Welcome to a special live recording of Travels Through Time, made at the Chalke Valley History Festival.

In the sun of a midsummer day in southern England, Violet Moller sat down for a chat, and a song, with a brilliant young historian. Oskar Jensen took Violet back to the year 1815 and introduced her to several characters from his new book, Vagabonds: Life on the Streets of Nineteenth Century London.

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Dickensian London, with its cast of colourful characters, are familiar to us today, but how realistic are the depictions of Oliver Twist, Pip, the Artful Dodger and the rest, and what of the real people who inspired them?

In this episode we travel back in time to meet some of the extraordinary inhabitants of London’s streets in the early nineteenth century, to listen to their stories and hear the songs they sang. Our guide is the historian Oskar Jensen whose new book, Vagabonds, Life on the Streets of Nineteenth Century London, draws back the curtain on this brutal, exhilarating, kaleidoscopic world.

Jensen gives voice to the marginalised and dispossessed, the people who struggled to survive, living on their wits alone at a time when there was little help or recognition of hopelessness of their situation.

We meet May Ann Donovan, who was brought up before the bench for unlawfully selling sponges in the city of London. As she demanded of the judge, ‘What’s a poor girl to do?’.

While some songs are about the hardship the people faced, others intersected with the polticial events of the time. Jensen takes us to Torbay harbour in 1815, as a certain Corsican gentleman named Bonaparte sets off total mania and hysteria, across the land, inspiring a number of songs in the process.

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Oskar Jensen is the author of Vagabonds: Life on the Streets of Nineteenth-Century London. Many thanks to the wonderful Chalke Valley History Festival for inviting along to make this recording.

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Show Notes

Scene One: Kennington in South London, as 22-year-old servant Mary Bailey, who has just been fired, hears an execution ballad about Eliza Fenning.

Scene Two: Torbay harbour, as a certain Corsican gentleman sets off total mania and hysteria in Britons across the land, inspiring a number of songs in the process.

Scene Three: Tower Hill, as Joseph Johnson tries to come to terms with alienation, disappointment, and disability - partly through appropriating songs of both hope and protest.

Momento: Napoleon’s tricorn.

People/Social

Presenter: Violet Moller

Guest: Oskar Jensen

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

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About Oskar Jensen

Oskar Jensen completed a doctorate at Christ Church, Oxford before being awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. He is currently teaching at the University of East Anglia as a Senior Research Associate and is about to take up a NUAcT Fellowship at Newcastle University, he has appeared on BBC1’s Who Do You Think You Are? and regularly contributes to Radio 3 and 4.

He is also one of the BBC New Generation Thinkers 2022 and is a co-founder of the Romantic National Song Network. Vagabonds is his first popular history book, he is also the author of academic studies and articles, and two novels.

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