Mayhew's London 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.

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...

The Rat-Catcher's Prank: Interspecies Cunningness and Scavenging in Henry Mayhew's London

Drawing upon Mayhew's interviews with rat-catchers, sewer workers and the dog-men of the rat pit, the article explores the varied relationships these aforementioned groups had with rats across three distinct spaces: the country, sewers and rat-pits. In addition to developing a framework for historicizing the practices of rat-catching, the article illuminates Mayhew's highly ambiguous relationship with two key rationalizing projects: the emerging discourses of sanitary progress and ‘animal welfare’, which had consequences for how he conceptualized the diverse cultures of London's working poor.

Work, Poverty and Modernity in Mayhew's London

Mayhew's understanding of work in London has not been considered a great success. His accounts of workers were sentimental and erratic and his ambivalence to political economy prevented him from fully understanding the relationship between work and poverty. As the century progressed, it was Marx and Booth who provided systematic and sustained studies of the labour question. However, as this article argues, the circulation of facts, moral judgements and guesswork that filled the pages of London Labour and the London Poor offers a fair representation of a metropolitan manufacturing economy that was characterized by uncertainty, speculation and shifting boundaries of capital and labour. In particular, Mayhew's demonization of small masters, the working poor who set up as independent producers and whom he blamed for over-competition, drew out a contradiction in contemporary understandings of capitalism: large-scale capital and well-organized labour were seen as progressive and modern but small businesses were...

Always Fiction?: The Limits of Authorial License in Our Mutual Friend

This essay concerns the connection between literature and reality. It argues that the existence of such a connection is made possible by the dual role of social practice in founding, on the one hand, human reality (including character), and on the other, linguistic meaning. While an author is free to determine such matters as plot or imagery under the control of nothing stronger than general plausibility and verisimilitude, a far stronger constraint from the side of reality comes into play the moment he sets about deploying the resources of a natural language, which is not his private property but a public possession, whose possibilities of meaning stand before him independently of his wishes, already richly charged with references, both historic and contemporary, to the structures of practice constitutive of the social order from which it has emerged, and the complexities of whose daily intercourse on all levels it serves to mediate. In developing these themes, the essay explores the relationships between fairy tale, language, and reality in Our Mutual Friend , and the way in which Dickens' language mediates between our "uneasy" sense that, on the one hand, we are reading a fairy tale, or rather a set of interwoven fairy tales, and on the other hand, that the novel is, nevertheless, in some sense a work of "realism," though not at all concerned with "social reality" in any sense seriously analogous to, say, Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor . The title and the epigraph pick up a passage in Cynthia Ozick's early novel Trust : "here was a man who shunned novels on the ground that they were always fiction."

Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era , and: Semi-Detached Empire: Suburbia and the Colonization of Britain, 1880 to the Present (review)

Reviewed by: Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era, and: Semi-Detached Empire: Suburbia and the Colonization of Britain, 1880 to the Present Richard L. Stein (bio) Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era, by Lara Baker Whelan; pp. xi + 177. London and New York: Routledge, 2010, £80.00, $125.00. Semi-Detached Empire: Suburbia and the Colonization of Britain, 1880 to the Present, by Todd Kuchta; pp. viii + 264. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2010, $59.50, $24.50 paper, £53.50, £21.95 paper. For over half a century, led by such scholars as A. J. Dyos, British urban history has enlarged its scope to include British suburban history, particularly by charting—to borrow from the title of Donald J. Olsen's classic study—the "Growth of Victorian London" in developments around the shifting margins of the expanding city. The questions posed by this tradition remain vital: how much of what we think we know about Victorian London belongs to the city itself? Precisely what was that city, and where was it? How should its historical boundaries be drawn? What evidence provides the best measure of its changing character or the changing characters with whom it was identified? How much of its legacy survives? Both books under review address such questions through parallel if distinct approaches. In Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era, Lara Baker Whelan describes what might be termed the psychic geography of London suburbanization in a historically grounded literary survey that gives equal weight to the facts and fantasies of the city's late-nineteenth-century expansion. Todd Kuchta's Semi-Detached Empire examines the same phenomena over a longer period and with a wider lens, remapping suburbanization in relation to the dialogue of city and country and, especially, the history of British colonization, an imperial growth fundamentally (if paradoxically) linked with suburban growth at home. The main outlines of Whelan's story are familiar: incomes rose, people moved, villages developed into something less picturesque. As the size and idea of London shifted, material places gave rise to hopes and fears. Escape from the inner city, once the cherished dream of a rising middle class, produced a social return of the repressed when undesirables joined the march of bricks and mortar out of town. Suburban dreams turned to nightmares; once-placid communities like Lambeth or Chelsea provided backdrops for the gothic drama of sensation novels. By the beginning of the twentieth century the urban exodus reversed as cultural elites like the Bloomsbury Group returned to inner London. Whelan's penultimate sentence sums this up provocatively: "Could Modernism have existed without the Victorian suburb and all it engendered?" (158). As that sentence suggests, this is primarily a literary study, focusing on fiction by numerous well- and lesser-known writers, from Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins to Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Charlotte Riddell. One of its strengths is to treat their work (and that of others) as suburb-specific. Rather than invoke such familiar categories as "Dickens on railway construction," Whelan considers works in relation to their locales, which in turn are placed on a detailed map of social mobility. Hence, Dombey and Son (1846-48) is read in relation to developments in and around Camden Town, episodes like Florence's encounter with Good Mrs. Brown in the context of Victorian anxieties about a migrating "residuum" that found its way into respectable suburbs (45). As Whelan's use of the term "anxieties" in her title suggests, these concerns are grounded less in demographic realities than cultural fantasies, generated (in a notable [End Page 745] example) by the "most titillating sketches" in Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1851-62) (49), among other sources. Whelan's emphasis on fiction reveals how such fantasies were formed and circulated; her detailed account of class measures the distance between fantasy and fact. If Whelan is at her best evoking material environments, she is less successful in distinguishing such subgenres as suburban gothic, suburban mysteries (which are, she acknowledges, a category of the former), or (in the least convincing section) suburban sublime. The treatments of fictional plots and settings...

<em>Bookish Histories: Books, Literature, and Commercial Modernity, 1700––1900</em>, edited by Ina Ferris and Paul Keen

Reviewed by: Bookish Histories: Books, Literature, and Commercial Modernity, 1700–1900 Solveig C. Robinson (bio) Bookish Histories: Books, Literature, and Commercial Modernity, 1700–1900, edited by Ina Ferris and Paul Keen; pp. x + 283. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, £55.00, $80.00. Although the subtitle of this volume suggests that it encompasses two full centuries of book history, a cursory review of its table of contents quickly reveals its origins in an American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies conference session. The book's twelve chapters are written primarily by eighteenth-century and Romantic scholars, and the content similarly is concentrated in the first half of the covered era. While only three [End Page 365] articles are expressly concerned with the Victorian period, several others, however, offer valuable contextual and critical analyses that point forward in potentially productive ways. Linked—however tenuously—by a debt to Pierre Bourdieu's notion of the literary field and its imperative to examine literary history as a complex of book history, cultural history, and literary studies, the essays in this volume invite us, in the editors' words, to think about literary production "as at once a materially embedded activity, caught up in a thick network of concrete material relations, and an intensely symbolic activity, engaged in the less easily defined pursuit of authority and legitimacy in a competitive artistic and professional (as well as commercial) arena" (8). Of most immediate interest to Victorianists will be the contributions by William R. McKelvy, Deidre Lynch, and Leah Price. McKelvy's "'This Enormous Contagion of Paper and Print': Making Literary History in the Age of Steam" concentrates on publisher Robert Chambers and his contributions to the definition of English literary studies. Based on a close examination of the contents and publishing history of Chambers's History of the English Language and Literature (1835) and his subsequent Cyclopaedia of English Literature (1842–44), McKelvy claims that Chambers "was the first single author to compose a narrative literary history that covered both verse and prose fiction during a long period that extended into the nineteenth century" (63). McKelvy notes the importance of Chambers's recognition that the novel was in fact the rising literary genre of the early nineteenth century, a recognition born of his close association with the works of Walter Scott. McKelvy also calls attention, however, to Chambers's innovations in publishing, particularly his embrace of steam-powered printing. Having established "the world's first industrialized information factory, one that produced a weekly periodical [Chambers's Edinburgh Journal] as part of an on-going process of production and reproduction" (71), Chambers was an essential player in the process of generating more—and less expensive—publications for Britain's burgeoning literary appetites. Lynch's "Canons' Clockwork: Novels for Everyday Use" is an illuminating examination of the evolution of the reading habit in the nineteenth century. Combining Samuel Johnson's and Leigh Hunt's notions of literature as "that which we are always re-reading and never reading for the first time" with Harold Bloom's "no-nonsense definition of the canonical text as simply the durable, complex text that demands re-reading" (89, 90), Lynch suggests we need to rethink our assumptions that the novel's growing popularity derived from its novelty. In an era in which the medical profession prescribed regularity of habit as crucial to health, reliability was an important value—even in literature. Lynch looks at the many accounts of (sometimes compulsive) re-reading of beloved texts, along with the prevalence of periodic and serial forms during the period, to argue that the novel's actual appeal may have been its predictability. "Might we connect the form's ascendancy to the public's willingness to ratify," she asks provocatively, "the proposition that, under ideal conditions, every reading might represent a resumption of an earlier, interrupted reading?" (101). Price's "Getting the Reading Out of It: Paper Recycling in Mayhew's London" is one of the most enjoyable chapters in the volume. Starting with the question of why Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1851–62) "so encyclopedically catalogs the uses to which used paper can be turned" (149), Price systematically...

In Deadly Time

This article examines the temporal dimension of waste in Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor as an instance of how modernity has produced a largely hidden domain of the non-identical and indeterminate. Through a consideration of the phenomena of uselessness, decay and poverty I argue that the temporal dimension of waste is constituted as a corrosive or malign `Deadly Time'. In placing such emphasis on time directed towards death, I aim to show that Mayhew's undisciplined researches can be seen as a valuable source for understanding why modern thinking struggles to come to terms with waste.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Victorian Life Writing

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Victorian Life Writing

Love—State—Ego: ‘Centres' and ‘Margins' in 19th Century Britain

Questions of marginalization and the representations of ‘otherness' are increasingly important within geography. The author explores what such representations can tell us about the ‘centre’ rather than the ‘margins’. He does so by employing the tools of deconstruction to read a 19th century ‘historical geography’ of prostitution. This text, written by Horace St. John, forms a substantial part of Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor. Volume IV: Those Who Will Not Work (1861–62). Through an exploration of the textual strategies deployed within the text it is argued that it operates within a discursive space marked out by three sets of oppositions between ‘the same and the other’: forms of sexual relations, forms of state power, and forms of the self. The elaboration of these oppositions, and their inherent contradictions, suggests the conclusion that the ‘centre’ is made up of multiple power relations which are never able to achieve closure.

A Nineteenth-Century Correction

I enjoyed Andrew Miller's engaging Marxist rereading of Thackeray's Vanity Fair ( Vanity Fair through Plate Glass, 105 [1990]: 1042-54), but one sentence of his piece gave me pause. Miller compares Thackeray's treatment of objects in fiction with Henry Mayhew's nonfiction account of the Newcut market, and he leads into this analogy by saying that Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor was in 1861-62, after Vanity Fair finished its serial run (1046). Vanity Fair was published serially in 1847-48; Mayhew's book, composed of articles he had written for the Morning Chronicle in the late 1840s, appeared in 1851, not 1861.

Rat Worship and Taboo in Mayhew's London

Rat Worship and Taboo in Mayhew's London

Rat Worship and Taboo in Mayhew's London

HENRY MAYHEW POINTEDLY IDENTIFIES his pioneering work of urban sociology, London Labour and the London Poor, with the still embryonic discipline of anthropology. Each civilized or settled has generally some wandering horde intermingled with, and in measure preying upon, he declares on his first page, citing various ethnographic authorities and claiming that his study of the nomadic tribe of London's street folk will illustrate laws of primitive life and personality the world over.' Understandably, writers on Mayhew have given no more than passing notice to his claims to be an anthropologist,2 since the proposition about the interrelations of the civilized and the primitive seems never significantly developed, despite few references to it later on. Yet it turns out to be central to the argument of London Labour after all, at deeper level of analysis than its original formulation would lead to expect. Its focus is that constellation of superstitious ideas of uncleanness, contagion, and the forbidden known in ethnography by the Polynesian word for it, taboo. When anthropology emerged as true science of culture in the 1860s and afterward, as well as in its germinating phase of the preceding few decades, the phenomenon of taboo in Polynesia and elsewhere constituted of its chief topics of research. Franz Steiner suggests why: calling the problem of taboo in ethnography a Victorian invention, he remarks that Victorian society was itself one of the most taboo-minded and taboo-ridden societies on record.3 He does not elaborate the pregnant hint that the Victorians studied taboo in primitive society as an oblique means of learning how their own was organized, and he bypasses the crucial issue of the degree to which Victorian cultural taboos in fact were continuous with, not merely reminiscent of, the fantastical religious systems of primitive societies. We shall address these questions concretely in what follows, looking at them through the eyes of text that strikingly-if with only partial lucidity-enacts the circular processes that may propel all ethnographic investigation. Steiner's guess that the Victorians figured their own society and their own communal obsessions in their reports on (for example) the Polynesians turns out to be very specifically confirmed in London Labour and the London Poor. This is just the schema that would be anticipated on theoretical grounds by Roy Wagner, who argues that even the most rigorously empirical field study in anthropology is bound to proceed through reflexive invention of culture, that is,

A Map for Mayhew's London: The Geography of Poverty in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

(1985). A Map for Mayhew's London: The Geography of Poverty in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. The London Journal: Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 115-126.

A Map for Mayhew's London: The Geography of Poverty in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

A Map for Mayhew's London: The Geography of Poverty in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Dickens's Our Mutual Friend and Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor

Dickens's Our Mutual Friend and Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor

Dickens's Our Mutual Friend and Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor

Dickens's Our Mutual Friend and Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor