Casual Friday: Victorian London Street Life

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Loretta reports:

Continuing this week’s look at the streets of bygone days—

This short series of slides from Street Life in London, by journalist Adolphe Smith and photographer John Thomson, calls to mind Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1861), but the photographs have an immediacy that even the finest print artists can’t quite capture.

The Smith & Thomson book is online at Google Books, but the photographs are not nearly as clear as the ones in the video.




Illustration,  A Foggy Morning, Piccadilly Circus, London, England, c1904, courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA
 
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