Vagabonds

'Oskar Jensen's fascinating, delightfully readable book about nineteenth-century street life is animated by a formidable passion for recovering the stories of some of metropolitan London's poorest, most precarious, but also most creative people, a passion that is all too rare in accounts of the period... 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, Professor of English, UCL, and author of Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London 'A very readable and historically well researched picture of the nineteenth-century poor' GARETH STEDMAN JONES, Professor of the History of Ideas, Queen Mary University of London, and author of Outcast London 'Not only a notable accumulation, from original sources, of the horrors of survival on the streets of nineteenth-century London, but a devastating exposure of pseudo-charity as a form of coercive policing. 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 'Oskar Jensen's Vagabonds is an elegantly-written and vivid account of the people that lived and worked in Georgian and Victorian London. Jensen doesn't just present these hitherto marginalised figures on the page; like a delightful sorcerer, he brings them back to life' TOMIWA OWOLADE, award winning author of This is Not America