Mayhew's London

The main character in Neverwhere is Richard Mayhew - the one who falls through the cracks in the city to London Below, and finds a different world there.

In Victorian London, there was another Mayhew - Henry, who also found a different world to the one that most Londoners were aware of. He was a journalist who worked, among other things, as a joint-editor of Punch magazine, and he wrote many books of travel, biography, popular science and also novels and plays. What he's best remembered for now, though, is his huge tome London Labour and the London Poor. He made it his business to find out how the poor lived, and what their working lives were like, and where they lived, at a time when the middle and upper classes had no idea what the lives of the poor were like, and never really came into contact with them.
The sheer variety of jobs that were being carried on in London around the 1850s was astounding. There were porters, carrying goods on their backs around the city, and quenching their enormous thirsts with the dark beer that bears their name.
There were costermongers with their donkey carts, who bought fruit and vegetables for re-sale from Covent Garden. Mayhew described not only what they sold, but how they amused themselves in their time off.
Some of the street traders were very specific in their wares - oranges and nuts and lemons were popular, and so was hot elder wine, or hot green peas, or pickled whelks.
There were street traders selling anything from a goldfinch in a cage to second hand clothes to writing paper. One man only sold nutmeg graters.
There were people called 'screevers' who would write begging letters and petitions for their clients, and there were people who went round public houses selling metal spoons.
A gentleman could outfit himself with a walking stick, pipe, and tobacco box, without setting foot inside a shop, or a doll for his daughter and a stuffed bird for the mantlepiece.
There were street entertainers who played instruments or performed magic tricks on street corners. One man was a bagpiper who had been a corporal in the 93rd Southern Highlanders, and orderly to the Colonel of the regiment, until he went blind - and found that he had not served long enough to be entitled to a pension. While he played, his daughter danced the sword dance over two long tobacco pipes instead of swords. There were acrobats and jugglers and tightrope walkers, singers and dancing dogs, and 'Negro serenaders' who were white men who had blacked up.
Mayhew did meet a real Negro, though - an ex-sailor who had lost his legs, and worked as a crossing sweeper or, when he couldn't manage to do that, would beg while wearing his sailor's uniform.
He also met lots of Jews, engaged in a variety of trades. There was a lot of prejudice against them, but Mayhew found them selling 'foreign fruit' (such as oranges), or cheap jewellery, or second hand clothes, and sometimes ostrich feathers, cigars or looking glasses. He also found that they were being undercut in some street trading, especially mentioning oranges, by the Irish boys who had come over to London after the Irish Famine, because they were prepared to live in worse conditions than the Jewish boys were.
There were 'mudlarks' looking for anything that might have been washed up on the banks of the Thames, and men who went down the sewers looking for valuables and catching rats. Mayhew interviewed a little girl who worked as a crossing sweeper - sweeping the muck out of the way of people who wanted to cross the road - who was once given threepence for her trouble. So amazing was this amount to her that she declared "I should know that gentleman again." Other people went round with a bucket picking up dog dirt (or 'pure') which they then sold to the tanneries in Bermondsey for use in the leather tanning process.
Mayhew talked to the men who worked on the river, watermen and bargemen and steam-boat men, and the omnibus drivers and conductors (when an omnibus was horse-drawn), and the hackney cabdrivers, too.
The edition I have is abridged from three volumes down to one, so I've only got the edited highlights. Apparently there is a fourth volume which deals only with prostitutes, thieves, swindlers and beggars. It gives a vivid impression of what life was like on the streets of Victorian London, often in the words of the people being interviewed. I recommend it highly to anyone who's interested in Victorian history, and also anyone who wants to write about a fantasy city if they're going to take their characters into the poorer parts of town.