‘A picture of 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.’ This was Thackeray in 1850, on reading Henry Mayhew’s ‘Labour & The Poor’ columns in the Morning Chronicle newspaper. City life had coerced the poor into adopting elaborate strategies for scavenging a bare living; the ingenuity of their entrepreneurship, the tenuous nature of their hold on life, their suffering and stoicism but also the regular belly-laughs of their world, tumble from every page of Mayhew’s reports, which he expanded in 1861 into a book in four volumes.

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