What I Read in January 2011

Mark Twain & Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today. I have also posted about Mark Twain’ s Autobiography. My comments are not about the current best seller, but about an earlier edition of some of the same material.

Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor. The Penguin Classics edition excerpts from the original 4 volumes, 2000-pages. I am working my way through it, volume by volume. Volume 2 depicts the various occupations we glimpse in Dickens and the other Victorian novelists: chimney sweep, mudlark, dustman, crossing sweeper. Volume 3 is devoted to street entertainers and the unemployed and homeless.

Alessandro Manzoni, The Betrothed. A long classic Italian historical novel, undertaken by my Ex Libris book group. Good, but not overwhelmingly so.

Mary, Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women. I read this as part of the Feminist Classics challenge. They/we have now moved on to John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women, with more great classics to come.

I was able to do some much-appreciated reading during a winter vacation.

These two novels, published in the same year make an interesting contrast.
Rose Macaulay, Dangerous Ages
Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

Ivan Turgenev, Torrents of Spring

Nathanial Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

Michel de Montaigne, Letters and Essays

Finishing Mayhew

In Volume 1 of Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, he describes and interviews the great variety of street sellers. Volume 2 might be entitled “occupations” as he explains the various occupations practiced in the streets from old clothes entrepreneur to crossing sweeper.

Volume 3 begins with entertainment and ends with the most abject poverty. First, the entertainment. Entertainers include Punch show operators, conjurors, salamanders (fire eaters), clowns, Irish pipers, English and German street bands, bagpipe players, Scotch pipers, photographers. Mayhew tells you how the people live, how much or little they earn and how they feel about it. A clown speaks:

I must own that the street clowns like a little drop of spirits, and occasionally a good deal. They are in a measure obligated to it. I can’t fancy a clown being funny on small beer; and I never in all my life knew one who was a teetotaller. I think such a person would be a curious character, indeed.

After sections on makers and sellers of dolls’ eyes and drivers of omnibuses, he finishes with “Characteristics of the Various Classes of Vagrants.” By vagrants, he means those who roam the roads, unemployed and often engaged in petty crime. Some claim that those seeking work are the minority. “The remainder consisted of youths, prostitutes, Irish families, and a few professional beggars.” When desperate they seek relief in the workhouses and asylums for “Houseless Poor.” Deserving or not, the conditions of the poor are appalling.

His clothes which were fustian and corduroy, tied close to his body with pieces of string, were black and shiny with filth, which looked more like pitch than grease. He had no shirt, as was plain from the fact that, where his clothes were torn, his bare skin was seen. The ragged sleeves of his fustian jacket were tied like the other parts of his dress, close to his wrists with string. This was clearly to keep the bleak air from his body.

When a worker is laid off or unable to work because of illness and injury, he sells his clothing for food. Then he can no longer get work because of his miserable appearance. Also, the Irish have come in great numbers as a result of the potato famine.

We are all starving. We are all willing to work, but it ain’t to be had. This country is getting very bad for labour; it’s so overrun with Irish that the Englishman hasn’t a chance in his own land to live. Every since I was nine years old I’ve got my own living, but now I’m dead beat, though I’m over twenty-eight next August.

The title of Mayhew’s book is significant when you consider that to be part of London labor is to be always under threat of becoming one of the London poor. There is no safety net. Lose your footing in the struggle to survive and you can fall rapidly to the bottom.

More from Mayhew

The Penguin Classics edition of excerpts from Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor includes some illustrations from the original books. Volume I was devoted to street sellers, while Volume II takes up some of the other occupations we know from the Victorian novelists: mudlarks, chimney sweeps, crossing sweepers and dust-yard workers.

The prosperous dustman is an important character is Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend. A  fortune could be made from dust, and Mayhew explains how it is done. A dust contractor gets a contract with a parish to haul away its dust, mostly the residue from the thousands of coal fires. The dust is carted to a dustyard, where it is sifted, so that the particulate matter can be sold for enriching soil and making bricks. Men shovel the dust to women who wield great sieves, as shown in the illustration.

In a dust-yard lately visited the sifters formed a curious sight; they were almost up to their middle in dust, ranged in a semi-circle in front of that part of the heap which was being worked; each had before her a small mound of soil which had fullen through her sieve and formed a sort of embankment, behind which she stood…. Their coarse dirty cotton gowns were tucked up behind them…; over their gowns they wore a strong leathern apron, extending from their necks to the extremities of their petticoats…. In the process of their work they pushed the sieve from them and drew it back again with apparent violence, striking it against the outer leathern apron with such force that it produced each time a hollow sound, like a blow on the tenor drum.

The workers begin as children, since even small children can retrieve items from the dust. They continue in the life as adults because that is all they know. They are poorly paid, but they value the work because it is “steady,” unlike selling on the street.

Mayhew has really been there and seen how it was done. His descriptions of the other occupations and interviews with the workers are similarly concrete, whether of mudlarks searching for items in the Thamses mud or chimney sweepers visiting the public baths — some daily, some weekly, and some not at all.

London Labour and the London Poor

The four volumes of Henry Mayhew’s great work of the 1850s, London Labour and the London Poor, contain 2000 pages of interviews and reporting. I have been reading the Penguin Classics edition, edited by Victor Neuberg, which excerpts some 189 pages from Volume I.

This book is not what I expected. I undertook it as a sort of sociological duty, knowing its reputation and wanting more background on the London of Dickens. I expected statistics and anguish over the situation of the poor. What I find is first-class journalism. Mayhew doesn’t do his research in a library or with Google. He visits the markets and neighborhoods, he counts, he interviews, and he brings the people to life.

Volume I is devoted to people who sell things on the street. Mayhew classifies and analyzes. No, it is not good that children are selling oranges rather than going to school, but why are these children there? Because of the actions of their parents, because this is all they know, because they are following their parents’ occupation, because they are orphans and friendless.

Are they ignorant? One of them speaks:

No; I never heerd about this here creation you speaks about. In coorse God Almighty made the world, and the poor bricklayers’ labourers built the houses afterwards — that’s my opinion; but I can’t say, for I’ve never been in no schools, only always hard at work, and knows nothing about it. I have heerd a little about our Saviour,– they seem to say he were a goodish kind of a man; but if he says as how a cove’s to forgive a feller as hits you, I should say he knows nothing about it.

Again and again we hear the street sellers speak, but from a background Mayhew delineates of the types of people he meets and the types of work that they do. Who sells what? How do they do it and where, and where do they live, and what do they eat, and do they have shoes? What does it cost to set yourself up to sell baked potatoes on the street? It’s all here in wonderful variety, yet building a pattern of chronic want and the ways the poor go on, improvising a living from day to day.

Some of the street sellers leave London. They are restless. They pick hops. They hope to sell at fairs and races and hangings. When cold weather comes, most of them return to the city. Some achieve small successes. Mayhew admires the “patterers,” those with the silver tongue who can persuade by enticing.

I sell to women of all sorts. Smart-dressing servant-maids, perhaps, are my best customers…. I sold one of my umbrellas to one of them just before you spoke to me… “Look here, ma’am,” said I, “this umbrella is much bigger you see, and will carry double so when you’re coming from church of a wet Sunday evening, a friend can have share of it, and very grateful he’ll be, as he’s sure to have his best hat on. There’s been many a question put under an umbrella that way that’s made a young lady blush, and take good care of her umbrella when she was married, and had a house of her own.”

The strength of Mayhew is like the strength of Dickens. He recognizes ignorance and privation and bemoans the injustice done to those who labor with little reward. At the same time he recognizes their strength to endure and to enjoy what pleasures their lives offer them.