London Labour and the London Poor: Selection (Classics)

by Henry Mayhew

  A sad comment, this, and all the sadder for being essentially true.

  II

  In their sheer bulk the four volumes of London Labour and the London Poor are both impressive and daunting. Printed virtually throughout in double column, averaging about five hundred pages per volume, they represent a tremendous achievement; and it is neither a denigration nor a devaluation of Mayhew’s work to ponder its nature, more particularly since, as we have seen, his own approach to it, as indeed to all his work, was somewhat dilatory. Clearly, however, the great study of London (including of course The Criminal Prisons of London, published in 1862) compelled his mind and created its own momentum to enable him to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion.

  This work represents Mayhew’s journalism at its best. He provides us with a stunning and detailed panorama of what life in the streets of London during the early Victorian period was like for a wide range of hucksters, pedlars, poor, destitute and unprivileged people; but unlike Frederick Engels, who had been exploring the slums of Manchester some years before him and who was primarily interested in the physical environment of poverty, Mayhew’s focus was upon people. It is this which gives his writing its immediacy and its vividness.

  Then, too, Mayhew was unencumbered by political theory and conscious ideology. His aim was to study the London poor, occupation by occupation, trade by trade, and he also explored the worlds of those who had neither trade nor occupation. What he did bring to this monumental survey was a deep sense of compassion for those he talked to, a reluctance to moralize and a mistrust for the kind of evangelical philanthropy which he described in these words:

  There is but one way of benefiting the poor, viz. by developing their powers of self-reliance, and certainly not in treating them like children. Philanthropists always seek to do too much, and in this is to be found the main cause of their repeated failures. The poor are expected to become angels in an instant, and the consequence is, they are merely made hypocrites. Moreover, no men of any independence of character will submit to be washed, and dressed, and fed like schoolboys; hence none but the worst classes come to be experimented upon. It would seem, too, that this overweening disposition to play the part of pedagogues (I use the word in its literal sense) to the poor, proceeds rather from a love of power than from a sincere regard for the people. Let the rich become the advisers and assistants of the poor, giving them the benefit of their superior education and means – but leaving the people to act for themselves – and they will do a great good, developing in them a higher standard of comfort and moral excellence, and so, by improving their tastes, inducing a necessary change in their habits.10

  Sentiments like this – and in the great tide of evangelistic philanthropy they were comparatively unusual – probably dated from his days with Punch. They hardly add up, though, to a coherent political attitude, and his political ideas remain, as E. P. Thompson has pointed out, an enigma.11 He did seem to become increasingly well informed about orthodox political economy; but whether he was a radical or not is uncertain. He was clear enough about his intentions:

  I shall consider the whole of the metropolitan poor under three separate phases, according as they will work, they can’t work, and they won’t work. Of those that will work, and yet are unable to obtain sufficient for their bodily necessities, I shall devote my attention first to such as receive no relief from the parish; and under this head will be included the poorly-paid – the unfortunate – and the improvident. While treating of the poorly-paid, I shall endeavour to lay before the reader a catalogue of such occupations in London as yield a bare subsistence to the parties engaged in them… After this it is my intention to visit the dwellings of the unrelieved poor… to discover, not only on how little they subsist, but how large a rate of profit they have to pay for the little upon which they do subsist – to ascertain what weekly rent they are charged for their waterless, drainless, floorless, and almost roofless tenements; to calculate the interest that the petty capitalist reaps from their necessities.12

  Mayhew goes on to assert, ‘… however alive I may be to the wrongs of the poor, I shall not be misled by a morbid sympathy to see them only as suffering from the selfishness of others.’13 And he taxes the poor with a want of temperance, energy, cleanliness, morality, knowledge…

  What Mayhew achieved was the fullest and most vivid picture of the experiences of labouring people in the world’s greatest city in the nineteenth century. In his pages many of them speak for themselves, and we hear of their hopes, fears, customs, grievances, habits, in their own words. No other social investigator came near to him: in its scope and execution his work has no peer.

  How did he do it? The book grew out of a series of articles that Mayhew wrote for the Morning Chronicle. The first of these, ‘A Visit to the Cholera Districts of Bermondsey’, was published in its columns on Monday 24 September 1849, and was to culminate in the four volumes of London Labour and the London Poor more than a dozen years later. Following the initial article, Mayhew persuaded the Editor of the paper that a series of articles on the social problems of the time would be worth undertaking. The idea was taken up and three journalists were assigned to the task: Charles Mackay (1814–89) was to cover the northern industrial centres; Shirley Brooks (1816–74) was to write from the Continent; and Mayhew was to cover London. An editorial in the Chronicle of 18 October 1849 defined the series and looked forward to ‘a full and detailed description of the moral, intellectual, material, and physical condition of the industrial poor’.

  Between 19 October 1849 and 31 October 1850 Mayhew’s contribution consisted of seventy-six letters averaging 3,500 words each. They dealt with poverty, exploitation and the precarious lives led by the London poor. Publication of these letters was interrupted by a dispute between Mayhew and the Editor. The latter had objected to an account of a successful West End tailoring establishment which, said Mayhew, was using sweated labour; and Mayhew believed that his freedom to write as he wished was being interfered with. The upshot was that Mayhew made no further contributions to the Chronicle, but he continued to write his letters and they were issued in twopenny parts until March 1852, when the quarrel with his printer, George Woodfall, to which I have already referred, meant that publication ceased. Meanwhile a two-volume edition of London Labour and the London Poor consisting of bound-up parts had been published, but it was not until more than ten years later that the complete four-volume edition appeared.

  Because none of Mayhew’s notebooks appears to have survived, we know little or nothing about his methods of work. A rather unsympathetic observer described him at work during the Chronicle days:

  He was in his glory at that time. He was largely paid, and, greatest joy of all, had an array of assistant writers, stenographers, and hansom cabmen constantly at his call. London labourers… were brought to the Chronicle office, where they told their tales to Mayhew, who redictated them, with an added colour of his own, to the shorthand writer… Augustus helped him in his vivid descriptions and an authority on political economy controlled his gay statistics.14

  Despite the cattiness of this description, some fragments of reality seem to lurk beneath these half-truths. So far as the assistant writers are concerned, it must be remembered that Mayhew was producing material for a deadline and needed all the help he could get. We can accept that he must have ‘led’ his interviewees, and the writing-up of the final version was of course his own – and there is no doubt where his sympathies lay. Where did the interviews take place? Some, almost certainly, in his office; but many would surely have been conducted on the streets. The sheer number of people involved would support this conclusion, and there is the practical consideration that many of them, in a working situation, would have been too dirty to bring into an office. One can imagine their feeling miserably out of place there, and less than likely to give the detailed accounts which, as Mayhew reports them, so often have the ring of truth. One of the most compelling series of portraits drawn by Mayhew relates to dustmen a
nd the disposal of refuse. The cogency of this section certainly did not derive from interviews at second or third hand conducted in a clean office. Readers of Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend will recall Boffin and the dust yard… Mayhew provides an authentic context for a setting in the novel which might otherwise be regarded as fancifully grotesque.

  As for the reference to statistics, it is clear that Mayhew regarded them as an important and intrinsic part of his work, although for the modern reader they are perhaps the least valuable part of the survey. What makes it live is the record of human experience. From that above all ‘Mayhew’s London’ draws its enduring vitality.

  In the lack of sentimentality of his approach Mayhew was very much a pioneer;15 but the streets of London had proved overwhelmingly fascinating to serious observers before he put pen to paper. In 1838 James Grant had published Sketches in London, which in its faithful descriptions and lack of condescension anticipated Mayhew. Another who did the same was a doctor, Hector Gavin, whose book Sanitary Ramblings: Being Sketches and Illustrations of Bethnal Green appeared in 1848. The wealth of statistical tables equally foreshadows Mayhew’s use of figures to illuminate his text. The Rookeries of London: Past, Present and Prospective by Thomas Beames, published in 1850 and reprinted in 1852, indicates a widening interest in the themes discussed in the Morning Chronicle articles.

  While it would be pointless, and untrue, to claim that Mayhew founded a school of writers, he did influence several who followed him. Notable amongst these was George Augustus Sala (1828–96), whose Twice Round the Clock (1862) presents a perceptive, if hurried, view of twenty-four hours in the life of the capital. Despite a facsimile reprint it remains – undeservedly I think – a largely forgotten book. It has very real merits, especially in that it looks at London without sentimentality and, like Mayhew’s work, is journalism of a very high order.16 The same is true of James Hain Friswell (1825–78), author of Houses with Their Fronts Off (1854), a series of prose sketches of people in London and the houses they lived in. It was a minor best-seller. Round about this time, too, Charles Manby Smith (1804–80) published his Curiosities of London Life (1853), which is a book of entertaining low-life reporting. He followed this in 1857 with a similar volume, The Little World of London.

  Later in the century there was another wave of books about London streets and the London poor. Amongst the writers were James Greenwood (1852–1929)17 and George R. Sims (1847–1922), who wrote about themes which were directly derived from Mayhew. The same can be said of Charles Booth (1840–1916), whose Life and Labour of the People in London stretched from one volume in 1889 to seventeen which were published between 1902 and 1903.18

  The last book directly within the nineteenth-century Mayhew tradition that I have been able to trace is A Vicarious Vagabond (1910) by Denis Crane, a pseudonym of Walter Thomas Cranfield. His investigations were, in his own words, undertaken ‘with the idea of bridging the gulf, so far as I myself was concerned, between a theoretical and an experimental knowledge of how the poor live…’19 With this end in view he disguised himself and went out on to the streets of London. A conversation which he records with ‘Ginger’, outside porter of a City hotel, has echoes of Henry Mayhew, for it appears authentic and shows a natural acceptance of what he found:

  He and I met in the following circumstances. We were standing together at the kerb, I hoarse with hawking my wares, he weary of fruitless waiting. He explained, with a touch of bitterness, that his line of business had declined of late owing to the popularity of the telephone, which had abolished the necessity for sending messages by hand. Furthermore, this particular hotel had lost its wealthier patrons.

  ‘I haven’t earned a pennypiece today,’ he said; ‘nor did I yesterday.’

  ‘Then how do you live?’

  ‘Borrow,’ with a shrug of the shoulders. ‘Sometimes I don’t take anything for three days. Then it takes all I get to pay off my debts. It’s only when I have a bit of luck that I really get straight, for I’ve got three kids.’

  There was a note of tenderness in the tone.

  ‘Ah,’ quoth I, thinking of my own babies. ‘So have I.’

  ‘Two girls and a boy are mine. The youngster’s seven this week.’

  ‘And my boy’s six – to-morrow.’

  This touch of nature drew us closer, and I inquired what were his average earnings.

  ‘About two bob a day; but they used to be more.’

  Twelve shillings a week, with a wife and three children! Rent, though he lived in a cellar, could not be less than three or four shillings. And there were coals and boots, not to mention food.20

  That the Mayhew tradition lives on is apparent in the work of the best-selling American writer Studs Terkel, whose Hard Times (1970) and Working (1972), within the context of twentieth-century America, catch the authentic Mayhew tone. ‘Terkel has caught the sound of the people,’ said the Baltimore Sun in a review quoted by Avon Books on the cover of a paperback edition. Mayhew had done precisely the same thing for the poor of London about one hundred and fifty years earlier.

  After Mayhew’s death London Labour and the London Poor became a very neglected book. The Second World War, however, was followed by a renewed interest in matters Victorian, and it came into its own again. Several volumes of selections were published, and eventually it was reprinted in its entirety.21 Poverty is still a fact of life throughout much of the world. It remains a pressing issue – and at least one British politician has talked of a return to Victorian values. How should we assess the relevance now of Mayhew’s work?

  Current discussion of poverty amongst historians and social scientists may often obscure the reality that he described in nineteenth-century London. A recent contribution to the subject does just this. In The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (Faber, 1984) the author, Gertrude Himmelfarb, discusses in the first of two projected volumes the problem of poverty as it was defined between 1780 and the 1840s. My own feeling is that Mayhew saw what he described at first hand – it was a reality of daily life – and for this reason his evidence, however critically we examine and evaluate it, remains inevitably more compelling than extended theoretical discussions of the word ‘poverty’. In a sense, the detachment from reality implicit in the debate about terms allows a comforting neutrality to both participants and spectators. Mayhew, on the other hand, still has the power to disturb us, and this, I believe, is a major reason for the continuing vitality, popularity and even relevance of his work.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Works by Mayhew

  London Labour and the London Poor: 1852 edn, 2 vols.; 1861–2 edn, 4 vols.; new impression of 1865, 4 vols. The two latter editions are identical as regards text. Priority of issue, however, can be established by the imprint. The earlier one was published by Griffin, Bohn & Co., Stationers’ Hall Court. Bohn went out of business in 1864, and the later imprint is Charles Griffin & Co., Stationers’ Hall Court.

  The Criminal Prisons of London (1862). Mayhew’s co-author was John Binny. Although I have not used material from this volume, it should be considered with the four volumes of the previous title as completing Mayhew’s survey of the metropolis. Both titles – five volumes in all – were reprinted by Frank Cass in 1967–8.

  There have been several volumes, issued by various publishers, of selections from Mayhew. The best of them is Henry Mayhew: Selections from London Labour and the London Poor, chosen with an introduction by John L. Bradley (OUP, 1965). The 40-page introduction is excellent.

  The Morning Chronicle

  So far as the Morning Chronicle letters are concerned, three volumes of selections have been published:

  E. P. Thompson and Eileen Yeo (eds.), The Unknown Mayhew (Merlin Press, 1971; Penguin, 1973). The editors contribute an 85-page introduction divided into two roughly equal sections, ‘Mayhew and the Morning Chronicle’ by E. P. Thompson, and ‘Mayhew as a Social Investigator’ by Eileen Yeo. Both are essential reading for an understanding of Mayhew’s wo
rk.

  Anne Humpherys (ed.), Voices of the Poor (Frank Cass, 1971). There is some overlap between the contents of this title and those of the preceding one. Both, however, are worth looking at. Anne Humpherys’s introduction is brief but illuminating. The volume also contains a contemporary picture of Henry Mayhew playing the part of Knowell in Charles Dickens’s amateur production of Every Man in his Humour.

  P. E. Razzell and R. W. Wainwright (eds.), The Victorian Working Class (Frank Cass, 1973). The importance of this book lies in the fact that for the first time letters (not by Henry Mayhew) about the condition of the poor in various parts of England are reprinted from the Morning Chronicle. Although letters about London are included, those from other areas predominate.

  All the letters to the Morning Chronicle by correspondents from outside London are currently being published by Frank Cass in eight volumes. The editor is Jules Ginswick. The following have already appeared: Vol. 1, Lancashire, Cheshire and Yorkshire; Vol. 2, Northumberland and Durham; Vol. 3, The Midlands. The remaining five volumes are scheduled for publication as follows: Vol. 4, Liverpool and Birkenhead; Vol. 5, Birmingham; Vol. 6, Midlands, Northern Counties; Vol. 7, South-western Counties; Vol. 8, Eastern Counties, South-eastern Counties.

  There is also a six-volume paperback edition of The Morning Chronicle Survey of Labour and the Poor: The Metropolitan Districts, with an introduction by Peter Razzell (Caliban Books, 1983).

  Biography

  The standard biography of Henry Mayhew is Anne Humpherys, Travels into the Poor Man’s Country (University of Georgia Press, 1977; Caliban Books, 1980). It contains a very full bibliography of books and articles by and about Mayhew.

  For Mayhew’s connection with Punch see A. A. Adrian, Mark Lemon, First Editor of ‘Punch’ (OUP, 1966).

  Dickens and Mayhew