Welsh Journals

TRAVELS INTO THE POOR MAN'S COUNTRY: THE WORK OF HENRY MAYHEW. By Anne Humpherys. University of Georgia Press, 1977, and Caliban Books. Pp. xiv, 240.$12.50. Professor Humpherys has written a solid, detailed and meticulous account of the genesis and nature of the works of Henry Mayhew. Little is known about Mayhew's life, for he left no personal papers. But he left a great corpus of writing, and Professor Humpherys offers a theory to explain its strengths and its weaknesses. It is known that the seven Mayhew boys disliked their father, a bad-tempered, calculating tyrannical lawyer, a Pontifex senior type of pater familias. Most of the sons, including Henry, abandoned the careers he chose for them and took to journalism. The most consistent rebel among them, Thomas, became a radical journalist, editor of Hetherington's Penny Papers and of the first issues of the Poor Man's Guardian, but he committed suicide at the age of 27. Henry was never able to carry his opinions to extremes. A bit of a Bohemian himself (although little is known about his private life), he was still imbued with the bourgeois ideas of morality and standards of gentility instilled by his upbringing. Professor Humpherys recounts how he was giving a comic recitation and imitation of characters from his London Labour and the London Poor in Brighton when he suddenly saw his sternly disapproving father sitting in the front row. He immediately left the stage and refused to appear again. Irresistibly attracted by and in sympathy with the poor (including the shady poor) with whom his profession as journalist allowed him to associate, his continued identification with Victorian middle-class standards made him stand away and keep his distance. This tension between sympathy and class distance accounts, so Professor Humpherys thinks, for the strength and weaknesses of his work. But there was also another tension in Mayhew's writings. As well as being a journalist with a strong gift for vivid reportage, he saw himself as a social scientist, objectively collecting information with a view to discovering the cause of the poverty his enquiries revealed. In his letters to the Morning Chronicle he denounced the employers who ground down their employees to the limits of starvation in shoe-making and cheap clothes-making, until the needlewomen of London were forced into prostitution in order to survive. But the growing detail of Mayhew's enquiries ensured that he never completed the ambitious and comprehensive programmes he set himself, while he never got very far in formulating the causes or the cure of the poverty he was investigating. Eventually he drifted away from his incipient radicalism, and in later and less worthy works, for reasons which are not explained (perhaps because they cannot be traced) adopted all the prejudices of the employers. Mayhew's preoccupation with poor people, with the conditions of poverty and the causes of low pay have inevitably attracted the attention of Labour historians. There are notable introductory essays by E. P. Thompson and Eileen Yeo in their selection of Mayhew's letters to the Morning Chronicle in 1849-1850, entitled The Unknown Mayhew (Merlin Press, 1971). The high view of Mayhew's importance as 'the systematic empirical sociologist' differs from the views of Gertrude Himmelfarb in her essay 'Mayhew's Poor: a Problem of Identity',