London, a pilgrimage: Gustave Dor's historic visions of the capital city | Cities

In 1869, French artist Gustave Dor began an extraordinary collaboration with the British journalist Blanchard Jerrold. Together, over four years, they produced a landmark account of the deprivation and squalor of mid-Victorian London

London, a pilgrimage: Gustave Doré's historic visions of the capital city

In 1869, French artist Gustave Doré began an extraordinary collaboration with the British journalist Blanchard Jerrold. Together, over four years, they produced a landmark account of the deprivation and squalor of mid-Victorian London

Mon 28 Dec 2015 09.12 GMT Last modified on Wed 19 Oct 2022 15.25 BST

  • Father Thames

    Gustave Doré’s cover illustration for London: A Pilgrimage. The project took four years to complete, featured 180 engravings, and was finally published in 1872. The engraver’s name is in the bottom right-hand corner of each image

  • The Workmen’s Train

    Steam trains depicted at Gower Street station on the Metropolitan underground line, which had opened in 1863

  • Bishopsgate Street

    Contemporary critics expressed reservations about the book when it came out; Doré disliked sketching in public so there were many errors of detail

  • Over London – by Rail

    Despite the criticisms, Doré’s work has become celebrated for its dramatic use of light and shade, and the power of his images to capture the atmosphere of mid-Victorian London

  • Covent Garden Market, Early Morning

    ‘Covent Garden Market is the most famous place of barter in England – it has been said, by people who forget the historical Halle of Paris, in the world’

  • Warehousing in the City

    ‘The warehouse-men pause aloft on their landing-stages, book in hand, to contemplate us ... The man bending beneath an immense sack turns up his eyes from under his burden, and appears pleased that he has disturbed us’

  • Pickle-Herring Street

    ‘At the cost of sundry blows and much buffeting from the hastening crowds, we make notes of Pickle-Herring Street: now pushed to the road, and now driven against the wall’

  • Inside the Docks

    ‘We have travelled through the commerce of a world in little. The London Docks alone receive something like two thousand ships a year’

  • Billingsgate, Early Morning

    ‘The opening of Billingsgate Market is one of those picturesque tumults which delight the artist’s eye’

  • Wentworth Street, Whitechapel

    ‘From the Refuge by Smithfield we rattled through dark lanes, across horrid, flashing highways, to the Whitechapel Police Station, to pick up the superintendent of savage London’

  • Bluegate Fields in Shadwell

    As Jerrold later recalled, the two men spent many days and nights exploring the capital, often protected by plain-clothes policemen

  • Scripture Reader in a Night Refuge

    Jerrold and Doré visited night refuges, cheap lodging houses and even the opium den described by Charles Dickens in The Mystery of Edwin Drood

  • Dudley Street, Seven Dials

    Jerrold and Doré were both transfixed by the deprivation, squalor and wretchedness of the lives of the poor, even though they realised that London was changing and some of the worst social evils were beginning to be addressed

  • The Organ in the Court

    See more of Gustave Doré’s London illustrations here.
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