London Labour and the London Poor: Selection (Classics)

LONDON LABOUR AND THE LONDON POOR

H
ENRY
M
AYHEW
, journalist and social investigator, humorist, dramatist, novelist, author of works of travel and popular instruction, was born in 1812 and died in 1887. The son of a London solicitor, he was educated at Westminster School, from which he eventually ran away. Mayhew then went to sea and travelled to India before entering his father’s office, which, however, he soon quitted to embark on a long and prolific but often penurious literary career. He started (with an old schoolfriend)
Figaro in London
, a pungent illustrated weekly, in 1831, wrote a very successful farce,
The Wandering Minstrel
(1834), and was one of the group which founded
Punch
in 1841; but in 1845 he severed his connection with the journal, which became increasingly conformist. The voluminous survey known as
London Labour and the London Poor
began publication in 1849 in the
Morning Chronicle
, and in 1851–2 bound volumes of the collected, uncompleted work were issued. Further publication was interrupted by litigation and not resumed until he found a new publisher in 1861, although in 1856 Mayhew embarked on another ambitious series of studies entitled
The Great World of London
, part of which appeared in 1862 as
The Criminal Prisons of London
. Mayhew’s other noteworthy book is the readable
German Life and Manners
(1864). His work is distinguished by vivid reportage, unsentimental sympathy, humour and an eye for detail. During his life Mayhew was an outspoken advocate of social reform and a trenchant critic of
laissez-faire
doctrine, but even before his death his work had sunk into the obscurity in which it remained until interest in it revived during the 1940s.

V
ICTOR
N
EUBURG
was born in Sussex in 1924 and educated at Varndean and at the universities of London and Leicester. At one time a soldier and schoolmaster, he is a former Senior Lecturer at the School of Librarianship, Polytechnic of North London (now the University of North London). He has been a visiting professor at State College, Buffalo, Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, and Ruhr University, Bochum. In the summer of 1984 he was Simon Foster Haven Fellow of the American Antiquarian Society. His publications include
Popular Education in Eighteenth Century England
(1971),
Popular Literature
(Penguin, 1977),
The Batsford Companion to Popular Literature
(1982) and
A Guide to the Western Front
(Penguin, 1988).

Victor Neuberg is married, with a wife inured to his enthusiasm for book collecting, and has a daughter married to a doctor, and two granddaughters. Henry Mayhew has been an enthusiasm of his for many years.

Acknowledgements

Henry Mayhew: A Chronology

Introduction

Bibliography

Mayhew’s Collaborators

Note on the Text

LONDON LABOUR AND THE LONDON POOR

Volume One

Volume Two

Volume Three

Volume Four: Those That Will Not Work

As ever I am more grateful than I can say to Barbara Gilbert, who has done her best to keep me on the path of stylistic virtue, and also typed an untidy manuscript impeccably. Gratitude as well to my wife Anne, long-suffering as ever in the face of a rising tide of books and papers. To Frank Cass and Michael Zaidner my thanks for their interest and the speedy unearthing of an indispensable book which they presented to me. And, to Annie Pike of Penguin Books, a special thankyou for invaluable help.

HENRY MAYHEW.

It is strange that more is not known about the life of Henry Mayhew. He was a journalist, occasionally a minor dramatist, and a man of letters rubbing shoulders on friendly and even intimate terms with some of the best-known writers of his day; he married the daughter of Douglas Jerrold, a prolific and popular writer;
¹
for a time he was Editor of the newly founded magazine
Punch
;
²
and yet Mayhew eludes the biographer. No cache of surviving letters is known and there was no contemporary biography, nor did he essay an autobiography. In the memoirs and biographies of his contemporaries he is of course mentioned, but the picture of him that has come down to posterity remains essentially shadowy.

The one indispensable guide to his life and work is Anne Humpherys’s
Travels into the Poor Man’s Country
(1977). It contains pretty well all the known facts about Mayhew – and there are not many of them! His father was a self-made successful lawyer, Joshua Dorset Joseph Mayhew, and his mother’s maiden name was Mary Ann Fenn. Henry, one of seventeen children, was sent to Westminster School in 1822, and while there showed himself to be brilliant but indolent, always full of new projects and ideas but temperamentally unable or unwilling to bring them to fruition. Having refused to be flogged by the Headmaster, Dr Goodenough, for some misdemeanour he ran away from school. Then he was sent to India, where his brother Alfred was in the government service, and upon his return tried a career in law. In this he was remarkably unsuccessful, and, as a result of his forgetting to submit a vital document to court, Mayhew senior narrowly escaped being committed to prison for contempt.

After this Henry left home and drifted into journalism
³
and playwriting. His first play,
The Wandering Minstrel
, was performed in 1834, and
But
However
and
A Troublesome Lodger
were staged in 1838 and 1839. It was in this latter year that the magazine
Figaro in London
, which Mayhew had helped to found in 1831 and which he had edited since 1835, came to an end. By this time he was well launched into a journalistic career, and some years later he was concerned with the founding of
Punch
, Number 1 of which was published on 17 July 1841. Three years later Mayhew married Jane, daughter of his friend and colleague Douglas Jerrold – with whom he was later to quarrel.
⁴
M. H. Spielmann
⁵
quotes an old but unnamed friend of Mayhew at about this time, who described him as ‘lovable, jolly, charming, bright, coaxing and unprincipled. He rarely wrote himself, but would dictate, as he walked to and fro, to his wife, whom he would also leave to confront his creditors.’

It seems, then, characteristic of this man that when he gave up the editorship of
Punch
in 1842, the publishers Bradbury and Evans made a place for him as ‘suggestor in chief. However’, he was never really happy with the reorganization that had put Mark Lemon in the Editor’s chair, and he finally severed his connection with
Punch
in 1845.

Mayhew was clearly a man of considerable ability and full of ideas, but it is difficult to escape the conclusion that his temperament was unstable. His bankruptcy in 1846 suggests strongly that he had no head for business, and, as we have seen, he relied upon his wife to face his creditors. The bankruptcy was the direct result of Mayhew’s attempt to capitalize upon the railway mania which was then sweeping the country. He began a newspaper called the
Iron Times
, to be published daily and to include gossip, chit-chat and serious news about railways. To launch the project he joined forces with Thomas Lyttleton Holt, former part-proprietor of
Figaro in London
and an active publisher. The venture proved unsuccessful: the
Iron Times
failed in the middle of 1846 and Mayhew went bankrupt.

So far as Jane was concerned the bankruptcy was a disaster. Mayhew had bought and lavishly furnished a house in Parson’s Green called ‘The Shrubbery’. He had accumulated debts of about £2,000, while his salary at the time of the crash was only around £300 per annum. Because of a change in the law he did not go to prison, though he was roughly handled in court by the Bankruptcy Commissioner, who censured him in brutal terms for his improvidence and irresponsibility in financial matters.

Through sheer energy and even ebullience, Mayhew bounced back into
active life apparently unencumbered by the bankruptcy. It is, though, worth reminding ourselves that the house in Parson’s Green represented his first and last attempt at maintaining so respectable an establishment; and for Jane the catastrophe of the bankruptcy was such that she went to stay with her father in the Channel Islands, where she became so ill that her father later said she had ‘made a “runaway knock at death’s door!”’
⁶
At some point – it is impossible to say when – she returned to her husband, and eventually two children were born, Amy and Athol. The marriage cannot, however, have been easy, and Jane’s life was made unhappier by a long-standing quarrel between her husband and her father. While few details are known, there seem to have been several separations, though none was permanent until some time in the late 1860s. Victorian census figures are not always reliable, but it does appear that she was not counted as a member of her husband’s household in 1851, and during the 1860s he spent long periods In Germany without her. When she died at the age of fifty-three in 1880 her husband was not at her bedside.

Following the bankruptcy novels by Henry and Augustus Mayhew appeared, including
The Greatest Plague of Life
(1847) and
Whom to Marry
(1848), both of them illustrated by George Cruikshank. Designed for the popular end of the market, both books dealt with themes of interest to middle-class readers, the first being about the servant problem and the second recording the adventures of a young woman looking for a good husband. They found plenty of readers and were reissued in cheap editions. Two further novels, also written in collaboration with Augustus, indicate an advance in Mayhew’s fiction. Both
The Good Genius That Turned Everything into Gold
(1847) and
The Magic of Kindness
(1849) show a more incisive style than that of the earlier works and are to some extent concerned with moral and social themes. In these later novels of the 1840s Mayhew was laying the foundations of the great work by which he would be remembered when all his other books were largely forgotten,
London Labour and the London Poor
.

The publication of this in 1851–2 did much to enhance Mayhew’s reputation – though characteristically enough it was marred by an unseemly wrangle with George Woodfall, who printed the work. According to the contract he was to receive his money after Mayhew and John Howden, the publisher, had received their salaries and after necessary expenses connected with the serial publication had been paid. Something went wrong, and in March 1851 Woodfall filed a suit in Chancery
demanding that Mayhew and Howden should be prevented from selling further copies because the contract had been broken. The case proved to be a complicated one, although the sums involved were small – in one instance there was the matter of an unauthorized increase of £1 per week in Howden’s salary. Woodfall had in fact attempted to reach a settlement before going to court, but Mayhew either neglected the matter or refused to cooperate. As a result, when the case was concluded in 1852
London Labour and the London Poor
ceased publication. The first edition in book form with that year’s date consisted of the two volumes so far completed.

Why did Mayhew behave in this way? Perhaps he was tired of the whole undertaking and wanted to end it, or perhaps it was an example of his instability and unwillingness to see a long-term project through to its end. Whatever the reason, a promising enterprise had been killed off, and little is known of Mayhew’s activities between 1852 and 1854.

In 1856, however, his thoughts returned to the idea, and there were plans for David Bogue, a publisher with premises at 86 Fleet Street, to reissue and continue
London Labour and the London Poor
. They came to nothing when Bogue died in November of the same year, and Mayhew seems not to have persisted in the search for a new publisher and to have turned his mind to other things. In 1857 he began writing another novel,
Paved with Gold
, in collaboration with his brother Augustus, but he dropped out after the first five numbers and when the novel was eventually published in 1858 with illustrations by H. K. Browne (‘Phiz’), the title page said ‘by Augustus Mayhew’. It is a good novel, and demonstrates vividly the extraordinary fascination which the London streets held for the brothers Mayhew.

Henry, in the meantime, drifted from project to project. Nothing really seemed to interest him. He edited
Morning News
for the month of January 1859, after which the paper ceased publication; and his book
Young Benjamin Franklin
came out in 1861. However, at about this time – though nothing seems to be known about the circumstances surrounding the decision – the publishing firm of Griffin Bohn undertook to complete and issue
London Labour and the London Poor
in four volumes.
⁷
Three of these appeared in 1861 and the final volume came out in 1862. In this year also
The Criminal Prisons of London
, by Henry Mayhew and John Binny, was published. In 1865 the four volumes of
London Labour
were reprinted under the imprint of Charles Griffin.

Mayhew’s best work was done, and the last decades of his life were marked by a steady decline. He made abortive efforts to keep going. During the mid 1860s he pondered starting a rival to
Punch
, but such plans as there were came to nothing. At about this time, too, he brought out a series of monthly parts called
The Shops and Companies of London
, designed as a tribute to British industry. He was for a brief period Editor of a magazine called
Only Once a Year
, and he went to Germany again – in 1870 he was in Metz, where, with his son Athol, he acted as a foreign correspondent. Pretty well his last literary effort seems to have been made in 1874 when he and his son wrote a play called
Mont Blanc
, which turned out a failure. Mayhew’s name appeared on the title page of a book called
London Characters
in 1874, but his involvement in it is problematic.
⁸

After this, there was nothing. Mayhew died of bronchitis on 25 July 1887, and an obituary in the
Illustrated London News
commented, by the by, upon the Mayhew brothers: