London Labour & the London Poor is a masterpiece of personal inquiry & social observation. It is the classic account of life below the margins in the greatest Metropolis in the world & a compelling portrait of the habits tastes amusements appearance speech humour earnings & opinions of the labouring poor at the time of the Great Exhibition. In scope depth & detail it remains unrivalled. Mayhew takes us into the abyss into a world without fixed employment where skills are declining & insecurity mounting a world of criminality pauperism & vice of unorthodox personal relations & fluid families a world from which regularity is absent & prosperity has departed. Making sense of this environment required curiosity imagination & a novelists eye for detail & Henry Mayhew possessed all three. No previous writer had succeeded in presenting the poor through their own stories & in their own words & in this undertaking Mayhew rivals his contemporary Dickens. To pass from one to the other writes one authority is to cross sides of the same street.