Down but not out

FERN RIDDELL applauds an honest portrait of 19th-century street life in Britain's capital, highlighting the hopes, fears and toils of real people who strove for more than just survival

- FERN RIDDELL

It's not often a book comes across my desk that deserves high praise, but Oskar Jensen's Vagabonds is worthy of just that. Compellingly written, this account of the loves, lives and losses of the people who navigated the warrens and thoroughfares of Oskar Jensen Regency and Victorian London is utterly captivating. It's part of an important body of works that focus on "history from below" the lives of ordinary folk rather than the deeds of great men.

Jensen's book is stuffed to bursting with original voices and sources alongside his well-crafted expert analysis. In it we meet renegades and professional criminals as well as embattled elders, all of whom lived, worked, and loved on London's streets.

As Jensen investigates and dissects the characters we might come across while wandering this great city, we first meet the abandoned babies and lost infants Charles Dickens was so fond of depicting. But, as Jensen makes clear, what he really wants his readers to do is to turn their "backs on Dickens and the rest" - ignore what they think they know about the lives he has found and instead prepare to be surprised. This is not a new idea: academic historians have been pushing back against our cultural reliance on Dickens for some time. His fictional version of the past often ignored the realities and agency - especially of women - that can be found during this exciting an explosive era of our history.

Indeed, this is not a book written in praise of those hand-wringing social reformers to whom we are so used to listening as Victorian voices of authority. Nor does it laud those who wanted to moralise about the actions of the people who lived and worked on the streets of the metropolis. Instead, this is an exploration of real life. Jensen’s subjects are not there for us to gawp at, but set out so that we see the world through their eyes as if we walked along those cobbles and pavements alongside them.