The Labours of Henry Mayhew, 'Metropolitan Correspondent'

Abstract

CALIBAN BOOKS have performed an invaluable service to historians of London and to students of 19th century literature and sociology in bringing out the complete collection of Henry Mayhew's contributions to the Morning Chronicle Survey of Labour and the Poor. * Running to six volumes and over a million words, the 82 letters of the 'Metropolitan Correspondent' will at last provide an adequate basis upon which historians may assess his significance and location in nineteenth-century history. Previous selections of Mayhew, beginning with the four volume London Labour and the London Poor of 1861 have all tended to accentuate his reputation for lack of proportion and eccentricity. Mayhew himself must of course bear a lot of the responsibility for this. He never succeeded in putting together a properly edited version of his survey and there is no evidence after the late 1850s of his making any serious attempt to do so. Thus the association of Mayhew with a baroque medley of street entertainers and costermongers goes back to the stump of the project of London Labour and the London Poor which appeared serially in 1851 and 1852; and in a late and pathetic self-caricature, London Characters. Illustrations of the Humour, Pathos and Peculiarities of London Life, published in 1874, Mayhew himself crystallised the subsequent trend to identify his work with the quaint. Selections of his writings like those of Peter Quennell in the 1950s only reinforced this picture of Mayhew as a connoisseur of the picturesque. It was not until 1971 that the importance of Mayhew as a social analyst was brought to the attention of historians through a selection of his Morning Chronicle Survey by Edward Thompson and Eileen Yeo in The Unknown Mayhew. But inevitably, the need to compress the selection within the covers of one volume could not give an adequate impression of the sheer extent and ambition of what was actually completed within the survey. While the four volumes of London Labour and the London Poor are overwhelmingly concerned with street traders, street performers and prostitutes to such an extent, that the title seems a misnomer the Morning Chronicle Survey does cover a major cross-section of the artisan and labouring trades of London. Among the skilled and the semi-skilled, there is description and discussion of tailors, shoemakers, hatters, cabinet-makers, toymakers, carpenters, turners, joiners, sawyers, coopers, shipbuilders, weavers and leather-makers; among the unskilled, most branches of land and water transport dockers, ballast heavers, coalwhippers, cabmen, carmen, watermen, seamen. The major omissions are parts of the building trade, the metal and engineering trades, printing and paper work, precision manufactures and domestic service. It is true that some of this treatment is uneven hatters get much more hurried treatment than tailors, for example. It is also true that skilled trades with a higher standard of living get far less attention than poor and overcrowded occupations. Nevertheless, some of the best accounts of the culture and life-styles of the 'honourable' trades are to be found in Mayhew, as are a series of uniquely detailed analyses of the diet and purchasing habits of the poor and the working classes, their relationship to pawnshops and alcohol consumption and of their situation in relation to such well-publicised contemporary charities as Asylums for the Houseless, and Ragged Schools. Taken together, London Labour and the Morning Chronicle Survey do constitute a far more representative survey of those who 'will work' , those who 'can't work' and those who 'won't work' than historians have been prepared to acknowledge. If the publication of the Morning Chronicle Survey seems likely to lead to a positive re-assessment of Mayhew's achievement as a social investigator, it seems even more probable that his analyses of the trades themselves will also receive more serious attention from economic historians. Twenty years