London Labour Henry Mayhew Analysis

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Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (hereafter London Labour) is a journalistic work that describes the living conditions of the working street-folk and the poor in mid-19th century London. Whilst creating vivid impressions of metropolitan street-life, the text also tries to arrange a part of the population unknown to the middle and upper classes into systematic order. Personal narratives alternate with numbers, tables and statistics. On an abstract level, there is a dichotomy between subjective and objective forms of representation, which makes it hard to pin down the text as either fact or fiction. Several critics take this dichotomy as a starting point to examine the status or relevance of London Labour as a historical document. …show more content…

Yet, right at the beginning of volume one, Mayhew states his ambition to subject the London street-folk to scientific classification: Those who obtain their living in the streets of the metropolis are a very large and varied class; indeed, the means resorted to in order ‘to pick up a crust’, as the people call it, in the public thoroughfares (and such in many instances it literally is,) are so multifarious that the mind is long baffled in its attempts to reduce them to scientific order or classification. It would appear however, that the street-people may be all arranged under six distinct genera or kinds.(Mayhew, 1985, 5) From this paragraph we learn that Mayhew anticipates some of the problems that come along with his attempt to find a taxonomy of the poor population working in the streets. He admits that the group of interest is large and diversified, which makes it hard to comprehend it in all detail. He is aware of the fact that a systematisation is only possible by means of reduction, which inevitably means limitation and omission of certain characteristics. Yet, he postulates six “distinct” categories under which all of the London street-folk could be subsumed, without further commenting on the aforementioned problems. The paradox he thereby creates reveals also on the semantic level, where the antonyms “multifarious” or “varied” and “distinct” are used to refer to the very same group of

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