Impenetrable poverty on the streets of London in 1873-1877
Categories: Europe | History | Photo project
By Pictolic https://pictolic.com/article/impenetrable-poverty-on-the-streets-of-london-in-1873-1877.htmlBetween 1873 and 1877, Scottish photographer John Thomson, along with journalist Adolph Smith, documented the lives of London's urban poor.
The results of their work under the title "Street Life of London" were released every month in parts, and later came out in one volume. Documentaries of street vendors, beggars and other inhabitants of the streets were combined with interviews, essays and reports that showed poverty as a sociological problem that needs to be studied and methods to combat it.
This project became one of the first examples of documentary photography on a social theme and set the tone for such photographers and fighters against social inequality and injustice of the next century as Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine.
Vegetable saleswoman.
A street procession in honor of Guy Fawkes Night.
Street vendors and a shoe cleaner.
A man is waiting for bored passers-by to offer them a ride on a donkey.
Street photographer.
A street vendor of oysters.
A seller of expensive jewelry for such streets.
An Italian harpist entertains local children.
Water carrier.
Canteen for former prisoners. The owner of the canteen (left) is talking to local Indian drummer Ramo Sammi.
A seller of cheap ice cream.
A caravan of gypsies in a parking lot near Notting Hill.
Used furniture store.
Flower girls at Covent Garden Market.
The poster man puts up an advertisement about an exhibition at Madame Tussauds.
A traveling craftsman and ginger beer producers.
Bootblack at work.
People in front of a junk shop in the Lambeth area, where the annual flooding due to the River Thames gives the locals a lot of trouble.
Friends are enjoying a beer.
A woman begging for alms was paid to take care of a child.
Recruiting sergeants in the British Army at the entrance to the pub.
A local merchant sells herring.
A bus driver known as Cast Iron Billy.
Signboard artist at work in the studio.
City sanitizers clean the street after a smallpox outbreak.
The chimney sweep and his assistant.
Two-wheeled taxi.
Master of locks.
Advertising in 1877.
Workers on the barge.
Porters with baskets of plants.
The seller of cough medicines.
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