The London Underworld in the Victorian Period: v. 1

The first and possibly the greatest sociological study of poverty in nineteenth-century London, this survey by a journalist invented the genre of oral history a century before the term was coined. Henry Mayhew and his collaborators explored hundreds of miles of London streets in the 1840s and 1850s, gathering thousands of pages of testimony from the city's humbler residents. A sprawling, four-volume history resulted; this extract focuses on the criminal class, whose true stories of degradation, horror, and desperation rival Dickensian fiction.