London Labour and the London Poor: Selection (Classics)

by Henry Mayhew

  LONDON LABOUR AND THE LONDON POOR

  HENRY MAYHEW, journalist and social investigator, humorist, dramatist, novelist, author of works of travel and popular instruction, was born in 1812 and died in 1887. The son of a London solicitor, he was educated at Westminster School, from which he eventually ran away. Mayhew then went to sea and travelled to India before entering his father’s office, which, however, he soon quitted to embark on a long and prolific but often penurious literary career. He started (with an old schoolfriend) Figaro in London, a pungent illustrated weekly, in 1831, wrote a very successful farce, The Wandering Minstrel (1834), and was one of the group which founded Punch in 1841; but in 1845 he severed his connection with the journal, which became increasingly conformist. The voluminous survey known as London Labour and the London Poor began publication in 1849 in the Morning Chronicle, and in 1851–2 bound volumes of the collected, uncompleted work were issued. Further publication was interrupted by litigation and not resumed until he found a new publisher in 1861, although in 1856 Mayhew embarked on another ambitious series of studies entitled The Great World of London, part of which appeared in 1862 as The Criminal Prisons of London. Mayhew’s other noteworthy book is the readable German Life and Manners (1864). His work is distinguished by vivid reportage, unsentimental sympathy, humour and an eye for detail. During his life Mayhew was an outspoken advocate of social reform and a trenchant critic of laissez-faire doctrine, but even before his death his work had sunk into the obscurity in which it remained until interest in it revived during the 1940s.

  VICTOR NEUBURG was born in Sussex in 1924 and educated at Varndean and at the universities of London and Leicester. At one time a soldier and schoolmaster, he is a former Senior Lecturer at the School of Librarianship, Polytechnic of North London (now the University of North London). He has been a visiting professor at State College, Buffalo, Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, and Ruhr University, Bochum. In the summer of 1984 he was Simon Foster Haven Fellow of the American Antiquarian Society. His publications include Popular Education in Eighteenth Century England (1971), Popular Literature (Penguin, 1977), The Batsford Companion to Popular Literature (1982) and A Guide to the Western Front (Penguin, 1988).

  Victor Neuberg is married, with a wife inured to his enthusiasm for book collecting, and has a daughter married to a doctor, and two granddaughters. Henry Mayhew has been an enthusiasm of his for many years.

  HENRY MAYHEW

  LONDON LABOUR AND THE LONDON POOR

  SELECTIONS MADE AND INTRODUCED BY

  VICTOR NEUBURG

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

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  This selection first published 1985

  19

  Selection and editorial material copyright © Victor Neuburg, 1985

  All rights reserved

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

  to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

  re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s

  prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

  which it is published and without a similar condition including this

  condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  EISBN: 978–0–141–90746–8

  For Alison, Anne, Barbara, Caroline, Katherine, Stella,

  – the ladies in my life.

  And, of course, for Brian – best of friends –

  who shares some of them with me.

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  Henry Mayhew: A Chronology

  Introduction

  Bibliography

  Mayhew’s Collaborators

  Note on the Text

  LONDON LABOUR AND THE LONDON POOR

  Volume One

  Volume Two

  Volume Three

  Volume Four: Those That Will Not Work

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  As ever I am more grateful than I can say to Barbara Gilbert, who has done her best to keep me on the path of stylistic virtue, and also typed an untidy manuscript impeccably. Gratitude as well to my wife Anne, long-suffering as ever in the face of a rising tide of books and papers. To Frank Cass and Michael Zaidner my thanks for their interest and the speedy unearthing of an indispensable book which they presented to me. And, to Annie Pike of Penguin Books, a special thankyou for invaluable help.

  HENRY MAYHEW.

  HENRY MAYHEW: A CHRONOLOGY

  1812

  Born 25 November, fourth surviving son of Joshua Dorset Joseph Mayhew, a successful solicitor, and Mary Ann (née Fenn).

  1827

  Runs away from Westminster School and is sent to India as a midshipman.

  1831–9

  Involved in various theatrical and journalistic projects.

  1834

  His play The Wandering Minstrel is produced.

  1835

  Becomes Editor of Figaro in London (magazine founded in 1831). This post relinquished in 1839. Probably meets Douglas Jerrold (1803–57, man of letters) and W. M. Thackeray in Paris.

  1841

  First number of Punch, 17 July. Mayhew is its Editor until 1842 and maintains contact with the magazine until 1845.

  1844

  Marries Jane Jerrold.

  1846

  Declared bankrupt.

  1847

  Bankruptcy suit.

  1851–2

  First edition of London Labour and the London Poor, published serially. Lawsuit with the printer, George Woodfall.

  1854

  Mayhew in Germany.

  1858

  Father dies.

  1859

  Editor of Morning News for the month of January – after which it ceases publication.

  1861–2

  Enlarged edition of London Labour and the London Poor published in four volumes. Mayhew in Germany again in 1861.

  1865

  Second printing of the four-volume edition.

  1880

  Wife Jane Jerrold Mayhew dies on 26 February.

  1887

  Mayhew dies of bronchitis on 25 July.

  INTRODUCTION

  I

  It is strange that more is not known about the life of Henry Mayhew. He was a journalist, occasionally a minor dramatist, and a man of letters rubbing shoulders on friendly and even intimate terms with some of the best-known writers of his day; he married the daughter of Douglas Jerrold, a prolific and popular writer;1 for a time he was Editor of the newly founded magazine Punch;2 and yet Mayhew eludes the biographer. No cache of surviving letters is known and there was no contemporary biography, nor did he essay an autobiography. In the memoirs and biographies of his contemporaries he is of course mentioned, but the picture of him that has come down to posterity remains essentially shadowy.

  The
one indispensable guide to his life and work is Anne Humpherys’s Travels into the Poor Man’s Country (1977). It contains pretty well all the known facts about Mayhew – and there are not many of them! His father was a self-made successful lawyer, Joshua Dorset Joseph Mayhew, and his mother’s maiden name was Mary Ann Fenn. Henry, one of seventeen children, was sent to Westminster School in 1822, and while there showed himself to be brilliant but indolent, always full of new projects and ideas but temperamentally unable or unwilling to bring them to fruition. Having refused to be flogged by the Headmaster, Dr Goodenough, for some misdemeanour he ran away from school. Then he was sent to India, where his brother Alfred was in the government service, and upon his return tried a career in law. In this he was remarkably unsuccessful, and, as a result of his forgetting to submit a vital document to court, Mayhew senior narrowly escaped being committed to prison for contempt.

  After this Henry left home and drifted into journalism3 and playwriting. His first play, The Wandering Minstrel, was performed in 1834, and But However and A Troublesome Lodger were staged in 1838 and 1839. It was in this latter year that the magazine Figaro in London, which Mayhew had helped to found in 1831 and which he had edited since 1835, came to an end. By this time he was well launched into a journalistic career, and some years later he was concerned with the founding of Punch, Number 1 of which was published on 17 July 1841. Three years later Mayhew married Jane, daughter of his friend and colleague Douglas Jerrold – with whom he was later to quarrel.4 M. H. Spielmann5 quotes an old but unnamed friend of Mayhew at about this time, who described him as ‘lovable, jolly, charming, bright, coaxing and unprincipled. He rarely wrote himself, but would dictate, as he walked to and fro, to his wife, whom he would also leave to confront his creditors.’

  It seems, then, characteristic of this man that when he gave up the editorship of Punch in 1842, the publishers Bradbury and Evans made a place for him as ‘suggestor in chief. However’, he was never really happy with the reorganization that had put Mark Lemon in the Editor’s chair, and he finally severed his connection with Punch in 1845.

  Mayhew was clearly a man of considerable ability and full of ideas, but it is difficult to escape the conclusion that his temperament was unstable. His bankruptcy in 1846 suggests strongly that he had no head for business, and, as we have seen, he relied upon his wife to face his creditors. The bankruptcy was the direct result of Mayhew’s attempt to capitalize upon the railway mania which was then sweeping the country. He began a newspaper called the Iron Times, to be published daily and to include gossip, chit-chat and serious news about railways. To launch the project he joined forces with Thomas Lyttleton Holt, former part-proprietor of Figaro in London and an active publisher. The venture proved unsuccessful: the Iron Times failed in the middle of 1846 and Mayhew went bankrupt.

  So far as Jane was concerned the bankruptcy was a disaster. Mayhew had bought and lavishly furnished a house in Parson’s Green called ‘The Shrubbery’. He had accumulated debts of about £2,000, while his salary at the time of the crash was only around £300 per annum. Because of a change in the law he did not go to prison, though he was roughly handled in court by the Bankruptcy Commissioner, who censured him in brutal terms for his improvidence and irresponsibility in financial matters.

  Through sheer energy and even ebullience, Mayhew bounced back into active life apparently unencumbered by the bankruptcy. It is, though, worth reminding ourselves that the house in Parson’s Green represented his first and last attempt at maintaining so respectable an establishment; and for Jane the catastrophe of the bankruptcy was such that she went to stay with her father in the Channel Islands, where she became so ill that her father later said she had ‘made a “runaway knock at death’s door!”’6 At some point – it is impossible to say when – she returned to her husband, and eventually two children were born, Amy and Athol. The marriage cannot, however, have been easy, and Jane’s life was made unhappier by a long-standing quarrel between her husband and her father. While few details are known, there seem to have been several separations, though none was permanent until some time in the late 1860s. Victorian census figures are not always reliable, but it does appear that she was not counted as a member of her husband’s household in 1851, and during the 1860s he spent long periods In Germany without her. When she died at the age of fifty-three in 1880 her husband was not at her bedside.

  Following the bankruptcy novels by Henry and Augustus Mayhew appeared, including The Greatest Plague of Life (1847) and Whom to Marry (1848), both of them illustrated by George Cruikshank. Designed for the popular end of the market, both books dealt with themes of interest to middle-class readers, the first being about the servant problem and the second recording the adventures of a young woman looking for a good husband. They found plenty of readers and were reissued in cheap editions. Two further novels, also written in collaboration with Augustus, indicate an advance in Mayhew’s fiction. Both The Good Genius That Turned Everything into Gold (1847) and The Magic of Kindness (1849) show a more incisive style than that of the earlier works and are to some extent concerned with moral and social themes. In these later novels of the 1840s Mayhew was laying the foundations of the great work by which he would be remembered when all his other books were largely forgotten, London Labour and the London Poor.

  The publication of this in 1851–2 did much to enhance Mayhew’s reputation – though characteristically enough it was marred by an unseemly wrangle with George Woodfall, who printed the work. According to the contract he was to receive his money after Mayhew and John Howden, the publisher, had received their salaries and after necessary expenses connected with the serial publication had been paid. Something went wrong, and in March 1851 Woodfall filed a suit in Chancery demanding that Mayhew and Howden should be prevented from selling further copies because the contract had been broken. The case proved to be a complicated one, although the sums involved were small – in one instance there was the matter of an unauthorized increase of £1 per week in Howden’s salary. Woodfall had in fact attempted to reach a settlement before going to court, but Mayhew either neglected the matter or refused to cooperate. As a result, when the case was concluded in 1852 London Labour and the London Poor ceased publication. The first edition in book form with that year’s date consisted of the two volumes so far completed.

  Why did Mayhew behave in this way? Perhaps he was tired of the whole undertaking and wanted to end it, or perhaps it was an example of his instability and unwillingness to see a long-term project through to its end. Whatever the reason, a promising enterprise had been killed off, and little is known of Mayhew’s activities between 1852 and 1854.

  In 1856, however, his thoughts returned to the idea, and there were plans for David Bogue, a publisher with premises at 86 Fleet Street, to reissue and continue London Labour and the London Poor. They came to nothing when Bogue died in November of the same year, and Mayhew seems not to have persisted in the search for a new publisher and to have turned his mind to other things. In 1857 he began writing another novel, Paved with Gold, in collaboration with his brother Augustus, but he dropped out after the first five numbers and when the novel was eventually published in 1858 with illustrations by H. K. Browne (‘Phiz’), the title page said ‘by Augustus Mayhew’. It is a good novel, and demonstrates vividly the extraordinary fascination which the London streets held for the brothers Mayhew.

  Henry, in the meantime, drifted from project to project. Nothing really seemed to interest him. He edited Morning News for the month of January 1859, after which the paper ceased publication; and his book Young Benjamin Franklin came out in 1861. However, at about this time – though nothing seems to be known about the circumstances surrounding the decision – the publishing firm of Griffin Bohn undertook to complete and issue London Labour and the London Poor in four volumes.7 Three of these appeared in 1861 and the final volume came out in 1862. In this year also The Criminal Prisons of London, by Henry Mayhew and John Binny, was published. In 1865 the four volumes
of London Labour were reprinted under the imprint of Charles Griffin.

  Mayhew’s best work was done, and the last decades of his life were marked by a steady decline. He made abortive efforts to keep going. During the mid 1860s he pondered starting a rival to Punch, but such plans as there were came to nothing. At about this time, too, he brought out a series of monthly parts called The Shops and Companies of London, designed as a tribute to British industry. He was for a brief period Editor of a magazine called Only Once a Year, and he went to Germany again – in 1870 he was in Metz, where, with his son Athol, he acted as a foreign correspondent. Pretty well his last literary effort seems to have been made in 1874 when he and his son wrote a play called Mont Blanc, which turned out a failure. Mayhew’s name appeared on the title page of a book called London Characters in 1874, but his involvement in it is problematic.8

  After this, there was nothing. Mayhew died of bronchitis on 25 July 1887, and an obituary in the Illustrated London News commented, by the by, upon the Mayhew brothers:

  But all of them being dead except Henry, who in his later years moved in rather a small circle, it was but natural that the world should regard the literary Mayhews as extinct. If the author of London Labour and the London Poor had died earlier, many people would have been present at his funeral in Kensal-Green Cemetery on Saturday last. As it was, those for whose causes he had so valiantly contended seem to have forgotten him.9