London Labour and the London Poor Mayhew Henry (2008)

With an introduction by Rosemary O’Day, this masterpiece of personal inquiry and social observation offers a classic account of life below the margins in the greatest metropolis in the world. It presents a compelling portrait of the habits, tastes, amusements, appearance, speech, humour, earnings and opinions of the working poor at the time of the Great Exhibition. In scope, depth and detail it remains unrivalled. Henry Mayhew takes readers into a world without fixed employment, where skills are declining and insecurity mounting, and into a society marked by criminality, pauperism and vice, unorthodox personal relations, fluid families, absent regularity and departed prosperity. Making sense of this environment required curiosity, imagination and a novelist’s eye for detail, and Mayhew possessed all three. No previous writer had succeeded in presenting the poor through their own stories and in their own words, and in this undertaking Mayhew rivals his contemporary Dickens. As one authority writes, to pass from one to the other is to cross sides of the same street.