The Social Explorer as Anthropologist: Victorian Travellers among ...

know nor care for the enjoyments of home," Mayhew argues,
it is because "we are the culpable parties." 22 If the "wandering
tribes" of the London streets are improvident, ignorant in
matters of religion, and careless of the rules of private prop-
erty, it is because of the circumstances in which they live and
because of our neglect of those circumstances. We deny them
both a moral education and the means to make our own
morality an expedient alternative to theirs.
What, finally, is the meaning of Mayhew's "ethnological"
stance, and what does it add to our understanding of the oft-
repeated analogy between the urban poor and the "uncivil-
ized" tribes of foreign lands? Other critics of Mayhew's work
have tended to dismiss or regret what Anne Humpherys has
called his "weak anthropological analogy." 23 Humpherys her-
self treats the "wandering tribes" passages of London Labour
and the London Poor as a lapse in Mayhew's writing and in-
terprets quite literally his statements that the street-folk of
London constituted a separate—and inferior—race of peo-
ple. Further, she sees this lapse as evidence of the belief in
"innate qualities" to which Mayhew was drawn periodically
during the course of his study. 24
Gertrude Himmelfarb contends that Mayhew succeeded
only in "making 'foreigners,' aliens, out of the 'labouring
population.' " 25 Mayhew represented the poor "less as a class
in the Marxist sense," she remarks, "than a species in the
Darwinian sense." 26 According to Himmelfarb, it is Mayhew
and other reformers of his ilk that were responsible for cre-
ating the destructive notion of a "culture" of poverty. Both
of these critics read Mayhew too literally, and yet neither
takes what is quite obviously a conscious literary pose seriously
enough.
There is no question that at the beginning of his first vol-
ume Mayhew sought to dramatize, even to sensationalize, his
subject or that his rhetoric contained elements of crude, ra-
cialist thinking; but, more importantly, he sought a new vo-
cabulary and a new perspective for the unimpassioned
discussion of urban poverty. In his opening pages Mayhew
was groping toward a new way of seeing and of writing about
human behavior and of accounting for the disquieting var-
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