ABSTRACT
The public prints have latterly brought into prominence some of the phases of want and misery abounding in this wide-spreading metropolis, which may have struck some of the readers as frightful novelties, though, to thousands of others, they must have been long familiar facts. The class of ‘miserables’ who thus parade their wretchedness are enough to make any man sad whose business or inclination brings him face to face with the ‘night side of London;’ but in truth, degraded and destitute as they are, they do not represent by any means the lowest depth of suffering endured by multitudes in this thrice-million-peopled city. Now, more than ever, the wealth of the world is for the clever and the unscrupulous, while those who are neither go to the wall; huge fortunes are made by reckless speculation, while the conscientious and plodding labour too often ends in destitution.
