author
Andrew Mearns
Best remembered for helping bring The Bitter Cry of Outcast London into public view, this Scottish minister turned firsthand reporting on urban poverty into a book that shook Victorian readers. His work sits at the meeting point of faith, reform, and social investigation.
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 at Burnside, New Cumnock in Ayrshire, he was educated in Glasgow and later at Glasgow University before training for the ministry in Edinburgh. He began his pastoral career in Great Marlow and then moved to London, where he became pastor of the Congregational chapel in Markham Square.
Mearns went on to serve as secretary of the London Congregational Union, a role that made him an energetic organizer in Nonconformist religious life. He is now chiefly remembered as the prime mover behind the 1883 pamphlet The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, a powerful exposé of slum conditions whose impact far outlasted its brief length.
Although later scholarship has concluded that the pamphlet itself was written by journalist William Carnall Preston, Mearns was central to commissioning the research and driving the project forward. He died in 1905, and his name remains closely linked with one of the best-known social reform publications of late Victorian Britain.