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Henry Mayhew and the Life of the Streets

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2014

Richard Maxwell
Richard Maxwell*
Affiliation:
Valparaiso University
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Extract

Lamb in the 1820s and Dickens in the 1830s had written about some of those who made their living or advertised their services in the streets of London: beggars, chimney sweeps, cab drivers, the vendors of baked potatoes and kidney pies. When, in the late forties, Henry Mayhew began his extensive study of the street-folk, he found reason to cite both these chroniclers. London Labour and the London Poor, however, is an enterprise different in kind from the essays and sketches it occasionally quotes. Somehow, in the middle years of the nineteenth century, the street-folk became a subject worth four volumes and sixteen hundred pages.

The decision to devote so much attention to the people of the streets came at a crisis-point in Mayhew's journalistic career. He had undertaken for the Morning Chronicle (1849) a comprehensive study of the metropolitan poor. Defining the poor as “those persons whose incomings are insufficient for the satisfaction of their wants,” Mayhew proposed to discuss them “according as they will work, they can't work, and they won't work.” He had progressed part way through the first of these classifications when he quarrelled with the editors of the Chronicle and ended by severing his ties with them. On his own, Mayhew commenced the publication in parts of London Labour. The “will, can't, won't” division, which persists in these volumes, was supplemented or perhaps superseded by another. Mayhew's ultimate object was still to study all the London poor but he now began with a trade-by-trade survey of the street-folk.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , Spring 1978 , pp. 87 - 105
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1978

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References

1. Mayhew refers to Dickens, Lamb, and certain eighteenth-century observers of street-life in London Labour and the London Poor, 4 vols. (London, 1861–1862; reprint ed., New York, 1968), I, 8Google Scholar; II, 24, 35, 55, 366, 370. London Labour has much praise for the achievement of Sketches by Boz; Mayhew seems not to have bothered much with the depictions of street-life in the novels. His brother Augustus, on the other hand, combined material from London Labour (on which he had collaborated) with the plot of Oliver Twist to produce Paved with Gold, or the Romance and Reality of London Streets: an Unfashionable Novel (London, 1858)Google Scholar.

2. Yeo, Eileen and Thompson, E. P. (eds.), The Unknown Mayhew (New York, 1972), p. 102Google Scholar— (excerpt from Letter I to the Chronicle, 19 Oct. 1849).

3. London Labour, I, xvGoogle Scholar.

4. After the wide range of the Chronicle letters, London Labour's consistent focus on the street-folk comes as a kind of shock. Mayhew did intend to write eventually about the rest of the poor, perhaps in the same detailed way; the significant point, however, is that he chose to begin by writing about this particular group and that he, in fact, wrote so much about them.

5. Auden, W. H., “A Very Inquisitive Old Party,” Forewords & Afterwords (New York, 1973), pp. 233-34, 243Google Scholar. For William, 's comments, see The Country and the City (hereafter, Country) (New York, 1973), p. 218Google Scholar.

6. Glass, Ruth, “Urban Sociology (Great Britain),” Trend Reports and Bibliography, Current Sociology, IV (1955), 43Google Scholar.

7. Himmelfarb, Gertrude, “The Culture of Poverty,” in The Victorian City, eds. Dyos, H. J. and Wolff, Michael, 2 vols. (London, 1973), II, 714, 731Google Scholar. An earlier draft of this essay appeared in Victorian Studies, XIV (March, 1971), 307–29Google Scholar, as “Mayhew's Poor: A Problem of Identity.”

8. Humpherys, Anne, “Dickens and Mayhew on the London Poor,” Dickens Studies Annual, IV, 88, 179Google Scholar; the assumption that London Labour is a secondary and perhaps a slightly embarrassing book runs throughout The Unknown Mayhew, but see especially pp. 45, 51.

9. Williams, , Country, p. 222Google Scholar; Auden would agree with this remark, but — probably more than Mayhew's other critics — he is suspicious of the new “way of seeing” and emphatically prefers Mayhew's approach.

10. A Plea for Advertising Vans,” Our Own Times (July, 1846), 123Google Scholar.

11. London Labour, I, xvGoogle Scholar.

12. Ibid., 6.

13. Ibid.

14. At a few points in London Labour (see especially II, 5)Google Scholar, Mayhew is concerned about an increase in the population of street-people; here he speaks partly as a responsible Englishman fearing urban chaos and perhaps revolution. For other ambivalences, see below. An instructive study of casual labor in London is Jones, Gareth, Outcast London (Oxford, 1971)Google Scholar. In Ch. III of his study Jones argues that the proportion of those casually employed rose in the decades after mid-century, or at least remained constant. “Casual labor” is an elusive category but it seems to include some of the street trades. However, Jones's analysis does not contradict Mayhew's. The latter is concerned mainly with those who are selfemployed, Jones more often with those employed by others.

15. “Systematic” implies a particular kind of financial backing and/or political authority. Most of the street-trades existed, or tried to exist, outside such a framework.

16. London Labour, II, 3Google Scholar.

17. Ibid., 4.

18. Ibid., 146.

19. Ibid., 161. Mayhew's remarks here and elsewhere recall Edwin Chadwick's calculations in the Inquiry into the Sanitary Condition (1842), but by the time London Labour was published Mayhew would have had reason to dissociate himself from Chadwick. As Francis Sheppard notes, not only did Chadwick's “passionate desire to exploit the commercial possibilities of … liquid manure for agricultural purposes [prove] wrong-headed,” his plan to flush sewers turned out disastrously. In the summer of 1849 Chadwick had the London sewers flushed into the Thames at points where the water supply picked up. By September, deaths in London were rising drastically and Chadwick was removed from the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers. (See Sheppard, Francis, London 1808-1870: The Infernal Wen [Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971], pp. 265, 273.Google Scholar) Mayhew, with this rather conspicuous precedent behind him, speaks dubiously of emptying sewage into the Thames: “the tide washes these evacuations back again, with other abominations. The water we use is derived almost entirely from the Thames … (II, 386).” It is in this context that we should see Mayhew's expostulation on the economic benefits of sewage; one Chadwickian policy is rejected so that the other may be developed more plausibly.

20. London Labour, II, 143Google Scholar.

21. Ibid., 258.

22. On the other hand, the pure-finders did complain that they were being run out of business; furthermore, Mayhew does seem to say (II, 261-62) that the street-orderlies had better educational and economic backgrounds than most of the free lance scavengers. Both purefinding as a traditional street trade and the purefinders as individuals may have been threatened by the street-orderly system.

23. London Labour, II, 6Google Scholar.

24. Ibid., 134.

25. Mayhew, Henry, “What is the Cause of Surprise? and What connection has it with the law of Suggestion?,” Douglas Jerrold's Shilling Magazine, VI (1847), 561, 562–64Google Scholar. The quotation at the end is from Hazlitt on comedy.

26. London Labour, III, 370Google Scholar.

27. Ibid., I, 24.

28. Ibid., 22.

29. Ibid., 36.

30. Ibid., 44.

31. Ibid., II, 352.

32. Ibid., III, 432.

33. Ibid., I, 1-3.

34. Ibid., 320.

35. Ibid.

36. Ibid., II, 5.

37. Ibid., III, 84.

38. Ibid., I, 10.

39. “Assassinates you with reality” is Delacroix's phrase, used of the streets of Tangiers; see Prideaux, Tom, The World of Delacroix 1798-1863 (New York, 1966), p. 105Google Scholar. I would hazard a guess that the liveliness of a city's street life is in inverse proportion to the control exercised over the city by engineers, bureaucrats, etc. This observation may be stated too simply. Nonetheless, aspiring present-day Mayhews would be well-advised to travel to Lagos, say, rather than London or Paris.

40. The Comic Almanack 1851 in The Comic Almanack (second series, 1844–1853; London [1874]), 334–35Google Scholar. James Braidwood was the superintendent of the London fire-brigade (killed in 1861 in a fire near London Bridge; Braidwood's death marked the end of fire-fighting by insurance companies and the beginning of systematic municipal responsibility in this area); Charles Green was a famous balloonist (he flew from Vauxhall to Nassau in 1836 and made 526 ascents between 1821 and 1852); T. C. Anstey had been M.P. for Youghal, 1847-52. A Catholic convert and a supporter of O'Connell, he was a controversialist on several points. The first London arcade, a kind of enclosed shopping mall, was constructed in 1815-19 and bv mid-century there were several others. Why in this context beadles? Could Mayhew mean private policemen maintained by shopkeepers? For Mayhew's authorship of the Comıc Almanack in 1851, see Bradley, John L., introduction to Selections from London Labour and the London Poor (The World's Classics: Oxford, 1965), p. xxiGoogle Scholar.

41. Mayhew, Henry, The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of Prison Life (London, 1856), p. 53Google Scholar. This volume was to be followed by others dealing with the Great World of London; the project fell through, however.

42. Mayhew, Henry, London Characters (London, [1870]). pp. 32–33Google Scholar. London Characters is a bibliographical oddity. It was first published anonymously in 1870; in 1874 a second edition appeared with Mayhew's name on the title-page, and wo hundred new pages at the back. Both editions contain samples from Mayhew's London journalism, along with articles whose attribution is less certain. The London Characters excerpt, then (like the passage from Our Own Times), may or may not be by Mayhew himself. In any case, it documents Victorian attitudes owards the street-people. These attitudes are also discussed in The Unknown Mayhew, pp. 65ff.: on Mayhew's predecessors and followers, particularly the latter. See also [Hollingshead, John], “Street-Memories,” Household Words, 17 (19 Dec. 1857), 9–12Google Scholar. Hollingshead plays the follower of both Mayhew and Dickens. In the former role his performance is especially notable, for while he discusses many of Mayhew's street trades he does so strictly in terms of nostalgia; he is an “incarnation of intense respectability” remembering childhood experiences with the pieman, the potato-man, etc. The respectability of business seems to rule out an ppreciation of street life. About four decades later, a situation much like this is central to Georg Simmel's analysis of city life: “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. Wolff, Kurt (New York, 1964), p. 410Google Scholar.

43. In The Victorian Treasure-House (London, 1973)Google Scholar, Peter Conrad asserts that “Dickens's imaginative transformation of the city into a multitude of secret, sheltering interiors has a parallel in Mayhew's monumental study … London Labour and the London Poor …. Mayhew as often as possible follows his subjects from the streets to their homes, and once there he is, like Poe, a physiognomist of the interior … (pp. 74-75).” Although to some extent it is true, this comment seems (for reasons that should be clear at this stage) somewhat off the point. Mayhew, even more than (say) Dickens, has a divided attitude toward the streets: they are at once full of hardship and an irreplaceable source of imaginative energy. For the mythology of the hearth, see Welsh, Alexander, The City of Dickens (Oxford, 1971)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. Ch. IX. Welsh comments in passing that Mayhew's effort “to describe the kinds of ‘pure’ found in the streets and its value in the wholesale market, was incurably scientific and businesslike (p. 23).” But a passion for statistics need not always be businesslike; it can involve an effort to calculate the incalculable, to exhibit a particularly elusive element of London life. Perhaps. a study of attitudes toward the streets is in order — something to match Welsh's discussion of the hearth and the ideal of life it suggests.