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 Dore. 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. AUTHOR: Oskar Jensen is an author and academic with a doctorate in History from Christ Church, Oxford. He has held positions at King’s College London and Queen Mary, University of London, where he was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, and he is now Senior Research Associate in the department of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies at the University of East Anglia. Oskar writes for New Statesman, has appeared on BBC1’s Who Do You Think You Are? and BBC Radio 3 and 4, and was the historical advisor for the 2018 ITV/Amazon production of Vanity Fair. Vagabonds is his first trade non-fiction book.