London Low Life

Taking as its subject Victorian London, London Low Life is a full-text searchable electronic resource. The core of this online resource is derived from the Michael Sadleir Collection of London Low Life, the Pforzheimer Collection of George Gissing's manuscripts, and the Virginia Warren Collection of Street Cries, all held in the Lilly Library of Indiana University. Although some material dates from the 18th and 20th century, the overwhelming bulk is from the 19h century and predominantly from the Victorian period. This digital resource has the potential to encourage some overdue rethinking of the way in which we conceptualize the Victorians, especially the line between different classes offering alternative avenues for research and teaching. 

The collection is well-designed, easy to use, and rich in content. The home page lists six sections at the top of the screen: "Introduction," "Browse Documents," "Map," "Visual Galleries," "Searching Guide," and "Research Tools." The rolling widget on the front-page features themes under which the documents are collated. On clicking, users are presented with a list of items that have been digitized. The core section of this resource is "Browse Documents," which allows users to explore all of the 1386 digitized items in the collection. Those items included advertisements, broadsides, novels, ephemera, popular fiction, cartoons, and fast guides. The collection also included penny dreadful, they were cheap popular serial literature produced during the 19th century in the United Kingdom. Another valuable type of sources are street cries, which are the short lyrical calls of merchants hawking their products and services in open-air markets.

Users may search for content by author, title, and keyword while restricting the scope of searches to particular collections, dates, document types, and themes. Each digitized item is reproduced at high resolution in full color, can be enlarged to reveal intricate detail and texture, and, if a printed text, is accompanied by a transcript. The site provides documents that can be downloaded and printed in PDF format. A large number are single sheets and small pamphlets or ephemera. One of the examples is Ally Sloper’s Comic Calendars. Ally Sloper was Britain’s first cartoon superstar. He made his debut in 1867 in Judy magazine, and then appeared in various print forms thereafter. The character was the true embodiment of a London low life. The character satirized the people who went sloping down alleyways to avoid their landlord when he came looking for the payment of rent. The Comic Calendars, which appeared around December each year, contained a calendar of the year ahead with references to significant events on various dates, as well as fictitious entries relating to the personal life of Ally Sloper. Interspersed throughout the calendar entries are several comic strips involving Sloper as well as random riddles, rhymes, and advertisements. Ephemera's fragile quality and the tendency of contemporaries to discard these items once they had served their purpose has meant that much has been lost to us. Digitization of ephemera is thus of great importance, most obviously for reasons of preservation. These items are of value because they will deepen our understanding of both culture and the workings of daily life for nearly every level of society. 

An alternative method for exploring the scope of London Low Life can be found in the "Map" and "Visual Resources" sections. Under the "Visual Galleries" section, users can discover the collection's thematic visual resources, such as illustrations, picture cards, posters, and photographs. The interactive map provided geographic references to primary documents held in the collection. By digitizing over 100 maps of London in the period c.1700 to c.1920, London Low Life enables students to take a look around Victorian London in a 3-D environment. The map shows the locations of entertainments, monuments, parks, and streets of London described in the original documents. The section also allows students to compare the Victorian city with present-day London by overlaying Victorian cartography over a modern, searchable base map. On the map, students could check socio-historical information about London, including population, mortality, and key social institutions such as workhouses, charities, and orphanages. The maps dealing with historical data, combining population information with the provision of institutions and illustrating change over time will certainly help to deep students’ knowledge.

Finally, the section "Research Tools" provides users with a series of valuable secondary sources to supply the rich primary sources. The "Essays" and "Bibliography" provide historical background information about the documents and contained a selection of suggestions for further reading which organized into thematic areas of study. The tab "Popular Searches" features a list of keywords and places occurring frequently in the documents to guide users quickly finding resources. "A Dictionary of London Low Life" and "A Dictionary of Slang" contain a glossary for contemporary terms and slang used by the lower classes during the 19th century which may now be less familiar. 

Overall, Lon Low Life is an extraordinary digital collection. Many items are often produced by printers or entertainers from the lower classes for consumption by the lower classes, for example broadsides or penny fiction focusing on crime or scandal.  However, users need to realize that the collection also includes a large number of publications produced by those who were not of the lower classes. Those publications and entertainments featured content considered scandalousthat were targeted at a predominantly male and middle to upper class market. From the comic calendars of city wanderers to the guidebook of London's nightlife, all these sources helped to project "low life" to respectable audiences. This is precisely where a large part of the value of this resource lies: in its problematization of the term "low life." What were the boundaries of the Victorian underworld? How should we define "low life"? Who was defined as low life-street hawkers, slum dwellers, or both? In other words, given the range of sources and possibilities, "low life" had many dimensions and was, throughout the Victorian period, a shifting category which, in different forms, permeated every level of society. Clear boundaries between the respectable and the unrespectable never existed. In conclusion, by exposing source material previously difficult for many students and researchers to access and encouraging users to interpret evidence they are presented with from different angles, these resources have the potential to change the way we have approached the Victorian period and imagined life in London.