Showing results for "classics" in Poverty & Homelessness

This New York Times bestseller intimately depicts urban life in a gripping book that slips behind cold statistics and sensationalism to reveal the true sagas lurking behind the headlines of gangsta glamour. One of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century In her extraordinary...

A Quill & Quire Fall 2026 Nonfiction Pick In Edgelands, Somali-Canadian writer Mohamed Abdulkarim Ali, author of Angry Queer Somali Boy, explores what it means to live life on the margins, in the city and beyond, and offers a unique perspective on the way we live now. “Edgelands will break you...

Brought to you by Penguin. George Orwell's searing account of working-class life in the bleak industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire in the 1930s, The Road to Wigan Pier is a brilliant and bitter polemic that has lost none of its political impact over time Orwell's graphically...

Brought to you by Penguin. George Orwell's vivid memoir of his time living among the desperately poor and destitute, Down and Out in Paris and London is a moving tour of the underworld of society. 'You have talked so often of going to the dogs - and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached...

This grimly picturesque novel by Arthur Morrison was first published in 1897. The central character is Dicky Perrott, an urchin living in the Jago, an extremely squalid district of London's East End. The Jago is based on the Old Nichol slum, which lay at the back of Shoreditch High Street, and which has since been demolished. The novel describes Dicky's futile attempts to escape from the soul-destroying environment of the Jago, with the support of the Reverend Henry Sturt, who was based on the historical East End crusader, Arthur Osborne Jay, to whom the book is dedicated.

London Labour and the London Poor is a rare and fascinating insight into the lives and struggles of the 19th-century poor. Written by journalist and reformer Henry Mayhew, a founder and editor of the satirical magazine Punch, it collects hundreds of testimonials from the lower strata of Victorian society. We encounter street entertainers, 'pure finders', cabinetmakers, gingerbread sellers, 'screeve-fakers', swindlers, and burglars. We hear accounts from toshers finding items in sewers, people attempting to train pigs to dance, and witness the sale of everything from gilt watches and chickweed to needles, dog collars, and eel soup.