Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship Between Classes in Victorian Society

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Victorian middle and upper classes felt increasingly threatened by the masses of “outcast London.” Gareth Stedman Jones, working from a mass of statistical and documentary evidence, argues that after 1850 London passed through a crisis of social and economic development. Outcast London is a fascinating and important study of the problem at the center of the crisis: the casual poor and their fraught relations with the labor market, with housing and with middle-class London.

Gareth Stedman Jones is a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge University and in 2010 become Professor of the History of Ideas at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of An End to Poverty? and Languages of Class: Studies in Working-Class History 1832–1982.