Journalism and social commentary are often linked. There’s a fine tradition running from Geoffrey Chaucer through Daniel Defoe’s A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain to William Cobbett’s Rural Rides and JB Priestley’s English Journey. All have added richness to our literary and social heritage and provided ample material for historians and novelists.
Henry Mayhew’s series of interviews, observations and commentaries about London in the 1850s and 1860s, published in the Morning Chronicle, fits perfectly into this tradition. Described by William Makepeace Thackeray as “A picture of human life so wonderful, so awful… so exciting and terrible,” Mayhew’s industrious work is an invaluable source of fact-based material which gives credence to Charles Dickens’ novels of the period.
This edition, collated by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, has a thoughtful, detailed and illuminating introduction which sets Mayhew’s work in its contemporary context. The articles have a flow which builds the picture of Victorian London and sets out a moving definition of poverty. But the selection is more than that. It defines character and dealing with adversity which, based as it is in real, first hand observation belies an often romanticised and Panglossian view of the Victorian working-class.
Poverty is always with us and will be in spite of the best endeavours of politicians and social reformers. Capitalism dictates it will be that way because there will always be the haves and have nots. What Mayhew wrote about in the 19th century puts a human face on what poverty actually is. We are the richer for what he did.
The chimney sweeps described as a “distinct and peculiar class” by virtue of their work “giving them not only a filthy appearance, but an offensive smell” are now part of history. The costermongers live on in our street markets and have a veritable fount of knowledge as well as a healthy scepticism summed up by one who, in response to his interview, said: “The press? I’ll have nothing to say to it. We are oppressed enough already.” Plus ca change…
My own favourite, forged out of trade union experience of the bus industry, was about the omnibus drivers. Even in the 1850s, Mayhew gives a glimpse of their superior place in the working-class hierarchy.
Mayhew’s work deserves a wider contemporary audience in austerity Britain, to remind us where we come from. His writing is acute in observation and challenging in interpretation. For, like the mill owner who responded to Friedrich Engels by saying: “And yet, sir, a lot of money is made here,” it describes ways of life dominated by the repression of capitalism for which only social revolution is the escape.
