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

the rhetorical strategies I have already discussed, but he chose
to adopt the persona of the anthropologist.
Mayhew, a satirist, journalist, amateur actor, and member
of the literary bohemia of the 1830s and 1840s (of which
Dickens and George Cruikshank were also a part), was asked
to undertake a series of articles on the conditions of the
London working poor for the Morning Chronicle in 1849. The
Chronicle appointed a number of journalists to cover various
industrial cities throughout England, and Mayhew was made
"Special Correspondent from the Metropolis." 11 The paper,
which had liberal, reformist leanings, responded to the grow-
ing middle-class interest in problems of poverty and urban
life in general. The cholera epidemic of 1849, which claimed
the lives of the urban poor in far greater numbers than the
rest of the population, served to focus even greater attention
on the social issues already brought to public consciousness
by the Depression of the early 1840s, by the Chartist Move-
ment, and by the publication in 1842 of Edwin Chadwick's
Poor Law Commission report on the sanitary conditions af-
fecting the urban poor. The middle class reacted to these
phenomenon of the decade with fear of social unrest, with
some measure of repugnance, and with an often hesitant
desire for reform.
Mayhew continued to publish his "letters" from the Me-
tropolis in the Chronicle for just over a year until, in December
of 1850, he broke with the paper and began to issue articles
from an office of his own in twopenny weekly parts. In 1851-
52 the pieces were bound together for publication as London
Labour and the London Poor, and a four-volume edition was
re-issued in 1861-62. In the Preface to the bound volumes
Mayhew identified himself as a "traveller in the undiscovered
country of the poor," who will supply information "concern-
ing a large body of persons of whom the public had less
knowledge than of the most distant tribes of the earth." 12
These remarks, as should by now be obvious, are not unusual
and do not distinguish Mayhew from the other "travellers"
who wished to capture the imaginations and sympathies of
their readers. But, as we shall see, Mayhew was after more
than sympathy: he wanted to alter the conventional judg-
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