London Labour Research Articles

Untangling Concepts of Objectivity in Nineteenth-Century Social Reform: Harriet Martineau and Henry Mayhew Observe Urban Poverty

This article examines emerging concepts of objectivity in the work of Harriet Martineau and Henry Mayhew. It focuses on Martineau's How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838) and Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1861), documenting how ideas about objectivity appeared in journalism and popular writing by these two prolific nineteenth-century social commentators.

Disorder, Riot and Governance in Early Tudor London: Evil May Day, 1517

Abstract On the eve of the May Day festival in 1517, a night of anti-immigrant violence broke out in London. Though pre-modern English historians have frequently invoked Evil May Day, as it came to be called, it has only recently been given concerted scholarly attention. The riot itself was ordinary, one amongst dozens in the first decades of the sixteenth century; it reveals, as a reflection of endemic grievance, a constellation of tensions surrounding labour, immigration, masculine identities, and governance in early Tudor London. More extraordinary, and heretofore not much noticed, was the Crown reaction to the Evil May Day disturbances, on which this article focuses. The insurrectionists were prosecuted for high treason rather than the minor charge of riot; a multi-day pageant of severe justice punctuated by theatrical reprieves followed. At least fifteen were put to death within London’s city walls and there are indications that the final execution toll was much greater, perhaps as high as forty-three. Such a toll following a mild riot could only have been unexpected and shocking, even if in fact ‘only’ fifteen rather than forty or more were executed. This was a message from the Crown both strategically conceived and emotionally driven by the king’s own rage, fury and fear. Though it was the youthful rioters who constituted most of those put to death in the aftermath, the message was meant primarily for the London civic elite, who had dared to question Crown policy and had failed to control the violence in their city.

Indian Servitude(s) in Imperial London: Tanika Gupta’s The Empress

Abstract Dramatic acts of retrieving marginalised stories and of rewriting imperial history from a transnational perspective have been essential for efforts at decolonising knowledge. In The Empress (2013), Tanika Gupta explores the neglected history of Indian communities and the nexus of imperial labour and mobility in late-Victorian London through interlacing the fictional story of the Bengali ayah Rani and the Indian lascar Hari; the true story of the relationship between Queen Victoria and her Indian munshi Hafiz Mohammed Abdul Karim; and the stories of Westminster’s first Indian MP, Dadabhai Naoroji, and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. By foregrounding the urban experiences of diverging Indian servant characters in the sense of a critical cosmopolitanism and by privileging a heterogeneous “history from below,” this article explores how The Empress presents a counterstory to notions of a Dickensian London “full of bonnets and white people” (Royal Shakespeare Company, “Emma Rice”) and a critical intervention in discourses relating to the ethical challenges inherent in the commemoration and teaching of the British Empire.

Melodramatic Mayhew: J.B. Johnstone’s How We Live in the World of London

The British stage of the1850s produced a flurry of dramas influenced by Henry Mayhew’s work on urban poverty, many of which were written for the “minor” theatres of London’s East End and the south side of the Thames. Often dismissed as literary “hacks,” the writers for these theatres and their works have been largely undervalued and understudied. This article shines a spotlight on one such writer, John Beer Johnstone, whose How We Live in the World of London; Or, London Labour and the London Poor premiered at the Surrey Theatre on 24 March 1856. Taking a positive view of literary “piracy,” I argue that Johnstone’s play cleverly re-imagines Mayhew’s social journalism and subverts prevalent stereotypes of the urban poor for the Surrey’s mixed audiences.

Curious Conversations: Henry Mayhew and the Street-Sellers in the Media Ecology of London Labour and the London Poor

Abstract Henry Mayhew is renowned as the chronicler and historian of London street-sellers and poor labourers. However, Mayhew’s relationships with his subjects, and their influence on the development of London Labour and the London Poor, is less often discussed. This article examines Mayhew’s productive and disruptive friendships, collaborations, and disagreements with the London poor, and situates these exchanges within the layered print and oral texts that comprise the extensive media ecology of London Labour. I argue that through their disruptive collaborations with Mayhew, some street-sellers, including Charles Alloway, memorialized as ‘The Crippled Street-Seller of Nut-Meg Graters’, strategically harnessed the media forms of London Labour for profitable self-representation. In contrast, a group of street-sellers known as the Street Traders’ Protection Association mobilized against Mayhew and critiqued his representations of their class. These disruptive collaborations reveal underlying kinships and conflicts between Mayhew and the street-folk, thus destabilizing his reputation as a neutral and authoritative observer in the history of poverty.

Art with marginalised communities

In contrast to the dominant masculinised discourses on global cities, this project explores the feminised and private spheres of global cities—‘domestic work’ in London. Domestic work is of particular concern for London, given the concentration of domestic workers in the capital and the large numbers of migrants employed in the sector. In the polarised London labour market, migrant domestic workers are concentrated at the bottom end of the labour market and suffer from high levels of exploitation, but often face difficulties to articulate their social and political will and to intervene in public forums. Our participatory video project with 12 migrant domestic workers from The Voice of Domestic Workers, a grassroots campaigning and advocacy organisation in London, suggests that participatory art can play a significant role in supporting the voice of marginalised communities. It reveals the power of art as a voice of dissent and as a tool for advancing social justice. Our project also highlights the importance of shifting the attention from the object of art and art as end product, to the subject of art and art as a social process in which social relationships may be restructured, in order to better understand the potential role of art in helping oppressed groups to achieve social changes. The latter approach implies a stronger sense of agency regarding the ability of marginalised communities to participate directly in structural changes.

London Labour and the London Poor: Selections by Henry Mayhew

London Labour and the London Poor: Selections by Henry Mayhew

Incognito Social Investigation in British Literature: Certainties in Degradation by Luke Seaber

Reviewed by: Incognito Social Investigation in British Literature: Certainties in Degradation by Luke Seaber Rebecca Nesvet (bio) Luke Seaber, Incognito Social Investigation in British Literature: Certainties in Degradation (London: Palgrave, 2017), pp. viii + 274, $99.99/£67.99 hardcover, $79.99/£53.99 ebook. In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story "The Man with the Twisted Lip" (Strand, December 1891), London newspaper reporter Neville St. Clair accepts an assignment that pitches him headlong into a double life. Commissioned to write "a series of articles upon begging in the metropolis," St. Clair tries "begging as an amateur" (636). He aims to "get the facts," but also rather improbably acquires a lucrative haul and consequently makes incognito panhandling a regular gig (636). When Holmes unmasks him, he confesses his terror that his children will learn his secret. This premise was hardly Doyle's invention. In 1866, journalist James Greenwood masqueraded as an indigent at the request of his brother Frederick, the Pall Mall Gazette's first editor. The resulting expose, "A Night at the Workhouse," inaugurated a literary genre that Luke Seaber calls "incognito social investigation," of which "The Man with the Twisted Lip" is the "best-known fictional representation" (131). As Seaber's monograph shows, Victorian and later incognito social investigators struggled to represent experiences alien to them. They "often sought certainty," Seaber proposes, "but the ambiguities and contradictions of the texts that they produced degrade those same certainties" (13). This problem is central to the realist mode and to Victorian periodical journalism. Enlisting anthropology's lexicon, Seaber argues in his second chapter that "A Night at the Workhouse" differs from sociological exposés such as Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1851) by pursuing emicity, or, in Seaber's tweaked definition, writing told from the point of view of the collective subject—in this case, the poor. Greenwood fails at this pursuit because, judging his workhouse fellows in deeply negative ways, he refuses to truly identify with them. Instead, his account demonstrates emicity's antithesis, eticity, or, the target audience's social consciousness, which alienates the subject (19). Despite this methodological failure, Greenwood quickly attracted imitators. For instance, later in 1866, W. H. Stallard sent a female reporter to research and partly ghost-write an exposé of female indigence, The Female Casual. As Seaber argues, her unattributed contribution stands out in part because she is less judgmental than Stallard. So are several subsequent Greenwood emulators who peripatetically studied "tramping." Seaber begins the third chapter with an impressive recovery of the tramping experiment of David Railton, Vicar of Margate, who was responsible for the concept of the "Unknown Soldier" monument. In a now-lost 1921 lecture, Railton discussed his incognito social investigation of First World [End Page 357] War veterans' experiences of tramping. Unlike Greenwood, Railton "felt a very strong personal drive" to learn how his research subjects lived and felt (61, emphasis in original). However, this chapter's true focus is George Orwell's (that is, Eric Blair's) Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), in which Orwell "live[s] the wandering life of the homeless" (63). According to Seaber, this work is the genre's first genuine masterpiece. In documenting Orwell's debt to Victorian writing, Seaber builds on his previous monograph, G.K. Chesterton's Literary Influence on Orwell: A Surprising Irony (Mellen, 2012). Down and Out, Seaber argues, transcends the eticity of the Greenwood model of social incognito investigation yet disdains to pursue emicity. Not attempting to blend in with his social subjects, he emphasizes his difference from them, and, via that emphasis, achieves credibility (67). As an actual down-and-outer pretending to be a poverty tourist, Orwell created what Seaber calls the "ne plus ultra" of the Greenwoodian tradition (73). Seaber further develops his study of tramping in the fourth chapter. He briefly surveys several Edwardian tramping tales, "even though they complicate the book's chronology," to show that tramping, as a pursuit of freedom, was an upper-middle-class Edwardian "pastime" (85). Seaber then leaps across time and the Atlantic to focus on the manuscripts of a mid-twentieth-century American, Harry A. Franck, in the collection...

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

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.

“THE DEAD MAN COME TO LIFE AGAIN”: EDWARD ALBERT AND THE STRATEGIES OF BLACK ENDURANCE

This essay tells a story of endurance: the endurance of a person and the endurance of an object in an archive, both of which have survived despite their apparent fungibility and ephemerality. It focuses on a Jamaican veteran of the navy and merchant marine – one Edward Albert – who lost his legs while at sea and therefore took to working at various intervals as a crossing sweeper, beggar, shop-owner, and author in London and Glasgow. Albert should have been lost. His shipmates burnt his legs to the point of bursting, and his doctors presumed him to be dead following their amputation. I located Edward Albert initially in the pages of Henry Mayhew's massive, unwieldy, almost unnavigable archive, the four volumes of London Labour and the London Poor. Mayhew interviews Albert in his home and then refers to a small chapbook Albert sells to accompany his begging. A simple WorldCat search led me to a copy of the book, housed at the University of Washington in Seattle. It had endured.

Plumbing the Depths, Scouring the Surface: Henry Mayhew's Scavenger Hermeneutics

This essay intervenes into ongoing debates over the alleged obsolescence of critique by returning to the historical scene of the emergence of depth hermeneutics in the social transformations of the nineteenth century. It argues that present accounts of the exhaustion of depth hermeneutics in fact signal the need for a reinvigorated and complex account of how those explanatory systems were produced, and, along with them, the dialectical valuations of surface and depth that have been so central in in recent scholarship. This essay begins to embark on that project by turning to Victorian social investigator Henry Mayhew's writings in London Labour and the London Poor on the sewers and their scavengers, in order to reflect on the processes by which surface and depth were fused to one another throughout the nineteenth century, such that surfaces came to imply depths that in turn determined surfaces. While this dialectical mode of thinking is quite common currency today, contemporary critical discourse may have nevertheless lost touch with the empirical convictions that initially framed the various forms of a hermeneutics of suspicion.

Deceptive data? The role of the investigators in the New Survey of London Life and Labour 1928–32

ABSTRACTThe data collected by the New Survey of London Life and Labour between 1928 and 1932 is one of the most significant resources of detailed household information for the interwar period, with data extracted for almost 30,000 households, providing detailed information including birthplaces, hours of work, and wages. This article assesses the process of the original data collection, highlighting issues that mean users of the extracted data must proceed with a measure of caution. In particular, it demonstrates that one investigator employed by the survey, who provided information for around a fifth of households, appears to have regularly submitted generic and estimated information that problematizes the dataset.

Female Workers, the Confectionery Industry, and the London Labour Market c.1880

This paper explores the labour conditions of a small confectionery firm, Epps and Co., in late Victorian London before the rise of New Unionism. Utilizing details of employees and disciplinary proceedings contained within a wage book uncovered in the Rowntree’s company archives, it explores how discipline was enacted in the complex world of the London labour market. The relationship between, employer, employee, and discipline placed significant emphasis on the individual rather than the group, and both employer strategy and employee resistance operated on a remarkably singular level.

Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850–1915 by Owen Clayton

Reviewed by: Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850–1915 by Owen Clayton Joanna Madloch Owen Clayton, Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850–1915 New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2015, 233 pp. This book discusses a variety of interactions between photography and literature in the transitory period of the medium between 1850 and 1915. Building on terminology established by Daniel Novak and John Tagg, Owen Clayton chooses the term “photographies,” which stresses the fact that during the early days of the photographic medium, instead of one dominant process, there existed an array of coexisting techniques and photographic methods. As the author explains in his Introduction, the main goal of his work is to establish how various literary uses of photography reflect upon the heterogeneity of the medium itself and how they portray the changes that photography was undergoing. Chapter One further explores the notion of the term “photographies” and features [End Page 367] Clayton’s abbreviated history of the medium’s development, which includes notions of both its simultaneity and technological multiplicity. Chapter Two discusses Henry Mayhew’s work titled London Labour and the London Poor (1850–62), in which a popular English journalist portrays urban workers and underprivileged classes of his time. Clayton notices that while Mayhew’s work has already been well researched, the critiques never paid enough attention to the way it utilizes photographic images. According to Clayton, Mayhew’s choice of the daguerreotype-engraving mixed process over the more modern collodion technique is purposeful. The chapter presents how, by staging the images and then selectively engraving them, Mayhew achieves his goal to create an illusion of objectivity, while at the same time establishing his position of control and succeeding in generating specific emotions among his readers. In Chapter Three, Clayton presents how photography is employed in the creation of selfhoods in late nineteenth-century fiction. While discussing Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Clayton argues that Stevenson uses photography as a metaphor for the psychotic effect of modernity. The novel itself reflects the writer’s fascination with several photographic techniques, especially those that allow multiple images to be shown simultaneously (zoopraxiscope) and those that combine multiple exposures of the same image (composite photography). On the other hand, Amy Levy’s The Romance of a Shop (1888) introduces photography as a gender-model construction tool. According to Clayton, Levy uses photography to display how gender is constructed not through the portrayal of characters, but rather through their performance. This is illustrated by the novel, which presents the story of four sisters engaged in (an unusual for their time) pursuit of the photographic business, in the form of a gender performativity discourse in relation to photography. Chapter Four is dedicated to the analysis of William Dean Howells’s Suburban Sketches (1871). Clayton concentrates his attention on relationships between the notions of work, literature, and photography expressed in Howells’s work. For example, according to the author, Howells builds one of his reoccurring characters, Bartley Hubbard, as a polemic to Hawthorne’s Holgrave, and respective characters illustrate both authors’ notions of the nature of work. In addition, Clayton argues, in his novel titled A Modern Instance (1882), the motif of photographic portraiture is used as a representation of the self-destructive impulses of the protagonist. Chapter Five explores the interconnections between literary works by Jack London and both photography and early cinema. The analysis of London’s The People of the Abyss (1902), presents how London uses a variety of photographic techniques, including composite method, in order to create socially and politically meaningful images. As it is shown in the chapter, the image manipulation allows the writer to achieve the rhetorical effect, but consequently puts his work [End Page 368] under scrutiny for the lack of realism. Later in the chapter, Clayton presents the ways London’s photographs adopt numerous cinematic tropes, but also how the changing cinema reflects itself in his late fiction, including the Abysmal Brute (1911) and The Valley of the Moon (1913). In the Afterward the author talks about nostalgia for “photographies,” which at the end of the twentieth century takes a form of a revival of interest in old...

Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods: Nineteenth-Century Missionary Infant Schools in Three British Colonies by Helen May et al.

Reviewed by: Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods: Nineteenth-Century Missionary Infant Schools in Three British Colonies by Helen May et al. Elizabeth Gargano (bio) Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods: Nineteenth-Century Missionary Infant Schools in Three British Colonies. By Helen May, Baljit Kaur, and Larry Prochner. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2014. In the nineteenth century, visitors to Robert Owen’s innovative school at New Lanark might have observed a striking sight: boys and girls—the children of factory workers, and perhaps destined for a life of factory labor themselves—dancing in flowing Roman togas. In an illustration of the scene (Empire, figure 2.1), ladies in bonnets and gentlemen in tailcoats watch the children caper barefoot across the floorboards in a vast schoolroom decorated with a giant map and outsized images of exotic jungle animals. The dancers’ unusual clothing reflects the influence of Bernard Christoph Faust, a medical doctor who advocated dressing children in Roman garb; in the tradition of Rousseau, Faust argued that the tight confines of adult clothing forced children’s bodies into unnatural postures that might impair healthy growth. As the children in the illustration dance free and unconfined, they enact a Rousseauian pageant of “natural” education; “noble savages” unburdened by the constricting responsibilities and postures of adulthood, they have something in common with the proud and savage animals stalking freely across the wall. Yet the children at New Lanark were also taught during geography lessons to be grateful that they were civilized Christians and not “Cannibals or Hindoos” (qtd. [End Page 220] in Empire 74). From this perspective, the images of globalism that decorate the walls—the map and the exotic animals—represent not icons to inspire, but rather obstacles to be mastered. John Locke had argued as early as 1693 that teaching children to dance exerted a civilizing influence. By taming their so-called savage impulses, the dancing children at New Lanark might also equip themselves for the imperialist and “civilizing” mission of taming the British colonial territories. Such contradictions and complexities are at the heart of Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods, whose authors contend that English educational practices that had been developed to train working-class children at home were transplanted, sometimes with only a few modifications, to “civilize” children in the British colonies. This direct transfer of educational methods drew, of course, on widespread and disturbing assumptions about class, race, and ethnicity. In his vast compendium London Labour and the London Poor, Henry Mayhew records his visits to the most impoverished neighborhoods of “darkest” London, drawing analogies between the poor in their urban jungle and the so-called primitive natives of the colonial territories. The British and Foreign Schools Society (founded in 1808 as the Lancastrian Society) incorporated this conflation of perspectives in its very name; the education of children in the colonies, like the education of the English working class, would be tailored to create selfdisciplined, respectful subjects, good Christians who never challenged the lessons of the colonizers. At the same time, this educational project would be viewed by its proponents as a liberating one, freeing “uncivilized” children from the shackles of ignorance and superstition. In fact, missionary teachers would sometimes embrace new, experimental, and supposedly enlightened approaches to education, similar to those developed at New Lanark. Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods tackles the difficult project of inscribing a narrative that was never fully recorded by those who strove to enact it. The school records, lesson plans, journals, and letters produced by English missionary teachers in the colonies generally obscured the effects and ramifications of their efforts, either willfully or as a result of their own confused agendas. Thus this monograph takes on a complex interdisciplinary project; it engages with nineteenth-century educational theory, missionary culture and evangelical doctrine, and an array of indigenous histories in order to trace what the authors describe as an “invisible” narrative, one that has been inscribed only in fragmentary form. Chronicling the founding and development of missionary schools in three British colonies from the 1820s through the 1850s, the authors, in their own words, open “a window” on “the momentous impact of the collision of ideas and consequences that resulted from missionary teaching and colonial conquest...

The Companion to Dombey and Son by Trey Philpotts (review)

Reviewed by: The Companion to Dombey and Son by Trey Philpotts Robert R. Garnett Trey Philpotts. The Companion to Dombey and Son. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2015. Pp. xiv +575. $120.00; £75.00 Like the children of Dombey and Son’s philoprogenitive Mr. and Mrs. Perch, books on Dickens arrive steadily, with a spate since Dickens’s 2012 bicentennial. Few can be more welcome than the latest volume in The Dickens Companion series. Next to the (also ongoing) Pilgrim Letters project, the Companions series ranks as the most valuable new scholarly resource for Dickens scholarship. Trey Philpotts’ Companion to Dombey and Son is particularly welcome for several reasons. The tenth volume to appear, it’s the first addition in a decade, since Philpotts’ own earlier contribution, The Companion to Little Dorrit (2004), and Dickens scholars can only hope that future Companions (to the five novels not yet “companioned”) arrive at shorter intervals (and that Trey Philpotts does not have to produce all of them). There’s a good reason that these works appear at wide intervals. With over 500 pages of detailed and often extensive annotations, The Companion to Dombey and Son is not only an encyclopedia of mid-century Victorian culture, but also a tour of the baroque palace of Dickens’s mind, as well as a reminder that even palaces have lumber rooms. Samuel Johnson boasted that in compiling his great English dictionary, he had singlehandedly accomplished what it had taken forty members of the French Academy forty years to complete for their own language. In locating sources and analogues for thousands of Dombey references, allusions, parallels, sources and cultural context, Trey Philpotts has performed a nearly Johnsonian feat. Since the series’ inception the Companions have grown longer and more comprehensive. The Companion to Dombey and Son is almost twice as long as the earlier Companions to Our Mutual Friend (1986) and Bleak House (1988). Perhaps this is due to the growing ambition of the volumes’ authors; and perhaps the rise of the worldwide web with its online texts and mountains (and dustheaps) of data and information has made it possible to expand the scope of the Companions. It may be, as well, that the internet has made it necessary for reference volumes like the Companions to justify themselves with deeper and more extensive annotation. Wikipedia can provide quick undergraduate-level glosses to many issues and allusions in Dickens, but the Companion to Dombey goes far deeper into such sources than anything [End Page 255] available on the internet. Computers may be able to defeat grandmasters at chess, but not yet at diligent and intelligent scholarship. Roughly speaking, the Companion to Dombey provides two overlapping kinds of information. It is, first, a mine of information about mid-nineteenth century English conditions and culture, from the mean streets of London – with, for example, over twenty-five citations of Henry Mayhew’s 1851 London Labour and the London Poor – to the latest in scientific (and pseudo-scientific) knowledge and technology: most famously, the revolutionary advent of the railroad. With profound and analogous revolutions in our own time – both technological and cultural – the England of the 1840s diminishes from our view like a scene rapidly receding through the wrong end of a telescope. Dickens, we may hope, is not for an age but for all time, but he does not float above his age; he was deeply, enthusiastically, and angrily immersed in it, and Philpotts helps us visit the material circumstances and intellectual climate in which he lived and from which he inhaled his assumptions. The Companion takes us into food and cookery, buildings, medicine, empire, decoration, transport, schools, and more. This was the public world of Dickens. More idiosyncratic are allusions and references, often fragmentary, which take us into his private experience and reading. A good example is Captain Cuttle, initially a minor comic character who grew in Dickens’s fancy and sympathy until he comes to dominate large stretches of the later chapters. Cuttle’s strange nautical jargon – as obscure to us, probably, as to the baffled Mr. Toots – and his habit of mixing and muddling quotations must have presented a particular challenge to Philpotts, who has nonetheless managed...

The Non-Taxonomical Mayhew

In his ceaseless subdivisions and detours, Henry Mayhew invites a reading of London Labour and the London Poor that argues against its own purported taxonomical endeavor. Supposing a non-taxonomical Mayhew, then, this essay argues that the generic categories that most accurately record the collaborative effort of Mayhew and his subjects are portraiture and the performances of the depicted figures. I delineate the principles of what I call Victorian visual ethics to ask questions about the relationship between perception and judgment when confronting physically aberrant subjects. Looking at one exemplary figure in Mayhew, “The Street-Seller of Nutmeggraters,” I demonstrate how such subjects—utilizing the conventions of performance and portraiture—engage in acts of strategic self-fashioning in order to shape the terms of the visual encounter.

Victorian Miser Texts and Potential Energy

In London Labour and the London Poor, Henry Mayhew envisions a fully sustainable future, one in which recycling averts fears of overpopulation and excessive urban waste.1 “Up to the present time we...

Did the Subaltern Speak? Mayhew and the coster-girl

This essay focuses on some of Mayhew's interviews in London Labour and the London Poor, and especially his interview with one coster-girl. Do these sources express the lived experience of a speaking subject; or do they merely rehearse contemporary cultural and linguistic codes? There is no subject without language; language precedes and determines the subject, but nor is there language without subjects. Language exists only insofar as individuals and groups utilize it, reproduce it and transform it – and always within specific social relations and networks of power and in a relentlessly material world. Mayhew's writings provide a wonderful resource to explore some of these complex struggles over meaning – in a precise time and place.

Henry Mayhew at 200 – the ‘Other’ Victorian Bicentenary

The New Agenda introduction puts forward the case for a much-needed revision of the scholarship devoted to Henry Mayhew – journalist and wit, playwright, co-founder of Punch, educational writer, novelist for children, travel writer, hack, social explorer and author of London Labour and the London Poor. It argues for a more intertextual and contextual reading of his major and minor works, and presents the articles contained in this new agenda special issue. The complex publishing history of Henry Mayhew's work and of London Labour and the London Poor in particular are explored in part one. The second part surveys the scholarship so far devoted to Mayhew and sketches out a new agenda for research based on a wider intratextual and intertextual approach to Mayhew's corpus. It is time, the introduction urges, for Victorianists to revisit Henry Mayhew.