Henry Mayhew
Charles Booth famously expended a dozen years of his life, between 1891 and 1903 compiling his mammoth Life and Labour of the People of London - 17 volumes exhaustively documenting the jobs, habits, lives and deaths of the cockney working classes. But if it hadn’t have been for Henry Mayhew, a half century before, the epic work may never have been started.
For before Mayhew turned his pen to them, nobody had paid too much attention to the poor of London’s East End. And yet the man was no philanthropist, politician or philosopher, rather a popular journalist picking up on the spirit of the times. This was the 1840s, and Friedrich Engels was writing about the appalling conditions of the working classes in Manchester, that ‘the working class and the bourgeoisie are like two radically dissimilar nations’. Benjamin Disraeli had just published his novel ‘Sybil, or The Two Nations’, laying bare the shameful state in which working people lived.
London had mushroomed in size from under a million souls in 1801 to being the world’s most populous city, with 1.6m people in 1831. By 1851, it would number more than 2.4m as trade and industry pumped ever more money and manpower into the capital - with the East End and docks growing most of all. And yet most of it was uncharted territory, unplanned housing, the people with no fixed jobs and often no fixed abode. The vast mass of the workers were effectively invisible to those in Westminster. Mayhew sensed that there were stories to be told about the millions who made up the other of the ‘two nations’
Mayhew may have been an unlikely social chronicler: he was joint founder of the satirical magazine Punch in 1841 with Mark Lemon and engraver Ebenezer Landells. Educated at Westminster School, he had worked as a lawyer in his father’s practice for three years, a stormy relationship that say Mayhew abandon the law for journalism in 1831. As well as writing he had an entrepreneurial streak, but he was a better wordsmith than businessman: Punch struggled to sell 6000 copies a week while 10,000 were needed to break even, and the title was sold in 1842. Severing his connections with ‘The London Charivari’ in 1845, Mayhew attempted to hop aboard the craze for railways with the launch of ‘Iron Times’. It lost so much cash that in 1846 he ended up in the Court of Bankruptcy.
His life took an unexpected turn in 1849, when an outbreak of cholera, a continual problem in Victorian London, killed a probable 13,000: the exact number was, of course, never known. Mayhew was still writing as a freelance for the Morning Chronicle (along with contemporaries Charles Dickens and John Stuart Mill) and he wrote a piece on the outbreak. Mayhew saw the disease as one of poverty, centred as it was on the poorest and most crowded parts of the capital; it would be another five years before Dr John Snow would observe the common water pump in Soho’s Broad Street and make a further connection, that the disease was borne by dirty water.
Mayhew suggested to his editor, John Douglas Cook, that the paper should carry out an investigation into the state of the working classes in England. It would turn into a long-running and exhaustively researched project, fully feeding the Victorian reader’s obsession with detail, statistics and empirical ‘proof’. Cook assigned three reporters to help Mayhew: Angus Reach was sent off to the industrial towns of the north (he would die exhausted from overwork before he made 30), with Charles Mackay and Shirley Brooks.
Mayhew headed into the East End, where he interviewed milliners and millers, prostitutes and publicans, sawyers and smiths, tinkers and tailors … every conceivable profession in fact. The team produced an article every day for the rest of 1849 and most of 1850. It was a remarkable quantity of words, and the detail bordered on the obsessive. The minutiae on people’s religious and domestic practices, habits and working hours seems extraordinary to modern readers, with our myriad distractions and, perhaps, shorter attention spans, but it was meat and drink to the earnest and worthy Victorian readers, who loved facts and figures. And the Victorians, with long nights at home under the gaslight like to read. With no other media to distract them, these were Londoners who found light relief in the wordy tomes of Dickens and Walter Scott.
So we find out what the mudlarks who scoured the Thames foreshore were dredging up in the 1840s. Mayhew watches in horror as people draw drinking water from an open sewer ‘more like watery mud than muddy water; and yet we were assured this was the only water the wretched inhabitants had to drink’. He painstakingly asks interviewees their wages and their detailed outgoings (and logs the shortfall). He cross references censuses, police reports and his own researches, to work out how many street traders are operating per square mile. He works out the margins tea traders are making on their cheaply hawked goods … the detail is remarkable.
The unexpected bonus for modern historians, of course, is that Mayhew and his team piled up a huge amount of original source material, telling us exactly how East Enders lived a century and a half ago. Next week we’ll see what they discovered about our forebears.
Last week we saw how Henry Mayhew and his team of reporters set out to chart the lives of the labouring classes of England and Wales - but what exactly did the inexhaustible founder of Punch discover when he ventured east of Aldgate?
An example of Mayhew’s staggering attention to detail, almost comical to modern eyes, is his attempt to quantify the excessive drinking habits of the various East End trades. In ‘The curiosities of drunkenness’ (one of the dozens of pieces that would appear during 1849 and 1850), Mayhew interviewed the coal whippers and coal backers employed in the Pool of London - the men who did the backbreaking job of hauling the coal out of the holds of ships. One of the men tells Mayhew that it ‘was an absolute necessity that the men … though earning only a pound a week, spend at least 12 shillings (60p) on beer and spirits to stimulate them in their work’.
In classic style, Mayhew sets out to test this thesis, interviewing men who drink, men who had signed the pledge ‘and kept it without any serious injury to their constitutions’ and those who had signed the pledge ‘but had been induced to violate their vow in consequence of injury to their health’. To the modern reader it may seem obvious that large quantities of water might be a better option than booze, but at least alcohol didn’t give you cholera and to Victorian East Enders beer was about as safe as liquid got. Mayhew prevents us with a magnificent table of those professions that are above the average for drunkenness (button makers top this, for some reason, with one in every 7.2 of them being a drunk). Toolmakers, surveyors, paper makers and brass founders come in close behind. Among the most sober professions are clergymen, grocers, book-binders and artificial flower makers.
Thomas Heath, a weaver of 8 Pedley Street, Spitalfields, gives Mayhew a detailed account of his earnings. ‘The sum of the gross earnings for 430 weeks is £322 3s. 4d., being about 15s. a week. He estimates his weaving expenses at 4s., 11s. net wages. He states his wife’s earnings at about 3s. a week. He gives the following remarkable evidence:
“Have you any children?” [asks Mayhew].
“No. I had two, but they are both dead, thanks to be God … I am relieved from the burden of maintaining them, and they, poor dear creatures, are relieved from the troubles of the mortal life.”‘
A woman is forced into prostitution to make ends meet. ‘I used to work at the shirt work - the fine full-fronted white shirts; I got 2d. each for them. There were six button-holes, four rows of stitching in the front, and the collars and wristbands stitched as well. By working from five o’clock in the morning till midnight each night I might be able to do seven in the week. Out of this the cotton must be taken and that came to 2d. every week. I had a child, and it used to cry for food.
‘So, as I could not get a living for him myself by the needle, I went into the streets and made out a living that way. I pledge my word, solemnly and sacredly, that it was the low price paid for my labour that drove me to prostitution.’
As Mayhew says in a speech to a meeting of London tailors in October 1850: ‘Morality on £5,000 a year in Belgrave Square is a very different thing to morality on slop-wages in Bethnal Green.’
Those who weren’t forced to sell themselves scraped what they could where they could. Tea traders adulterate their product with used leaves, grass and dirt; ‘pure finders’ gather dog faeces to sell to tanners; and of course the mudlarks and toshers dredge anything of value from the riverbanks and sewers.
The journalism of Mayhew and his team became hugely influential, gathered together in book form as London Labour and the London Poor, in three volumes in 1851, then a fourth ten years later. Christian Socialists such as Thomas Hughes, Charles Kingsley, and FD Maurice seized on the work, as did Radicals and Republicans (a growing worry for the Government of Victorian Britain). And that other great chronicler of the East End, Charles Dickens, drew on his colleague’s work for inspiration. Henry Mayhew died in 1887.
London Labour and the London Poor: Selection
by Henry Mayhew, published by Penguin, £12.99, ISBN 0140432418