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phileasfogg's review against another edition
4.0
In the 1840s, journalist Henry Mayhew published a series of articles about the poor of London. These were published in book form in 1851, in the three-volume [b:London Labour and the London Poor|448459|London Labour and the London Poor|Henry Mayhew|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1317658768s/448459.jpg|437115]. When the books were reprinted in 1861 a fourth volume was added, subtitled Those That Will Not Work, comprising Prostitutes, Thieves, Swindlers and Beggars. The present book is a Dover reprint of that fourth volume.
Despite the cover and title page, Mayhew does not seem to have contributed to this volume. The section on Prostitutes is by Bracebridge Hemyng, who was 20 years old when the book was published, and must have conducted most or all of his research while in his teens. He later found success as the author of many stories about schoolboy adventurer Jack Harkaway. Thieves and Swindlers is by John Binny, and Beggars is by Andrew Halliday.
Prostitutes by Bracebridge Hemyng
In researching his section, like Mayhew before him, Hemyng conducted lots of interviews, bravely asking some very personal questions.
A few drinks are usually enough to win his subjects over, as most of the women he speaks to are alcoholics. In addition to interviews, Hemyng also joined police detectives on a case requiring the search of some brothels and 'low lodging houses' that he might have had difficulty entering (or exiting) himself.
It is during a search of a lodging house that Hemyng observes this scene of poverty:
Amongst the interviews and observations is much heavy-handed Victorian moralising, perhaps to counter any misconception that might arise from the author being such an expert on prostitutes. The author's definition of 'prostitute' encompasses all women who have consensual extramarital sex, making no distinction between sex for money and for pleasure. (He does, however, mostly write about 'professional' prostitutes.) He says some rather silly things which may have more to do with schoolboy fantasy than research -- "Ballet-girls have a bad reputation, which is in most cases well deserved." He thinks trashy novels and other publications have made many women susceptible to becoming prostitutes, which seems absurd alongside his own evidence that most of the women he meets are desperately poor and have no other means of surviving, even those who have other employment. He repeats a story that sounds a lot like an urban legend, of a bored wife who goes to a house where she can meet men (for money or pleasure is not stated), and is surprised that her first visitor is her own husband. (They live happily ever after.)
At times the women's stories resemble Victorian melodrama. There are several possible reasons for this, all of which may be true to some extent: a) those fictions are based on the everyday reality of Victorian London; b) out of many interviews, those selected for inclusion are those that read like 'good stories'; c) interviewees tend to fictionalise their own stories, beating the truth into a fictional shape; d) some of the stories have been invented by the subjects to conceal their own perceived wrongdoing or to elicit sympathy.
As is often the case with Dover, this is a no-frills reprint: there are no footnotes, no translation of the occasional French and Latin; no attribution for the illustrations. There's probably no reason to buy this rather than read a free ebook edition.
Without access to a time machine, this is as close as you're likely to get to walking the streets of Victorian London and asking its most miserable inhabitants for their stories. It's like looking behind the facades of those streets in Dickens and finding out what was really going on.
Thieves and Swindlers by John Binny
Thieves and Swindlers was less engaging than Prostitutes. The interviews and personal stories are the great strength of this book, and it's obviously more difficult to interview a thief than a prostitute. Even so, there are several excellent interviews with 'reformed' thieves, each of which amusingly ends with the claim that 'since then I have lived an honest life', expressed so consistently that you suspect the author appended it himself each time, to protect his sources.
This section is not so well-written as the previous. At times the author seems a little disorganised, awkwardly doubling back on a story or description to tell you something he should have mentioned at the start. He would have loved a word processor. His descriptions of his catalogue of thieves frequently state that this type are 'chiefly Irish cockneys', a claim that becomes almost comical with repetition. And the modern reader may be bothered by the occasional mention of 'unprincipled Jews', generally as fences.
The early part of the section is packed with detail about various kinds of thieves and theft but lacks any indication of where it all came from. The reader must presume it is a mixture of information provided by the police, personal observation, hearsay and imagination.
Readers who persevere through this comparatively less interesting material are rewarded by the interviews that come later, the accounts of ingenious burglaries, and the details of popular swindles. At times it's almost a manual for how to make money dishonestly in 1861. The description of how counterfeit coins are made seems especially useful for readers who live in a world where coins are worth enough to justify the labour involved.
The police describe a burglary of a warehouse, where a gang of burglars needed to defeat six locks to reach their target (money and goods worth more than L13,000). The police estimated that the burglars had spent four months on the job, presumably visiting the warehouse most nights during that time. Their method was to closely study the locks -- exactly how is not described, but presumably they probed the lock with a piece of wire or another tool, to determine its shape -- and make keys to fit them. Presumably a lot of trial and error was required.
Here's an interesting swindle that would be a lot more challenging to pull off today: a person rents a room under an assumed name, orders lots of expensive goods to be delivered there, takes the goods away and is never seen again. The shopkeepers eventually come looking for their money and find an empty room with a pile of invoices on the floor and no way of tracking the renter. It seems extraordinary that shopkeepers would ever have sold expensive goods on credit to strangers, but the swindler typically visits the shop in the guise of a lady or gentleman. To treat them with suspicion would be to violate class rules.
Beggars and Cheats by Andrew Halliday
As with the previous section, this starts off unpromisingly as a catalogue of unsourced claims, but by the end the author had overcome my scepticism and convinced me that there were indeed many fraudulent beggars in mid-Victorian London. The author occasionally takes pains to state that some beggars are genuinely needful and deserving, but no Victorian Londoner would have given a halfpenny to a starving child after reading this.
There are only a few interviews. The best is with the seventy year old man who has been a beggar all his life. He tells what it was like in the good old days (apparently the 1810s), when he and almost 200 other beggars shared two large houses in Pye street, organised and led by the beggar captain Copenhagen Jack, begging by day and feasting all night. Then Jack is 'pressed' (i.e. captured by a Navy press gang, and forced to join the Navy, a common practice during the Napoleonic wars) and is never seen again. It's very reminiscent of the beggar king Horrabin, in The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers.
Another good interview is with a bricklayer who lost both arms after falling from scaffolding. He tries to beg, but finds he can't make enough to live. After a day when he receives only a penny, he's about to place himself in a workhouse -- the last resort for the desperately poor -- when another armless man stops him. This more experienced beggar teaches him how it's done. There's no money in being an armless tradesman -- the public need something more picturesque to excite their compassion, like a shipwrecked sailor. They join forces.
The author becomes humorous toward the end, as he reminisces about some of the more absurd beggars he's known. Perhaps the best is 'the offal eater', the seemingly imbecilic old man who picks up filthy old pieces of bread from the ground and eats them. He never asks for money, and seems incapable of coherent speech. He simply ensures someone is watching when he eats from the ground, and then relies on their compassion to do the rest. When the author gives him some fresh bread and then sees him a few hours later, again doing his 'offal eating' stunt, he becomes suspicious.
Despite the cover and title page, Mayhew does not seem to have contributed to this volume. The section on Prostitutes is by Bracebridge Hemyng, who was 20 years old when the book was published, and must have conducted most or all of his research while in his teens. He later found success as the author of many stories about schoolboy adventurer Jack Harkaway. Thieves and Swindlers is by John Binny, and Beggars is by Andrew Halliday.
Prostitutes by Bracebridge Hemyng
In researching his section, like Mayhew before him, Hemyng conducted lots of interviews, bravely asking some very personal questions.
This was merely a question to ascertain the amount of remuneration that she, and others like her, were in the habit of receiving; but it had the effect of enraging her to a great extent.
A few drinks are usually enough to win his subjects over, as most of the women he speaks to are alcoholics. In addition to interviews, Hemyng also joined police detectives on a case requiring the search of some brothels and 'low lodging houses' that he might have had difficulty entering (or exiting) himself.
It is during a search of a lodging house that Hemyng observes this scene of poverty:
[W]e went into another room, which should more correctly be called a hole. There was not an atom of furniture in it, nor a bed, and yet it contained a woman. This woman was lying on the floor, with not even a bundle of straw beneath her, rapped up in what appeared to be a shawl[...] Her face was shrivelled and famine-stricken, her eyes bloodshot and glaring, her features disfigured slightly with disease, and her hair dishevelled, tangled and matted. More like a beast in his lair than a human being in her home was this woman[...] She said she was charged nothing for the place she slept in. She cleaned out the water-closets in the daytime, and for these services she was given a lodging gratis.
Amongst the interviews and observations is much heavy-handed Victorian moralising, perhaps to counter any misconception that might arise from the author being such an expert on prostitutes. The author's definition of 'prostitute' encompasses all women who have consensual extramarital sex, making no distinction between sex for money and for pleasure. (He does, however, mostly write about 'professional' prostitutes.) He says some rather silly things which may have more to do with schoolboy fantasy than research -- "Ballet-girls have a bad reputation, which is in most cases well deserved." He thinks trashy novels and other publications have made many women susceptible to becoming prostitutes, which seems absurd alongside his own evidence that most of the women he meets are desperately poor and have no other means of surviving, even those who have other employment. He repeats a story that sounds a lot like an urban legend, of a bored wife who goes to a house where she can meet men (for money or pleasure is not stated), and is surprised that her first visitor is her own husband. (They live happily ever after.)
At times the women's stories resemble Victorian melodrama. There are several possible reasons for this, all of which may be true to some extent: a) those fictions are based on the everyday reality of Victorian London; b) out of many interviews, those selected for inclusion are those that read like 'good stories'; c) interviewees tend to fictionalise their own stories, beating the truth into a fictional shape; d) some of the stories have been invented by the subjects to conceal their own perceived wrongdoing or to elicit sympathy.
As is often the case with Dover, this is a no-frills reprint: there are no footnotes, no translation of the occasional French and Latin; no attribution for the illustrations. There's probably no reason to buy this rather than read a free ebook edition.
Without access to a time machine, this is as close as you're likely to get to walking the streets of Victorian London and asking its most miserable inhabitants for their stories. It's like looking behind the facades of those streets in Dickens and finding out what was really going on.
Thieves and Swindlers by John Binny
Thieves and Swindlers was less engaging than Prostitutes. The interviews and personal stories are the great strength of this book, and it's obviously more difficult to interview a thief than a prostitute. Even so, there are several excellent interviews with 'reformed' thieves, each of which amusingly ends with the claim that 'since then I have lived an honest life', expressed so consistently that you suspect the author appended it himself each time, to protect his sources.
This section is not so well-written as the previous. At times the author seems a little disorganised, awkwardly doubling back on a story or description to tell you something he should have mentioned at the start. He would have loved a word processor. His descriptions of his catalogue of thieves frequently state that this type are 'chiefly Irish cockneys', a claim that becomes almost comical with repetition. And the modern reader may be bothered by the occasional mention of 'unprincipled Jews', generally as fences.
The early part of the section is packed with detail about various kinds of thieves and theft but lacks any indication of where it all came from. The reader must presume it is a mixture of information provided by the police, personal observation, hearsay and imagination.
Readers who persevere through this comparatively less interesting material are rewarded by the interviews that come later, the accounts of ingenious burglaries, and the details of popular swindles. At times it's almost a manual for how to make money dishonestly in 1861. The description of how counterfeit coins are made seems especially useful for readers who live in a world where coins are worth enough to justify the labour involved.
The police describe a burglary of a warehouse, where a gang of burglars needed to defeat six locks to reach their target (money and goods worth more than L13,000). The police estimated that the burglars had spent four months on the job, presumably visiting the warehouse most nights during that time. Their method was to closely study the locks -- exactly how is not described, but presumably they probed the lock with a piece of wire or another tool, to determine its shape -- and make keys to fit them. Presumably a lot of trial and error was required.
Here's an interesting swindle that would be a lot more challenging to pull off today: a person rents a room under an assumed name, orders lots of expensive goods to be delivered there, takes the goods away and is never seen again. The shopkeepers eventually come looking for their money and find an empty room with a pile of invoices on the floor and no way of tracking the renter. It seems extraordinary that shopkeepers would ever have sold expensive goods on credit to strangers, but the swindler typically visits the shop in the guise of a lady or gentleman. To treat them with suspicion would be to violate class rules.
Beggars and Cheats by Andrew Halliday
As with the previous section, this starts off unpromisingly as a catalogue of unsourced claims, but by the end the author had overcome my scepticism and convinced me that there were indeed many fraudulent beggars in mid-Victorian London. The author occasionally takes pains to state that some beggars are genuinely needful and deserving, but no Victorian Londoner would have given a halfpenny to a starving child after reading this.
There are only a few interviews. The best is with the seventy year old man who has been a beggar all his life. He tells what it was like in the good old days (apparently the 1810s), when he and almost 200 other beggars shared two large houses in Pye street, organised and led by the beggar captain Copenhagen Jack, begging by day and feasting all night. Then Jack is 'pressed' (i.e. captured by a Navy press gang, and forced to join the Navy, a common practice during the Napoleonic wars) and is never seen again. It's very reminiscent of the beggar king Horrabin, in The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers.
Another good interview is with a bricklayer who lost both arms after falling from scaffolding. He tries to beg, but finds he can't make enough to live. After a day when he receives only a penny, he's about to place himself in a workhouse -- the last resort for the desperately poor -- when another armless man stops him. This more experienced beggar teaches him how it's done. There's no money in being an armless tradesman -- the public need something more picturesque to excite their compassion, like a shipwrecked sailor. They join forces.
At the end of the week we shared two pound and seven shillings, which was more nor a pound than my mate ever did by his self. He always said it was pilin' the hagony to have two without ne'er an arm. My mate used to say to me, 'Enery, if your stumps had only been a trifle shorter, we might ha' made a fortune by this time; but you waggle them, you see, and that frightens the old ladies.'
The author becomes humorous toward the end, as he reminisces about some of the more absurd beggars he's known. Perhaps the best is 'the offal eater', the seemingly imbecilic old man who picks up filthy old pieces of bread from the ground and eats them. He never asks for money, and seems incapable of coherent speech. He simply ensures someone is watching when he eats from the ground, and then relies on their compassion to do the rest. When the author gives him some fresh bread and then sees him a few hours later, again doing his 'offal eating' stunt, he becomes suspicious.
This convinced me that he was an artful systematic beggar, and this impression was fully confirmed on my following him into a low beer-shop in St. Giles's and finding him comfortably seated with his feet up in a chair, smoking a long pipe, and discussing a pot of ale. He knew me in a moment, dropped his feet from the chair, and tried to hide his pipe. Since that occasion he has never come my way.
gilroi's review against another edition
2.0
Extremely informative, but very dense and difficult to get through due to the dated structure of Mayhew's prose. It's not his fault, he wasn't writing for us, but all the same, the thing's a bit of a slog.
tricky's review against another edition
4.0
This is a gem of a book as it is a good source material of social history of London's Underworld around the 1850s.
Henry Mayhew while proclaiming to be objective is not that all, he certainly comes in with 'an holier than thou attitude' about the profession that 'these' people undertake.
He goes through an extensive analysis of prostitution, he categorises the levels of engagement that women participate. For example Mayhew defines one class as 'female operatives' who can be milliners, dress makers, furriers, shoe-binders who only partake in prostitution to fund their extravagant life style or their own sexual gratification. In other classes of prostitution he reasons that some women undertake this type of work in the hope of finding a husband. I mean it is really fascinating the way he tries to reason prostitution. With the female operatives he decides the following is the cause of the lax morality:
'1 Low wages inadequate to their sustenance
2 Natural levity and the example around them
3 Love of dress and display, couple with the desire for a sweetheart
4 Sedentary employment and want of proper exercise
5 Low and cheap literature of an immoral tendency
6 Absence of parental care and the inculcation of proper precepts, In short, bad bringing up.'
Number 4 is where he blames the abundance of penny romance novels as a reason that women were driven to prostitution.
There are wonderful characters and descriptions in this book for example "Opposite to this was the Rose and Crown public-house, resorted to by all classes of the light-fingered gentry, from the mobman and his 'Amelia' to the lowest of the street thieves and his 'Poll'. I n the tap-room might be seen Black Charlie the fiddler, with ten or a dozen lads and lasses enjoying the dance and singing and smoking over potations of gin and water, more or less plentiful according to the proceeds of the previous night - all apparently free from care in their wild carousals."
If you enjoy social history, if you reading almost first hand accounts, if you want to understand a period of English history, then this is a really interesting read.
Henry Mayhew while proclaiming to be objective is not that all, he certainly comes in with 'an holier than thou attitude' about the profession that 'these' people undertake.
He goes through an extensive analysis of prostitution, he categorises the levels of engagement that women participate. For example Mayhew defines one class as 'female operatives' who can be milliners, dress makers, furriers, shoe-binders who only partake in prostitution to fund their extravagant life style or their own sexual gratification. In other classes of prostitution he reasons that some women undertake this type of work in the hope of finding a husband. I mean it is really fascinating the way he tries to reason prostitution. With the female operatives he decides the following is the cause of the lax morality:
'1 Low wages inadequate to their sustenance
2 Natural levity and the example around them
3 Love of dress and display, couple with the desire for a sweetheart
4 Sedentary employment and want of proper exercise
5 Low and cheap literature of an immoral tendency
6 Absence of parental care and the inculcation of proper precepts, In short, bad bringing up.'
Number 4 is where he blames the abundance of penny romance novels as a reason that women were driven to prostitution.
There are wonderful characters and descriptions in this book for example "Opposite to this was the Rose and Crown public-house, resorted to by all classes of the light-fingered gentry, from the mobman and his 'Amelia' to the lowest of the street thieves and his 'Poll'. I n the tap-room might be seen Black Charlie the fiddler, with ten or a dozen lads and lasses enjoying the dance and singing and smoking over potations of gin and water, more or less plentiful according to the proceeds of the previous night - all apparently free from care in their wild carousals."
If you enjoy social history, if you reading almost first hand accounts, if you want to understand a period of English history, then this is a really interesting read.
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