Gustave Doré’s London pilgrimage (2025)

Doré was a French artist born in 1832. He’s most famous for his illustrations of books like Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. His drawings, printed by a team of wood engravers, also appeared in London: A Pilgrimage. The book stoked the public’s fascination with the highs and extreme lows of modern urban life in Victorian London.

By the 1860s, London was a crowded city wrestling with the impacts of industrialisation. The British empire was generating immense wealth, but many Londoners were incredibly poor. Doré and Jerrold’s book claimed to show “the extremes of London life”. In Drury Lane, Jerrold found that “the mark of misery seems to be upon every man, woman, and child.”

There was help from charities, religious groups and the state, but not enough. These men are queuing for a bed for the night at a refuge. “No single fact more forcibly illustrates the enormous trade of London,” says Jerrold, “than the million sterling which the metropolitan pocket disgorges at the call of charity.”

Doré and Jerrold describe themselves as two pilgrims travelling through London. This illustration shows the pair at Highgate in north London, looking down on the city. While Doré made sketches in London, he completed his illustrations in Paris, relying on memory and creativity to fill in the gaps. His images are based on real places and recall the people he saw, but there’s serious exaggeration on show.

On their travels through the East End, the pair were guided by police officers. One claimed that locals struggled to avoid poverty and crime. “Once they come here… the best of them are lost. They can't help it. Some will struggle for a long time; but unless they are fortunate enough to get away, they are done for. You see... they fall in with all sorts – except those who could do them any good. That's how it begins with many of them. The rest are born to it."

As well as the working class, Doré also showed wealthier Londoners enjoying themselves – gathered in their top hats and dresses for opera in Covent Garden, for the Derby at Epsom and cricket at Lord’s. He also shows Londoners parading through London’s parks. Here, a frenzy of carriages have flocked to Hyde Park.

Jerrold commented on the many communities that made up the East End at the time. In Whitechapel and Shoreditch he spotted "The German, the Jew, the Frenchman, the Lascar”. Lascars were sailors, most often from South Asia, hired abroad to work on ships headed to Britain.

Doré’s illustrations aren’t restricted to misery. His drawings of working class leisure and entertainment include crowded coffee houses, this intense game of cards and a ‘penny gaff’ – a cheap show of music and theatre.

This illustration shows a well-off group watching the Boat Race in Mortlake, with a mass of other spectators lining the river. It’s a view from the terrace of The Limes, an 18th-century building which still stands today. Jerrold wrote that “the more fortunate people upon the private river-side terraces” were given a view of “a mixed population” below.

A defining feature of 19th-century London was its changing industries and infrastructure. Doré drew gas works, docks, markets, railways and the new London Bridge. Here, he shows a workman’s train on the Metropolitan railway – the world’s first underground line. Workmen’s trains ran specifically to provide cheaper transport for the working class.

Doré’s own trip by train gave him this view of the closely packed terraced houses. "The journey between Vauxhall, or Charing Cross, and Cannon Street, presents to the contemplative man scenes of London life of the most striking description,” says Jerrold. “He is admitted behind the scenes of the poorest neighbourhoods [and] surveys interminable terraces of back gardens alive with women and children.”

Jerrold describes Covent Garden market as “the most famous place of barter in England” where the surrounding streets are “choked with wagons and barrows... From the tails of carts producers or ‘higglers’ are selling off mountainous loads of cabbages. The air is fragrant with fruit to the north, and redolent of stale vegetables to the south.”