London Calling

In this latest abridgment, by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, we can see that “earnest hope” in all its large-hearted fellow-feeling. In one section, Mayhew meets with an elderly female street seller, whom he hears has been tending to her sick husband for many years: 

Here was the sort of heroism that Mayhew had in mind. And yet, as Thackeray attested, the suffering that made it necessary “had been lying by your door and mine since we had a door of our own. We had but to go a hundred yards off and see for ourselves, but we never did.” Why? Thackeray could not have been more categorical: “We are of the upper classes; we have had .  .  . no community with the poor.” 

Mayhew’s claim to be one of Great Britain’s best social historians has not always been acknowledged. Too often he is treated as a proto-sociologist whose real aspiration was to write the sort of pseudo-scientific history that came into vogue in the late 19th century. It is true that the author of London Labour can be excessively fond of statistics; but he was first and foremost a reporter who never let his regard for the quantifiable stand in the way of his deep sympathy for the poor. 

Moreover, Mayhew was a truthteller. At a time when so many of his contemporaries were celebrating that paean to material progress the Great Exhibition of 1851, Mayhew was content to study the direst poverty imaginable, in rookeries and alleyways where respectable Londoners seldom, if ever, ventured. 

What gives London Labour so much of its life are the voices that rise from its pages like ghosts, such as when the old woman caring for her husband tells Mayhew: “If God takes him, I know he’ll sleep in heaven. I know the life he’s spent, and am not afraid; but no one else shall take him from me—nothing shall part us but death in this world.” Similarly, when Mayhew encounters an old strumpet in the Haymarket, nothing he reports about her tragic life can match her own pungent account: “You folks as has honor, and character, and feelings, and such, can’t understand how all that’s been beaten out of people like me. I don’t feel. I’m used to it.” 

Then again, when he falls among the “duffers,” or peddlers of pretended smuggled goods, an informant tells him: 

If Mayhew often describes his subjects with a novelist’s eye for the defining detail, he could also write with the prescience of a prophet. In the following portrait, he might almost be describing what we are in danger of becoming if we continue to allow the political class to swell the national debt: 

This exhibits another characteristic of Mayhew’s work: its droll humor. In this, London Labour is a precursor of George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier (1937), which was ostensibly written to expose the evils of poverty but ended up celebrating the comedy of class. Mayhew’s research led him into similarly amusing byways. For example, apropos the “sham indecent literature” peddled by straw-sellers in sealed packets in the Strand and Holborn, Mayhew commiserates with the elderly gentlemen who fork over for these packets only to find that they contain not French postcards but religious tracts. In another passage, he describes overhearing a burglar refusing to break bread with a pickpocket: “No, no! I may be a thief, sir; but, thank God, at least I’m a respectable one.” 

Henry Mayhew could write with such sympathy about those trying to keep body and soul together because he had struggled to make a living himself. Born in London, he ran away from Westminster School at 16 and soon afterwards began writing popular novels with his brother. Then he turned his sights on the theater, with a farce called The Wandering Minstrel (1834), which had only a modest success. After editing a satirical paper called Figaro in London, he returned to novel-writing. In 1841, he cofounded Punch, but was fired shortly thereafter. He also wrote travel pieces and books for children. Years of extravagance landed him in bankruptcy court in 1846 and wrecked his marriage. 

It is a sad irony that the man who spoke so glowingly of the blessings of home should have lost his own by incurring debts of over £2,000 for the redecoration and furnishing of his large house in Parson’s Green. When the Morning Chronicle commissioned him to write a sketch on London, Mayhew submitted “A Visit to the Cholera Districts of Bermondsey” (1849), which became the genesis of London Labour. After this lone success, he failed to make a go of a railway magazine and died in 1887.

It was the newspaperman in Mayhew that was drawn to what he called “the multifarious tribe of ‘sturdy rogues,’ ” or those who refused to work not because of physical or mental unfitness but because they preferred thieving, swindling, and begging. In her brilliant The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (1984), Gertrude Himmelfarb observes how “even the most compassionate reader might find himself more impressed by the ingenuity of these outcasts than their miseries.” Mayhew was clearly fascinated by the layabouts and scoundrels he encountered, but he also spoke with many who were clearly keen on working. The old woman who went mad rather than see her bedridden husband thrust on the parish is a case in point. 

Indeed, the resourcefulness of London’s poor is one of the book’s great revelations. Mayhew presents not only fruit sellers, flower sellers, sandwich sellers, omnibus drivers, coffee-stall keepers, chimney sweeps, and dock workers but sellers of nutmeg-graters, dog collars, boot laces, corn salve, firecrackers, and rat poison, not to mention rat killers, bone grubbers, rag gatherers, even sewer hunters. He also came upon a number of people who made their living (however precariously) by buying such things as rags, glass, bones, umbrellas, parasols, metal, bottles, and dung. Then again, some of his best chapters are on those who entertained London’s poor, including the Punch-and-Judy men, ballad sellers, hurdy-gurdy players, snake-, sword-, and knife-swallowers, street clowns, strolling actors, and various street musicians, some of whom plied their trade with the help of dancing dogs. 

W. H. Auden once made a trenchant observation about the fate of this extraordinary industry:

Even when I was a child, the streets were still full of venders, musicians, Punch-and-Judy men, and such. Today they have vanished. In all modern societies, the public authorities, however at odds politically, are at one in their fear and hatred of private enterprise in the strict sense; that is to say, self-employment.  

Of course, in our own time, we have seen this hatred of the state for private enterprise intensify into an ever more insatiate encroachment into nearly every aspect of our lives: our health care, our commerce, even our religion. The question of what ought to be the relationship between the state and the private citizenry has also exercised the English, especially after the dissolution of monasteries in the 16th century, which deprived the poor of so much of the charity that had been set up to relieve their distress. 

When almshouses gave way to workhouses, the seeds of the modern welfare state were sown. Gertrude Himmelfarb writes that what the Victorians found shocking about Mayhew’s book was that it described a “street-folk [who] were literally regressive, a throwback to a pre-industrial, even pre-civilized state, a primitive ‘tribe’ surviving in the very heart of civilization.” What shocked them even more was that the book revealed the humanity of the poor. For Mayhew, the unaccommodated man was not a poor, bare, forked animal: He was a fellow creature. In this most hands-on of histories, London Labour and the London Poor shows the poor to be real people with real troubles whose distress calls for true charity, not the travesty of alms that our own bureaucratic state offers. 

Edward Short is the author, most recently, of Newman and His Family.