London Labour and the London Poor
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
London Labour and the London Poor is a work of Victorian journalism by Henry Mayhew. In the 1840s he observed, documented and described the state of working people in London for a series of articles in a newspaper, the Morning Chronicle, that were later compiled into book form.
The articles go into deep, almost pedantic detail concerning the trades, habits, religion and domestic arrangements of the thousands of people working the streets of the city. Much of the material comprises detailed interviews in which people candidly describe their lives and work: for instance, Jack Black talks about his job as "rat and mole destroyer to Her Majesty", remaining in good humour despite his experience of a succession of near-fatal infections from bites.
Beyond this anecdotal material, Mayhew's articles are particularly notable for attempting to justify numerical estimates with other information, such as census data and police statistics. Thus if the assertion is made that 8,000 of a particular type of trader operate in the streets, Mayhew compares this to the total number of miles of street in the city, with an estimate of how many traders operate per mile.
The articles were collected and published in three volumes in 1851. A fourth 'Extra Volume' in 1861 , co-written with Bracebridge Hemyng, John Binny and Andrew Halliday, covered the lives of prostitutes, thieves and beggars, though it departed from the interview format to take a more general and statistical approach to its subject.
Contents |
Mayhew's London
London in the 1840s was more like a 21st-century Third world megalopolis than a 20th-century city. A significant portion of the population had no fixed place of work, and indeed many had no fixed abode. In classic fashion, the city teemed with outsiders, migrants from other parts of Britain and even Europe.
Items of commerce – food, drink, textiles, household goods – were distributed, not by trucks but by an army of carts and wagons. While goods were sold from storefronts, there were also thousands upon thousands of street-traders, generally lumped together as costermongers. Alongside these relatively familiar forms of trade in consumer goods and services, Mayhew's work describes lesser-known trades driven by now-obsolete markets and by sheer poverty, such as gathering of snails for food, and the extreme forms of recycling practised by 'pure finders' (who collected dog dung for tanneries) and 'sewer-hunters' (who searched the sewers for scrap metal and other valuables).
Use by Larkin
The poet Philip Larkin referenced an extract from London Labour and the London Poor for his poem Deceptions. The extract details a rape: "Of course I was drugged, and so heavily I did not regain consciousness until the next morning. I was horrified to discover that I had been ruined, and for some days I was inconsolable, and cried like a child to be killed or sent back to my aunt."
The Big City or the New Mayhew
In the early 1950s, Punch published a series of articles based upon and to some extent parodying London Labour and the London Poor. Although these articles were humorous, their purpose was still to document and describe the lives of working people in London.Template:Fact In 1953 the articles, which were written by Alex Atkinson and illustrated by Ronald Searle were published in a single volume under the title The Big City or the New Mayhew.
References
- London Labour and the London Poor; selections made and introduced by Victor Neuburg, Penguin Classics 1985, ISBN 0-14-043241-8
- London Labour and the London Poor: Volume I, Dover Publications (1968), Paperback ISBN 0-486-21934-8
- London Labour and the London Poor: Volume II, Dover Publications (1968), Paperback ISBN 0-486-21935-6
- London Labour and the London Poor: Volume III, Dover Publications (1968), Paperback ISBN 0-486-21936-4
- London Labour and the London Poor: Volume IV, Dover Publications (1983), Paperback, ISBN 0-486-21937-2
- The Unknown Mayhew, Selections from the "Morning Chronicle" 1849-50, E. P. Thompson, Eileen Yeo (editors), The Merlin Press, 1971. Repr.: Pelican Classics, 1973
