London Labour and the London Poor: Selection (Classics) Read Online Free

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. ‘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