Paved With Gold

This is the book Victorians didn't want to read but needed to. Augustus Mayhew, brother of the great social reformer Henry Mayhew, crafted what he called a "truthful account of the miseries of criminal life" - an unflinching portrait of a child swallowed by the streets of London. Philip is born in the workhouse, endures its dehumanizing conditions, and escapes into a city that promises everything and delivers suffering. But Mayhew's genius lies in his double vision: he shows us the romantic fantasies that comfortable Victorians entertained about street life - the nimble pickpocket, the charming rogue - then tears them apart with the grinding poverty, violence, and despair that actually awaited the vulnerable. This is gritty, essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what lay beneath Victorian London's gleaming surface.