ABSTRACT
Capital cities of all countries contain extremes of wealth and poverty. Many contemporary and modern views of nineteenth-century London echo the refrain of opulence for the rich and extreme misery and deprivation for the poor. It is easy, however, for emotion at the apparent lack of social justice of this state of affairs to cloud interpretation of the available data. Descriptions of wealth and poverty alone do not tell much about the overall distribution of income in a city and how it was changing. Nor do they identify whether the situation was typical of the time or specific to a city, like London. Was it actually true that the distribution of income was more unequal in the capital city than elsewhere in Britain?
