There is a rare clarity of vision in the photography of Horace Warner. It brings us startlingly close to the Londoners whose images he captured and permits us to look them in the eye.
Warner came to Spitalfields as superintendent of the Sunday school at the Bedford Institute, one of nine Quaker missions operating in the East End of London at the end of the 19th century. Geographically, the “Nippers” in his photographs were creatures of the byways, alleys and yards that laced Spitalfields. Imaginatively, theirs was a discrete society independent of adults, in which they were resourceful and sufficient, doing washing, chopping wood, nursing babies and making money by selling newspapers, hawking flowers or bunching parsley for market. A few swaggered for the camera, but most were preoccupied in their own world and look askance at us, without assuming the playful, clownish faces that adults expect of children today. These Nippers were not trained to fawn by posing for innumerable snaps, and consequently many have a presence and authority beyond our expectation of their years.
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