Novel set in London. No. 5 John Street has the character from the first novel return to London, but has no money, and describes the low-life of London. English author's best- known book, a satiric report on Queen Victoria's Jubilee to a group of Pitcairn Islanders.

The book begins: No. 5 John Street is a four-storied hovel, in the very heart of a slum which lies between two of the finest thoroughfares of the West End. I have come here, in this year of Diamond Jubilee, to learn what it is to live on half a crown a day and to earn it. My scheme is not so high as a pleasure, nor quite so mean as a fad.

Richard Whiteing was born in London the son of Mary Lander and William Whiteing, a civil servant employed as an Inland Revenue Officer. His mother died early and Richard claimed to have spent much of his upbringing with foster parents.[1][citation needed]

For seven years in his youth Whiteing was apprenticed to Benjamin Wyon as a medalist and seal-engraver;[1] meanwhile he was also educating himself on the side.[citation needed] In 1866, after a failed attempt to start his own medalist business,[citation needed] he turned to journalism as a career. He made his debut with a series of papers in the Evening Star in 1866, printed separately in the next year as Mr Sprouts, His Opinions. He became leader-writer and correspondent on the Morning Star, and was subsequently on the staff of the Manchester Guardian, the New York World, and for many years the Daily News, resigning from the last-named paper in 1899.[1]

His first novel The Democracy (3 vols, 1876) was published under the pseudonym of Whyte Thorne.[2] His second novel The Island (1888) was about a utopian life on Pitcairn Island; it attracted little attention until, years afterwards, its successor, No. 5 John Street (1899), made him famous; the earlier novel was then republished