About London

Newspapers, cab rides and public charities give J. Ewing Ritchie his points of entry into London life in 1860. His social sketches begin inside the machinery of the daily press, following editors, managers, reporters and printers as they turn scattered messages into the next morning's paper. The account makes the newspaper both a workplace under pressure and a source of opinions repeated across dining tables and railway carriages.

Ritchie also examines the habits of fashionable society. His complaints about bored pleasure seekers and families following the social season give these observations an argumentative, sometimes comic edge. Chapters on coal, Highgate, Westminster Abbey and drinking fountains extend the range of this urban survey. For readers interested in nineteenth-century daily life, the appeal lies in the mixture of practical detail and outspoken judgment, showing how one observer connected the city's institutions with its ordinary routines.