Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship Between Classes in Victorian Society

by Gareth Stedman Jones

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781781680551
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	08/19/2014
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	480
File size:	11 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Gareth Stedman Jones is a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge University and in 2010 become Professor of the History of Ideas at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of An End to Poverty? and Languages of Class: Studies in Working-Class History 1832–1982.

Table of Contents

List of Plates vii

List of Tables, Maps, and Figures ix

Preface to the 2013 Edition xiii

Preface to the 1984 Edition xxvii

Preface xxxix

Abbreviations xli

Introduction 1

Part I The London Labour Market and the Casual Labour Problem

1 London as an Industrial Centre 19

2 Seasonality of Production 33

3 Casual Labour: Numbers and Occupations 52

4 The Structure of the Casual Labour Market 67

5 The Development of the Casual Labour Market in East London 99

6 Casual Labour and Rural Immigration: the Theory of Urban Degeneration 127

7 The Crisis of the Inner Industrial Perimeter 152

Part II Housing and the Casual Poor

8 The Transformation of Central London 159

9 The Search for a Palliative before 1875 179

10 Cleansing the Augean Stables 197

11 The Housing Crisis in the 1880s 215

Supplementary Tables for Part II 231

Part III Middle-Class London and the Problem of the Casual Poor

12 Prologue 239

13 The Deformation of the Gift: the Problem of the 1860s 241

14 The Economics of 'Demoralization.' 262

15 'Moralizing' the Casual Poor 271

16 From 'Demoralization' to 'Degeneration': the Threat of Outcast London 281

17 The Impact of the Dock Strike 315

18 Epilogue: The Casual Poor in the Age of Imperialism 322

19 Postscript: Socialism and the Casual Poor 337

Appendix 1 Notes on the Reclassification of the 1861 and 1891 Censuses into Social and Industrial Groupings 350

Appendix 2 Statistical Tables, Charts, and Figures 358

Select Bibliography 394

Index 413