The introduction of the handsomely produced book, Street Life in London by John Thomson (1837–1921) and Adolphe Smith (1846–1924), touts the precision of photography as a means of depicting its subjects: “the unquestionable accuracy of this testimony will enable us to present true types of the London Poor.”1 For readers in the twenty-first century, familiar with the deceptions of photography, this claim may seem hard to justify. But the publication nonetheless contains a fascinating document of street life of Victorian England and stands as one of the first works of social documentary street photography.
Street Life in London is comprised of thirty-six photographs by Thomson with accompanying descriptions by Smith, a journalist by training. The stories he tells delve into the lives of London’s working class, offering chronicles of perseverance and betterment that supported the mildly reformist views of Smith, who was active in the Trades’ Union Congress. The images appeared in installments in periodicals during 1876 and 1877 before being published in a single volume in 1878. The pictures and text fed the curiosity of the middle and upper classes who, at the time, were rapidly moving out to new suburbs made accessible by improved regional transport, and largely abandoning the inner city to the working classes.
Thomson was born in Edinburgh in 1837, the son of a successful tobacconist. His education included training in the sciences and the arts, and as a young man he left for Southeast Asia on an extended journey. While it is not known if Thomson trained as a photographer prior to departing for Asia, by 1863 he was, traveling and taking pictures in Malaysia. Establishing a studio in Singapore, he trained two Chinese assistants, Akum and Ahong, who remained with him during his peripatetic time in the far East. From Singapore he traveled to Siam, Cambodia, and Vietnam, recording kings, peasants, ruins, and temples, while enduring the hardships of travel in the tropics.
In 1868, Thomson moved to Hong Kong where he set up a second studio, this one to serve as a base for his several photographic trips into mainland China. Thomson belongs to the first generation of photographer/explorers including Maxime Du Camp, Francis Frith, and Désiré Charnay, all of whom set out from Europe to document the world with their cameras. Thomson, who learned several of the local languages, distinguished himself for his carefully observed and posed portraits of people of all social classes.
Returning to London in 1872, Thomson presented lectures on his travels and published several books, including Foochow and the River Min (1873) and Illustrations of China and Its People (1873–1874), both of which remain important documents of nineteenth century China. It is likely that his publisher introduced Thomson to Adolphe Smith, and they soon began to develop a project depicting the working class of London. As Thomson had spent a decade abroad honing his eye, his sense of composition, and had become adept at naturalistically posing groups of people, he was ready to apply his skills in photographing his own countrymen.
Smith’s introduction to Street Life in London acknowledges his debt to Henry Mayhew’s book London Labour and London Poor, which was groundbreaking in its description of the lives of London’s working class. Published in 1851, it was illustrated with woodblock prints made after Daguerreotypes. Arriving more than two decades later, Thomson and Smith’s book made use of advancements in printing technology to include photographic reproductions, something not previously possible. Executed as Woodburytypes, a truly continuous tone relief printing process using varying thicknesses of pigmental gelatin, the images in the book display a remarkably subtle range of tonality and detail. While not as long, in-depth, or as heavily researched as Mayhew’s book, Street Life in London is unusual in its depiction of actual working classes as opposed to more sentimentalized depictions by photographers like Oscar Rejlander who used models posed and dressed-up to
appear poor.
Whereas most of the book’s photos portray working tradesmen, The “Crawlers” is a depiction of abject poverty. The title refers to the crawlers of St. Giles’s, a church where destitute women would beg, often from other beggars, and who were so malnourished that they are reduced to crawling. “But old age, and want of proper food and rest, reduces them to a lethargic condition which can scarcely be preferable to death itself,”2 writes Smith in the essay accompanying the photograph. Smith was not immune to Victorian- era prejudices which tended to blame the poor themselves for their own poverty, but this essay goes at length to explain the story of this woman and her descent into poverty: “The abject misery into which they are plunged is not always self-sought and merited.”3
The “Crawlers” is placed near the end of the book and is atypical in that instead of showing a group of people, it depicts a single adult woman, late-middle aged, cradling a child. There is a suggestion in the text that the photograph was meant to be another group shot, but as Smith writes, “Another well-known crawler had consented to have her portrait taken in the company with that of the woman whose circumstances I have already described, but on the previous evening a gentleman gave her a sixpence while she was strolling down Albermarle Street. This enabled her to indulge in a night’s lodging, and she was so unaccustomed to the luxury of a bed, that she overslept herself and thus missed the appointment!”4
In its sense of utter hopelessness, Thomson’s powerful portrait transcends all others in the book. Most of his other subjects are engaged in a recognized trade, albeit one that is identifiably lower class. For men, these include fishmongers, dustmen, street musicians, locksmiths, shoe blacks, and street photographers; for women it was selling old clothes and furniture, fruit, and flowers. These figures convey a sense of agency and engagement with the world around them, whereas the woman in The “Crawlers” casts her gaze downward, indifferent to the camera’s presence, conveying a startlingly raw psychological intensity absent in the other images.
Thomas Locke Hobbs
John Thomson, The “Crawlers,” c.1876–77, Woodburytype, 11.4 x 8.9 cm, SOLARI 94.017.031L