“True Types of the London Poor”

Visual representation of poverty and street culture underwent a fundamental shift between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, the standard for representation of street life was broadly typological: images tended to present not singular individuals, but figures representing a kind of visual average. By the mid-twentieth century, viewers had come to expect documentary-style representations of poverty: naturalistic images, depicting real individuals who lived real lives. Viewers had also come to expect that the primary medium for representing poverty and street culture would be photography, which had become the default mode for representing the real.

While it is tempting to view the typological and documentary modes as opposites, this chapter contends that the latter evolved out of the former. The chapter examines the 1877 publication Street Life in London, by photographer John Thomson and journalist Adolphe Smith, as an early, but dramatic, moment in that evolution. Through analysis of its images and texts—what its authors termed “true types of the London Poor”—this study shows how the publication both perpetuates and deviates from the typological tradition, some of its entries cleaving to the existing norm while others move purposefully toward a more emotionally affective naturalism.