This classic book is a ‘must read’ by any British person or anyone fascinated by the emergence of the ‘class system’ in this country.

Penguin have managed to keep this book available as a hardback,but also as an eBook. I was so pleased to add it to my eBook library so I can carry it around with me now. Thank you Penguin.

I also have this as an ebook:

The Vory also looks back in history, to Moscow in the 19th century, and there are similarities to the London slum dwelling filth in areas where poverty sprang out of thousands leaving rural areas, arriving at the capital to seek opportunity. There was wealth in London and Moscow, but in the hands of the few.

Early 19th century Moscow:

During the early 19th-century, Russia developed trading relationships with other European countries but much of this trade was focused on grain exports. Much of the export revenue that flowed into the empire lined the pockets of aristocrats and wealthy landowners; it was not used as capital to build an industrial and manufacturing economy

https://alphahistory.com/russianrevolution/russian-industrialisation/

Early 19th century London:

London in the 19th century was a city of superlatives. At the height of its imperial power, the British capital was the largest, richest, and most technologically advanced metropolis in the world. Yet it was also a city of stark contrasts – a glittering hub of wealth and culture that rested on a foundation of poverty, squalor, and social dysfunction. This was the London that contemporaries dubbed “the Monster City” – a seething cauldron of humanity that inspired both awe and apprehension.

https://www.historytools.org/stories/the-rise-of-victorian-london-anatomy-of-the-monster-city

Mark Galeotti describes the historical conditions of a location, not far from the Kremlin, during the 1820s:

Not twenty minutes’ walk from the Kremlin was the Khitrovka, perhaps the most notorious slum in all Russia. Levelled during the 1812 Moscow fire, the land was bought by Major General Nikolai Khitrovo in 1823 with plans to build a market there. He died before his designs could be enacted, though, and by the 1860s, following the emancipation of the serfs, the area had become a spontaneous labour exchange. It was a magnet for newly arrived hopefuls and dispossessed peasants, at once desperate for a place to seek work and prey for urban predators of every kind. Dosshouses and cheap taverns lined a maze of small, dark courtyards and alleyways, teeming with the unemployed, unwashed and usually drunk or drugged. It was perennially cloaked in a heavy and evil-smelling fog from the stagnant river Yauza and the cheap tobacco and open cooking pots of its denizens as they cooked the unsavoury mix of salvaged and spoiled food known as ‘dog’s delight’. The common saying that ‘once you’ve eaten Khitrovka soup, you’ll never leave’ was as much a statement about the mortality rates as about the miserable chances for social elevation.1 This was a living hell, a slum in which up to 10,000 men, women and children were crammed into lean-tos, shacks, tenements and four disease-ridden trushchoby: the Yaroshenko (originally Stepanov), Bunin, Kulakov (originally Romeiko) and Rumyantsev houses. In these dosshouses, they bunked down on double- and triple-decked wooden sleeping platforms, above infamous drinking dens including those tellingly known as Siberia, Katorga (‘Penal Servitude’) and Peresylny (‘Transit’).2 The last was a particular haunt for beggars, Siberia for pickpockets and their fences, and Katorga for thieves and escaped convicts, who could find anonymity and employment in the Khitrovka.

And in London, the infamous taverns, as here painted by William Hogarth:

Alcohol was the chosen liquid as water was unsafe, therefore people soon lost their inhibitions! The novels of Charles Dickens reflected the struggles and immorality of the class divisions.

The price of this explosive growth and domination of world trade was untold squalor and filth. In his excellent biography, Dickens, Peter Ackroyd notes that “If a late twentieth-century person were suddenly to find himself in a tavern or house of the period, he would be literally sick – sick with the smells, sick with the food, sick with the atmosphere around him” (Ackroyd, 1990, p. 687).

Imagine yourself in the London of the early 19th century. The homes of the upper and middle class exist in close proximity to areas of unbelievable poverty and filth. Rich and poor alike are thrown together in the crowded city streets. Street sweepers attempt to keep the streets clean of manure, the result of thousands of horse-drawn vehicles. The city’s thousands of chimney pots are belching coal smoke, resulting in soot which seems to settle everywhere. In many parts of the city raw sewage flows in gutters that empty into the Thames. Street vendors hawking their wares add to the cacophony of street noises. Pick-pockets, prostitutes, drunks, beggars, and vagabonds of every description add to the colorful multitude.

Read more about the times of Charles Dickens:

https://m.charlesdickenspage.com/charles-dickens-london.html

In Moscow, as in London, divisions of class grew during industrialization:

Mechanization and industrialization emerged during the 19th century, leading to the growth of factories and the rise of a working class. Industrial workers, including factory laborers, miners, and railroad workers, earned wages for their manual labor. The development of industries, particularly in areas such as textiles, iron, and coal, offered new employment opportunities for the Russian population.

Hot, dirty work ensured cheap alcohol for the labourer. In Moscow it was Vodka, in London it was ales.

In May 1859, the vodka protests in Russia turned violent. There were attacks on taverns in town after town in Pensa province, mainly during local markets. The movement spread West to neighbouring Tamhov province and then East to the Volga provinces of Samara, Saratov, Simbirsk, Orenburg, and Kazan as well as to Vyatka in the Urals, and Voronezh province to the South. Meanwhile, riots broke out further to the West in Moscow province. After July, the protests began to subside, although there were minor outbreaks even into the first months of 1860. In contrast to the boycotts, which were mainly a rural phenomenon, most of the riots seem to have taken place in towns or large villages, and mainly on market days when large crowds were present. Amongst those arrested for ‘inciting’ the riots were landlords, priests, towndwellers, and several ex-soldiers or soldiers on leave, though it seems that state peasants probably played the major role. The riots reflected the same working class hostility to tax farms as the boycotts.

Wherever there was excess of alcohol, there was violence. But always there was a richness , diversity, warmth and love amidst the seething humanity who dreamed of a better life than the one they had found themselves in.