Lynn MacKay's Respectability and the London Poor, 1780–1870: The Value of Virtue is a densely researched phenomenology of survival among the poor in an old, large and overcrowded London parish, St Martin in the Fields. At the same time, it expertly synthesizes a continuously growing literature on plebeian London communities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Shoemaker, Green, Crone, Tebbutt, Waddams, Schwartz and many more). MacKay brings into play with ‘respectability’ such wide-ranging issues as male crime and violence, women's work, street insults, artisans and the fate of artisanal trades, parish and charity poor relief, sexual insult, wage rates and housing. She has defined her subject with both practicality and imagination. By situating her research between 1780 and 1870, she includes several phases in London's and Britain's economy, and social life under the old and new poor law regimes. The shift to a more punitive and ‘scientific’ form of relief in St Martin in the Fields, she believes, came well before 1834. By choosing one parish, whose transformation by urban improvements did not begin until the 1820s, she is able to give geographical precision to many of issues she discusses. An ingenious use of local sources adds to the book's vibrancy. Among these are Old Bailey Proceedings, a range of Settlement examinations, Consistory court defamation cases, Westminster poll books and detailed annual reports of the local Mendicity Society. On the periodization of the expansion of respectable behaviour among working-class Londoners, MacKay differs from Shoemaker (who believes it was achieved by the late eighteenth century) and from Overy and Pugh (not until the 1930s). The acceptance of respectable practices in her reading was variable, spotty and continued throughout the nineteenth century.

The book's introduction discusses some of the main scholarship on working-class respectability, then turns to increases in government spending on poor relief after 1780 and the composition of the workforce of the parish and Westminster, which was focused on luxury trades and on service to the wealthiest 10 per cent of the population. The chapters that follow deal with the parish's late eighteenth-century built environment, one that included vastly more narrow streets, courts, yards and alleys than would be the case by the 1850s – arenas for the exchange of news, aid, and slander. A third chapter examines male and female employment in the district, as trades were being deskilled and work precarious. Chapter 4 deals with poor relief, the great majority of applicants being women, both through the poor law and a private philanthropy, the Mendicity Society.

A final chapter, with a looser connection to poverty in St Martin in the Fields, offers a different kind of analysis: close reading of texts. It is based on two case-studies in the enactment of respectability. One is the 1844 Life of a Licensed Victualler's Daughter, by Mary Ann Ashford, a woman whose survival required a range of both respectable and non-respectable actions. Those paragons of ‘roughness’, costermongers, are a second case, one that does indeed belong in a discussion of respectability, and MacKay discusses their representation, usually negative, in national newspapers.

‘Respectability’ may only hazily describe actual practices and values among workers historically, but the concept has inspired creative research over the past generation, like that of Peter Bailey's ‘Bill Banks’, Anna Clark's ‘Whores and Gossips’ and many of the scholars mentioned above, and commands us to take seriously the emotional lives of the very poorest of town dwellers. The concept of respectability comes to life in defamation cases in Church of England courts (1780–1820); they tightly revolve around sexual reputation and show the amazing range of ways in which ‘whore’ could be used as an epithet. Women could also be ‘loose’, ‘violent-tempered’ and ‘drunk about the streets’ (p. 27). Women were far more numerous than men as defamers as well as defamed. As MacKay concludes, slander was ‘two-edged. At once a code through which women could express their outrage and grievance . . . its usage also reaffirmed the value construct by which female behavior was restricted and controlled’ (p. 26).

Putting respectability at the centre of her study has led MacKay to a more accurate reading of slum survival strategies than a more traditional focus on wages or women's housekeeping skills can provide. MacKay provides a full basis for her position by showing how St Martin in the Fields was economically structured to make material survival difficult, but also to provide stable neighbourhood forms of mutual help. A reader might become impatient with the book's depth of detail, much of it statistical, on women's and men's trades, residential clustering by male occupations, and so on. Yet, this information amply supports the author's central argument: reputation was the quintessential component of subsistence for the very poor. To be reputed respectable allowed an individual ‘to maintain access to the collective resources of the neighbourhood’ in the form of shopkeepers’ credit, landlords’ toleration of arrears, pawnshops’ co-operation and neighbours’ sharing of food, childcare and other resources (p. 30). Wages were just one of several means of subsistence and not the most important; Mackay aptly cites Muldrew and King's view that ‘credit rather than weekly wages lay at the heart of the family economy’ (p. 44). The real value of a job was that it generated respectability, which in turn, could be cashed in for food or coal.