Then he was sent to India, where his brother Alfred was in the government service, and upon his return tried a career in law. In this he was remarkably unsuccessful, and, as a result of his forgetting to submit a vital document to court, Mayhew senior narrowly escaped being committed to prison for contempt.

After this Henry left home and drifted into journalism3 and playwriting. His first play, The Wandering Minstrel, was performed in 1834, and But However and A Troublesome Lodger were staged in 1838 and 1839. It was in this latter year that the magazine Figaro in London, which Mayhew had helped to found in 1831 and which he had edited since 1835, came to an end. By this time he was well launched into a journalistic career, and some years later he was concerned with the founding of Punch, Number 1 of which was published on 17 July 1841. Three years later Mayhew married Jane, daughter of his friend and colleague Douglas Jerrold – with whom he was later to quarrel.4 M. H. Spielmann5 quotes an old but unnamed friend of Mayhew at about this time, who described him as ‘lovable, jolly, charming, bright, coaxing and unprincipled. He rarely wrote himself, but would dictate, as he walked to and fro, to his wife, whom he would also leave to confront his creditors.’

It seems, then, characteristic of this man that when he gave up the editorship of Punch in 1842, the publishers Bradbury and Evans made a place for him as ‘suggestor in chief. However’, he was never really happy with the reorganization that had put Mark Lemon in the Editor’s chair, and he finally severed his connection with Punch in 1845.

Mayhew was clearly a man of considerable ability and full of ideas, but it is difficult to escape the conclusion that his temperament was unstable. His bankruptcy in 1846 suggests strongly that he had no head for business, and, as we have seen, he relied upon his wife to face his creditors. The bankruptcy was the direct result of Mayhew’s attempt to capitalize upon the railway mania which was then sweeping the country. He began a newspaper called the Iron Times, to be published daily and to include gossip, chit-chat and serious news about railways. To launch the project he joined forces with Thomas Lyttleton Holt, former part-proprietor of Figaro in London and an active publisher. The venture proved unsuccessful: the Iron Times failed in the middle of 1846 and Mayhew went bankrupt.

So far as Jane was concerned the bankruptcy was a disaster. Mayhew had bought and lavishly furnished a house in Parson’s Green called ‘The Shrubbery’. He had accumulated debts of about £2,000, while his salary at the time of the crash was only around £300 per annum. Because of a change in the law he did not go to prison, though he was roughly handled in court by the Bankruptcy Commissioner, who censured him in brutal terms for his improvidence and irresponsibility in financial matters.

Through sheer energy and even ebullience, Mayhew bounced back into active life apparently unencumbered by the bankruptcy. It is, though, worth reminding ourselves that the house in Parson’s Green represented his first and last attempt at maintaining so respectable an establishment; and for Jane the catastrophe of the bankruptcy was such that she went to stay with her father in the Channel Islands, where she became so ill that her father later said she had ‘made a “runaway knock at death’s door!”’6 At some point – it is impossible to say when – she returned to her husband, and eventually two children were born, Amy and Athol. The marriage cannot, however, have been easy, and Jane’s life was made unhappier by a long-standing quarrel between her husband and her father. While few details are known, there seem to have been several separations, though none was permanent until some time in the late 1860s. Victorian census figures are not always reliable, but it does appear that she was not counted as a member of her husband’s household in 1851, and during the 1860s he spent long periods In Germany without her. When she died at the age of fifty-three in 1880 her husband was not at her bedside.

Following the bankruptcy novels by Henry and Augustus Mayhew appeared, including The Greatest Plague of Life (1847) and Whom to Marry (1848), both of them illustrated by George Cruikshank. Designed for the popular end of the market, both books dealt with themes of interest to middle-class readers, the first being about the servant problem and the second recording the adventures of a young woman looking for a good husband. They found plenty of readers and were reissued in cheap editions. Two further novels, also written in collaboration with Augustus, indicate an advance in Mayhew’s fiction. Both The Good Genius That Turned Everything into Gold (1847) and The Magic of Kindness (1849) show a more incisive style than that of the earlier works and are to some extent concerned with moral and social themes. In these later novels of the 1840s Mayhew was laying the foundations of the great work by which he would be remembered when all his other books were largely forgotten, London Labour and the London Poor.

The publication of this in 1851–2 did much to enhance Mayhew’s reputation – though characteristically enough it was marred by an unseemly wrangle with George Woodfall, who printed the work. According to the contract he was to receive his money after Mayhew and John Howden, the publisher, had received their salaries and after necessary expenses connected with the serial publication had been paid. Something went wrong, and in March 1851 Woodfall filed a suit in Chancery demanding that Mayhew and Howden should be prevented from selling further copies because the contract had been broken.