A waterman's family

Illustration showing a waterman's family from 'London: a Pilgrimage' by Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré, 1872. Jerrold writes about the English working class as follows: 'In approaching the sadder parts of the great metropolis in which stubborn custom and purblind speculation have doomed them to abide' he notes 'the poverty of one man reacting on his neighbour, and the lack of money forcing the unfortunate to the companionship of drunkenness and crime'. However, 'work is the key to London. In the serried legions of the distressed battling for an independent crust, and loathing the unearned crumb, there is a spectacle of moral grandeur, which covers all the crime and vice and drunkenness."