By the end of the 19th century, London amazed the imagination with its scale: a city of millions, an incredible cauldron in which a stew of all imaginable and inconceivable professions, institutions, religions and institutions was cooked. According to statistics, a person died here every eight minutes, and a new one was born every five minutes. There were officially twenty thousand pubs and half a million houses, and “London’s old men, orphans, lame and blind would be enough to populate a city of normal size.” It is not surprising that many writers and artists sought to capture and describe London, to create a vivid, realistic portrait of it. In 1869, the great artist Gustave Doré appeared in London. The Frenchman is fascinated and shocked by the contrasts of the huge city: the fantastic splendor of its wealth and unprecedented poverty. 174 engravings were born, capturing different aspects of life in the capital and becoming the most famous images of London of their time. The elegant text for the illustrations was created by the famous wit, Parisian journalist, writer and traveler Louis Hainault. Today, Louis Hainault's book with illustrations by Gustave Doré is not only an invaluable source of knowledge about London at the end of the 19th century, but also extremely entertaining reading.