable accosts them and charges them with begging, they end up in court, where national newspapers pick up their story. Are the girls truly escaped slaves from Kentucky? Or will the city’s dystopian Mendicity Society catch them in a lie, exposing them as born-and-raised Londoners and endangering their safety?

With its many accounts of people like these who lived and made their living on the streets, Vagabonds forms a moving picture of London’s most compelling period (1780–1870). Piecing together contemporary sources such as newspaper articles, letters, and journal entries, historian Oskar Jensen follows the harrowing, hopeful journeys of the city’s poor: children, immigrants, street performers, thieves, and sex workers, all diverse in gender, ethnicity, ability, and origin. For the first time, their own voices give us a radical new perspective on this moment in history, with its deep inequality that bears an astonishing resemblance to our own era’s divides.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Victorian, 19th Century, European History, Audiobook, British Literature

352 pages, Paperback

Published February 20, 2024

About the author

Oskar Jensen is an author and academic. He researches songs at Newcastle University, and has written scholarly tomes on Napoleon, ballad-singing, and most recently the London streets, with 2022’s Vagabonds. He is a BBC New Generation Thinker, appearing frequently on Radios 3 and 4, as well as showing up in the New Statesman, on Who Do You Think You Are?, and as historical advisor for 2018’s Vanity Fair and a forthcoming major motion picture. Helle & Death is his first novel for adults. Find him on Twitter @OskarCoxJensen.

Reviews

[Maureen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Late 18th - to late 19th century London - from beggars and thieves, to musicians and missionaries, porters and hawkers to sex workers and street criers, author Oskar Jensen brings a wealth of original research and first-hand accounts and testimonies to tell their stories in their own words.

These are some of the voices that answer back. The ones that normally leave no trace behind - although some will have been named in dreaded courtrooms, on a charge of selling goods in the street, or for simply begging, or very likely named within some Workhouse record, but otherwise their names would never have been mentioned or thought worthy of mentioning. They are the ones who, by accident of birth, enter the world into a more lowly station in life, or have hit hard times, but in answering back, they give a face to all those invisible people, making the invisibility of poverty a little less so.

Make no mistake, there are some really distressing accounts of poverty, ill treatment, and the inevitable deaths as a result, which evoke feelings of compassion and sorrow for the extreme hardships that these people had to endure. However, it’s exceptionally well researched, making it not only informative, but completely fascinating. Highly recommended.

*Thank you to Netgalley and Duckworth Books for an ARC in exchange for an honest unbiased review*

[Fran · Rating 5 out of 5]

"...I want to listen to...voices that have rarely been heard and taken seriously. These voices-which cried out their wares, services, wants or simply sang a song...belong to those who lived and worked in London's streets between the 1780s and 1870s...urchins and prostitutes, pickpockets and sweeps, beggars and ballad singers."
-Oskar Jensen

The streets of Victorian London. "While respectable London saw them as places to pass through, conduits for capital and traffic, the people in the street saw them as places to be...". Mary Ann Donovan, age 18, attempted to sell combs in London's financial district. Her travail resulted in a fine and fourteen day incarceration for "obstruction-by creating a crowd of comb-buyers...[Was] selling combs...a cover for immodest purposes?" "Undaunted and unbowed, she has her say..." though, to no avail.

"The mewling infant is an asset to the street supplicant." A thirteen year old girl is out "singing, begging, generally making a scene." Her eleven year old sister carries their infant brother. The child's cries reach a fever pitch. He is being stabbed repeatedly, in secret, with a large pin. This is working "in a way the words of the song...could never be...people are stopping...fumbling for pennies." The children's father had sent his children out begging to supplement his fondness for "spirits". "...no account of [street infants] was complete without an itemisation of rags, holes and bare feet...Rags were essential stage-dressing for charitable exchanges...".

Easter, 1824. "Shame is an important part of street life." Cotton-winding and help from the parish barely covers rent and bread. The mother gambles on the purchase of hot cross buns. The son recalls "Folk had laughed at me, had rejoiced when I wept, but only two persons had bought...[Mother and son] cannot bear to cry out wares...they are not street folk." Desperation...willing to do anything, the child is hired as an errand boy. "He's still in the streets, but it's gainful employment...practically respectable...A 14 hour day stretching into 17 hours...He returns home 'foot-sore and ready to faint from low diet and excessive toil'." At every turn, the Mendicity Society is dedicated to ending street begging. "Convinced of their moral superiority-as confirmed by their own wealth, comfort and learning...[they apply] the law neither impartial or professional...but...dispensed in an alarmingly arbitrary fashion."

"Vagabonds: Life on the Streets of Nineteenth-century London" was written by British historian Oskar Jensen whose extensive research includes first-hand accounts, court proceedings and narratives written by some of the vagabonds who lived this squalid existence. One writes of the hotly contested boundary between work and begging. "His conscience eats at him especially when singing the same hymns in chapel [and on the street]...nothing seemed so recoiling to me as that any one should know what I did for my bread."

"Best of all is the life of the mind...[some] learned their letters quickly...[one child] finds his way to a much thumbed edition of David Copperfield, which he reads aloud to his illiterate parents...Dickens was a fairy musician to us, filling our minds with a sweeter strain than the constant cry of hunger." Unlike Dickens, who was not raised in poverty, the true voices of Victorian London come to light through the voices of the downtrodden as written in this exemplary tome penned by Oskar Jensen. Highly recommended.

Thank you Duckworth Books and Net Galley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[K.J. Charles]

A fascinating look at London street life and how the poor survived in the late 18th to late 19th centuries. A book that wears its politics on its sleeve in re class and social justice, although it's hard not to with such unequivocal bad guys as the Mendicity Society, the sort of heartless self-righteous bastards who these days put spikes on street furniture in their unceasing effort to ensure homeless people are as miserable as possible. I mean, if you put the actual acts of the Mendicity Society as recounted here into a novel, all the reviewed would complain of thumping heavy-handedness and caricature villains. The absolute sack of shits.

Arranged in 'seven ages' order, so we go from babies and children, the young, adults in their various guises as street performers, beggars, sellers, and then the elderly. The aim of the book is to tell its subjects' stories in their own words, from surviving autobiographies, journalism, studies like Mayhew's, and of course court records. Inevitably this weights the book towards men, but at least the author is aware of that. Inevitably also, a lot of the women are seen through male eyes. On the plus side, this is that very rare thing: a book that features poor Victorian London women without dwelling near-exclusively on sex work, and which also notes that sex work was frequently a temporary fallback, not a life sentence.

Lots of different lives here, reflecting the diversity of Georgian/Victorian London--Italians, Poles, Jews, a significant number of black Londoners, even someone who seems pretty unequivocally to be a trans man--and a lot of very different trajectories in life. Sometimes we can see a whole life through, very occasionally to triumph, more often downward; sometimes we see just flashes of a history or a personality shining through the heavy veil of Victorian social commentary.

A lot to be learned about Victorian London street people as individuals with pride, determination, endurance, as well as about the wealthy who ignored them and the reformers and the law who mostly persecuted them, and the intelligentsia who used them as story fodder. And about ourselves, because it's impossible for a Londoner now to read this without a lot of resonance and recognition.

Social history as it should be: fascinating, well-written, passionate, revelatory, and deeply humane. Terrific.

I had an ARC from the publisher

[LIsa Noell "Rocking the chutzpah!" · Rating 4 out of 5]

My thanks to Oskar Jensen, Duckworth publishing and Netgalley.
I often ask myself, why? Just why do I keep reading books like this? I suppose my answer is and must be to remember and never forget.
These people need to be remembered. What they've done, that seemed to have meant so little back in ages past, are really what most people of today live. Things are better.
I'm not religious at all, but I like to tell myself that there is a place for unfeeling people after they die. Hell? Nope. If I don't believe in heaven, then I don't believe in hell. I do believe in the soul though. I prefer to think that some souls just blink out! Do they? What the heck do I know?
Fantastic book.

[Chrissie · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredible collection of the real lives of some of the poor in Victorian London.

You will definitely be surprised by their stories, as it seems we have rather been given the wrong impression in many ways!

Loved it.

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unfortunately a bit of a mess and ending up as mediocre history lacking any rigor or proper critical engagement with deeply problematic sources. I know what we have is very limited, but that means we have to be even more cautious about engaging in flights of emotive fancy or taking things at face value. It also means not bringing 21st century ideas of subversion, gender etc and foisting them on people we know next to nothing about. I completely agree that many of these people were victims of an unjust and, frankly, at times horrific society, but imposing our perspective on the past does it a great disservice. It is also entirely possible for someone to be a victim and also a bloody awful piece of work (not to mention a hypocrite, a liar or a thief). The work of the historian is not one of rescue or sanctification.

[Helen · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I read the blurb to this book, all I could think was ‘Victorian social history – I’m in!’ I’m sad to say that although interesting and informative I found it a tough read. The books whole purpose seems to be telling the untold and often unwritten stories of London’s street people, but I can’t say that the author ever really provides enough of their stories for the reader to identify with these people; not as characters, but as the individuals themselves.

The writing was dry, which to a certain extent with non-fiction you expect, but I found myself wanting to skip over the text in places. Instead of opting for a recounting of the facts and trusting the reader’s ability to understand, process and not discriminate, Jensen hammers his opinions and views into the text. In doing so the author makes this book a critique of historical sources, rather than it being an opportunity to tell unheard stories. Sadly, and more often than not, Jensen’s ‘facts’ either contradict or negate the weight of the voices of the past, leaving us with very little learned and more questions than when they started.

Personally, the most frustrating thing for me was when the author started telling one person’s story and a few sentences later came to an abrupt halt. Jensen then tells the reader where he read about this person and that they can go and read more about them there. Jensen – I opened your book to hear their stories, not for you to point me in another direction!

Now that I’ve written this review part of me feels that ‘Vagabonds’ isn’t worth the 3 stars I’ve given it. At the end of the day though, the information this books contains has taken a lot of research and analysis and I am appreciative to Jensen for that.

[Christine · Rating 2 out of 5]

Describes life in London from the perspective (much enhanced) of the poor. Some of the characters were interesting but for me it was spoilt by the author’s insistence on overlaying almost everything with 21st century mores and language. Not so much a history lesson but a lecture on the authors politics and postmodern beliefs.

[Kimmy C · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recommended by another Goodreads reviewer (thanks, Lisa!), this in-depth study of the street dwellers (or very close to living on the streets) gives us, the 21st century survivors of that generation of people, an insight into their lives and ultimate deaths (and: with the practise of grave robbing, after their passing).
Told through the voices of the actual people, through meticulous research and end-of-book annotations and references for further investigation, these stories, told sympathetically but factually, invoke a sense of dread in the modern day reader - a wonder that they survived (and in a few cases, thrived and became famous) under the conditions of the streets of Georgian/Victorian London. Particularly striking are the stories of the children who escape to the streets from a worse home or work life, and sometimes, find a family of their own through the bonding together of similar experiences from other children. The threats are real, not only the conditions under which they live, but the dogooders and the ever present threat of the workhouse.
This is a very readable work, although at times I did find it a bit wordy for the sake of words, however you can stop at about 80% finished, as the rest is references.
Family history shows that a distant great-great (times I don’t know how many generations) died in a workhouse, so this little insight of the conditions at the time gave a bit of life to her story.
With thanks to NetGalley, Oskar Jensen, and Duckworth publishing for a copy for readig and review.

[Arthur Morrill III · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Vagabonds: Life on the Streets of Nineteenth-Century London,” by Oskar Jensen (ISBN: 9780715654392), publication date 2 Jun 2022, earns four stars.

One might be tempted to recall Dickens, et.al., when reading this book but then that would do this book an injustice for Dickens stayed on the surface whereas this author dives deep into the gritty, debilitating, and oppressive reality faced by those individuals who actually lived on the streets of Victorian England. These were real people; they had names.

His approach is to tell their stories by categorizing the vagabonds (or victims, as he also calls them) into “the seven ages of man,” i.e., infancy, young boyhood, adolescent girlhoods, newcomers, professionals, old age, etc. He uses their words, those of their observers, and others to paint as bleak a reality as can be imagined. Juxtaposed to their plight are those more fortunate citizens who range from preying on the street people—many of whom are children—to providing them genuine assistance.

In the end, the author is sympathetic, even admiring, of these vagabonds, who by force of circumstances create their own environment, society, and freedom while plying their trades in and around the streets of 19th Century England.

It is an evocative book, one that promotes great sympathy, but one that also takes the vagabonds who are one-dimensional literary characters to living, breathing, three dimensional human beings. In doing so, he reveals the worst and best of people, while admiring the pluckiness of those on the streets even as he deplores their conditions in which they live.

Thanks to the publisher, Duckworth Press, for granting this reviewer the opportunity to read this Advance Reader Copy (ARC), and thanks to NetGalley for helping to make that possible.

[Bookshire Cat · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received the ARC through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Overall, this book is social history as I like it, well-written, individual-driven, striving to provide the subjects’ own narrative whenever possible. The book sits somewhere in between of popularizing and academic text and I think general public will find this book accessible, engaging and eye-opening, and academics will find it a very useful companion to more data-oriented monographies.

I have several issues with the book, some minor, some not:

There are formatting issues in the ARC that hopefully will be corrected in the finished eBook.

The author’s voice is very distinct, maybe too forceful in making his point. It is clear who the villain is and letting the people, events and facts speaking for themselves would have had stronger impact. I would also appreciate at least brief factual commentary to frame the personal stories and to provide context.

The chapter division more or less follows the age groups from childhood to old age and it mostly works well. However, the decision to separate children and young adults to the chapters The Boy and The Girl which do not follow the same age groups seems arbitrary and achieves the exact opposite to what the author strives to do in the chapter on the girls in the streets. He distances himself from the male-gaze-heavy period reports but by focusing separately on girls of the age when they are most vulnerable to male advances and introducing the issue of prostitution in relation to women only, he contributes to the stereotypes. Why isn’t male prostitution mentioned?

There are also no queer people, save for a single transgender man, mentioned in the book. Given how vocal the book is on issues of social injustice, racism, and injustice towards women, it’s rather surprising.

[Tim O'Neill · Rating 5 out of 5]

A treasury of interesting details and careful analysis presented in a lively and interesting style.

[Ergative Absolutive · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25/5

One of the most difficult parts of writing about the past is capturing the lives of the people--and yet, the lives of the people is often the thing that makes the past so fascinating to so many. What was it like to live back then? Vagabonds answers this question with a single-minded focus: It describes the lives of the people who lived on London's streets in the 19th century, organised chronologically according to the different stages of life--infancy, childhood, adolescence, the age of travel and immigration (adulthood), and finishing with old age and death. The book is a fascinating combination of modern values--Jensen makes no bones about coloring the narrative with his own progressive opinions about feminism, trans rights, colonialism, and race--and 19th century voices. He takes great effort to use primarily contemporary accounts, and as much as possible the words of those people themselves: memoirs, court transcripts, interviews, and so on.

This focus on primary accounts and first-person narratives is a rhetorical choice that comes with advantages and drawbacks. The advantages are numerous: Jensen is very careful to present the lives of these people with the utmost respect and sympathy, recognizing their courage and independence and own desire for self-determination in the face of wildly oppressive systems that presented themselves as charities and aids, while in fact just making a hard life that much harder. Throughout the entire book the Mendicity Society--ostensibly a charity set up to assist the beggars ('mendicants') of London streets--lurks as a villain. Since begging is illegal, the Mendicity Society often operates not to assist beggars, but to investigate and charge them with the crime of begging, locking them up in prisons rather than helping them change their circumstances. When the naive, new to town, hear that the Mendicity Society is there to help, and willingly apply for aid, they get not the aid they need--a replacement tool to carry out a trade--but the most condescending treatment and charity that is useless to them.

Individuals, too, like to think of themselves as charitable benefactors, but instead just make life harder. This is particularly evident in the chapter on the lot of young women, who are forever seen as being either sex workers or on the road to becoming sex workers, and whatever their actual profession, they must forever ward off the attentions of men who want to 'rescue' them. Worse, in the case when they actually need help, they only get it if they can present themselves as the right kind of woman in distress: genuinely repentant for having fallen into sin; responsible for a small child (children are incredibly valuable assets for soliciting charity, to the point that there is a small industry in loaning out children to make women seem more sympathetic); and above all pretty. Society likes to think of itself as a fount of Christian charity, but only for the 'worthy', and those who are not worthy--or who cannot present themselves as worthy--are either ignored or else locked up in jails for the crime of being poor.

Yet by focusing specifically on the perspectives of the street people themselves, Jensen necessarily restricts the scope of what he can discuss. This isn't necessarily a problem. Indeed, he navigates this restriction extremely nimbly in explaining why, when talking about adolescence, he must separate the experience of boys and girls, and why the experience of boys is mostly in their own words, while the experience of girls is primarily told through other people's eyes, and usually heavily features the male gaze. These girls are almost always described in terms of their proximity to sex work. On the one hand, this is the result of the fact that boys grew up to be men, who got to write memoirs and tell their own stories, while women's writing tended not to be published or survive. So we have a survivorship bias: the only words that survive are mostly men's, and men of course have a male gaze. But, on the other hand, because of the heavily patriarchal society, it's not the case that these young women's lives were ever actually free of the male gaze in the first place, so the unbalanced focus in tellling their stories is to some extent going to reflect the unbalanced experience that boys and girls lived. Jensen does a very good job navigating this incredibly thorny issue.

Nevertheless, this restriction of focus does, in the end, leave gaps in the story. I wanted to know more about the institutional underpinnings that governed the world these street people lived. How, exactly, did the Mendicity Society work? Where did its money come from, what was its stated mission, how many people a year did it lock up/prosecute/feed/'assist'? What other charities were there? How did the workhouse system work? What, exactly, were the poor laws, and how were they administered and adjusted throughout the nineteenth century? All of these systems are mentioned when the stories of the individual street people come up against them, but I didn't have any broader perspective about how they worked.

Nevertheless, this limited perspective is a rhetorical choice: Jensen is not telling the history of street poverty, but the stories of street people, and so I cannot criticise him too harshly for having written the book he wanted to write, rather than the book wish he had written. And in the context of the book he chose to write, he has succeeded admirably.

NB: I received an advanced copy of this book from Netgalley. Inasmuch as I can be sure of such things, I believe that this has not affected the content of my review

[Sherrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A must-read for Dickens fans as the author specifically set out to depict the buskers, hustlers, and beggers of 19th century London without using a fictionalized or romanticized lens. Jensen's meticulous research unearths myriad stories about both lucky and unlucky souls, put upon by the relentless Mendicant Society, whose job was to "eliminate begging" by consistently locking street people up, whether they were begging or not. You can also draw a straight line to Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London - Orwell spends much of the London part of the book avoiding the cops and just trying to find a warm place to sleep. The stories of desperate scrounging range from the astonishing (the various schemes to beg for change range from stealing babies - a babe in arms garnered a lot more sympathy - to faking suicide attempts - again, for sympathy) to the downright depressing (starvation and sickness was inevitable for many) to a few rare triumphs (some performers he profiles moved on to legitimate careers in the British theater). A good read for a post-London trip as many of the streets and neighborbhoods of 19th century London still persist... although now, many of them, are for the richest of people only.

[Shaz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating social history about those who lived on the streets in Late 18th to late 19th century London. It's very well written and I now hate the mendacity Society. Some of these accounts are quite distressing but the book is always compassionate.

The book is broken down into life stages, the final section is The Elder and contains this line:
"We are nearing the end now, and while memoires can go out on a relative high, a complete biography has only one possible conclusion."

[Nicole Edbrooke · Rating 3 out of 5]

Difficult

[Eliante · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing work of research.

[Heather Rogers · Rating 5 out of 5]

My thanks to the publishers for an advanced copy of this fascinating book for review. It is a gripping and visceral read on what it was really like to live and make a living on London’s streets in the century between the Napoleonic and Crimean wars. Unlike the voyeuristic, sometimes frankly pornographic, imperial liberals who observed, categorised and passed moral judgement on the ordinary and extraordinary people struggling to live on the streets of the capital, the author goes to considerable trouble to enable as many as possible to tell us about their world and what matters to them in their own words.

Beginning with Mary Ann Donovan’s eloquent defiance in court and the slum dweller’s articulate rage about how journalists describe his world, we meet a range of people who just do not conform to the stereotypes categorised by experts like Henry Mayhew and Thomas Barnardo. There are Margaret Cochran, crossing sweeper, lollipop lady and lifeguard and Bridget, the newspaper seller. There is Sarah Tanner, whose resolute rise from maid servant to affluent courtesan enables her to retire and become a successful coffee shop proprietor. There are busking hymn singers and ballad singers plying their song sheets. There is Joseph Johnson, a disabled black merchant seaman, who performs a Jonkanoo rendition of ‘the storm’ on crutches with the Nelson ship on his head. There are the fugitive slave girls of Kentucky. There is double amputee Edward Albert, who writes and gets published a pamphlet about his ordeal when he was a pastry chef with frostbite on board ship. There are kidnappers and there are pick pockets. And this is without mentioning the most famous of those who were born on the street. People like Edmund Kean, maybe the best of Shakespearean actors, and William ‘Billie’ Waters, fiddler extraordinaire.

For all these, and many more, life on the street is far, far better than life in an institution. They all prize their liberty in an age of arbitrary law and private order enforcement. Institutions set up on the face of it to help are monsters of persecution. The law succeeds in separating Eliza from her blind, black partner, Mohamet Abraham, in a story of institutional racism which repeats to the present day. If it could, the law would have persecuted a couple, when the man turns out to be a woman. The mendacity of the poisonous Mendicity Society knows no boundaries. The poor are always blamed for their plight in any age, but this book shows some everyday and some heroic resistance. These people are not victims.

Do read this book. It’s tremendous.

[thewoollygeek (tea, cake, crochet & books) · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really interesting and well researched book, I loved the fact it’s focused on the poor, something not often covered in history books and the diversity in this is wonderful, covering gender, sexuality, class and race and how these affected those in poverty in nineteenth-century London. A thoroughly well written and interesting history and would be a great addition to anyones self learning

Thanks to netgalley and the publisher for a free copy for an honest opinion

[Peter Baran · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vagabonds is self-consciously light touch history. Jensen's collection of stories of life on the streets and the margins on 18th and 19th Century London does not add up to any grand narrative of the development of London, or British society. Indeed Jensen's foreword is strictly against those types of conclusions, rather he wants to give an opportunity of these people who are usually glossed over in history a chance to speak. And where possible (and he has done a terrific job in sourcing here), he wants to do it in their own voice - so as many direct quotes from journalists and court reporters as possible. Because sadly in a lot of these cases we know about them because of run-ins with the courts, where the Lord Mayor is trying to fine, expel or send to the workhouse someone or other for just trying to make a living on the street. Between poverty and the hardcore busybodies of the Mendicant Society, it was tough out there.

Thematically the book runs through its chapters grouped around either age or societal status. So we get chapters of birth, boys, girls (less on girls because society wasn't as interested in them, and then it was in a different way). He looks at immigration into the city from the rest of the country, and from outside - threading nicely the truism that there have always been people of colour in the capital, and they have usually been treated badly. We see stories of ingenuity in crime, derring-do for street-sweepers -helping people across the road has never been so dangerous. And often we get moments of true pathos when these folks called into court, plainly lay on the line their situation. If a girl is stopped from selling lavender, then what is left to sell. There is no safety net.

Vagabonds is a great bit of scholarship that is also an excellent casual read. Jensen only lightly editorialises, to give context and in some cases stand up for a society we don't understand (there is a case where a woman who has lived as a man and their partner has their prefer pronouns used in a way that many politicians today would refuse to do out of spite). I was initially surprised that it didn't really have much int he way of a conclusion, but that is kind of the point. Jensen gives voice to the voiceless and he is not about to try to talk over those voices to tell us what it all means. It was tough, some people survived, some didn't but remember those people on the street, toiling day to day just to get by, that's most of history.

[Atulya Kriday · Rating 3 out of 5]

Distancing from the pedantic, moralistic, and often prejudiced narratives of the past, Oscar Jensen provides an extensive and empathetic look into the history through the rarely mentioned lives of the lower classes and the poor. Vagabonds is a fascinating look into the past, and from the get go, the author makes his stand clear - the poor are not the stereotypical caricatures depicted by the sneering middle-class and are not the objects of pity and derision of the upper classes. However, instead of opting for the clinical recounting of the facts and trusting the reader's ability to distinguish and not discriminate, the author continously hammers his opinions and views into the text. And sadly, and more often than not, his 'facts' either contradict or negate the weight of the voices of the past. The gendered segregation in topics of prostitution (author fails to note that men are also the victims of sex trade) and the exclusion of the queer people from the narrative stands out. All in all, Vagabonds is an intriguing read despite its several shortcomings.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher Duckworth Books for an ARC.

[Lettice · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author tells the story of life on London's streets during the Victorian era, from babies to the elderly, including the experiences of Londoners and those who came to London and made it home. Where possible we hear their stories in their own words, but often through the eyes of others. For some the city holds opportunity, for others hardship. The variety of experiences is what makes this book so interesting.

[Graham · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good idea, but I don't think this book quite works. It follows the lives of various people through the slender records available.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my favourite paintings is ‘Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward’, by Sir Luke Fildes. When I first laid eyes on this mid-Victorian masterpiece at Royal Holloway University, I was captivated by image of poor Londoners, lining up outside a police station on a dark and snowy night, in the hope of receiving a ticket that would allow them admission to a casual ward – temporary accommodation granted on a nightly basis.

Literally huddled against the biting cold, a diverse range of characters populate this haunting scene. An old soldier leans against a crutch. A drunk sleeps against a wall. A father clutches a small child, its bare legs and feet exposed to the freezing night air. A small boy, too poor even to have a coat, stands bent double, perhaps from the cold, perhaps from hunger - probably from both. His face is gaunt and pinched, and there is pain and desperation in his eyes. He is a visual embodiment of the children lurking beneath the coat of the Ghost of Christmas Present in ‘A Christmas Carol’.

It is an image not easily forgotten. Yet while the suffering of the subjects is plain to see, their backgrounds and stories remain a mystery. Oskar Jensen’s new book, ‘Vagabonds’, goes a long way towards addressing this by shining an unflinching light on the lives of those who struggled to survive on the streets of nineteenth-century London.

Jensen, borrowing perhaps from Shakespeare’s seven ages of man, divides his book into seven chapters, five of which deal with the different life stages of those who called the streets home – from the infant to the elder. The two remaining chapters deal with the specific experiences of particular groups – immigrants and those who found themselves on the wrong side of the law.
It is an effective structure, and rather than rely on generalisations, each chapter is filled with examples of real people. Some of those we meet as children are reintroduced in later chapters, giving a touching sense of seeing lives unfold.

Jensen does an excellent job of weaving the various stories together and providing context, although the highlights are undoubtedly the passages in which we are able to read the words of the subjects themselves. Wisely, Jensen has included many direct quotes, which speak powerfully of the experiences of those who lived on the poverty line.

Unsurprisingly, the lives we encounter are overwhelmingly bleak. While there are some moments of humour, and a few of the youngsters go on to prosper (to varying degrees), poverty and desperation stalk nearly every page. Particularly harrowing are descriptions of bereaved families so poor that they must share their small, crowded rooms with the dead bodies of their loved ones - in some cases for up to two weeks - until funeral arrangements can be made. Sometimes, the corpses are in plain view. In one especially tragic example, the lifeless remains of a small child are kept on a shelf in a cupboard, next to one of its few worldly possessions.

Reading these heart-breaking accounts, one cannot help but think about how far we have come. In Britain today, the extremes of squalor described in the book are unimaginable, and it is hard not to feel grateful to be alive now, and not then.

And yet, for all our progress, a cursory glance at the news suggests that we are not as far removed from the Dickensian poverty described in this book as we may like to think. Increasing rates of homelessness, foodbanks experiencing unprecedented demand and spiralling energy costs which force households to choose between heating and eating provide grim echoes of the plight of those whose stories fill this book.

Vagabonds is an engrossing, startling and humane examination of the poorest and most vulnerable of London’s past. It is a reminder of how much worse things were, and, as a cost of living crisis grips the nation, a timely warning of what can happen when those at the bottom of society are neglected.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jensen drills a historian's inquisitive bore holes across the entire span of C19 London in search for the smaller but no less revealing nuggets of individual lives lived on the streets of London.

Rather than surveying the larger topology of the Industrial Revolution and Queen Victoria's expanding British empire, these individuals are like corks floating on the waves of history. "Vagabonds" recounts the individual lives of veterans, ex-slaves, and the poor and/or unfortunate who find themselves having to survive precariously without paid employment or a fixed abode. These he cleverly orders into separate chapters describing the experiences of The Infant, The Boy, The Girl, The Immigrant, The Pro, The Renegade and The Elder.

These are all hard lives, led by enterprising people who survive by their skill, ingenuity and resilience of character. Like Sarah Macduffick, they pull off "the rare trick of being conspicuously deserving - of overcoming that cruel double standard of nineteenth-century charity {only C19?] that requires her to be humble and undemanding in order to be worthy, while simultaneously needing to be noticed in order to get alms" (p.253). These attributes are their only defence in the face of an institutional context that views them as guilty for being poor. While they rely on the generosity of many genuinely empathetic individuals, the institutions such as the Courts mostly dispense arbitrary and unjust prison sentences, taking an average of less than 5 minutes to hear the facts from those who have difficulty expressing themselves and cannot afford proper representation.

These vagabonds live and fight for their freedom and independence under the ever-present shadow of pestilence, the workhouse, and the officers of the Mendicity Society - supposedly a charity intended to provide help to complement the small and conditional payments dispensed by the Parishes under the Poor Laws but in practice acting as a brutal and dehumanising agency for the removal of 'these objects that infest our streets'.

As many reviewers have remarked, if a Jensen living in a hundred years' time were to narrate the stories of our London vagabonds of today, I doubt they would be greatly different .... although perhaps attenuated by the work of some inspirational charities.

A final thought. provoked by the tale of the anonymous vagrant sailor who draws in chalk along the boundary wall of Kew Gardens the entire fleet of 800 ships constituting the British Navy - if you know that dreary wall, you might agree with me that someone should commission something similar for today!

[Book Club of One · Rating 4 out of 5]

A primary source derived excursion in to the rarely heard voices of people who lived and worked in London's streets between the 1780s and 1870s. Oskar Jensen's goal is to humanize and empathize with people who lived and worked on the streets, offering a quite different view of how we picture or imagine Victorian London.

This is not an architectural or legal story, but one of people. Jensen using the birth to death structure to arrange chapters describing street life for different groups. Chapter one looks at the infant, chapter the boy, three the girl. Chapter four explores the immigrant experience. Chapter five looks at the life of the professional. Chapter six looks at those living beyond or fleeing from the law. Chapter seven centers on the elderly. All of these chapters looks at that almost century and present, in their own words, or the words of contemporary witnesses, lived experience. Some people reappear across multiple chapters, having written of their own lives. Other's we only see briefly.

It is very much a work focused on the poor and the struggle and challenges of survival. Some are temporary residents of the streets falling on bad luck, others have made due and eke out their daily lives through an established location or routine. However, it does also highlight stories of success, of those who learned to game the system or reached heights of fame. There are some possibilities of support either through the local parish or by entering a workhouse, but many speak to the inefficiency or unhygienic conditions of these places. To appear clean and presentable is seen by many to be necessary to secure any sort of work, especially as begging is criminalized.

Most striking is the ephemerality of the lives led. For example, in 'The Elder" chapter, some street musicians names are only known, because they performed at a funeral that made the newspaper. Many of the people's whose stories are told here are only known through the writings cited in this volume. What traces does a life leave? Is to survive enough?

Recommended to those interested in History, this book serves as an excellent survey of London's Street life and would be a useful accompaniment to
Dirty Old London: The Victorian Fight Against Filth

I received a free digital version of this book via NetGalley thanks to the publisher.

[CPE · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oskar Jensen is a Senior Research Associate at the University of East Anglia. His latest book, Vagabonds, uses a series of case studies to show us what it was like to be on the street in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jensen uses writing by or about a series of men, women, boys, girls, old, young – so that we meet them as individuals, not as nameless exemplars.

Jensen is keen to emphasise how much the people of the street valued their independence and freedom, even at an early age. “[…] for many of London’s poor infants, life in the street might seem preferable to life in an institution.” They are often harassed by do-gooders (or, in the case of the Mendicant Society, vicious hypocrites who think all poor people are shamming). The book opens with Mary Ann Donovan up before a magistrate (the Lord Mayor of London, no less) in 1859. She’s charged with selling combs on Cornhill. The Lord Mayor tells her that the combs were a cover for immodest purposes and, besides, she’s liable to a fine of forty shillings or one month’s imprisonment. Donovan asks what a poor girl is supposed to do? She can’t take a shop; if she sells combs, she’ll be fined or sent to jail; if she begs, she’ll be sent to jail; if she steals, goodness knows what will happen to her; and she won’t become a prostitute – so, again, what should she do? The Lord Mayor doesn’t like her answering back and imprisons her.

The book is structured around Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man, starting with the birth of Edmund Cary (better known in adulthood as Edmund Kean, the famous actor) and finishing with Charles Mackey, reputed to be either 87 or 110 when he died in 1854. This gives a wide variety of case studies. We meet some of the cast, such as Billy Waters and Charles Humphreys, more than once through the book – and Jensen does use a large cast to illustrate his chapters.

I enjoyed the book but I did find some passages rather overwritten for my taste. Also, all the examples are from the streets of London. I did wonder whether life on the street of other cities was very similar or vastly different.

#Vagabonds #NetGalley

[Ru · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting, immensely readable, book with a strong narrative voice, and a firm sense of story. I enjoyed reading it a lot, and found both the age based structure, and variety of characters, to work well in creating a very clear sense of street London during this time. The later chapters in particular gave me a very strong reminder of the London chapters in Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, albeit a century apart.

The author's voice is very clear throughout, which is probably quite a personal preference, but one that was effective for me. In part this was because so much of the sources relied on to describe the people featured in the book were sources that simultaneously claimed their inherent impartiality while judging and patronising their subjects. Jensen's refusal to pretend impartiality is much more refreshingly honest in this context.

One general topic that I would have liked to have seen covered a bit more was of the relationships between the people who lived on and around the streets- what were the norms and realities as compared to the laws and societal norms in higher classes. There were a few elements mentioned which showed differences here, such as the (seemingly) trans man and the contrast between the apparent ease and recognition in his relationship and the censorship (and confusion!) of the authorities, and then the discussion of mixed race relationships that were accepted more by the lower classes, and I would have liked to have delved more into this.

Relatedly I would have liked more about queerness in general, and more exploration of the topic of gender roles as well. For example the chapter on sex workers looked solely at female prostitution gor example, and I would have been interested in seeing the comparative lives and treatment of male sex workers too.

Overall this was an excellent book that was really readable, full of interesting detail and sought to portray a wide and diverse breadth of London life in the period.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC

[Ken Sampson · Rating 3 out of 5]

[2 Apr 2023] This book was right up my street. I love evocative accounts of old London and the personal and social history that brings it to life. It is meticulously researched and new interesting characters are included and all are described well. It is well written, engaging and enjoyable and I was really settling into it before I realised that I was not only reading the voices of the individuals described, but increasingly the voice of the author too.

Essentially, the author was I subsequently discovered 'the BBC New Generation Thinker of the year' and regularly broadcasts on the BBC. I then discovered online the book being described as 'the experiences of Dickensian London’s poor show that queer stories, mixed-race stories, anti-racist stories don’t belong only to the present day, but form a longstanding part of British history.' All the left wing assumptions are there - the always, totally not-responsible for themselves poor and the evil tyrannical capitalists, the uncaring rich, misogyny, black-lives matter, endemic institutional racism. London being 'a multicultural melting-pot', the evils of empire, the struggle for trans-rights. Now intrinsically there is value in thinking about all of these issues in themselves and in depth and in context, each are aspects of our history - but here they appeared tokenistic and slightly voyeuristic and I thought simply peddled the contemporary theories of our day and the real risk that it wasn't the voices of the London poor that came through, but that of - and excuse my prejudicial assumptions - a middle-class, twenty-first century academic, who inhabits academia, the BBC and the New Statesman magazine, all institutions that, forgive me once again, are not currently known for their politically balanced-thinking.

So if you believe in the 'Britain is a nation of immigrants' theory, that the British empire was inherently evil, in total acceptance of Black Lives Matter and Trans-ideology then this book will be comforting and affirmative. If you want your history told as it was, with lives of people described as they would probably have described them, then you may like me be ultimately disappointed. In summary - Don't get me wrong - there is much to like, but I could have done without the lives of 19th century Londoners being squashed and distorted through a the 21st century left-wing prism.

[Steven Henry · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have rarely before encountered a book in which my interest in the subject matter clashed so violently with the writing.

Victorian street life is a fascinating topic, full of literally Dickensian characters. The societal injustice, the daily struggle of London's poor against both physical and moral danger and degradation, against a backdrop of rapid industrialization and vicious class struggle, is the stuff of great stories.

But this is not one of the great stories. Jensen's writing is a transparent attempt to foist his own 21st-Century viewpoint into the minds and histories of his subjects. It detracts from the perceived objectivity of his narrative, it rings patently false in many of his conclusions, and I say this as someone who AGREES with a great many of his modern opinions.

I'm sorry, but your average London street dweller was not interested in "making their voice heard," or in being "subversive" or of "reclaiming their narrative." These are a writer's own desires, transposed onto his subjects. The people wrestling a living from the streets were primarily interested in food, shelter, and safety.

Jensen, in an apparent 180 from the Victorians' own prejudices, finds no bad people on the streets. All his subjects are, somehow, sympathetic. Apparently there was no serious problem with street crime in London, as even the few career criminals he examines are presented as almost admirable characters. Even the prostitutes, he suggests, are there voluntarily! Human trafficking? Sex slavery? Not to be seen.

Ironically, in his attempt to celebrate the diversity of the London streets in the mid-1800s, Jensen does a better "whitewashing" job than if he'd only written about middle-class white Victorians. This book was a severe disappointment to me, and a lesson in how to resist ideology-driven narrative revisionism.