Cheap fish of St. Giles's. Photographer: Thomson, John
Scope & Content:
Genre: Portrait Photography (generic types) View of a fisher-seller and his stall, with customers crowded round: 'It has often been remarked that but for our cheap fish supply the poor of London would undoubtedly be reduced to the most acute stages of starvation. Notwithstanding, therefore, the...
Genre: Portrait Photography (generic types) Portrait of two men, posed at the rear of a horse-drawn omnibus. The figure on the left is, 'William Parragreen, known as 'Cast-iron Billy',' a driver since 1834 and now at the end of his employment with the London General Omnibus Company.
Genre: Portrait Photography (generic types) Portrait of a metropiltan water cart, used for street cleaning: 'The men employed on the water-carts work according to the state of the weather. Thus, in summer under a hot dry wind, they emerge at early morning from the vestry yards and radiate over ...
'Mush-fakers' and ginger-beer makers. Photographer: Thomson, John
Scope & Content:
Genre: Portrait Photography (generic types) Portrait of a ginger beer maker with his barrow and an itinerant umbrella-repairer ('mush-faker'), posed on Clapham Common: 'According to a rough estimate there must be about 300,000 galons of ginger-beer sold per annum in the streets and immediate ne...
Genre: Portrait Photography (generic types) Study of a fireworks night effigies on a small donkey cart in a London street, accompanied by a man in woman's dress banging a drum: 'The accompanying photograph is that of a nondescript guy, somewhat clumsily built up by a costermonger who lives in t...
'Hookey Alf,' of Whitechapel. Photographer: Thomson, John
Scope & Content:
Genre: Portrait Photography (generic types) Group portrait of men, women and children, posed in front of a public house in Whitechapel: 'Even new paint and a new roof have failed to destroy the quaint look of this inn, while the groups generally seated outside contemplating the broad, busy road...
Genre: Portrait Photography (generic types) Portrait of an impoverished women, seated on steps in front of a doorway and holding in her arms an infant she has been entrusted to look after for a friend: 'Huddled together on the workhouse steps in Short's Gardens, those wrecks of humanity, the Cr...