An extract from Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor. London Labour and the London Poor is a work of Victorian journalism by Henry Mayhew. In the 1840s, he observed, documented and described the state of working people in London for a series of articles in a newspaper, the Morning Chronicle, which were later compiled into book form. Mayhew was accompanied on his walks of impoverished neighbourhoods by his friend, the author Charles Dickens. (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0)