How Cultural? How Material? Rereading the Slums of Early Victorian London

In approaching the spatial zone which in 1800-50 began to be known as the 'London slums'--home to the very poorest and increasingly shocking to more prosperous outsiders--literary scholars face a choice between cultural and material approaches. This chapter argues for a form of literary archaeology as a way of bridging the gap between the two, drawing on methodologies originating in historical geography and industrial-age archaeology to reread texts and places thus offering a roadmap of the 'London slum' in the earliest era in which the concept (which would afterwards be used to grasp new urbanities in many other contexts) existed.