Journalist Henry Mayhew (1812-1887) began publishing his vast collection of interviews and observations on London street life in the mid-century, in the newspaper the Morning Chronicle in 1849. When the newspaper collapsed in 1850, Mayhew continued…

John Everett Millais’s (1829-1896) The Blind Girl (1856) shows a blind musician with a concertina in her lap, and a little girl, presumed to be her sister, resting on the roadside after a rainstorm. They are on their way toward Winchelsea, whose…