Shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize 2023
Compelling,moving and unexpected portraits of London's poor from a rising star British historian - the Dickensian city brought to real and vivid life.
Until now,our view of bustling late Georgian and Victorian London has been filtered through its great chroniclers,who did not themselves come from poverty - Dickens,Mayhew,Gustave Dore. Their visions were dazzling in their way,censorious,often theatrical. Now,for the first time,this innovative social history brilliantly - and radically - shows us the city's most compelling period (1780-1870) at street level.
From beggars and thieves to musicians and missionaries,porters and hawkers to sex workers and street criers,Jensen unites a breadth of original research and first-hand accounts and testimonies to tell their stories in their own words. What emerges is a buzzing,cosmopolitan world of the working classes,diverse in gender,ethnicity,origin,ability and occupation - a world that challenges and fascinates us still.
Publisher: Duckworth BooksISBN: 9780715654958Number of pages: 352Dimensions: 198 x 129 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
'Vagabonds is a collection of exquisite stories. Open the cover and a beguiling crowd of characters run amok... Jensen gives these past lives a monument,a dignity and recognition they deserve. Jensen is the real deal; I've never encountered a historian quite like him'- Gerard de Groot
'Jensen's fascinating,delightfully readable book 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... Vagabonds narrates their lives with a sympathy and sensitivity that is often moving'- Matthew Beaumont
'A very readable and historically well researched picture of the nineteenth-century poor'- Gareth Stedman Jones
'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
'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
'Oskar Jensen has coaxed out of the archives a vast range of original voices of the street poor of London. With great sensitivity and scholarly rigour,he ensures that,once again,we hear the lived experiences of those who lived and died on the margins of metropolitan life'- Sarah Wise
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