London Labour and the London Poor

Henry Mayhew’s sprawling record of nineteenth-century London can be overwhelming, but his ear for the vernacular and eye for weird detail means that the reader can dip in and find something.

London’s population exploded in the nineteenth century, bulked out by a huge number of itinerant workers. Mayhew interviews these people–in the prologue to the first volume, he describes himself as a "traveller in the undiscovered country of the poor"–and because he gives no judgment on their lives, the book feels more like a modern documentary.

The voices are one thing; Mayhew’s statistics are another–"expenditure in ham sandwiches supplied by… show more.

A sadly neglected masterpiece that describes a series of visits into the darker areas of the city where few rarely trod. In an extraordinary and vivid series of interviews, Mayhew gets the mudlarks, rat catchers, pure finders, and the whores of Shadwell and Seven Dials to tell their stories in their own voices.

Henry Mayhew was a journalist and writer who described the lives of London’s working people in a series of articles for the Morning Chronicle in the 1840s. His work proved so influential that the articles were published in three volumes in 1851. Today, they provide a fascinating glimpse of what life was like for ordinary working people, especially the poorest sectors of society, during the early years of Queen Victoria’s reign.