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

iations in that behavior. He did not abandon this perspective
after the first few dramatic pages, but continued to employ
it throughout his analysis of the culture of the street-folk.
The language of early, even primitive, anthropology pro-
vided writers like Mayhew with the metaphor they needed
to describe a new class, the inhabitants of a new kind of
neighborhood in a new kind of city. Where would the lan-
guage come from to discuss with some degree of seriousness
the lumpenproletariat that dwelled in the slums of the industrial
cities of the nineteenth century? If a writer wished to evoke
the social scene neither as a pure entertainer nor as a rigidly
censorious moralizer, if he or she wished to make an attempt
at "scientific" objectivity, what tone and what attitude were
available and acceptable?
In the 1830s and 1840s the British nation first attempted
to come to terms with the facts of urban-industrial life, and
a number of different methods of writing about the urban
poor were or became available during these decades. Men
like Peter Gaskell and Edwin Chadwick used statistical studies
to examine infant mortality, birth rates, sanitation, and the
spread of disease in slums; early socialists and revolutionaries
developed a critique of industrial capitalism; hidebound mor-
alists preached that slum-dwellers were an inherently inferior
lot and deserved their squalid fates; popular writers described
the high jinks of upper-class "slummers" in low-life settings;
and novelists like Dickens, Disraeli, and Elizabeth Gaskell
used fiction to evoke sympathy for the poor and bring about
reconciliation between classes.
Social investigators like Mayhew represented yet another
tradition; Mayhew was a reformer who wished to report in
nonfictional form on the human conditions that statisticians
represented numerically. He wished to impress upon his au-
dience that the circumstances of slum life produced certain
kinds of individuals and, by implication, to suggest that con-
ditions would have to be transformed before individuals could
be redeemed or "civilized." He had to convince his public
that the people of whom he wrote were of English society
though separate from it, related to the middle class but a "race"
apart from it, fellow inhabitants of the same city but members
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