London, 1857: A pair of teenage girls holding a sign that says “Fugitive Slaves” ask for money on the corner of Blackman Street. After a constable accosts them and charges them with begging, they end up in court, where national newspapers pick up their story. Are the girls truly escaped slaves from Kentucky? Or will the city’s dystopian Mendicity Society catch them in a lie, exposing them as born-and-raised Londoners and endangering their safety?

With its many accounts of people like these who lived and made their living on the streets, Vagabonds forms a moving picture of London’s most compelling period (1780–1870). Piecing together contemporary sources such as newspaper articles, letters, and journal entries, historian Oskar Jensen follows the harrowing, hopeful journeys of the city’s poor: children, immigrants, street performers, thieves, and sex workers, all diverse in gender, ethnicity, ability, and origin. For the first time, their own voices give us a radical new perspective on this moment in history, with its deep inequality that bears an astonishing resemblance to our own era’s divides.