‘Terkel has caught the sound of the people,’ said the Baltimore Sun in a review quoted by Avon Books on the cover of a paperback edition. Mayhew had done precisely the same thing for the poor of London about one hundred and fifty years earlier.

After Mayhew’s death London Labour and the London Poor became a very neglected book. The Second World War, however, was followed by a renewed interest in matters Victorian, and it came into its own again. Several volumes of selections were published, and eventually it was reprinted in its entirety.21 Poverty is still a fact of life throughout much of the world. It remains a pressing issue – and at least one British politician has talked of a return to Victorian values. How should we assess the relevance now of Mayhew’s work?

Current discussion of poverty amongst historians and social scientists may often obscure the reality that he described in nineteenth-century London. A recent contribution to the subject does just this. In The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (Faber, 1984) the author, Gertrude Himmelfarb, discusses in the first of two projected volumes the problem of poverty as it was defined between 1780 and the 1840s. My own feeling is that Mayhew saw what he described at first hand – it was a reality of daily life – and for this reason his evidence, however critically we examine and evaluate it, remains inevitably more compelling than extended theoretical discussions of the word ‘poverty’. In a sense, the detachment from reality implicit in the debate about terms allows a comforting neutrality to both participants and spectators. Mayhew, on the other hand, still has the power to disturb us, and this, I believe, is a major reason for the continuing vitality, popularity and even relevance of his work.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Works by Mayhew

London Labour and the London Poor: 1852 edn, 2 vols.; 1861–2 edn, 4 vols.; new impression of 1865, 4 vols. The two latter editions are identical as regards text. Priority of issue, however, can be established by the imprint. The earlier one was published by Griffin, Bohn & Co., Stationers’ Hall Court. Bohn went out of business in 1864, and the later imprint is Charles Griffin & Co., Stationers’ Hall Court.

The Criminal Prisons of London (1862). Mayhew’s co-author was John Binny. Although I have not used material from this volume, it should be considered with the four volumes of the previous title as completing Mayhew’s survey of the metropolis. Both titles – five volumes in all – were reprinted by Frank Cass in 1967–8.

There have been several volumes, issued by various publishers, of selections from Mayhew. The best of them is Henry Mayhew: Selections from London Labour and the London Poor, chosen with an introduction by John L. Bradley (OUP, 1965). The 40-page introduction is excellent.

The Morning Chronicle

So far as the Morning Chronicle letters are concerned, three volumes of selections have been published:

E. P. Thompson and Eileen Yeo (eds.), The Unknown Mayhew (Merlin Press, 1971; Penguin, 1973). The editors contribute an 85-page introduction divided into two roughly equal sections, ‘Mayhew and the Morning Chronicle’ by E. P. Thompson, and ‘Mayhew as a Social Investigator’ by Eileen Yeo. Both are essential reading for an understanding of Mayhew’s work.

Anne Humpherys (ed.), Voices of the Poor (Frank Cass, 1971). There is some overlap between the contents of this title and those of the preceding one. Both, however, are worth looking at. Anne Humpherys’s introduction is brief but illuminating.