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Shoe shiners, street sellers and 'selfies': Rare photos give fascinating insight into 1877 London
Sepia-tinged images are part of Victorian photo series famed for its social documentation
With shoe shiners, street vendors, black cabs and even people taking 'selfies', these incredibly rare images show that some aspects of London life havn't changed in 150 years.
The fascinating pictures are part of a rare photographic series which sheds light on life in the capital in 1877.
The grainy sepia-tinged photos show street musicians in the city centre, as well as donkey-drawn carts plodding along the cobbled streets.
The 'Street Life in London' series also shows the grim reality of life for millions of poverty-stricken Londoners during the Victorian age.
Scottish photographer John Thomson took the 36 photographs between 1877 and 1878, and published them in a monthly serial over 12 parts.
They were then printed in Street Life in London, with the work regarded as being hugely important for its use of photography as social documentation.
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The book is going under the hammer on Thursday at Gloucestershire auctioneers Dominic Winter.
It is expected to sell for between £4,000 and £6,000.
John Trevers, a valuer and auctioneer at Dominic Winter, said: 'The book is famous in the sense it is one of the first social documentations shown in photographs.
'Rather than photographs of the Royal Family or of pretty parks, this is real people at the bottom of society.
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'It was around the same period as Charles Dickens was exposing the underclass and it must have been shocking to see the photographs at the time.
'One of the photographs shows a lady who looks very ill, she was dying.
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'It really shows a grim London life and must have been very hard-hitting, this is a very important book.'
John Thomson made his name as one of the first photographers to travel to the Far East where he documented the people, landscapes and artifacts of eastern cultures.
He returned to the UK 1872 and moved to Brixton to live with his family where he published his photojournalism.
It was on his return he started documenting Victorian London. He later returned to Scotland, living in Edinburgh until his death from a heart attack in 1921 at the age of 84.
