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Henry Mayhew: London Labour and the London Poor, 1861
By Nina Brown Back to Classics |
Background |  Henry Mayhew (1812-1887)
Henry Mayhew was born into a wealthy London family, one of seventeen siblings.
As a youth Mayhew was rebellious and ran away from boarding school, causing
his father to enlist him involuntarily in the East India Company as a means
of instilling discipline. After returning from this service Mayhew briefly tried
a law career, but found it distasteful, quickly abandoning the profession to
become a freelance journalist. Unable to support himself through this work,
Mayhew moved to Paris to escape his creditors. In Paris he became part of a
circle of young expatriate novelists and writers and in 1841 Mayhew collaborated
with his friends to found the satirical weekly serial Punch. In 1849
Mayhew accepted the journalistic assignment that would define his career, agreeing
to become the London correspondent for a large-scale survey of Britain's working
poor, sponsored by the Morning Chronicle newspaper. His unflinching treatment
of the life of the poor was shocking and controversial and his contributions
were often censored by the editors. By 1850 Mayhew either quit or was fired
from the project, but continued to publish articles on the London poor independently
until 1852. These articles were later collected and published in four volumes
titled London Labour and the London Poor (1861). | Innovation | Mayhew approached his work on London Labour and the London Poor ethnographically,
venturing directly into the poorest parts of London to interview his subjects
directly. The first three volumes contain biographical sketches of the flower
girls, cat and dog meat dealers, pickpockets, prostitutes, and others who struggled
to eke out a living in Victorian London. His writing captured the conditions
of their daily life and recorded their utterances in a form that many have described
as the best oral history of the period.
The fourth volume, which Mayhew wrote only a portion of, departed from this
format to analyze the characteristics and activities of criminals in Britain
and Wales. Mayhew completed a series of choropleth maps for this volume to illustrate
the criminal statistics of each county. The maps, rendered in simple black and
white, addressed a variety of topics including the overall intensity of criminality
in each county, the intensity of "ignorance" (illiteracy), the number
of illegitimate children, rates of teenage marriage, and the number of crimes
committed by women. In each case, counties below the average were represented
in white and counties above the average were shaded in black. Mayhew also printed
the county average within the county boundaries and included detailed data tables
along with each map. Mayhew's maps were an important innovation in the study
of crime, providing easy to read evidence of the spatial concentration of crime
and suggesting that crime would be found in relationship to other variables,
such as illiteracy.
Mayhew's maps were among the earliest attempts to study crime using cartographic
techniques. Along with other early criminologists, such as Joseph Fletcher, Mayhew
was part of the "cartographic" or "geographic" school that
flourished in criminology between 1830 and 1880 (Phillips 1972). His work laid
the foundation for 20th century efforts to understand the relationship between
criminal activity and such "ecological" variables as urbanization,
poverty, and disease. Several criminologists working in the mid-20th century,
such as Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay, also used maps to explore the spatial
relationship between criminal activity and these ecological variables, constructing
detailed maps of crime in major cities like Chicago (Shaw and McKay 1942). Today,
law enforcement officials also make use of geographic techniques to understand
the causes and spatial organization of crime. Many American cities have implemented
sophisticated computerized crime mapping systems to improve crime prevention
efforts (Cho 1998).
Mayhew portrait from London Labour and the London Poor, volume
1. New York: Augustus M. Kelley. |
Untitled Document
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The Intensity of Criminality
Map showing the number of criminal offenders to every
10,000 of population in each county of England and Wales.
The counties printed black are those in which the number of criminals
is above the average. The counties left white are those in which the number
of criminals is below the average. Averages were calculated from the returns
for the last ten years.
Map Source: London Labour and the London Poor, volume
4. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1967. |
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| Publications | London Labour and the London Poor: A Cyclopaedia of the Condition and Earnings
of Those That Will Work, Those That Cannot Work, and Those That Will Not Work
[1861]. (New York: A.M. Kelley, 1967). The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of Prison Life. (London: Griffin,
Bohn and Co., 1862). London Characters: Illustrations of the Humor, Pathos, and Peculiarities of
London Life. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1874). | Related Works | Cho, George. Geographic Information Systems and the Law: Mapping the Legal
Frontiers. (New York: J. Wiley & Sons, 1998). Humpherys, Anne. Travels Into the Poor Man's Country: The Work of Henry
Mayhew. (Athens : University of Georgia Press, 1977). Phillips, Phillip D. A Prologue to the Geography of Crime. Proceedings of
the Association of American Geographers 4 (1972): 86-91. Shaw, Clifford Robe and Henry D. McKay. Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942). Turnbull, Linda S., Elaine Hallisey Hendrix and Borden D. Dent, eds. Atlas
of Crime: Mapping the Criminal Landscape. (Phoenix: Oryx Press, 2000). | Links | http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/MayLond.html
http://www.punch.co.uk/history.html
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Jpunch.htm
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/cmrc/welcome.html
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Copyright © 2001-2007 by Regents of University of California, Santa Barbara,
Page Author: Nina Brown
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