Lives of Famous London Beggars With Forty Portraits of the Most Remarkable.

A vivid window onto 18th‑century London, this collection gathers detailed sketches of the city’s most memorable beggars. Their habits, speech, and daily routines are recorded with a frank, observant tone, painting a picture of a world that existed alongside the glitter of courts and theatres. The author situates each figure within the broader social climate, noting how legislation and charity shaped the lives of the street‑bound and how the poor were both a nuisance and a fascination for the public.

Forty engraved portraits follow the biographies, drawn from life and reproduced from the work of contemporary artists who used real mendicants as models. By linking these humble subjects to famous painters—Michelangelo, Reynolds, Gainsborough—the book highlights a surprising equality between the high and low tiers of society. Readers are invited to consider how the ordinary faces of poverty once inspired some of the era’s most celebrated art, offering a compassionate yet unvarnished glimpse into a vanished urban underworld.