This lavishly illustrated volume offers a comprehensive and original survey of a fascinating collection of images of the lower orders of London. The London Cries is a body of graphic art produced between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries that provided continually changing representations of the tradesmen and street hawkers that roamed London during this period. Analyzing prints, drawings, lithographs, and paintings done during this time period, Sean Shesgreen traces imagery of ordinary men and women who made their living on the streets of this bustling city; characters include milkmaids, cheapjacks, beggars, prostitutes, Merry Andrews, religious fanatics, and other colorful figures of their stripe.

Images of the Outcast examines the Cries in relationship to the historical actualities of street trading, bourgeois attitudes toward the poor, and other forms of art. Through a lively discussion of the expression of the anxieties of urban culture in the work of artists from William Hogarth to Theodore Gericault, Shesgreen provides an important overview of the significance of this sub-genre of print culture. Many of the riveting images the author discusses have never been published or analyzed before.

Sean Shesgreen is Distinguished Research Professor of English at Northern Illinois University. He is the author of many titles on European and British history including The Criers and Hawkers of London: Engravings and Drawings by Marcellus Laroon and Eighteenth-Century Cities: A Panorama.