One can imagine their feeling miserably out of place there, and less than likely to give the detailed accounts which, as Mayhew reports them, so often have the ring of truth. One of the most compelling series of portraits drawn by Mayhew relates to dustmen and the disposal of refuse. The cogency of this section certainly did not derive from interviews at second or third hand conducted in a clean office. Readers of Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend will recall Boffin and the dust yard… Mayhew provides an authentic context for a setting in the novel which might otherwise be regarded as fancifully grotesque.

As for the reference to statistics, it is clear that Mayhew regarded them as an important and intrinsic part of his work, although for the modern reader they are perhaps the least valuable part of the survey. What makes it live is the record of human experience. From that above all ‘Mayhew’s London’ draws its enduring vitality.

In the lack of sentimentality of his approach Mayhew was very much a pioneer;15 but the streets of London had proved overwhelmingly fascinating to serious observers before he put pen to paper. In 1838 James Grant had published Sketches in London, which in its faithful descriptions and lack of condescension anticipated Mayhew. Another who did the same was a doctor, Hector Gavin, whose book Sanitary Ramblings: Being Sketches and Illustrations of Bethnal Green appeared in 1848. The wealth of statistical tables equally foreshadows Mayhew’s use of figures to illuminate his text. The Rookeries of London: Past, Present and Prospective by Thomas Beames, published in 1850 and reprinted in 1852, indicates a widening interest in the themes discussed in the Morning Chronicle articles.

While it would be pointless, and untrue, to claim that Mayhew founded a school of writers, he did influence several who followed him. Notable amongst these was George Augustus Sala (1828–96), whose Twice Round the Clock (1862) presents a perceptive, if hurried, view of twenty-four hours in the life of the capital. Despite a facsimile reprint it remains – undeservedly I think – a largely forgotten book. It has very real merits, especially in that it looks at London without sentimentality and, like Mayhew’s work, is journalism of a very high order.16 The same is true of James Hain Friswell (1825–78), author of Houses with Their Fronts Off (1854), a series of prose sketches of people in London and the houses they lived in. It was a minor best-seller. Round about this time, too, Charles Manby Smith (1804–80) published his Curiosities of London Life (1853), which is a book of entertaining low-life reporting. He followed this in 1857 with a similar volume, The Little World of London.

Later in the century there was another wave of books about London streets and the London poor. Amongst the writers were James Greenwood (1852–1929)17 and George R. Sims (1847–1922), who wrote about themes which were directly derived from Mayhew. The same can be said of Charles Booth (1840–1916), whose Life and Labour of the People in London stretched from one volume in 1889 to seventeen which were published between 1902 and 1903.18

The last book directly within the nineteenth-century Mayhew tradition that I have been able to trace is A Vicarious Vagabond (1910) by Denis Crane, a pseudonym of Walter Thomas Cranfield. His investigations were, in his own words, undertaken ‘with the idea of bridging the gulf, so far as I myself was concerned, between a theoretical and an experimental knowledge of how the poor live…’19 With this end in view he disguised himself and went out on to the streets of London. A conversation which he records with ‘Ginger’, outside porter of a City hotel, has echoes of Henry Mayhew, for it appears authentic and shows a natural acceptance of what he found:

He and I met in the following circumstances. We were standing together at the kerb, I hoarse with hawking my wares, he weary of fruitless waiting. He explained, with a touch of bitterness, that his line of business had declined of late owing to the popularity of the telephone, which had abolished the necessity for sending messages by hand. Furthermore, this particular hotel had lost its wealthier patrons.

‘I haven’t earned a pennypiece today,’ he said; ‘nor did I yesterday.’

‘Then how do you live?’

‘Borrow,’ with a shrug of the shoulders. ‘Sometimes I don’t take anything for three days. Then it takes all I get to pay off my debts. It’s only when I have a bit of luck that I really get straight, for I’ve got three kids.’

There was a note of tenderness in the tone.

‘Ah,’ quoth I, thinking of my own babies. ‘So have I.’

‘Two girls and a boy are mine. The youngster’s seven this week.’

‘And my boy’s six – to-morrow.’

This touch of nature drew us closer, and I inquired what were his average earnings.

‘About two bob a day; but they used to be more.’

Twelve shillings a week, with a wife and three children! Rent, though he lived in a cellar, could not be less than three or four shillings. And there were coals and boots, not to mention food.20

That the Mayhew tradition lives on is apparent in the work of the best-selling American writer Studs Terkel, whose Hard Times (1970) and Working (1972), within the context of twentieth-century America, catch the authentic Mayhew tone.