I would suggest checking out the four volumes of Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor. Copies are available at archive.org.

These volumes are the product of a multi-year project that Mayhew, a journalist who was one of the founders of Punch, began in the late 1840s for the Morning Chronicle newspaper, and then continued himself in the early 1850s, with the aim of interviewing representatives of every working class profession that existed in London at the time. Mayhew worked in conjunction with others, asking the questions while the interviewee's responses were transcribed; this was generally done verbatim, and Mayhew placed value on the specialist vocabulary and the colloquialisms used by his informants, so his work is generally highly regarded, and widely cited by the social historians of the period. A review of a recent re-issue, in the New Statesman, notes that

In the words of Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, who contributes an elegant introduction, the author's "ear catches the unique accent" of the mean streets with compelling clarity... the dialogue complementing his descriptions has an immediacy that seems to confirm that, somehow, he recorded the conver­sations verbatim. “It’s a very jolly life strolling and I wouldn’t leave it for any other,” a street entertainer tells him. “At times it’s hard, but for my part I prefer it to any other . . . If you can make up your mind to sleep in the booth, it ain’t such bad pay.”

Among Mayhew's interviewees, to give just a couple of additional examples, are the oyster-stall holder:

“I’ve been twenty years and more, perhaps twenty-four, selling shellfish in the streets. I was a boot closer when I was young, but I had an attack of rheumatic fever, and lost the use of my hands for my trade. The streets hadn’t any great name, as far as I knew, then, but as I couldn’t work, it was just a choice between street selling and starving, so I didn’t prefer the last. It was reckoned degrading to go into the streets – but I couldn’t help that. I was astonished at my success when I first began, I made three pounds the first week I knew my trade.  I was giddy and extravagant. I don’t clear three shillings a day now, I average fifteen shillings a week the year through. People can’t spend money in shellfish when they haven’t got any.”

Then there was the Irish street-seller:

“I was brought over here, sir, when I was a girl, but my father and mother died two or three years after. I was in service, I saved a little money and got married. My husband’s a labourer, he’s out of worruk now, and I’m forced to thry and sill a few oranges to keep a bit of life in us, and my husband minds the children. Bad as I do, I can do a penny or tuppence a day better profit than him, poor man! For he’s tall and big, and people thinks, if he goes round with a few oranges, it’s just from idleniss.”

The seller of Victorian street-food, in the shape of baked potatoes:

Such a day as this, sir, when the fog’s like a cloud come down, people looks very shy at my taties. They’ve been more suspicious since the taty rot. I sell mostly to mechanics, I was a grocer’s porter myself before I was a baked taty. Gentlemen does grumble though, and they’ve said, “Is that all for tuppence?” Some customers is very pleasant with me, and says I’m a blessing. They’re women that’s not reckoned the best in the world, but they pays me. I’ve trusted them sometimes, and I am paid mostly. Money goes one can’t tell how, and ‘specially if you drinks a drop as I do sometimes. Foggy weather drives me to it, I’m so worritted – that is, now and then, you’ll mind, sir.”

and finally, the "pure-finder", whose job it was to collect dog droppings, which could be told to tanners as an ingredient to cure leather. This interview is also a fine example of Mayhew's habit of seeking and collating statistics from the people whom he interviewed: