London Labour and the London Poor: A Cyclopædia of the Condition and Earnings of Those That Will Work, Those That Cannot Work, and Those That Will Not

Assembled from a series of newspaper articles first published in the newspaper Morning Chronicle throughout the 1840s, this exhaustively researched, richly detailed survey of the teeming street denizens of London is a work both of groundbreaking sociology and salacious voyeurism. In an 1850 review of the survey, just prior to its initial book publication, William Makepeace Thackeray called it "tale of terror and wonder" offering "a picture of human life so wonderful, so awful, so piteous and pathetic, so exciting and terrible, that readers of romances own they never read anything like to it." Delving into the world of the London "street-folk"-the buyers and sellers of goods, performers, artisans, laborers and others-this extraordinary work inspired the socially conscious fiction of Charles Dickens in the 19th century as well as the urban fantasy of Neil Gaiman in the late 20th. Volume III explores the lives of: the "destroyers of vermin" street musicians "exhibitors of trained animals" dock laborers cab drivers steamboatmen vagrants and more. English journalist HENRY MAYHEW (1812-1887) was a founder and editor of the satirical magazine Punch.