SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOLFSON HISTORY PRIZE 2023

A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR

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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.

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*PRAISE FOR VAGABONDS*

'Jensen gives these past lives a monument, a dignity and recognition they deserve. For a brief moment, in the pages of this extraordinary book, they are London and London is them'
GERARD DEGROOT, THE TIMES (Book of the Year)

'Rich in research... a telling account'
MARTIN CHILTON, INDEPENDENT

'A vigorous and necessary account made timely by the widening chasm between obscene wealth and dire poverty in our contemporary metropolis'
IAIN SINCLAIR, author of The Last London

'Every page rings with the thrum and bass of a city that saw itself as the centre of the world'
FERN RIDDELL, BBC HISTORY

'Rescuing these diverse individuals from both the condescension of their contemporaries and the silence of so many historians since, Vagabonds narrates their lives with a sympathy and sensitivity that is often moving - not least because they speak obliquely but powerfully to urban life in our own troubled and unsettled times'
MATTHEW BEAUMONT, author of Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London

• We started tracking this book on June 25, 2022.
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• Politics & Social SciencesSocial SciencesSociology
• Politics & Social SciencesPoverty

• Text-to-Speech: Disabled
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• Print Length: 394 Pages
• File Size: 7,454 KB