Labouring Poor in London

This drawing of Victorian London, by the French illustrator and printmaker Gustave Doré, shows the squalid conditions created for the urban labouring classes by the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution reshaped the urban environment, not least by concentrating workers in the new industrial towns and suburbs linked and supplied by railways. Doré documented some of the process in his drawings of London made between 1869 and 1871. The atmosphere and imagery of these pictures may have been influenced by his earlier cycle of illustrations for Dante’s Inferno, but many contemporary critics felt that, for the poorest sector of the working classes, the first Industrial Revolution had in many respects created a new workaday hell.

Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

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Industrial Revolution

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