The volume also contains a contemporary picture of Henry Mayhew playing the part of Knowell in Charles Dickens’s amateur production of Every Man in his Humour.

P. E. Razzell and R. W. Wainwright (eds.), The Victorian Working Class (Frank Cass, 1973). The importance of this book lies in the fact that for the first time letters (not by Henry Mayhew) about the condition of the poor in various parts of England are reprinted from the Morning Chronicle. Although letters about London are included, those from other areas predominate.

All the letters to the Morning Chronicle by correspondents from outside London are currently being published by Frank Cass in eight volumes. The editor is Jules Ginswick. The following have already appeared: Vol. 1, Lancashire, Cheshire and Yorkshire; Vol. 2, Northumberland and Durham; Vol. 3, The Midlands. The remaining five volumes are scheduled for publication as follows: Vol. 4, Liverpool and Birkenhead; Vol. 5, Birmingham; Vol. 6, Midlands, Northern Counties; Vol. 7, South-western Counties; Vol. 8, Eastern Counties, South-eastern Counties.

There is also a six-volume paperback edition of The Morning Chronicle Survey of Labour and the Poor: The Metropolitan Districts, with an introduction by Peter Razzell (Caliban Books, 1983).

Biography

The standard biography of Henry Mayhew is Anne Humpherys, Travels into the Poor Man’s Country (University of Georgia Press, 1977; Caliban Books, 1980). It contains a very full bibliography of books and articles by and about Mayhew.

For Mayhew’s connection with Punch see A. A. Adrian, Mark Lemon, First Editor of ‘Punch’ (OUP, 1966).

Dickens and Mayhew

The picture of Mayhew as an actor in one of Dickens’s amateur productions may suggest a closer relationship between the two men than has hitherto been suspected. Certainly Dickens was influenced by Mayhew’s work. See F. R. and Q. D. Leavis, Dickens the Novelist (Chatto & Windus, 1970; Penguin, 1977). See also H. S. Nelson, ‘Dickens’ “Our Mutual Friend” and Henry Mayhew’s “London Labour and the London Poor”’, in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, XX (1965), pp.