‘Vagabonds’ Review: The Down and the Out

Great cities are full of poor people, for great cities manufacture poverty along with wealth. Victorian England invented a new, industrial poverty. Its workshop was Manchester, the “Cottonopolis” where Friedrich Engels did the fieldwork for “The Condition of the Working Class in England” (1845), but nowhere was bigger and dirtier, richer and poorer, than London. The poor are to the literature of 19th-century London as artists are to 19th-century Paris. In Henry Mayhew’s “London Labour and the London Poor” (begun in the 1840s, finished in 1861), journalism became sociology. In the novels of Dickens, it became art. In Orwell’s “Down and Out in Paris and London,” it returns to sociology.