Voices of Victorian London E-Book

Henry Mayhew

• Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 216

Beschreibung

History is written by historians, and the voices of ordinary people rarely feature. But this unique collection of interviews from the middle of the nineteenth century allows their voices to be heard. The journalist Henry Mayhew tramped the streets of London interviewing working people; this Hesperus selection from his work London Labour and the London Poor shows how they coped with the ups and downs of health and illness while continuing with the daily trial of scratching a living and feeding their families. The people Mayhew met showed remarkable resilience and a surprising sense of humour about their lot in life. Jonathan Miller, theatre director, writer and doctor, writes an introduction giving the social background to what Mayhew called the 'undiscovered country of the poor'.

Leseprobe

Voices of Victorian London

In Sickness and in Health

Henry Mayhew

Foreword byJonathan Miller

Published by Hesperus Press Limited

167-169 Great Portland Street, London W1W 5PF

www.hesperus.press

London Labour and the London Poor first published in 1851 This edition first published by Hesperus Press Limited, 2011 Foreword © Jonathan Miller, 2011

This ebook edition first published in 2024

Designed and typeset by Fraser Muggeridge studio Printed in Jordan by Jordan National Press

isbn: 978-1-84391-350-4

Ebook isbn: 978-1-84391-349-8

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

Contents

Foreword

A note on the text

Chapter One

The Public Health

A Fly-paper Seller

Rats and their Catchers

A Poorly Poet

A Seller of Fruity Drinks

A Shellfish Seller

A Shoemaker’s Widow

A Soldier’s Wife

A Girl Crossing-sweeper

An Irish Widower

An Anxious Dog-collar Seller

Flushermen

An Orphaned Street-girl

A General Dealer

Chapter Two

Disabled Bodies

A Crippled Seller of Nutmeg-graters

A Crossing-sweeper with a Wooden Leg

A Peep-show Exhibitor

An Afflicted Crossing-sweeper

A Writer Without Hands

Chapter Three

Dangerous Work

An Overworked Man

A Maimed Irish Crossing-sweeper

Chimney Sweeps

A Bearded Crossing-sweeper

A Hot-eel Man

A Disabled Coalwhipper

A Coal-backer

The Mother of a Featherhouse Worker

Chapter Four

Losing Sight

A Blind Silhouette-cutter

A Blind Street-reader

A Maker of Eyes

The Senses of the Blind

A Blind Needle Seller

Some Blind Musicians

Notes

Biographical note

Foreword

In the inquiring mind of Henry Mayhew we are beginning to see the antecedents of social anthropology, the process of paying attention to the commonplace details of the lives of otherwise forgettable ordinary people, and particularly people below one’s own social level, with whom one would not normally be acquainted. It is in the same way that in the late nineteenth century, anthropologists went off to the Torres Straits, and actually engaged for the first time, face to face, with what were previously called ‘savages’. And they began to ask for the first time, ‘What do they do? How do they cook? How do they get up in the morning? Who is it they feel they can marry, and who is it they feel they can’t?’ and so on. So probably from the middle of the nineteenth century, when Mayhew did his pioneering interviews, and with accelerating frequency, you get an attention to ‘The Other’, which epitomises the neglected world of the previously inconsiderable.

Of course, we have to be careful about interpreting what Mayhew reports as being what people might have said to their own friends or relatives. The very nature of these interviews, with someone who is there to give a confession or a discourse about themselves to someone who is recognisably of a different class, and possibly superior, may in fact yield a different type of discourse from the one which Mayhew, instead of hearing, might merely have overheard. For example, there is a great difference between being a ‘looker’ and being an ‘onlooker’, and in exactly the same way for speech there may be all the difference in the world between being a listener and an overhearer.

But the important thing is that this doesn’t in any way compromise or vitiate the value because these interviews are, in fact, straightforward descriptive accounts of what it is like to be someone like that. The philosopher Tom Nagel in a famous paper, asks, ‘What is it like to be a bat?’⁠* Now, of course, when it comes to bats, as Nagel says, there is no way in which any interview will yield what it is like to be a bat, and for most people before Mayhew there was no interest in what it was like to be a crossing-sweeper. They may even have been assumed to be not all that different from bats.

What is noticeable about Mayhew, first of all, is that he addresses himself to people who are conspicuously unfortunate, in comparison with someone solvent and respectable like himself, and of a social class which is self-respecting. He addresses, and listens to, people who are quite clearly unfortunate, whose daily work would have been regarded by someone like himself as unconvivial and humiliating. Many of the occupations he explores and analyses are activities which someone of his class would have regarded as quite impossible to engage in, unless one dropped off the edge of one’s social class due to drunkenness, or suffered a sudden misfortune which precipitated a slide into this subterranean world.

Indeed, there are a few interviews with such people who were from a social class nearer to Mayhew’s own, such as the Seller of Fruity Drinks, who was driven into poverty by illness. Such people maintain the language which they learnt of their previous class, and retain fluency and eloquence so that they talk with an accent conspicuously unlike the accents and idioms of the ordinary people, with whom most literate people were unacquainted. It may be that the more elevated language they used, particularly when addressed by someone of their own previous class, helped to maintain their dignity by maintaining the diction of their previous occupation or previous level of occupation.

Mayhew described the London he explored as ‘the undiscovered country of the poor’, and to our shame that country still exists today, and it is still undiscovered by many of us.

When I go down into the nearby market every day to buy fruit or vegetables there are many people in the market with whom I have often quite lengthy conversations, which, if they were written down, would be not altogether different from Mayhew’s. They are people from what would have been the same social class as his interviewees. They are none of them, with one or two exceptions, so unfortunate. Nevertheless, right around the corner from where I live there is huge overcrowded residence for the homeless called Arlington House and many of the people there are in situations comparable to those that were reproduced by Mayhew 160 years ago.

But of course, in addition to the poverty endured by the people Mayhew spoke to, there was for some an additional burden of ill-health, reflected in the selection in this book, and one of the interesting things about the representation of the disabled, or the sick, or the ill, is that it is very hard with hindsight, even with some sort of medical knowledge which I still have, actually to make a retrospective diagnosis. I would hesitate to identify any of the disabilities other than by their signs or symptoms, by saying they were blind or lame, or so forth. For example, the Blind Street-reader refers to having had an aneurysm, but what would he know of ‘aneurysms’? I suspect that what happened is that he was probably given a diagnosis in the hospital, and hung on to that word, ‘aneurysm’, without the faintest idea that an aneurysm is in fact a vascular disorder, a sudden dilatation, shortly perhaps to burst, with, perhaps, neurological consequences if it happened to occur inside the skull. Mind you, patients visiting a hospital today often don’t have much more understanding of the terms used unless their doctor is a very good communicator. But at least today’s doctor will know a lot more about aneurysms and how they cause illness than his Victorian predecessor would have.

For anyone looking at the history of illness through the Mayhew interviews, medical knowledge among doctors, let alone patients, at the time was so rudimentary that it is unlikely that anything the Londoners said to Mayhew about the nature or origins of their condition could be taken at face value. Take the Crippled Seller of Nutmeg-graters, one of the most vivid and moving interviews in the book. As a best guess, he could have had cerebral palsy or some sort of disorder somewhere in the central nervous system that produced difficulties of locomotion which then deteriorated with the effort and difficulty of walking or getting himself around. On the other hand, perhaps he had multiple sclerosis, a disease which itself progresses. But there’s no way of knowing – the understanding of diagnostic entities in the middle of the nineteenth century was extremely primitive.

For a long time, there had been some understanding of the organs in the body, based usually on post-mortems. Organs are identifiable because they are lumps which you can see when you open the chest or the abdomen. You can see a blocked intestine; you can see that the heart has undergone some sort of change of colouration, and so on. But it’s only when you start doing microscopic analysis of sections of organs that you get to the next level down, what’s called histology, the study of tissues. Aniline dyes enabled researchers to stain sections of organs and produce histological diagnoses. It’s very interesting that the notion of tissue is derived from ‘textile’; it means the same thing, a woven fabric. So up to the eighteenth century you have the notion of ‘organs’, then you get ‘tissues’, and then you get ‘cells’, and you realise that tissues are themselves composed of different types of cells, which then combine in very complicated ways to make the various organs of the body.

Now, at the time when Mayhew is interviewing these people, while biological research was beginning the process of understanding how the body works, the practice of medicine had not yet reached the level of sophistication which enabled anyone to make a useful diagnosis.

Some of the street people give accounts of hospitals and doctors but it is sometimes difficult to tell from the interviews what purpose they served. The Hot-eel Man, for example, stayed in several hospitals for an unconscionably long time. He was in King’s College Hospital, St Bartholomew’s and the Middlesex for a total of twenty-seven months and I wonder why on earth he was there for so long, how was he treated, and indeed why was he eventually then kicked out? Was it because the doctors said ‘We can’t do anything more for you’? It’s not as if they were doing anything for him anyway.

Of course, hospitals at least provided a sheltered residence with, in some cases, the possibility of surgical interventions – amputations, for example, performed without anaesthetic. Even in the early days of anaesthesia there were no palliative measures, techniques which reduced pain as opposed to eliminating it completely during an operation.

Nowadays, many of the most important disease prevention methods spring from an understanding of public health, but in Mayhew’s time such understanding barely existed. The early Victorians were on the verge of developing the idea that something was wrong with sewage. There were intimations that ill-health might have been due to the bad arrangement of cities, and ‘bad air’, what were called miasmas, and even malnutrition. But these causes were not visualised as disorders which you could systematise and classify. No one really thought about what constitutes a healthy diet. That idea developed towards the end of the nineteenth century when there arose an interest in the nature of diet, and the roles of proteins versus carbohydrates. Vitamins were not discovered until the early part of the twentieth century. No one really understood that vitamin deficiency might be the cause of several disorders.

As a result, many of the people Mayhew saw in the streets of London would have had problems of growth or development. They would have been wizened or shrunken. Children would have had various skeletal disorders as a result of inadequate calcium intake, and vitamin D deficiency as a result of poor exposure to sunlight. Scarcity of fruit and vegetables meant a lack of vitamin C. There was no idea of there being components which were necessary to supplement the diet and which people now buy in supermarkets – none of those dietary supplements would have existed because there wasn’t a natural history of diet. Mayhew was in no position to ask dietary questions because he himself knew nothing about dietary sufficiency; the biochemistry of diet was something with which he, and everyone else, was unacquainted.

This lack of knowledge of practical measures to prevent or treat disease meant that some of the people Mayhew met had to endure much more advanced stages of illness and disability than any modern patient while still trying to earn a living.

Someone today who had become afflicted in childhood by whatever the Nutmeg-grater Seller had, for example, would probably never have got to the stage of locomotor disorder of Mayhew’s interviewee. Many of the cases of profound, almost unintelligible, disorders which figure in Mayhew would not now occur at all. They can be pre-empted, by antenatal care, for example, which did not actually appear as a systematic format until the establishment of the National Health Service, or by pre-natal diagnosis, or intra-uterine surgery, or methods of treatment of babies and young children that were not available in Mayhew’s time.

There is a very interesting study of the types of birth disorders that occurred in Scotland among working-class women of the 1940s as the result of an increased frequency of bad deliveries. It turned out that poor women giving birth had had their pelvises affected by malnutrition in their infancy, which produced pelvic narrowing, meaning that the birth of their foetuses was compromised; this was not discovered until 1948.

In the absence of such knowledge of cause and effect, people accepted that life was little more than a gamble in which the poor suffered more than did the affluent. Nevertheless, the affluent realised that they would lose many of their children in the first eight years of life. If you look at gravestones from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, you will see how many of those buried are less than four weeks old. Many of them died of diseases for which they would now merely be excused P.E.

Judging from the number of blind people Mayhew spoke to there was a lot more blindness around, or at least, more blind people were forced to work in some capacity. For many, such disability would have been the result of serious infection, preventable today, which would have produced severe scarring on the anterior part of the eyeball, causing opacity of the cornea preventing the retina from receiving a projected image. Few of them wonder about what it would be like to see; perhaps expectations of good fortune are so low that they settle for the misfortunes they been dealt, and are therefore disinclined to wonder about what it is they have lost, and consider this loss as part of the risk of being alive. One might consider this is a kind of stoicism, but I do not think that is accurate in this context. Stoicism is a word you might use of someone who has high expectations of a long and healthy life and is then struck by misfortune, but in a world before effective medical intervention people accepted unaccountable biological misfortunes. There might have been grief, but people settled for their lot. Indeed, they even thanked God that things were not worse.

It may well be that in that period mere survival of self, albeit a reduced form of selfhood, would itself be a privilege, which you would assign to the benevolence of the Creator, notwithstanding the idea that the misfortune itself was the result of the Creator. They saw the Creator as the source of good fortune, and not of bad fortune, and offered praise for the extent to which they survived.

Perhaps this was peculiar to the class to which Mayhew addressed himself. The people he met don’t seem to ask the more general question, ‘Why am I socially unfortunate?’, in addition to ‘Why am I medically unfortunate?’ There is some sort of acceptance because social structure had not yet been called into question in England. If you read, in Chapter 3, the conversations Mayhew had with the crossing-sweepers, there seems to be no question of resentment of their social position as they make a path for the affluent, stepping delicately through the mud and the shit. They don’t ask, ‘Why is it that I am sweeping for them, and that no one is sweeping for me? Why is the social structure organised such that I have, in addition to my medical disorder, a social disorder which assigns me to a job which I know these gentry would regard as an impossible humiliation?’

They may have seen what the gentry looked like when they crossed the road, but could not conceive of the gentry’s lives when they had crossed the road and returned to their homes, and what their occupations were which made them relatively immune to injuries suffered by those on a lower social level.

One of the things that is most conspicuous about these interviews is that there is little social indignation, and, as a consequence, little sense of social injustice. There is no apparent expression of ‘It is unfair’. Social discrepancy was not yet articulated and visualised in ways which gave rise to socially organised discontent. Only then would revolutions begin to occur, or at least social organisations arise which through unions and other organisations could express the notion of injustice.

This is partly lack of information, but also lack of rhetoric. Where does the rhetoric start to spread which gives the working class the sense that there is an articulated justification for discontent? And it isn’t just that they are quietly forbearing, there is not yet a language in which the notion of injustice and discontent come together and express themselves in some sort of social arrangement of outrage.

It may of course be that Mayhew avoided raising those issues, because in fact, being of the class that he was, he did not wish to open the lid to the notion of unfairness, either the unfairness on the part of the Creator, or the unfairness on the part of ‘my betters’.

It is one result of the neutrality with which Mayhew went about his task that we can ask these questions, and many others, on behalf of his interviewees when, on the whole, he does not. He was the earliest ‘fly on the wall’ journalist, and it is thanks to the fact that he provides such a wealth of raw data about poor people’s working lives that his interviews, of which this book contains merely a small selection, are such a fertile stimulus for speculation, curiosity and wonder.

– Jonathan Miller, 2011

*The Philosophical Review LXXXIII, 4 (October 1974): 435–50

A note on the text

For many readers who approach Henry Mayhew’s daunting four-volume work, London Labour and the London Poor⁠*, the principal reward is the eye-opening verbatim transcripts of the interviews Mayhew carried out in the streets of London in the middle of the nineteenth century. At the time, they were the earliest printed examples of how ‘ordinary people’ spoke, and conveyed both the words and expressions they used and the topics that preoccupied them.

The novelist, William Makepeace Thackeray, was bowled over by what Mayhew had produced, when his writings were first published in the Morning Chronicle:

[H]e goes amongst labouring people and poor of all kinds and brings back what? A picture of human life so wonderful, so awful, so piteous and pathetic, so exciting and terrible, that readers of romances own they never read anything like to it; and that the griefs, struggles, strange adventures here depicted exceed anything that any of us could imagine... We have hitherto had no community with the poor. We never speak a word to the servant who waits on us for twenty years; we condescend to employ a tradesman, keeping him at a proper distance...; of his workmen we know nothing, how pitilessly they are ground down, how they live and die, here close by us at the backs of our houses; until... some clear-sighted, energetic man like the writer of the Chronicle travels into the poor man’s country for us, and comes back with his tale of terror and wonder.

For Mayhew, the interviews were part of a greater work – an analysis of the economy of the street people. Mayhew hoped that at a time of increasing mechanisation and the use of sweated labour he could gain some insights into the relationships between employer and employee, customer and tradesman, as applied to the poorest people in Britain’s largest city. But the theories and analyses that form the framework of his book have become outdated. We no longer need to worry, as Mayhew did, about the vast quantities of horse manure that would eventually overwhelm London’s streets as passenger traffic grew.

Far more enduring and significant have been the voices of Victorian Londoners as scattered in a fairly undisciplined way through Mayhew’s text. For the purpose of this book, a selection of the five hundred or so interviews Mayhew published has been isolated from the narrative text and presented in an arrangement that highlights one of the many topics that crept into the interviews even when Mayhew did not start out with the particular topic in mind. This particular selection deals with accounts of the burden of ill-health and disability that often crept into people’s conversations with Mayhew, and Jonathan Miller writes in his introduction about the limits of medical knowledge, the paucity of available remedial measures, and the extraordinary forbearance of people who not only had to put up with more pain and discomfort than most people do today, but actually had to earn a living in the midst of their suffering.

But these interviews contain much more. Although his main purpose was an understanding of the economics of street life, Mayhew’s approach was so undisciplined – or perhaps he himself was so fascinated – that he allowed his interviewees to tell him about anything and everything, and he or his hired stenographers took it all down.

Mayhew seems to have made little attempt to stem the flow when people embarked on a topic they wanted to talk about even if it didn’t fit Mayhew’s agenda. The Poorly Poet tells us about his abscesses but he also recites some of his poetry to Mayhew, and it is only near the end of the interview that the poet gives Mayhew the financial information he professes to be interested in.

Minor changes in spelling and punctuation have been made and where Mayhew left a blank for a name of a person or place one has been made up for ease of reading. The interviews are taken from the first three volumes of the 1861–2 edition, and the source for each interview is given at the back of the book.

– Karl Sabbagh

*All references are to London Labour and the London Poor, by Henry Mayhew, Griffin, Bohn and Company, 1861–2, vols 1–3

Voices of Victorian London

Chapter One

The Public Health

In the days before antisepsis, antibiotics, or even a general sense of the causes of major infections, the burden of disease from bad air, bad water, and bad food hygiene was huge. Many of Mayhew’s interviewees had suffered from the major scourge of cholera, not traced to poor water supplies until John Snow’s analysis which connected the pattern of deaths from an outbreak of the disease in Soho in 1854 to the output of one waterpump in Broad Street.

Staphylococcal infections – boils, blood poisoning, infected wounds – and contagious diseases faced little resistance and no treatment or cure. There was, however, a dim recognition that flies, rats and other vermin might be harmful to health, and sellers of fly-paper and catchers of rats could earn a decent living as a result.

A Fly-paper Seller

Fly-papers came, generally, into street-traffic, I am informed, in the summer of 1848. The fly-papers are sold wholesale at many of the oil-shops, but the principal shop for the supply of the street-traders is in Whitechapel. The wholesale price is twopence farthing a dozen, and the (street) retail charge a half-penny a paper, or three for a penny. A young man, to whom I was referred, and whom I found selling, or rather bartering, crockery, gave me the following account of his experience of the fly-paper trade. He was a rosy-cheeked, strong-built young fellow, and said he thought he was ‘getting on’ in his present trade. He spoke merrily of his troubles, as I have found common among his class, when they are over:–