Authentic First-Person Accounts by Beggars, Thieves and Prostitutes
Henry Mayhew and Others
Editor’s note:
The first and possibly the greatest sociological study of poverty in 19th-century London, this survey by a journalist invented the genre of oral history a century before the term was coined. Henry Mayhew vowed "to publish the history of a people, from the lips of the people themselves - giving a literal description of their labour, their earnings, their trials and their sufferings, in their own ’unvarnished’ language." With his collaborators, Mayhew explored hundreds of miles of London streets in the 1840s and 1850s, gathering thousands of pages of testimony from the city’s humbler residents. Their stories revealed aspects of city life virtually unknown to literate society.
A sprawling, four-volume history resulted from Mayhew’s investigations. This extract focuses on the criminal class—pickpockets, prostitutes, rag pickers, and vagrants, whose true stories of degradation, horror, and desperation rival Dickensian fiction. A classic reference source for sociologists, historians, and criminologists, Mayhew’s work is immensely readable. As Thackeray wrote, these urban vignettes conjure up "a picture of human life so wonderful, so awful, so piteous and pathetic, so exciting and terrible, that readers of romances own they never read anything like to it."
Unabridged reprint of the sections entitled "Prostitutes," "Thieves and Swindlers," and "Beggars" from Volume IV of London Labour and the London Poor, 1861.
Table of Contents:
PROSTITUTES
By Bracebridge Hemyng
Prostitution in London.
The Dependants of Prostitutes
Clandestine Prostitutes
Cohabitant Prostitutes
Criminal Returns
Traffic in Foreign Women
THIEVES AND SWINDLERS
By John Binny
Introduction
Sneaks, or Common Thieves
Pickpockets and Shoplifters
Horse and Dog Stealers
Highway Robbers
Housebreakers and Burglars
Prostitute Thieves
Felonies on the River Thames
Receivers of Stolen Property
Coining
Cheats
BEGGARS AND CHEATS
By Andrew Halliday
Introduction
Origin and History of the Poor Laws
Street Beggars in 1816
Mendicant Pensioners
Begging-Letter Writers in 1816
Mendicity Society
Begging-Letter Writers
Advertising Begging-Letter Writers
Ashamed Beggars
The Swell Beggar
Clean Family Beggars
Naval and Military Beggars
Foreign Beggars
Disaster Beggars
Petty Trading Beggars
Dependants of Beggars
Distressed Operative Beggars
Dover Publications, publication date: 1861 (first) 2005 (his edition) and 2012 (electronic version)
ISBN-13: 978-0-486-44006-4
416 pages / 13,6 x 21,5 cm / 17.95 $
Many thanks to «JAM» for this contribution to Smolny’s documentary fund.