Autumn 2012 Catalogue (12.4 Mb) - Hesperus Press

November 2012
The Wayward Genius of Henry Mayhew
Pioneering Reportage from Victorian London
Henry Mayhew
Edited by Karl Sabbagh
A selection from the two million or so words written by Henry
Mayhew during his investigations of the lives of poor working
people in Victorian London. The extracts are chosen to show the
versatility of this much-neglected writer.
The 200th anniversary of Henry Mayhew’s birth is overshadowed
by that of his friend and collaborator Charles Dickens. But in fact
Mayhew was a pioneering investigative journalist whose writings
and descriptions may have inspired some of Dickens’ characters.
In some respects, Mayhew was his own worst enemy. He was
disorganised – one of his books ended in mid-sentence – and
cantankerous, and perhaps as a result his funeral was sparsely
attended.
But embedded in his fine reportage, which included long and
moving interviews with Londoners, are passages descriptive of
London, of people’s appearances and of their shabby homes,
which stand alongside Dickens’ own writings for the quality and
compassion of the prose.
Henry Mayhew was a Victorian writer and journalist. One of the
co-founders of Punch, he went on to write a two million-word epic
survey of the lives of the London poor.
978 1 84391 378 8 • B-PB original • 120pp • Non-fiction • £9 • World
non-exclusive
978 1 78094 053 3 • eBook
14
‘A picture of human life so wonderful, so awful,
so piteous and pathetic, so exciting and terrible,
that readers of romances own they never read
anything like it’
W.M. Thackeray, on Henry Mayhew’s
London Labour and the London Poor