With an Introduction by Rosemary O'
Day. '
To pass from one to the other', writes one authority,' is to cross sides of the same street'..
No previous writer had succeeded in presenting the Poor through their own stories and in their own words, and in this undertaking Mayhew rivals his contemporary Dickens.
Making sense of this environment required curiosity, imagination and a novelist's eye for detail, and Henry Mayhew possessed all three.
Mayhew takes us into the abyss, into a world without fixed employment where skills are declining and insecurity mounting, a world of criminality, pauperism and vice, of unorthodox personal relations and fluid families, a world from which regularity is absent and prosperity has departed.
In scope, depth and detail it remains unrivalled.
It is the classic account of life below the margins in the greatest Metropolis in the world and a compelling portrait of the habits, tastes, amusements, appearance, speech, humour, earnings and opinions of the labouring Poor at the time of the Great Exhibition.
London Labour and the London Poor is a masterpiece of personal inquiry and social observation.
With an Introduction by Rosemary O'
Day
