London Labour and the London Poor

• 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 the 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 particulary attention to Mayhew's style.
• Detailed explanatory notes add further historical detail.
• Includes a period map of London and an appendix with the first of Mayhew's newspaper assignments from which the book grew.

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).

Henry Mayhew

Henry Mayhew was a journalist, novelist, dramatist, and social investigator, born in London in 1812. He was one of the founding editors of Punch and went on to produce some of the most important journalism of the nineteenth century. His series of articles on 'Labour and the Poor' attracted wide notice and eventually grew into a massive four-volume work. He died in 1887.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst writes regularly for the Daily Telegraph and Times Literary Supplement and has previously edited Dickens's A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Books and Great Expectations for OWC. He is the author of Victorian Afterlives: the Shaping of Influence in Nineteenth-Century Literature (OUP, 2002).

Review(s) from previous edition

"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, TLS 17/12/2010

"Should be required reading not just for lovers of Dickens, but for anyone who wishes to understand how our nineteenth century truly was." - Simon Heffer, Telegraph 14/01/2011

"superb new edition" - Ian Thomson, Evening Standard 02/12/2010

"superb introduction" - Michael Dirda, Washington Post 26/01/2011

"some of the best descriptive writing in the English language" - Roy Hattersley, New Statesman 18/10/2010