The streets of Victorian London became increasingly congested with vehicles, fast and furious drivers, pedestrians, costermongers, prostitutes, brass bands, homeless children and other obstacles to safe and rapid motion. Concerned citizens were alarmed by this unprecedented build-up of traffic and pollution. But how did this chaotic state come about - and why was more not done to prevent it? London's Teeming Streets brings an historical perspective to present-day concerns about the effects of continued urban expansion and shows that many current problems date back to the Victorian era. James Winter reveals that the issue of street reform was fraught with political intrigue. Many reformers were liberals; yet the question of attempting to limit or prohibit activity on the King's Highway which was, by definition, an open and democratic preserve, brought the very purpose of liberal reform into sharp focus.

The streets of Victorian London became increasingly congested with vehicles, fast and furious drivers, pedestrians, costermongers, prostitutes, brass bands, homeless children and other obstacles to safe and rapid motion. Concerned citizens were alarmed by this unprecedented build-up of traffic and pollution. But how did this chaotic state come about - and why was more not done to prevent it? London's Teeming Streets brings an historical perspective to present-day concerns about the effects of continued urban expansion and shows that many current problems date back to the Victorian era. James Winter reveals that the issue of street reform was fraught with political intrigue. Many reformers were liberals; yet the question of attempting to limit or prohibit activity on the King's Highway which was, by definition, an open and democratic preserve, brought the very purpose of liberal reform into sharp focus.

From around 1850, London’s street markets grew in number and scale, giving working-class Londoners a site for shopping, entertainment and sociability. Cheap Street is the first major study of this subject, analysing the street markets as a component of London’s lively informal economy, and providing new insights into urban and consumer geographies.

Dickensian London is brought to real and vivid life in this innovative, accessible social history, revealing the true character of this place and time through the stories of its street denizens—shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize 2023 London, 1857: A pair of teenage girls holding a sign that says “Fugitive Slaves” ask for money on the corner of Blackman Street. After a constable accosts them and charges them with begging, they end up in court, where national newspapers pick up their story. Are the girls truly escaped slaves from Kentucky? Or will the city’s dystopian Mendicity Society catch them in a lie, exposing them as born-and-raised Londoners and endangering their safety? With its many accounts of people like these who lived and made their living on the streets, Vagabonds forms a moving picture of London’s most compelling period (1780–1870). Piecing together contemporary sources such as newspaper articles, letters, and journal entries, historian Oskar Jensen follows the harrowing, hopeful journeys of the city’s poor: children, immigrants, street performers, thieves, and sex workers, all diverse in gender, ethnicity, ability, and origin. For the first time, their own voices give us a radical new perspective on this moment in history, with its deep inequality that bears an astonishing resemblance to our own era’s divides.

This is the story of the women, men, boys, and girls who hawked oysters, cherries, cabbages, and pies on London's streets, feeding the capital throughout its transformation from medieval city to global metropolis. Street Food reconstructs the working lives of these poor traders, following them from the back alleys and cramped rooms they called home, to the taverns, bridges, and corners where they set up shop. It describes fast-moving food chains, heaving markets, rumbling wheelbarrows, scruffy donkeys, rushing traffic, and advertising cries that echoed through the city. The first long-term, comprehensive history of street selling in London, the book explores the intricacies of hawkers' work and their profound social, economic, and cultural importance to metropolitan life between the late sixteenth and early twentieth centuries. Based on the largest collection of archival and published evidence to date, it not only highlights the crucial roles street sellers played in fuelling the capital's expansion, but argues that their endurance over three centuries raises challenging questions about major narratives and processes of urban history, like modernization, the rise of retail, and the improvement of the streets. And it examines why the street food of the past-like the continuing vitality of street vendors around the world - is so different to the fashionable street food ubiquitous across London today.

The Business of Beauty is a unique exploration of the history of beauty, consumption, and business in Victorian and Edwardian London. Illuminating national and cultural contingencies specific to London as a global metropolis, it makes an important intervention by challenging the view of those who-like their historical contemporaries-perceive the 19th and early 20th centuries as devoid of beauty praxis, let alone a commercial beauty culture. Contrary to this perception, The Business of Beauty reveals that Victorian and Edwardian women and men developed a number of tacit strategies to transform their looks including the purchase of new goods and services from a heterogeneous group of urban entrepreneurs: hairdressers, barbers, perfumers, wigmakers, complexion specialists, hair-restorers, manicurists, and beauty “culturists.” Mining trade journals, census data, periodical print, and advice literature, Jessica P. Clark takes us on a journey through Victorian and Edwardian London's beauty businesses, from the shady back parlors of Sarah “Madame Rachel” Leverson to the elegant showrooms of Eugène Rimmel into the first Mayfair salon of Mrs. Helena Titus, aka Helena Rubinstein. By revealing these stories, Jessica P. Clark revises traditional chronologies of British beauty consumption and provides the historical background to 20th-century developments led by Rubinstein and others. Weaving together histories of gender, fashion, and business to investigate the ways that Victorian critiques of self-fashioning and beautification defined both the buying and selling of beauty goods, this is a revealing resource for scholars, students, fashion followers, and beauty enthusiasts alike.

By drawing attention to the wide range of gruesome, bloody and confronting amusements patronised by ordinary Londoners this book challenges our understanding of Victorian society and culture. From the turn of the nineteenth century, graphic, yet orderly, ‘re-enactments’ of high level violence flourished in travelling entertainments, penny broadsides, popular theatres, cheap instalment fiction and Sunday newspapers. This book explores the ways in which these entertainments siphoned off much of the actual violence that had hitherto been expressed in all manner of social and political dealings, thus providing a crucial accompaniment to schemes for the reformation of manners and the taming of the streets, while also serving as a social safety valve and a check on the growing cultural hegemony of the middle class.