Book Description

This lavishly illustrated volume, featuring 170 images, offers a comprehensive and original survey of a fascinating collection of images of the lower orders of London. The London Cries is a body of graphic art produced between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries that provided continually changing representations of the tradesmen and street hawkers that roamed London from its beginnings right up to the present. Analyzing prints, drawings, lithographs, and paintings done during this time period, Sean Shesgreen traces portraits of ordinary men and women who made their living on the streets of this bustling city; characters include milkmaids, cheapjacks, beggars, prostitutes, Merry Andrews, religious fanatics, and other colorful figures of their stripe. Images of the Outcast examines the Cries in relationship to the historical actualities of street trading, bourgeois attitudes toward the poor, and other forms of art. Through a lively discussion of the prints, drawings, sketches and oils of artists, from the anonymous craftsmen of the sixteenth century to Theodore Gericault and others, Shesgreen provides an important overview of this significant genre. Many of the riveting images the author discusses have never been published or analyzed before.