These incredible snapshots of life of Londoners were taken by photojournalist John Thomson from 1876 to 1877. The pictures of Dickensian poverty on the streets of London show the grim reality of life in Victorian Britain.
John Thomson was a talented and influential photographer, who had spent ten years traveling in, and taking photographs of, the Far East. On his return to London he joined with Adolphe Smith, a socialist journalist, in a project to photograph the street life of the London poor. The volumes were published in monthly parts as Street Life in London, and were an early example of social and documentary photography.
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Photography on Clapham Common |
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The street locksmith |
A convicts home |
The dramatic shoe black |
Convent garden labourers |
The temperance sweep |
Street Doctor |
Street advertsing |
Suffereres from the floods in Lambeth |
Donkey for hire on Clapham Common |
Workers on the "silent highway" (boatmen on Thames) |
Dealer in fancy ware (jewelry, imitating gems and ornaments) |
"Tickets", The Card Dealer |
"Hookey Alf" of Whitechapel |
Cheap fish of Giles's |
London Cabmen |
Mush-Fakers and ginger-beers |
London Nomades |
Covent Garden flower women |
Public disinfectors |
The independent shoe black |
"Carey" the clown |
The Crawlers |
The flying dustmen |
Black Jack |
Cast-Iron Billy (a driver, holding whip) |
The Water-Cart |
The London Boardmen |
An old clothes shop, Seven Dials |
Italian street musicans |
The wall-worker |
The seller of shell-fish |
Halfpenny Ices |
November effigies |
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Recruiting Sergeants at Westminster |