London Low Life: Street Culture, Social Reform and the Victorian Underworld is a rich digital collection that brings to life the teeming streets of Victorian London. Explore the gin palaces, brothels and East End slums of the nineteenth century’s greatest city.
Material includes
- Fast literature
- Street ephemera – posters, advertising, playbills, ballads and broadsides
- Penny fiction
- Cartoons
- Chapbooks
- Street Cries
- "Swell’s guides" to London prostitution, gambling and drinking dens
- Reform literature
- Maps and views of London
Revolutionary new interactive mapping enables Victorian cartography to be laid over a modern, searchable base map, allowing comparison of the Victorian city with present-day London and much more.
London Low Life is particularly useful for 19th century scholars researching: working-class culture, street literature, popular music, urban topography, ‘slumming’, prostitution, the Contagious Diseases Act, the Temperance Movement, social reform, Toynbee Hall, police and criminality.
“The Swell's night guide, or, A peep through the great metropolis, under the dominion of nox… revised and carefully corrected, by the Lord Chief Baron, the arbiter elegantiarum of fashion and folly; with numerous spicy engravings. A new edition for 1849.1849." © The Lilly Library, Indiana University.