London Labour and the London Poor, Vol. 1

About this book

In 1849 the journalist Henry Mayhew began to walk the streets of London interviewing the people who made a living there, and this first volume is devoted to the street sellers: costermongers with their barrows of fruit, fish and vegetables, sellers of flowers, watercress, books, toys and old clothes. Mayhew records their trades, earnings, food, homes, slang, amusements and beliefs, and above all their own words, as in the interview with an eight-year-old watercress girl who had almost forgotten how to play and talked like a careworn woman.

Context and significance

Mayhew (1812–1887) first published the interviews in the Morning Chronicle and collected them in 1851; the work is a founding document of social investigation and oral history, and Dickens's London lives in it. Compare Oliver Twist and Jacob Riis's study of New York, How the Other Half Lives.

About the author