Redressing Reform Narratives: Victorian London's Street Markets and the Informal Supply Lines of Urban Modernity

Abstract

This paper traces the growth of working-class street markets in Victorian London and argues that they possessed the capacity to disrupt axiomatic narratives of liberal reform and commercial progress. It contends that accounts by slum writers (James Greenwood and George Gissing) and the visions of market reformers (Baroness Burdett-Coutts and Arthur Cawston) sought to define the parameters of a proscribed sphere of informal commerce and to replace it with a sanitized, formal ideal. Rather than meekly fading away into obsolescence, however, street traders challenged these ‘static images’ in spaces like Whitecross Street Market, which flourished on the frontiers of urban modernity.

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