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Vagabonds: Life on the Streets of Nineteenth-Century London

byOskar Jensen

Oskar Jensen reconstructs life among the homeless, itinerant, and precariously housed people of nineteenth-century London. Court records, songs, memoirs, newspapers, and institutional archives recover street sellers, beggars, performers, children, laborers, and travelers who survived through mobility and informal economies. The book looks beyond Victorian stereotypes of criminality and misery to reveal humor, community, ingenuity, and resistance. Jensen connects individual stories with policing, workhouses, urban growth, and changing definitions of respectability, showing that the streets were not social emptiness but a complex world hidden beneath official accounts.

Publisher

Experiment LLC, The

Publication date

2024

Format

Print edition

Pages

—

ISBN

9781891011429