A sympathetic eye on London’s underclass

London Labour and the London Poor

Public visits to the sewers of London are rare: for one thing, there's a danger of catching leptospirosis from rat urine. Access is most often through a manhole near Blackfriar's Bridge. As you descend into a Victorian darkness, the sound of traffic above grows fainter and you approach the Fleet Main Line. This giant sewer runs five miles north to Hampstead.

Built in 1858, it had served to divert drainage from the main sewers along the Thames. Until then, the river had been an open latrine, brimful of refuse and odd jetsam. Even today it's extraordinary what people flush down their lavatories. Thames Water periodically hires "flushers" to pan the muck hopefully for jewellery and other, less valuable items.

The great Victorian chronicler of London's underclass, Henry Mayhew, documented similar desperadoes, known as "toshers", who trawled sewerage outlets round Blackfriars and Surrey docks in search of copper nails and other windfall. In his towering work of social reportage, London Labour and the London Poor, Mayhew exposed a limbo of sewer-hunters, card-sharps, bone-grubbers and other chancers who scraped a pittance to get by.

The Victorian upper classes remained ignorant of the metropolitan poor until they read about them in Mayhew or Dickens. However, they were not untouched by the underworld. While top-hatted gentlemen frequented the flagellation houses of Mayfair, toshers crawled in the ooze a few yards beneath their feet. The police paid toshers to dredge for missing persons, though it was a rare corpse retrieved that had any money about it.

Mayhew was the first journalist to elevate London's poor to the dignity of print. Published in 1851, his book was a marvel of sympathetic reportage, in which the capital emerged in all its squalid grandeur. Town planners had earlier condemned the City of London especially as a metropolitan abomination: Smithfield market was choked in animal fat and foam, with nearby Pissing Alley ankle-deep in excrement. Mayhew added his voice to the growing outrage.

In addition to charting the City's social decay, he minutely documented the lives of East End chimney-sweeps, strolling actors, fire-eaters and, dreadfully, child prostitutes. The sexual life of the metropolis flourished mightily amid economic depredation, and prostitutes spoke to Mayhew of swift and joyless financial transactions conducted in the rookeries off Fleet Street and the Strand. "I don't want to live," one of them confided, "yet I don't care enough about dying to make away with myself." In the teeming antheap of mid-Victorian London, life was cheap as well as, often, alcoholic.

In this superb new edition of Mayhew's classic work, the city's dark side flickers like a magic lantern show, by turns grotesque and eerie. In squalid localities such as Petticoat Lane and Shoreditch, swindlers are seen to vend fake goods with "gaudy labels" — much as "Guchi" watches and "Louis Viton" handbags are sold in similar places today. Prostitutes still minister to the sad, momentary pleasures of men, moreover, just as they did in Mayhew's day.

The underworld described here with such unsparing lucidity has not quite disappeared. For its campaigning spirit, London Labour and the London Poor remains the greatest Victorian novel never written, still fabulously resonant.