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

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ments of his audience by forcing it to see the working poor through the lens of moral science. On the first page of this first volume, devoted to detailed accounts of London "street-folk"—sellers, buyers, finders, performers, artizans, pedlars, and laborers—Mayhew places himself among the "ethnologists." 13 He introduces the work of Dr. James Prichard on "wandering tribes," those groups of people who are neither pure nomads nor settlers but a "race" in between that attaches itself to various "civilized" tribes all over the globe. Such wanderers, according to Dr. Prichard in his Natural History of Man, have languages, physical characteristics, customs, and moral systems distinct from those of the settled tribes with whom they intermingle. James Cowles Prichard, the ethnologist Mayhew mentions, was a leading member of the London Ethnological Society, founded in 1843, and the most influential British theorist of "monogenesis." Prichard and fellow-members of the Society believed, that is, in the " 'cherished unity of mankind' ": all of humanity was the product of a single seed, although various groups—or tribes—were to be found at different stages of development in the same evolutionary process. 14 There is essentially one race, and all variations among humankind can be attributed to differences in external conditions and to the different influences that derive from these conditions: That so great differences in external conditions, by the double influence of their physical and moral agency, should have ef- fected during a long series of ages remarkable changes in the tribes of human beings subject to their operation,—changes which have rendered these several tribes fitted in a peculiar manner for their respective abodes,—is by no means an im- probable conjecture. .. . 15 Wandering tribes, then, would share the same characteristics—physical as well as "moral"—because they exist as nomads, under the same general conditions. Mankind is one but different, all of it moving toward a single point but at a varying pace. 16 "It is curious," Mayhew concludes after establishing Prich- ard's theories, "that no one has yet applied the above facts 129
to the explanation of certain anomalies in the present state of society among ourselves. That we, like the Kaffirs, Fellahs and Finns, are surrounded by wandering hordes—the 'sonquas' and the 'fingoes' of this country—paupers, beggars and out- casts. . . ." 17 Mayhew will, of course, go on to be the one to do just that, to treat the street-folk of London as an ethnologist observing foreign tribes. Using categories determined by the perception of street-folk as a separate culture, he cat- alogues their histories, dress, food, religion, language, poli- tics, earnings, amusements, and education. The culture of the streets is not, however, monolithic in Mayhew's view: costermongers, prostitutes, pickpockets, watermen, and street- ballad sellers all have different ways of thinking and behaving, as well as working. In a section devoted to the "backwards slang" of costermongers Mayhew maintains the ethnologist's pose when he remarks that "in my present chapter the language has, I believe, been reduced to orthography for the first time." 18 The costers' slang, Mayhew explains, is the result of their desire to "shield their bargainings at market, or their conversation . . . from the knowledge of any Irish or unini- tiated fellow-traders." 19 What appears a humorous or frivo- lous habit of speech to the "traveller" among the poor actually has its origins in the structure and customs of labor. Mayhew takes an anthropologist's interest in the rules and mores that govern conjugal behavior among the street-folk. Costermen resemble North American Indians, he asserts, in their conduct toward their wives: they regard their women as "inexperienced servants" and punish female "disobedi- ence" with physical abuse. 20 Among certain street-sellers ma- trimony is regarded as a waste of time and money: only one- tenth of all coster couples are legally married, and fidelity is as common among the unwed as among the wed. 21 But May- hew wishes to emphasize that financial prohibitions make wedlock an undesirable choice. In Clerkenwell, he adds by way of evidence, as many as one-fifth of all coster couples do marry, quite simply because the incumbent of the parish marries them free of charge at Advent and Easter. If notions of morality among these people "agree strongly . . . with those of many savage tribes," if these "Nomades of England neither 130
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Page 5 and 6: and an agent of godlessness. It is
Page 7: the rhetorical strategies I have al
Page 11 and 12: iations in that behavior. He did no
Page 13: 12. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and

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