Meet the poor Victorians who lived worse off than beggars in 19th Century London. This genuine account of the hard lives of ‘Crawlers’ is an accurate documentary of everyday Victorian poverty, the workhouse and slums as recorded in 1877 by John Thomson and Adolphe Smith. Thompson was a talented and influential photographer who joined with Smith, a journalist, in a project to photograph the street life of London’s poor. Their volumes were an early example of social and documentary photography in England. The descriptions really bring to life the photographs that accompany them and paint a picture of the Victorian era – in a time before moving pictures could do the same. What’s more remarkable is that the authors were careful not to varnish their words for an audience – what they saw and heard accurately reflects their interactions with street folk and, with ambience and sounds, genuinely immerses the reader in authentic Victorian street life.

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Video Glossary:

Mendicant – From the Latin: mendicans, "begging", being one who practices mendicancy and relies chiefly or exclusively on alms (food, clothing or money) to survive i.e. a beggar.

Casual Ward - Temporary admission to a workhouse for the night. Many resisted taking up permanent residence at the workhouse, where men and women would be separated, and would be required to work to pay for their board and lodging; once they entered, many only left when they died. Instead, from 1864, if the police in London certified that a person was genuinely in need, they could stay for one night on a "casual" basis, and leave the next morning, but they would have to queue up again for temporary admission the next evening. Poverty and vagrancy were pressing issues in Victorian London, and the issuance of "casual" tickets doubled from around 200,000 in 1864 to over 400,000 in 1869.

Urchin - A small child, especially one who behaves badly and is dirty or untidily dressed.

Oakum - A preparation of tarred fibre used to seal gaps. Its main traditional applications were in shipbuilding, for caulking or packing the joints of timbers in wooden vessels and the deck planking of iron and steel ships; in plumbing, for sealing joints in cast iron pipe; and in log cabins for chinking. In ship caulking, it was forced into the seams using a hammer and a caulking iron, and then sealed into place with hot pitch. Oakum was at one time recycled from old tarry ropes and cordage, which were painstakingly unravelled and reduced to fibre, termed "picking". The task of picking and preparation was a common occupation in prisons and workhouses, where the young or the old and infirm were put to work picking oakum if they were unsuited for heavier labour. The work was tedious, slow and taxing on the worker's thumbs and fingers.

Ha'penny - The British pre-decimal halfpenny coin, usually simply known colloquially as a ha'penny. It ceased to be legal tender from 31 July 1969.

Marylebone - An ancient parish of London and later a metropolitan borough, it merged with the boroughs of Westminster and Paddington to form the new City of Westminster in 1965.

Tweed – A river 97 miles (156 km) long, which forms the historic boundary between Scotland and England.

Mission Hall - A building used by the church for charitable community services.

Credits:
CC BY - Two Manchu soldiers with John Thomson by Wellcome Images, DoubleHorseCartGheorghieni by bourotte, Walla Park Ambient by costaipsa

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