The Unknown Mayhew

176 ALAN THOMAS English, and he has managed to find a prose diction which is alive, poetic, and close to contemporary speech and yet acceptable on both sides of the Atlantic. His version is the most lively English translation of Faust that there is. It is unconventional as a whole and often controversial in detail, and I suspect that many people will not like it; they will be the 'squares.' Fairley at 80 plus is more modem than most of his readers at 40 minus. He is also more modem than his illustrator, whose fussy and elaborate drawings look like a cluttered Victorian salon beside the clean streamlines of Fairley's prose. ( LEONARD FORSTER) THE UNKNOWN MAYHEW' The title of this work, The UnknOll7n Mayhew, migbt be applied to the man himself as mucb as to this collection of articles unlocked for the first time from the files of the Morning Chronicle. Henry Mayhew emerged from literary Bohemia ( Figaro in London, Punch, and various fly-by-night journalistic enterprises ) to gain for a decade a wide reputation as a social investigator and then to vanish, a couple of unmemorable travel books bobbing in his wake, into obscurity . An absence of personal papers bas thwarted the efforts of would-be biographers but glimpses of the man have been provided in a number of biographical sketches, the latest being contained in E.P. Tbompson's introduction to this collection. As man and writer Mayhew was of the kind that makes plausible analogies between Elizabethan and Victorian; a gusty, powerful imagination and confidence marked his projects, but a matching imprudence brought them often to wreck; he was one of those men whose reach almost always exceeds their grasp, who spend their energy in one task after another only to leave little behind of substance. Mayhew has not, of course, evaporated quite according to type : his monuments are the four-volume London Labour and the London POOT (I 861) and The Criminal Prisons of London (with John Binny, 1862), works both left unfinished years earlier - the fragments of grander designs - and completed for the press by publishers' hirelings. The restoration to viSibility, if not yet to prominence, of Mayhew (assisted by the reprinting of London Labour in 1968) has been a feature of recent Victorian scholarship; this new collection adds some of Mayhew's important work to the body of easily accessible material and also recalls that period which was his finest hour. In the winter of 1849-50 his revelations of conditions among the work-people in the London garment industry caused questions to be asked in the House and set in motion an agitation which ran through one stormy meeting after another in London and the provinces. At one gathering of a thousand East End needlewomen the parliamentarian Sidney Herbert, accompanied by Lord Ashley, entered unannounced - a splendid piece of Victorian theatre - and took the platform to declare to the ragged crowd that '"The Unknown Mayhew: Selections from the Morning Chronicle 1849-50. Edited and introduced by E.P. Thompson and Eileen Yeo. Merlin Press: London 1971. $12.95 . Mayhew had 'awakened a spirit in the country which ... would not be laid asleep till it had issued in their amelioration.' This line rhetoric had an issue in the Female Emigration Fund (subscribed to by the Queen and Prince Albert); in addition, the Christian Socialist group, alarmed by Mayhew's articles and positively offended by Herbert's 'transportation' scheme, as Ludlow called it, launched a rival, but domestic programme, the formation of workers' co-operatives. Professor Thompson does justice to Mayhew by recalling this episode in British social history in which an individual did the work of a Royal Commission - in fact, Mayhew was dubbed the 'Metropolitan Commissioner' by his readers - and by reprinting the articles on the 'slop' garment trade which were at the heart of the agitation. The remainder of the material which the editors have chosen to reprint from the foulteen~month run of Mayhew's 'Labour and the Poor' series is not always as sensational and consists of investigations of traditional London crafts (bootand -shoe-makers, woodworkers, tanners, hatters, etc.). Mayhew used the impetus and reputation gained by his...