Henry Mayhew Biography

Henry Mayhew is best known today for his four-volume survey of London street life at mid-century, London Labour and the London Poor (1851-1852; 1861-1862), the best and perhaps the only extensive glimpse available of this fascinating underside of Victorian life. In his own day, however, his reputation rested primarily on his investigation of the exploited pieceworkers in London's skilled and unskilled trades. He wrote these articles as the metropolitan correspondent for the Morning Chronicle from late 1849 through late 1850. The value of all his surveys is in the number and scope of the personal interviews Mayhew conducted with his subjects. In his decision to seek out these interviews, to rely on the information gleaned from them to project a picture of "Labour and the Poor" in London at mid-century, and to print as many full-length interviews as space and time would allow, Mayhew was unique as a social investigator and journalist in the Victorian period.

Mayhew was the fourth son of a very well-to-do London solicitor, Joshua Dorset Joseph Mayhew. Family tradition has it that he was the most brilliant of all the seven Mayhew brothers, but he had an erratic and disappointing career from the beginning. He was sent to a good school, Westminster, but ran away. He went to sea--probably to India, where his brother Alfred was working--as a midshipman; he worked in his father's law office, but that came to an end, so the family story goes, when he forgot to file some papers and almost caused his father to be arrested at his own dinner table. In the late 1820s, he entered the new field of popular journalism, founding magazines with an investment of five pounds (Figaro in London was the best), writing for others, collaborating with his friends on ephemeral farces for the nonlicensed stage, and in general enjoying himself very much. Somewhere along the way he developed an interest in chemistry and experimental science in general, an unusual direction for an upper-middle-class Englishman in the early 1800s. This interest was to affect the subjects of a few journalistic pieces (for example, a scientific, albeit comic, classification of voters in Punch in 1842) and in his boys' books (biographies of Humphry Davy [1855] and Benjamin Franklin [1861]). But most importantly it resulted in the deductive and empirical intentions that lay behind his social surveys.

In the 1840s, his life began to take a more serious turn, as one would expect of a man entering his thirties. After a decade of miscellaneous journalism and farce writing, he and his associates founded the venerable Punch in 1841, though Mayhew had only a tenuous connection with the magazine after its first year. He tried various projects on his own, including an abortive series on education. In 1844 he married Jane Jerrold, the daughter of the writer Douglas Jerrold; the couple had two children, Amy and Athol. Shortly after his marriage, financial disaster struck; Mayhew went bankrupt in 1846. It was a blow from which he never recovered; his father disinherited him as a result and the rest of his life was marked by the precariousness of his financial situation. Between 1846 and 1850, he and his youngest brother, Augustus, wrote a series of six comic novels on standard Punch themes of silly women and middle-class pretensions. They are good novels of their kind, but slight. Mayhew also took on a variety of journalistic assignments to make ends meet. One of these was from the Morning Chronicle--after the Times the most prestigious newspaper in England--to investigate the conditions in a notorious slum in south London where there had been a severe outbreak of cholera in 1848 and 1849; it led Mayhew almost immediately to his major work, the social surveys of London's working population.

Mayhew's series of eighty-odd articles for the Morning Chronicle was part of the paper's national survey on "Labour and the Poor." Mayhew investigated the clothing industry in London most thoroughly, and his exposé of the brutal conditions among pieceworkers in the East End made him famous. He also touched at varying lengths on furniture makers, sailors, toy makers, dockworkers, and "hucksters." This last led to his three-volume work on street folk, London Labour and the London Poor, which he began publishing on his own in weekly installments in December 1850 after he and the Morning Chronicle had come to an unfriendly parting of the ways.

In London Labour and the London Poor, volumes one and two, Mayhew surveyed a vast array of street sellers, buyers, and "finders" (those who picked up items on the streets and sold them). His interviews with this shifting population are sensitive, probing, and fascinating to read. Due to pressures of space and his respect for the empirical scientific method, which he thought required him to publish all his data before he drew any conclusions, he gives long "autobiographical" statements by his informants in which the questions are absorbed into the answers and each informant seems to be speaking in his own voice. His informants told him about their backgrounds, but the most fascinating parts to a modern reader are their descriptions of their "trades," such as that of a sixty-year-old "pure" (dogs' dung, used in tanning) finder: "If we only gathered a pail-full in the day, we could live very well; but we couldn't do much more than that, for there wasn't near so many at the business then, and the Pure was easier to be had. For my part I can't tell where all the poor creatures have come from of late years; the world seems growing worse and worse every day. They have pulled down the price of Pure, that's certain; but the poor things must do something, they can't starve while there's anything to be got. Why, no later than six or seven years ago, it was as high as 3s. 6d. and 4s. a pail-full, and a ready sale for as much of it as you could get; but now you can only get 1s. and in some places 1s. 2d. a pail-full; and, as I said before, there are so many at it, that there is not much left for a poor creature like me to find."

Due to a lawsuit in which his publisher sued Mayhew over some unjustified expenditures,London Labour and the London Poor stopped publication in February 1852 toward the end of volume two. Mayhew was never to get to the theoretical stage of his survey, though he did try to draw some weak analogies between the Kaffirs of Africa and the London street folk. His importance is as an observer and reporter, not as a theoretician. When he picked up the project again in 1856, he did a survey of "street entertainers" at the same time that he was engaged in a new work, a look at the London prisons, published as The Great World of London in 1856. Mayhew surveyed the different prison regimes and found them all wanting, but was not able to offer any substantive suggestions before both projects were stopped in mid-sentence by the death of his publisher. In 1861-1862 all the surveys were published in book form: volume four of London Labour and the London Poor was finished by John Binny and others; Binny also completed the prison book, which was published as The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of Prison Life (1862). There appears to have been little, if any, critical reception of these volumes: they came too long after the fact.

Mayhew's life after 1852 is marked by a sad decline. He went to Germany several times to live cheaply; there he wrote three ill-tempered travel books (1856, 1858, 1864) plus an undistinguished one on the life of the young Martin Luther (1863). He embarked on a series of children's books of mediocre quality and a few short-lived journalistic projects. He and his wife separated, though he visited her weekly at the home of their daughter and her husband. After 1865 he disappears from view until he died, forgotten and obscure, in 1887. His son, Athol, wrote a small volume vindicating his father's role in founding Punch; then he, too, disappeared.