Henry Mayhew's reputation as a pioneering nineteenth-century social historian has been as uneven as his career itself. In actual time, Mayhew's important work took up only eight years of a long forty-year working life, and even during those eight years he was engaged in conducting his investigations for only four. Not a little of what is impressive about his career, in fact, lies in the quality and quantity of work he produced in such a short time, none of it, however, finished.

In his twenties and thirties, Mayhew was known as part of a group of popular journalists whose usually precarious livelihoods came from the emerging comic press and the popular stage. Little of what Mayhew produced during these years is significant in itself, though he played an important role in the development of the satirical press in the early Victorian period by giving a generally responsible tone...