Henry Mayhew

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Henry Mayhew, from London Labour and the London Poor (1861)

Henry Mayhew (25 November 1812 - 25th July 1887) was an English journalist and advocate of reform, one of the two founders of the satirical and humorous magazine Punch, and the magazine's joint-editor, with Mark Lemon, for its beginning days.

Despite the founding of Punch, he is most famous now for his extensive series of newspaper articles in the Morning Chronicle, in which he carried out a groundbreaking and influential survey of the poor of London.

He wrote: "I shall consider the whole of the metropolitan poor under three separate phases, according as they will work, they can't work, and they won't work."

He interviewed everyone—beggars, street-entertainers (such as Punch and Judy men), market traders, prostitutes, labourers, sweatshop workers, even down to the "mudlarks" who searched the stinking mud on the banks of the River Thames for wood, metal, rope and coal from passing ships, and the "pure-finders" who gathered dog faeces to sell to tanners. He described their clothes, how and where they lived, their entertainments and customs, and made detailed estimates of the numbers and incomes of those practicing each trade. The books make fascinating reading, showing how marginal and precarious many people's lives were, in what, at that time, must have been the richest city in the world.

The articles were collected together in book form under the title London Labour and the London Poor. This was in three volumes in 1851: the 1861 edition included a fourth volume on the lives of prostitutes, thieves and beggars.

Mayhew's work was embraced by and was an influence on the Christian Socialists, such as Thomas Hughes, Charles Kingsley, and F. D. Maurice. Radicals also published sizeable excerpts from the reports in the Northern Star, the Red Republican and other newspapers. The often sympathetic investigations, with their immediacy and unswerving eye for detail, offered unprecedented insights into the condition of the Victorian poor. Alongside the earlier work of Edwin Chadwick, they are also regarded as a decisive influence on the thinking of Charles Dickens.