Vagabonds

"What’s original about this book is that it tells us the story of Victorian London from 1780 to about 1870, but not through the voices of the people that we normally know or are familiar with, like Charles Dickens . What Jensen is trying to do in this book—and I think he pulls it off really effectively—is to do it from street level. He tries to recapture the first-hand accounts of the beggars, the thieves, the musicians, the sex workers, the porters. There are all these occupations I didn’t even know about – road-crossing sweeper, for example; we encounter one of them, Margaret Cochrane, in the book. Unfortunately, because the material isn’t there to allow for a sustained engagement with them, you get only glimpses, but because he’s holding on to this one theme, you get a clear picture, over the aggregate of the book, of what life was like for people who were living in these precarious circumstances, like Mahomet Abraham, the blind sailor from Calcutta who begs on the streets with his dog. What is very impressive and touching is that this is a world full of poverty, violence and arbitrariness, but people do extraordinary things as well. That’s what’s so great about this book: you see all the sides. You see what a struggle it is just to eke out an existence. Sometimes, life in the Victorian era is sugar-coated. Until recently, people were talking about Victorian values as if it was a great thing to go back to that time. This dispels that myth, but it also isn’t a book that simply looks at poor people as victims. It shows that they are capable—under certain, very limited circumstances—of doing something wonderful with their lives, even if it’s just for a fleeting instance. You have to jump around. There are a lot of Old Bailey trial records because, for a lot of these people, the only moments when their voices end up being heard is when they break the law. That is problematic as well, because what they’re saying isn’t necessarily what they would say if they were being interviewed. But you have to take what you’ve got. I’m working on a book about the resistance of the slaves and there it’s the same problem. They didn’t write books. They were, for the most part, illiterate people. The few times when they appear in the records is when they carry out an insurrection, they get arrested, and then they’re interviewed before they go on trial. But what they say there doesn’t necessarily reflect what they would say in other circumstances. The book draws from a wide range of sources, including also personal diaries and newspaper articles; this gives the text a real sense of immediacy, which is reinforced by his use of the present tense—a very effective narrative technique. Oskar Jensen has done a really comprehensive trawl of all the available material and come up with an impressive and evocative set of stories."