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

12. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (London, 1851),
I, iii.
13. Mayhew, I, 1.
14. See J.W. Burrow, Evolution and Society (Cambridge, England, 1970),
pp. 98-99, 120-24.
15. James Cowles Prichard, The Natural History of Man (London, 1843),
p. 4.
16. Burrow argues that this and other Victorian evolutionary theories
avoided "the unpleasantly relativist implications of a world in which
many of the old certainties were disappearing" (p. 99). Mankind was
not "everywhere the same," at least not at any given moment.
17. Mayhew, I, 2.
18. Mayhew, I, 23.
19. Mayhew, I, 24.
20. Mayhew, I, 43.
21. Mayhew, I, 20.
22. Mayhew, I, 43.
23. Anne Humpherys, Travels into the Poor Man's Country: The Work of
Henry Mayhew (Athens, Georgia, 1977), p. 71.
24. Humpherys, pp. 71-72.
25. Gertrude Himmelfarb, "The Culture of Poverty," in The Victorian
City, ed. H.J. Dyos and Michael Wolff (Boston, 1973), II, 719. Anne
Humpherys concedes that Mayhew's assertions about the "wandering
tribes" do indeed "support Gertrude Himmelfarb's charge that May-
hew contributed to the idea that the poor were a class apart." She
defends Mayhew, however, by saying that the general introductory
section on street-life was "less important than the rest of his work;
it occupied only two pages out of all his volumes . . ." (Humpherys,
p. 72). Rather than offering another interpretation of the passages
in question, Humpherys simply minimizes their importance.
26. Himmelfarb, p. 711.
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