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 I explores the lives of: the "wandering tribes" costermongers sellers of fish, fruits and vegetables sellers of books and stationery sellers of manufactured goods women and children on the streets and more. English journalist HENRY MAYHEW (1812-1887) was a founder and editor of the satirical magazine *Punch.*

This book discusses the visual and verbal city sketches which proliferated during the 'journalistic revolution' of the 1830s and 1840s. It shows how sketches transformed models of visual and printed media and of life science into a unique kind of sociology, presenting a self-critique of the middle class on the brink of industrial modernity.