ABSTRACT
Among his many publications, the Victorian author Walter Besant (1836–1901) wrote two novels, All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882) and Children of Gibeon (1886), describing life in the slums of East London. His reforming interests led him to downplay the sensationalist images of the East End that proliferated during his era and emphasize instead the monotony of the ‘Unlovely City’. His writing ‘directly challenged the misconception that the district was a parasitical social cesspit that threatened the metropolis at large’. 1 The images included here accompanied his non-fiction writing, articles on the East End that were brought together in the book East London. Interestingly, while his fiction, according to Geoff Ginn, portrayed the busyness of the inhabitants of the district, the illustrations of people in this text feature ‘hooligans’, a ‘“shnorrer” (Beggar) of the Ghetto’, and ‘The British Workman in Epping Forest’, along with the two illustrations included here of ‘East End Loafers’ (15.1) and ‘Sandwich-Men’ (15.2), who were at the very lowest level of casual labour. 2
