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exposed, by degrees, the grubby underbelly of the richest and most powerful city in the world.

The massive work known as London Labour and the London Poor ought to be in every library, if only to show you that if you think things are bad now, they were oh so much more worse not all that long ago.

Readers may have heard of the movie Gangs of New York; well, London was worse and getting even more so every time fresh hopefuls arrived to try their luck in the big city. Mayhew’s work has been shortened, rearranged and occasionally printed in smaller volumes. The original, however, is not heavy going. And if you like fantasy, in a very strange way fantasy is there with realistic dirt and grime all over it.

And so, it is to Henry Mayhew that I dedicate this book.

Dodger is a made-up character, as are many of the people he meets, although they are from types working, living and dying in London at that time.

Disraeli was certainly real, and so was Charles Dickens, and so was Sir Robert Peel, who founded the police force in London and became Prime Minister (twice). His ‘peelers’ did indeed replace the old Bow Street runners who were, more or less, thief-takers and not known for excessive bravery. The peelers were a very different kettle of fish, being drawn from men with military experience.

Readers will recognize other personages from history along the way, I expect. Most fantastic of all was Miss Angela Burdett-Coutts, heiress of her grandfather’s fortune when she was still quite young and at that time the richest woman in the world, apart perhaps from a queen here or there. She was an amazing woman who did indeed once propose marriage to the Duke of Wellington. But more importantly, for me at least, she spent most of her time giving her money away.

But she wasn’t a soft touch. Miss Coutts believed in helping those who helped themselves, and so she set up the ‘ragged schools’, which helped kids and even older people to get something of an education, wherever they were and however poor they were. She helped people start up small businesses, gave money to churches, but only if they were in some way assisting the poor in practical ways, and all in all was a phenomenon. She plays a major role in this narrative, and since I couldn’t ask her questions, I had to make some informed guesses about the way she would react in certain circumstances. I assumed that a woman as rich as her without a husband would certainly know her own mind and generally not be frightened of anything very much.

The Romans did build the sewers in London; they were haphazardly repaired as the generations passed. The sewers were mostly intended for rain water, rather than human waste, cesspits and septic tanks effectively doing that job, and it was when these overflowed, simply because of too many human beings, that you were in the land of cholera and other dreadful diseases.

There were indeed toshers, whose lives were anything but glamorous, but the same applied to the mudlarks and the young chimney sweeps who had nasty diseases of their very own. Dodger, then, was very lucky to find a landlord who was in receipt of four thousand years’ worth of food safety information. But even then, I have to admit, as Mark Twain did many years ago, that I may have put a little touch of shine on things.

I didn’t need to put a shine on Joseph Bazalgette, who appears in this book as a young but keen man. He was the leading light among the surveyors and engineers who changed the face, and most importantly the smell, of London sometime after the story of Dodger has been told. The new London sewers and sewer works were one of the technological miracles of the new Iron Age and so, with some maintenance here and there, they remain.

‘Boney’, of course, was the nickname of Napoleon Bonaparte, and if you don’t know who he was, I am quite certain, alas, that your keyboard will sooner or later let you know.

A note about coinage. Explaining the British pre-decimal coinage to generations that haven’t had to deal with it is difficult, even for me, and I grew up learning it. I could talk at length about such things as thrupence ha’penny, and tanners and crowns and half crowns and the way it drove American tourists, in particular, totally nuts. So all that