In the second half of the nineteenth century, Victorian middle and upper classes felt increasingly threatened by the masses of ‘outcast London.’ Gareth Stedman Jones, working from a mass of statistical and documentary evidence, argues that after 1850 London passed through a crisis of social and economic development. Outcast London is a fascinating and important study of the problem at the center of the crisis: the casual poor and their fraught relations with the labor market, with housing and with middle-class London.

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