London: A Pilgrimage

"This is a work which was published in 1872. It had 118 engravings by Doré and it is a most wonderful and remarkable depiction of what you might call the low life of London in the 1870s – the working life of London. It shows people in the shipyards, it shows market traders, it shows the poor, it shows the railways systems. It is a very moving and evocative description of the life of London that was normally not recognised at the time – it was ignored. And in fact there were some contemporary critics who said that he was inventing the poverty rather than copying it, but he wasn’t doing that at all. He was observing what was all around him. Yes, it was in a way, perhaps equivalent to Henry Mayhew’s work on the labouring poor of London. But this book is animated by the very vivid and vibrant engravings by Doré."