Foreword to Voices of Victorian London

2011

In February 1996, BBC2 transmitted a documentary about Henry Mayhew’s exhaustive mid-Victorian study, London Labour and the London Poor (1851–62).³¹⁷ For this programme, Miller brought his directorial skill to a selection of interviews from the book which were now rendered as acted monologues.³¹⁸ Several years later he was invited to provide the following introduction to an abridged volume of Mayhew.³¹⁹

In the inquiring mind of Henry Mayhew we are beginning to see the antecedents of social anthropology, the process of paying attention to the commonplace details of the lives of otherwise forgettable ordinary people, and particularly people below one’s own social level, with whom one would not normally be acquainted. It is in the same way that in the late nineteenth century, anthropologists went off to the Torres Straits and actually engaged for the first time, face to face, with what were previously called ‘savages.’ And they began to ask for the first time, ‘What do they do? How do they cook? How do they get up in the morning? Who is it they feel they can marry, and who is it they feel they can’t?’ and so on. So probably from the middle of the nineteenth century – when Mayhew did his pioneering interviews – and with accelerating frequency, you get an attention to ‘The Other,’ which epitomizes the neglected world of the previously inconsiderable.

Of course, we have to be careful about interpreting what Mayhew reports as being what people might have said to their own friends or relatives. The very nature of these interviews, with someone who is there to give a confession or a discourse about themselves to someone who is recognisably of a different class – and possibly superior – may in fact yield a different type of discourse from the one which Mayhew, instead of hearing, might merely have overheard. For example, there is a great difference between being a ‘looker’ and being an ‘onlooker,’ and in exactly the same way for speech there may be all the difference in the world between being a listener and an overhearer.

But the important thing is that this doesn’t in any way compromise or vitiate the value, because these interviews are, in fact, straightforward descriptive accounts of what it is like to be someone like that. The philosopher Tom Nagel, in a famous paper, asks, “What is it like to be a bat?” (1974). Now, of course, when it comes to bats, as Nagel says, there is no way in which any interview will yield what it is like to be a bat, and for most people before Mayhew there was no interest in what it was like to be a crossing-sweeper. They may even have been assumed to be not all that different from bats.

What is noticeable about Mayhew, first of all, is that he addresses himself to people who are conspicuously unfortunate – in comparison with someone solvent and respectable like himself – and of a social class which is self-respecting. He addresses, and listens to, people who are quite clearly unfortunate, whose daily work would have been regarded by someone like himself as unconvivial and humiliating. Many of the occupations he explores and analyses are activities which someone of his class would have regarded as quite impossible to engage in, unless one dropped off the edge of one’s social class due to drunkenness, or suffered a sudden misfortune which precipitated a slide into this subterranean world.

Indeed, there are a few interviews with such people who were from a social class nearer to Mayhew’s own, such as the Seller of Fruity Drinks who was driven into poverty by illness. Such people maintain the language which they learnt of their previous class, and retain fluency and eloquence so that they talk with an accent conspicuously unlike the accents and idioms of the ordinary people with whom most literate people were unacquainted. It may be that the more elevated language they used – particularly when addressed by someone of their own previous class – helped to maintain their dignity by maintaining the diction of their previous occupation or previous level of occupation.

Mayhew described the London he explored as ‘the undiscovered country of the poor,’ and to our shame that country still exists today, and it is still undiscovered by many of us.320

When I go down into the nearby market every day to buy fruit or vegetables there are many people in the market with whom I have often quite lengthy conversations, which, if they were written down, would be not altogether different from Mayhew’s. They are people from what would have been the same social class as his interviewees. They are none of them, with one or two exceptions, so unfortunate. Nevertheless, right around the corner from where I live there is a huge overcrowded residence for the homeless called Arlington House and many of the people there are in situations comparable to those that were reproduced by Mayhew 160 years ago.

But of course, in addition to the poverty endured by the people Mayhew spoke to, there was for some an additional burden of ill-health, and one of the interesting things about the representation of the disabled, or the sick, or the ill, is that it is very hard with hindsight – even with some sort of medical knowledge, which I still have – actually to make a retrospective diagnosis. I would hesitate to identify any of the disabilities, other than by their signs or symptoms, by saying they were blind or lame, or so forth. For example, the Blind Street-Reader refers to having had an aneurysm, but what would he know of aneurysms? I suspect that what happened is that he was probably given a diagnosis in the hospital, and hung on to that word ‘aneurysm’ without the faintest idea that an aneurysm is in fact a vascular disorder – a sudden dilatation, shortly perhaps to burst – with, perhaps, neurological consequences if it happened to occur inside the skull. Mind you, patients visiting a hospital today often don’t have much more understanding of the terms used unless their doctor is a very good communicator. But at least today’s doctor will know a lot more about aneurysms and how they cause illness than his Victorian predecessor would have.

For anyone looking at the history of illness through the Mayhew interviews, medical knowledge among doctors – let alone patients – at the time was so rudimentary that it is unlikely that anything the Londoners said to Mayhew about the nature or origins of their condition could be taken at face value. Take the Crippled Seller of Nutmeg-Graters, one of the most vivid and moving interviews in the book. As a best guess, he could have had cerebral palsy or some sort of disorder somewhere in the central nervous system that produced difficulties of locomotion, which then deteriorated with the effort and difficulty of walking or getting himself around. On the other hand, perhaps he had multiple sclerosis, a disease which itself progresses. But there’s no way of knowing. The understanding of diagnostic entities in the middle of the nineteenth century was extremely primitive.

For a long time there had been some understanding of the organs in the body, based usually on post-mortems. Organs are identifiable because they are lumps which you can see when you open the chest or the abdomen. You can see a blocked intestine; you can see that the heart has undergone some sort of change of colouration, and so on. But it’s only when you start doing microscopic analysis of sections of organs that you get to the next level down – what’s called histology, the study of tissues. Aniline dyes enabled researchers to stain sections of organs and produce histological diagnoses. It’s very interesting that the notion of tissue is derived from ‘textile’; it means the same thing, a woven fabric. So, up to the eighteenth century you have the notion of ‘organs,’ then you get ‘tissues’ and then you get ‘cells,’ and you realize that tissues are themselves composed of different types of cells, which then combine in very complicated ways to make the various organs of the body.

Now, at the time when Mayhew is interviewing these people, while biological research was beginning the process of understanding how the body works, the practice of medicine had not yet reached the level of sophistication which enabled anyone to make a useful diagnosis.

Some of the street people give accounts of hospitals and doctors but it is sometimes difficult to tell from the interviews what purpose they served. The Hot-Eel Man, for example, stayed in several hospitals for an unconscionably long time. He was in King’s College Hospital, St Bartholomew’s and the Middlesex for a total of 27 months, and I wonder why on earth he was there for so long, how was he treated, and indeed why was he eventually then kicked out? Was it because the doctors said ‘We can’t do anything more for you’? It’s not as if they were doing anything for him anyway.

Of course, hospitals at least provided a sheltered residence, with, in some cases, the possibility of surgical interventions – amputations, for example, performed without anaesthetic. Even in the early days of anaesthesia there were no palliative measures – techniques which reduced pain, as opposed to eliminating it completely during an operation.

Nowadays, many of the most important disease prevention methods spring from an understanding of public health, but in Mayhew’s time such understanding barely existed. The early Victorians were on the verge of developing the idea that something was wrong with sewage. There were intimations that ill-health might have been due to the bad arrangement of cities, and ‘bad air’ – what were called miasmas – and even malnutrition. But these causes were not visualized as disorders which you could systematize and classify. No one really thought about what constitutes a healthy diet. That idea developed towards the end of the nineteenth century when there arose an interest in the nature of diet, and the roles of proteins versus carbohydrates. Vitamins were not discovered until the early part of the twentieth century. No one really understood that vitamin deficiency might be the cause of several disorders.

As a result, many of the people Mayhew saw in the streets of London would have had problems of growth or development. They would have been wizened or shrunken. Children would have had various skeletal disorders as a result of inadequate calcium intake, and vitamin D deficiency as a result of poor exposure to sunlight. Scarcity of fruit and vegetables meant a lack of vitamin C. There was no idea of there being components which were necessary to supplement the diet, and which people now buy in supermarkets; none of those dietary supplements would have existed because there wasn’t a natural history of diet. Mayhew was in no position to ask dietary questions because he himself knew nothing about dietary sufficiency; the biochemistry of diet was something with which he, and everyone else, was unacquainted.

That lack of knowledge of practical measures to prevent or treat disease meant that some of the people Mayhew met had to endure much more advanced stages of illness and disability than any modern patient, while still trying to earn a living.

Someone today who had become afflicted in childhood by whatever the Nutmeg-Grater Seller had, for example, would probably never have got to the stage of locomotor disorder of Mayhew’s interviewee. Many of the cases of profound, almost unintelligible, disorders which figure in Mayhew would not now occur at all. They can be pre-empted by antenatal care, for example, which did not actually appear as a systematic format until the establishment of the National Health Service; or by pre-natal diagnosis, or intra-uterine surgery, or methods of treatment of babies and young children that were not available in Mayhew’s time.

There is a very interesting study of the types of birth disorders that occurred in Scotland among working-class women of the 1940s as the result of an increased frequency of bad deliveries. It turned out that poor women giving birth had had their pelvises affected by malnutrition in their infancy, which produced pelvic narrowing, meaning that the birth of their foetuses was compromised. This was not discovered until 1948.

In the absence of such knowledge of cause and effect, people accepted that life was little more than a gamble in which the poor suffered more than did the affluent. Nevertheless, the affluent realized that they would lose many of their children in the first eight years of life. If you look at gravestones from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, you will see how many of those buried are less than four weeks old. Many of them died of diseases for which they would now merely be excused PE.

Judging from the number of blind people Mayhew spoke to, there was a lot more blindness around – or at least, more blind people were forced to work in some capacity. For many, such disability would have been the result of serious infection – preventable today – which would have produced severe scarring on the anterior part of the eyeball, causing opacity of the cornea, preventing the retina from receiving a projected image. Few of them wonder about what it would be like to see; perhaps expectations of good fortune are so low that they settle for the misfortunes they have been dealt, and are therefore disinclined to wonder about what it is they have lost, and consider this loss as part of the risk of being alive. One might consider this is a kind of stoicism, but I do not think that is accurate in this context. Stoicism is a word you might use of someone who has high expectations of a long and healthy life and is then struck by misfortune, but in a world before effective medical intervention, people accepted unaccountable biological misfortunes. There might have been grief, but people settled for their lot. Indeed, they even thanked God that things were not worse.

It may well be that in that period mere survival of self, albeit a reduced form of selfhood, would itself be a privilege, which you would assign to the benevolence of the Creator, notwithstanding the idea that the misfortune itself was the result of the Creator. They saw the Creator as the source of good fortune and not of bad fortune, and offered praise for the extent to which they survived.

Perhaps this was peculiar to the class to which Mayhew addressed himself. The people he met don’t seem to ask the more general question, ‘Why am I socially unfortunate?’, in addition to ‘Why am I medically unfortunate?’ There is some sort of acceptance because social structure had not yet been called into question in England. If you read the conversations Mayhew had with the crossing-sweepers, there seems to be no question of resentment of their social position as they make a path for the affluent, stepping delicately through the mud and the shit. They don’t ask, ‘Why is it that I am sweeping for them, and that no one is sweeping for me? Why is the social structure organized such that I have, in addition to my medical disorder, a social disorder which assigns me to a job which I know these gentry would regard as an impossible humiliation?’

They may have seen what the gentry looked like when they crossed the road, but could not conceive of the gentry’s lives when they had crossed the road and returned to their homes, and what their occupations were which made them relatively immune to injuries suffered by those on a lower social level.

One of the things that is most conspicuous about these interviews is that there is little social indignation, and, as a consequence, little sense of social injustice. There is no apparent expression of ‘It is unfair.’ Social discrepancy was not yet articulated and visualized in ways which gave rise to socially organized discontent. Only then would revolutions begin to occur, or at least social organizations arise which – through unions and other organizations – could express the notion of injustice.

This is partly lack of information, but also lack of rhetoric. Where does the rhetoric start to spread which gives the working class the sense that there is an articulated justification for discontent? And it isn’t just that they are quietly forbearing – there is not yet a language in which the notion of injustice and discontent come together and express themselves in some sort of social arrangement of outrage.

It may of course be that Mayhew avoided raising those issues, because in fact, being of the class that he was, he did not wish to open the lid to the notion of unfairness – either the unfairness on the part of the Creator, or the unfairness on the part of ‘my betters.’

It is one result of the neutrality with which Mayhew went about his task that we can ask these questions, and many others, on behalf of his interviewees when, on the whole, he does not. He was the earliest ‘fly on the wall’ journalist, and it is thanks to the fact that he provides such a wealth of raw data about poor people’s working lives that his interviews are such a fertile stimulus for speculation, curiosity and wonder.