author
Andrew Mearns
Best known for stirring Victorian Britain with The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, this Scottish minister and social reformer used writing to force public attention onto the lives of London's poorest residents.
1 Audiobook
The Bitter Cry of Outcast London An Inquiry into the Condition of the Abject Poor
by Andrew Mearns, William C. Preston
About the author
Born in 1837, he was a Scottish Congregational minister who later worked in England, serving churches before becoming secretary of the London Congregational Union. His name is closely tied to the 1883 pamphlet The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, a stark and influential work about poverty and overcrowding in the capital.
That pamphlet became one of the best-known social documents of its time, helping push the condition of the urban poor into public debate. Some modern sources note scholarly debate over exactly who drafted the text, but Andrew Mearns is consistently recognized as the driving force behind the investigation, publication, and impact of the work.
He died in 1905, and he is remembered less as a literary stylist than as a writer with a purpose: to make comfortable readers look directly at lives they might otherwise ignore.