Curious Conversations: Henry Mayhew and the Street-Sellers in the Media Ecology of London Labour and the London Poor

Henry Mayhew is renowned as the chronicler and historian of London street-sellers and poor labourers. However, Mayhew’s relationships with his subjects, and their influence on the development of London Labour and the London Poor, is less often discussed. This article examines Mayhew’s productive and disruptive friendships, collaborations, and disagreements with the London poor, and situates these exchanges within the layered print and oral texts that comprise the extensive media ecology of London Labour. I argue that through their disruptive collaborations with Mayhew, some street-sellers, including Charles Alloway, memorialized as ‘The Crippled Street-Seller of Nut-Meg Graters’, strategically harnessed the media forms of London Labour for profitable self-representation. In contrast, a group of street-sellers known as the Street Traders’ Protection Association mobilized against Mayhew and critiqued his representations of their class. These disruptive collaborations reveal underlying kinships and conflicts between Mayhew and the street-folk, thus destabilizing his reputation as a neutral and authoritative observer in the history of poverty.

‘The Property of 1851’

This chapter, which discusses Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Henry Mayhew, George Augustus Sala, and the writers for Punch magazine, explains that the Great Exhibition of 1851 led to a sudden demand for short-term accommodation in London. A popular display of ‘model’ cottages at the Exhibition spoke to wider concerns in the period about the condition of working-class housing. Though Dickens went to see the cottages, the literature of the Exhibition year reveals an interest in other kinds of rented space, which are sites of negotiation between the local, national, and global. Mayhew and the Punch circle saw the growth of the hospitality industry and the resourcefulness of Londoners as a cause for laughter. Meanwhile, Dickens, Collins and Sala were drawn to the cosmopolitan neighbourhood of Leicester Square. Here, hotels and lodgings brimmed not only with tourists but also with Continental spies and exiles, arriving in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions.

Henry Mayhew, Urban Ecologist

This article argues that Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor articulates a mid-nineteenth-century urban ecology that resonates with the “open” and “unfinished” form of midcentury London and Mayhew's London Labour itself. Mayhew's extensive elaboration of midcentury recycling, repurposing, and reusing practices is put into dialogue with the volumes’ print innovations and, in particular, print recycling practices. Drawing on the passage in which Mayhew describes his ecological vision most compactly—itself recycled from an earlier work—it illustrates how these volumes unite “the ragpicker” and the writer in the production of open and usable forms generative of social change.