Nearly 200 old photographs showing life in London from 1860 to 1960

This book is illustrated entirely by contemporary photographs. The earliest pictures belong to the 1840s, when Fox Talbot's camera was just in time to record the Old Hungerford Suspension Bridge and the erection of Nelson's Column. The latest show the London of seventy years further on, when the motor-car had begun to supplant the carriage, the hansom, and the horse-drawn omnibus. These photographs illustrate every aspect and district of London. The emphasis is on the streets, and the people and traffic in them, rather than on the buildings. Here are pictures of a vanished population of street traders and entertainers: the muffin men, umbrella menders, ginger-beer sellers, sweeps, dancing bears and organ grinders, flower girls, rabbit sellers, and Punch-and-Judy shows which were an everyday feature of London street life. The pictures in which they appear are often strikingly beautiful, though whether they are so from the conscious intention of their photographers it might be hard to say.--From publisher description.

In Victorian London, filth was everywhere: horse traffic filled the streets with dung, household rubbish went uncollected, cesspools brimmed with "night soil," graveyards teemed with rotting corpses, the air itself was choked with smoke. In this intimately visceral book, Lee Jackson guides us through the underbelly of the Victorian metropolis, introducing us to the men and women who struggled to stem a rising tide of pollution and dirt, and the forces that opposed them. Through thematic chapters, Jackson describes how Victorian reformers met with both triumph and disaster. Full of individual stories and overlooked details--from the dustmen who grew rich from recycling, to the peculiar history of the public toilet--this riveting book gives us a fresh insight into the minutiae of daily life and the wider challenges posed by the unprecedented growth of the Victorian capital.