Tim Hitchcock's latest book is a beautiful and challenging evocation of the life of the destitute poor of London—beautiful in that it molds together an extremely wide array of sources to produce a sympathetic and believable world of the poor, challenging in the way that it explodes myths of the poor as homogeneous and filling only one social and economic role. Hitchcock is known for his bold historical hypotheses, and also for his firm commitment to accessing “history from below.” Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century London is of the latter mold, tracing a path begun in the author's work on workhouses and the economy of makeshifts. Less bold than his work on sexuality, it nonetheless fills its aim to show what London life may have been like for the masses of people who moved in and out of destitution. It also represents another solid nail in the coffin of arguments that the lives of the poor are inaccessible to historians.

Hitchcock takes a thematic approach to the history of destitution, with chapters taking up in turn, access to accommodation, employment, begging, parish relief, appearances, and punishment. In common with his work on poor women, he finds a variety of options open to the poor and a significant degree of agency in their life courses. Using literary and artistic sources as well as parliamentary returns, statements by the poor, and contemporary descriptions of London, he evokes a city where beggars and the destitute were common, and where charity was forthcoming from strangers. The thematic approach enables him to frame a very fluid definition of destitution. Those who begged were not necessarily outside the employment market but often hawked goods, washed clothes, and sang ballads as well, or at other times. The line between legal and illegal employment might be blurred, shading into petty fraud, theft, and, sometimes, more serious crime. The poor were frequently resourceful in their use of workhouses, sleeping places, and even prisons, which might represent access to a bed and to medical support. Hitchcock also points out structural elements to begging in the form of customary periods of charity such as Christmas and May Day. Here, the discussion of begging is extended into vails and tips such as those given to apprentices, which perhaps muddies the water slightly. However, one of Hitchcock's strongest arguments is for an economy of makeshifts even at this lowest level of society, and access to seasonal goodwill is presented as part of that.

One of the most novel parts of the book is the attention paid to representations of beggars and the poor, and how this affected the way that they had to project themselves. Despite the apparently large amounts of casual charity doled out to beggars, representations in art and literature seem to have cast them as threatening and prone to dissembling. Beggars were invariably men, whereas the reality was of large numbers of young women and children. Contemporaries were mistrustful of maimed and disabled beggars, but this, in turn, prompted the poor to use the image of the wounded ex-soldier or destitute young mother to prove their moral credentials. Over time, this seems to have been molded by artistic depictions of the poor, creating an image that was both more sympathetic, but also further removed from reality. Beggar children, for example, were sentimentalized in art just as they were being sentimentalized more generally at the end of the eighteenth century. Occasionally, Hitchcock shows signs of sympathizing too much with his subjects. For example, the maimed and morally deserving beggar is at first presented as being in real want (as many undoubtedly were), and the association with mistrust and dissembling is not teased out until a later chapter. However, this should not detract from the fact that Hitchcock is extremely sensitive to the reality of hardship, cold, and significant threat to life posed by destitution, and that sometimes the economy of makeshifts failed.

The real strengths of this book lie in this sensitivity to hardship and to the variety of places in which the poor are located. Hitchcock creates a vibrant and convincing portrait of what it was like to piece together a living in London's thoroughfares and rookeries during the eighteenth century. This blending of pictures does, however, obscure the nature of the sources. At the end of the penultimate chapter, the reader is still only partially aware of exactly where the voices of the poor have been found. In the final chapter, however, Hitchcock addresses this absence, explaining that it was a conscious decision, in order to present a fuller impression of life and to encourage an imaginative element to its interpretation. This is an interesting aim, and one that is achieved successfully in the use of different source-types. The concluding chapter is, therefore, necessary in explaining the methodological approach and in tempering any impression that even an array of sources can achieve a knowable reality. To have made these statements at the outset would perhaps have detracted from the lovingly rendered image of the world of the poor. It does, however, introduce certain problems for the reader, the gravest of which is the question of representativeness. It is apparent, for example, that many statements were made to court officials: how common was involvement with the law for the destitute? Prostitution is largely (although not entirely) presented as an occupation of the poor: how far was this true? Questions such as these remain unanswered, meaning that the reader is never entirely sure how and where the poor met with authority figures who recorded their words.

This problem aside, however, the book is wide-ranging in its gaze and, thus, achieves a far more fluid and perhaps comprehensive analysis of extreme poverty than has ever been attempted before. There is some scope for wider comments on social ties between the poor and those above them, which are made only fleetingly, such as their apparently central role in London's economy. However, in this book, Hitchcock has provided a convincing justification for the new school of history from below. It is a very significant addition to our understanding of the lives of the poor.