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London Labour and the London Poor
Henry Mayhew
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
528 pages
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23 black and white
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196x129mm
978-0-19-956608-2
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Hardback
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14 October 2010
Price:
£12.99 £6.49
Please note, this offer price only applies to individual customers when ordering direct from Oxford University Press, while stock lasts. No further discounts will apply. If you are a bookseller, please contact your OUP sales representative.
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- A new selection from Henry Mayhew's pioneering work on the lives of the London poor in Victorian England, with original illustrations, illuminating introduction, and additional material.
- Mayhew's interviews with street traders, entertainers and others are as vivid as fiction and eye-opening in their revelations about hardship and poverty.
- The selection offers a cross-section from all four volumes of Mayhew's bulky original work, combining a full range of human interest stories and quirky statistical calculations which open a window on to the brilliantly obsessive nature of Mayhew himself, and the way that ordinary Victorians lived.
- Fascinating introduction looks at Mayhew's life and career, the genesis and development of the book and its influence on contemporaries such as Dickens and Kingsley, its short-term impact and longer term significance, paying particular attention to Mayhew's style.
- Detailed explanatory notes add further historical detail.
- Includes a period map of London and the first of Mayhew's newspaper assignments from which the book grew.
London Labour and the London Poor is an extraordinary work of investigative journalism, a work of literature, and a groundbreaking work of sociology. It originated in a series of articles for a London newspaper and grew into a massive record of the daily life of Victorian London's underclass. Mayhew conducted hundreds of interviews with the city's street traders, entertainers, thieves and beggars which revealed that the 'two nations' of rich and poor were much closer than many people thought. By turns alarming, touching, and funny, the pages of London Labour and the London Poor exposed a previously hidden world
to view. The first-hand accounts of costermongers and street-sellers, of sewer-scavenger and chimney-sweep, are intimate and detailed and provide an unprecedented insight into their day-to-day struggle for survival. Combined with Mayhew's obsessive data gathering, these stories have an immediacy that owes much to his sympathetic understanding and highly effective literary style. In its imaginative power the work can justly be regarded as the greatest Victorian novel never written.
This new selection offers a cross-section of the original volumes and their evocative illustrations, and includes among other features an illuminating introduction to Henry Mayhew and the genesis and influence of his
work.Readership: General readers of Victorian literature (e.g. lovers of Dickens or Gaskell), those interested in Victorian life and social history; students of English Literature, Victorian studies, social and political history, the history of the city (London).
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Henry Mayhew Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Fellow and Tutor in English, Magdalen College, Oxford
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"This edition... has a thoughtful, detailed and illuminating introduction." - Andrew Dodgshon, Tribune "Robert Douglas-Fairhurst has a strong sense of the contradictory forces at work in Mayhew's writing, which he compares successively to a peep show, a collection of dramatic monologues and an early work of sociology...This selection is still as long as a fair-sized novel, with helpful notes and a springy, suggestive introduction that captures the energy and variety of Mayhew's world." - John Bowen, Times Literary Supplement. "Should be required reading not just for lovers of Dickens, but for anyone who wants to understand our 19th century." - Simon Heffer, Daily
Telegraph "[A] superb new edition." - Ian Thomson, Evening Standard "As riveting as any Dickensian novel and as salutary as any social services report, this is a unique insight into the life of the capital over a hundred years ago." - Robert Gwyn Palmer, The Resident "A collection of some of the best descriptive writing in the English language." - Roy Hattersley, New Statesman
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The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.
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