by developing their powers of self-reliance, and certainly not in treating them like children. Philanthropists always seek to do too much, and in this is to be found the main cause of their repeated failures. The poor are expected to become angels in an instant, and the consequence is, they are merely made hypocrites. Moreover, no men of any independence of character will submit to be washed, and dressed, and fed like schoolboys; hence none but the worst classes come to be experimented upon. It would seem, too, that this overweening disposition to play the part of pedagogues (I use the word in its literal sense) to the poor, proceeds rather from a love of power than from a sincere regard for the people. Let the rich become the advisers and assistants of the poor, giving them the benefit of their superior education and means – but leaving the people to act for themselves – and they will do a great good, developing in them a higher standard of comfort and moral excellence, and so, by improving their tastes, inducing a necessary change in their habits.10

Sentiments like this – and in the great tide of evangelistic philanthropy they were comparatively unusual – probably dated from his days with Punch. They hardly add up, though, to a coherent political attitude, and his political ideas remain, as E. P. Thompson has pointed out, an enigma.11 He did seem to become increasingly well informed about orthodox political economy; but whether he was a radical or not is uncertain. He was clear enough about his intentions:

I shall consider the whole of the metropolitan poor under three separate phases, according as they will work, they can’t work, and they won’t work. Of those that will work, and yet are unable to obtain sufficient for their bodily necessities, I shall devote my attention first to such as receive no relief from the parish; and under this head will be included the poorly-paid – the unfortunate – and the improvident. While treating of the poorly-paid, I shall endeavour to lay before the reader a catalogue of such occupations in London as yield a bare subsistence to the parties engaged in them… After this it is my intention to visit the dwellings of the unrelieved poor… to discover, not only on how little they subsist, but how large a rate of profit they have to pay for the little upon which they do subsist – to ascertain what weekly rent they are charged for their waterless, drainless, floorless, and almost roofless tenements; to calculate the interest that the petty capitalist reaps from their necessities.12

Mayhew goes on to assert, ‘… however alive I may be to the wrongs of the poor, I shall not be misled by a morbid sympathy to see them only as suffering from the selfishness of others.’13 And he taxes the poor with a want of temperance, energy, cleanliness, morality, knowledge…

What Mayhew achieved was the fullest and most vivid picture of the experiences of labouring people in the world’s greatest city in the nineteenth century. In his pages many of them speak for themselves, and we hear of their hopes, fears, customs, grievances, habits, in their own words. No other social investigator came near to him: in its scope and execution his work has no peer.

How did he do it? The book grew out of a series of articles that Mayhew wrote for the Morning Chronicle. The first of these, ‘A Visit to the Cholera Districts of Bermondsey’, was published in its columns on Monday 24 September 1849, and was to culminate in the four volumes of London Labour and the London Poor more than a dozen years later. Following the initial article, Mayhew persuaded the Editor of the paper that a series of articles on the social problems of the time would be worth undertaking. The idea was taken up and three journalists were assigned to the task: Charles Mackay (1814–89) was to cover the northern industrial centres; Shirley Brooks (1816–74) was to write from the Continent; and Mayhew was to cover London. An editorial in the Chronicle of 18 October 1849 defined the series and looked forward to ‘a full and detailed description of the moral, intellectual, material, and physical condition of the industrial poor’.

Between 19 October 1849 and 31 October 1850 Mayhew’s contribution consisted of seventy-six letters averaging 3,500 words each. They dealt with poverty, exploitation and the precarious lives led by the London poor. Publication of these letters was interrupted by a dispute between Mayhew and the Editor. The latter had objected to an account of a successful West End tailoring establishment which, said Mayhew, was using sweated labour; and Mayhew believed that his freedom to write as he wished was being interfered with. The upshot was that Mayhew made no further contributions to the Chronicle, but he continued to write his letters and they were issued in twopenny parts until March 1852, when the quarrel with his printer, George Woodfall, to which I have already referred, meant that publication ceased. Meanwhile a two-volume edition of London Labour and the London Poor consisting of bound-up parts had been published, but it was not until more than ten years later that the complete four-volume edition appeared.

Because none of Mayhew’s notebooks appears to have survived, we know little or nothing about his methods of work. A rather unsympathetic observer described him at work during the Chronicle days:

He was in his glory at that time. He was largely paid, and, greatest joy of all, had an array of assistant writers, stenographers, and hansom cabmen constantly at his call. London labourers… were brought to the Chronicle office, where they told their tales to Mayhew, who redictated them, with an added colour of his own, to the shorthand writer… Augustus helped him in his vivid descriptions and an authority on political economy controlled his gay statistics.14

Despite the cattiness of this description, some fragments of reality seem to lurk beneath these half-truths. So far as the assistant writers are concerned, it must be remembered that Mayhew was producing material for a deadline and needed all the help he could get. We can accept that he must have ‘led’ his interviewees, and the writing-up of the final version was of course his own – and there is no doubt where his sympathies lay. Where did the interviews take place? Some, almost certainly, in his office; but many would surely have been conducted on the streets. The sheer number of people involved would support this conclusion, and there is the practical consideration that many of them, in a working situation, would have been too dirty to bring into an office.