Henry Mayhew

While Joyce’s representation of advertising in Ulysses has received some critical emphasis, his subtler depiction of the more traditional sales method of street-selling has gone practically unregistered. This article argues that the critical neglect plays out an imbalance established by Joyce within the narrative.

Comparing Joyce’s representation of advertising and street-selling to Henry Mayhew’s earlier account in London Labour and the London Poor, this article finds that Joyce, like Mayhew, distinguishes between the visual appeal of the advertisements and the aural appeal of the street-sellers.

It argues that the street-sellers in Ulysses are hard to discern because their vocal sales method is outmoded by the ascendant visual advertising culture. By centring the narrative upon Bloom’s sensual perception, Joyce successfully conveys the persuasive efficacy of a new spectacular consumerism, and the redundancy of the vocal methods of the earlier nineteenth-century. Joyce thus presents Dublin as a consumer culture in transition.

A glance over the back pages of mid-nineteenth-century newspapers and periodicals published in London reveals that Wellington Street stands out among imprint addresses. Between 1843 and 1853, Household Words, Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper, the Examiner, Punch, the Athenaeum, the Spectator, the Morning Post, and the serial edition of London Labour and the London Poor, to name a few, were all published from this short street off the Strand. Mary L. Shannon identifies, for the first time, the close proximity of the offices of Charles Dickens, G.W.M. Reynolds, and Henry Mayhew, examining the ramifications for the individual authors and for nineteenth-century publishing. What are the implications of Charles Dickens, his arch-competitor the radical publisher G.W.M. Reynolds, and Henry Mayhew being such close neighbours? Given that London was capital of more than Britain alone, what connections does Wellington Street reveal between London print networks and the print culture and networks of the wider empire? How might the editors’ experiences make us rethink the ways in which they and others addressed their anonymous readers as ‘friends’, as if they were part of their immediate social network? As Shannon shows, readers in the London of the 1840s and '50s, despite advances in literacy, print technology, and communications, were not simply an ‘imagined community’ of individuals who read in silent privacy, but active members of an imagined network that punctured the anonymity of the teeming city and even the empire.

http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&title_id=1218890888&edition_id=1218905588

A 6500 word essay - This project grew out of a paper entitled ‘Working-class heroes: Jack Sheppard, Henry Holford & The Literature of Costermongers’ presented at the G.W.M. Reynolds: Popular Culture, Literature & Radicalism in the Nineteenth Century Conference, at the University of Birmingham in July 2000. The complete essay places Reynolds’ epic serial The Mysteries of London (1844 – 1856) within the inter-related contexts of social investigation, Chartism, Newgate fiction, and the Victorian literary novel, comparing and contrasting Reynolds’ masterpiece with Eugene Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris (1843), and depictions of the London criminal underworld by Egan, Ainsworth, Dickens and Mayhew. Reynolds’ unorthodox treatment of fallen women is considered (he doesn’t kill them off like Sue’s La Goualeuse or as Dickens does ‘The Hospital Patient’ and Nancy), as well as his views on capital punishment, and his device of allowing underworld characters to annex the text in order to tell their own stories is read as a political gesture. The paper also explores the development of the ‘mysteries novel’ as an expression of the urbanisation of industrial Britain, and the contemporary critical debate surrounding Reynolds’ politics, seeking an answer to the question of whether or not he was truly radical or merely opportunist. I argue that the chaos of the new urban environment is reflected in the structure of Reynolds’ text, in which competing narrative codes mirror the incoherent experience of the city, anticipating the postmodern novel and allowing Reynolds’ genuine political commentary to co-exist within a gothic and sensational frame that he equally exploits, satirises and subverts.

This paper considers the idea of informality in market exchange, as introduced into the economic development literature by Keith Hart in the 1970s. In addition to Hart (1971, 1973) it will discuss three writers who may be considered his intellectual forerunners. Each, to a greater or less degree, anticipated the idea of informal economic activity and described it in a particular historical period and place. They are the mid-Victorian journalist Henry Mayhew (London, c.1850), the libertarian economist P. T. Bauer (British West Africa, c.1948) and the economic anthropologist R. F. Salisbury (colonial New Guinea, c.1952-1963). The principal texts relied upon are Mayhew’s monumental London Labour and the London Poor (4 vols, 1851-61), Bauer’s Economics of Under-Developed Countries (1957) and Salisbury’s From Stone to Steel (1962) and Vunamami: Economic Transformation in a Traditional Society (1970).

Special Issue, The Origins of the Welfare State: Global and Comparative Approaches Co-edited by Agnoletto, S. and Palmieri, C. http://zapruderworld.org/journal/archive/volume-3/overcoming-barriers-to-voluntary-servitude-positive-thinking-and-self-help-the-post-political-ideology-of-workfare/

This paper was originally entitled ‘Working Class Heroes’ and was presented at the G.W.M. Reynolds: Popular Culture, Literature & Radicalism in the Nineteenth Century Conference, held at the University of Birmingham in July 2000. Some of this material subsequently found its way into a biographical entry on Reynolds published in The Literary Encyclopedia in 2004 while the full text was finally published on Ainsworth & Friends.

This is a biographical sketch of Reynolds, beginning with his early life at Sandhurst, his time in Paris, and his first journalistic experience (on The London and Paris Courier). The paper also covers the animosity between Reynolds and Dickens, which had grown out of their political differences, and its origins in Reynolds’ plagiarisms of Dickens in the 1830s and 40s.  Reynolds’ politics are covered in detail, in particular his involvement with Chartism, and there is also an analysis of The Mysteries of London (1844 – 1856), focusing upon the first two volumes and Reynolds’ apparent empowerment of working class men and women in parallel with a sensational gothic narrative. The piece concludes that Reynolds’s contribution to Victorian literature, in particular London writing, is as significant as that of Dickens and Henry Mayhew.

This paper traces the growth of working-class street markets in Victorian London and argues that they possessed the capacity to disrupt axiomatic narratives of liberal reform and commercial progress. It contends that accounts by slum writers (James Greenwood and George Gissing) and the visions of market reformers (Baroness Burdett Coutts and Arthur Cawston) sought to define the parameters of a proscribed sphere of informal commerce and to replace it with a sanitized, formal ideal. Rather than meekly fading away into obsolescence, however, street traders challenged these ‘static images’ in spaces like Whitecross Street market, which flourished on the frontiers of urban modernity.

Racing the Street traces the history of how race was used as a technology for gathering, assembling, and networking the early cosmopolitan city. Drawing on an archive that ranges from engineering blueprints and parliamentary committee reports to sensationalistic pamphlets and periodical press accounts, Robert J. Topinka conducts an original genealogy of the nineteenth-century London street, demonstrating how race as a technology gathers, sorts, and assembles the teeming particularities of the street into a manageable network. This interdisciplinary study offers a novel approach to the intersections of race, rhetoric, media, technology, and urban government.

Melodramatic representations of disability pervaded not only novels by Dickens, but also doctors' treatises on blindness, educators' arguments for "special" education, and even the writing of disabled people themselves. Drawing on extensive primary research, Martha Stoddard Holmes introduces readers to popular literary and dramatic works that explored culturally risky questions like "can disabled men work?" and "should disabled women have babies?" and makes connections between literary plots and medical, social, and educational debates of the day. The first book of its kind, Fictions of Affliction contributes a new emphasis to Victorian literary and cultural studies and offers new readings of works by canonic and becoming-canonic writers like Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and others.

Jack Vincent used to be famous, part of a rising generation of literary celebrities that included Dickens, Lytton, Ainsworth and Thackeray. Now he’s a nobody, scratching a living as a freelance journalist writing for a penny a line. Worse, the only job he can get is on a troopship bound for the frontier wars of colonial Africa. Outed as a friend of Dickens at the captain’s table, Jack recounts the events that have brought him to this fallen state. It is a journey that begins in the Marshalsea debtor’s prison and ends in the shark infested waters of the Western Cape and his berth on the HMS Birkenhead, the Victorian Titanic.

Lost for over a century, Jack Vincent’s memoirs offer a history of the English novel that they don’t teach you in school, from his apprenticeship with the original Bill and Nancy to the boudoirs and brothels of Victorian London, while all the time the ship draws ever closer to Shark Alley…

As the freelance journalist is never off the clock, William Thackeray was, like friend and rival Charles Dickens, a born people watcher. In a short piece for Punch entitled ‘Waiting at the Station’ written in March 1850, Thackeray thus turns the everyday experience of killing time at Fenchurch Street into an essay on the unknowable gulf between the working class and his own, notionally inspired by a group of obviously poor women who are emigrating to South Australia:

But what I note, what I marvel at, what I acknowledge, what I am ashamed of, what is contrary to Christian morals, manly modesty and honesty, and to the national well-being, is that there should be that immense social distinction between the well-dressed classes (as, if you will permit me, we will call ourselves) and our brethren and sisters in the fustian jackets and patterns.

But this isn’t just wool-gathering. Thackeray is, in fact, responding to an explosive series of articles about the London poor in The Times’ main competitor:

What a confession it is that we have all of us been obliged to make! A clever and earnest-minded writer gets a commission from the Morning Chronicle newspaper, and reports upon the state of our poor in London: he goes amongst labouring people and poor of all kinds – and brings back what? A picture of human life so wonderful, so awful, so piteous and pathetic, so exciting and terrible, that readers of romances own they never read anything like it; and that the griefs, struggles, strange adventures here depicted exceed anything that any of us could imagine … But of such wondrous and complicated misery as this you confess you had no idea? No. How should you? – you and I – we are of the upper classes; we have hitherto had no community with the poor (Thackeray: 1850, 92).

Feigning complete ignorance of the plight of the urban poor is a bit of a reach, however – as is describing himself as ‘upper class’ – albeit a good ‘hook’ for the article. Dickens had by then been writing about the subject for well over a decade and, as his commercial nemesis G.W.M. Reynolds wrote in The Mysteries of London, ‘The most unbounded wealth is the neighbour of the most hideous poverty; the most gorgeous pomp is placed in strong relief by the most deplorable squalor; the most seducing luxury is only separated by a narrow wall from the most appalling misery’ (Reynolds: 1848, 3). Similarly, the middle-class reading public were well aware of the reports of Kay Shuttleworth and Edwin Chadwick, although Thackeray is citing something much more vivid than the standard tone of early-Victorian social investigation.

Instead, what Thackeray is really noting is an ongoing and complete indifference: ‘We never speak a word to the servant who waits on us for twenty years; we condescend to employ a tradesman, keeping him at a proper distance, mind’, while ‘of his workmen we know nothing, how piteously they are ground down, how they live and die, here close by us at the backs of our houses; until some poet like Hood wakes and sings that dreadful “Song of the Shirt”; some prophet like Carlyle rises up and denounces woe; some clear-sighted, energetic man like the writer of the Chronicle travels into the poor man’s country for us, and comes back with his tales of terror and wonder’ (Thackeray: 1850, 93).

The ‘writer of the Chronicle’ was, of course, an old friend from Thackeray’s mis-spent youth in Paris and the early days of Punch, the 37-year-old Henry Mayhew; and this series of articles, begun in 1849, were the foundation of his epic social study, London Labour and the London Poor.

In 'London: The Biography' Peter Ackroyd ends a chapter discussing London’s markets by describing ‘Rag Fair’ as a ‘woebegone place’ that over the course of the nineteenth-century ‘disappeared beneath its own waste.’ This response is typical of critical approaches that have thus far treated the Victorian rag trade as a topic barely warranting scrutiny. But why is it that irrespective of its apparent social value, the rag market still tends to disappear ‘beneath its own waste’ within economic and social histories? What are the implicit assumptions upon which this attitude is grounded?

This paper approaches this question by examining a number of literary responses to used clothing markets by writers and journalists such as Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle and George Augustus Sala. Discussions scrutinize a marked tendency within these accounts to associate the processes of recycling and reprocessing that took place in London’s informal markets with a degree of shame and moral suspicion. For example, in Dickens’ Oliver Twist (1838) Field Lane (significantly chosen as the location of Fagin’s Lair) is imagined as a ‘commercial colony in itself’, set apart according to its foreignness and criminality. The handkerchiefs, old boots and clothes sold in the market are coded as ‘sign-boards to the petty thief’ that effectively act as markers for the disreputable character of this district and the socially outcast condition of the local population.

Subsequently, representational strategies that sought to de-legitimize the rag trade as an ‘unsightly’ and ‘undesirable’ presence in the modernizing metropolis, need to be reread for the inherent contradictions and paradoxes that they were intended to preclude. Far from being an isolated and insignificant remnant of a more ‘developed’ urban economy, Henry Mayhew’s investigations suggest that by the 1840s old clothes reprocessing was an immensely profitable enterprise that was taking place on an industrial and global scale. Efforts to discredit and marginalize those workers who dealt with society’s ‘cast-offs’ on the city’s streets, corresponded to increasingly stringent attempts to regulate and reform informal marketing throughout the nineteenth-century. However, concluding remarks will explain how these cultural and commercial spaces were able to resist and ultimately survive the attempted deformation and denigration of their social function.

Peter Jones is studying for a PhD in English Literature at Queen Mary. This paper relates to his research into the literary representation of marginal and surplus populations in urban exploratory fiction and journalism. Peter has previously given talks discussing street markets, urban waste, and ‘residual’ economies at the Literary London Conference held at the Institute of English Studies, and at the Emergent Critical Environments event, which was held at Queen Mary. He has also been involved in setting up the Literary London Reading Group that takes place on a monthly basis at Senate House.

Published in Journal of Victorian Culture, 14:4 (2014)

Between 1832 and 1834, Henry Mayhew and Gilbert Abbot à Beckett produced a weekly twopenny paper called The Thief. As its title suggested, this publication consisted of articles, stories and illustrations extracted, condensed and brazenly stolen from other periodicals, magazines, newspapers and books. Modelled on the format of Le Voleur, an early paper of Émile de Girardin, the great innovator of French popular journalism, scholars of Mayhew have generally treated The Thief as inconsequential hack work, if they even mention it at all. This essay, the first analysis of the paper itself, argues that The Thief is less ‘throwaway’ than it first appears. In satirical fashion, the paper used the methods of the radical press to critique the ‘liberal values’ of useful knowledge and free trade. Mayhew's involvement with The Thief connected him with a vibrant radical underground print culture. Moreover, in its suspicion of middle-class liberalism and of the rhetoric of free trade, The Thief set the thematic tone for much of Mayhew's later work.