Henry Mayhew and the Street Traders of Victorian London — A Cultural Exchange with Material Consequences

Abstract

Generally, the early Victorian bourgeoisie imagined the poorer districts of London as a hotbed of ‘filth’ and anarchy. However, there are exceptions, such as the journalist Henry Mayhew, who wrote a report on London Labour and the London Poor (1851–52). In his work Mayhew frequently conveys the impression that poor Londoners lived in several sophisticated cultures of their own design. How are we to read this text? Some conceive of it as part of a bourgeois discourse. Others claim that Mayhew shows the poor man's life as it actually was. In accordance with newer approaches in Mayhew studies, I want to suggest a third reading, regarding ‘London Labour’ as part of a complex cultural exchange. The parties involved (i.e. Mayhew and his poor informants) evaluated each other, and in doing so they rethought and redefined their images of Self and Other in sophisticated ways. The Victorian press, for example, reports on a group of street traders who met several times to rail against Mayhew. He had depicted them entirely falsely, they argued, and consequently negotiated images of who they ‘really’ were. Cultural self-images such as these in turn can lead to ‘social closure’ and exclusion. In this sense Mayhew, however indirectly, may well have contributed to the social unequality among the poor people he described.