HENRY MAYHEW (1812-1887) AND

and accuracy of the dialogues, and the immediacy and vividness of the street-folk themselves;
second there is a constant obsession with encyclopaedic and exhaustive techniques as well as
subject matter, which is used in highly intellectualized ways; third, the elaborate, charming and
carnivalesque ways that Mayhew's nomadic characters parody civilized bourgeois Victorian
patterns of thought and behaviour are certainly evident; founh, the revelation of characters.
experiences, and events using dialogic interviewing techniques is noteworthy. It should not be
difficult for the reader to see, as the dissertation unfolds. that these four points describe elements
in London Labour, elements, which relate to the genre of the novel, satire and confession
respectively. Lundon Labour is a complete Menippea. or more specifically, a genre of the
carnival/grotesque (as in the illustrations in the Appendix and the humorous dialogue of Chapter
5, etc. ). X3 HOW did this parricular literary genre actually work in practice, and how did ir fir info
the history of documentation as well as reception This is why I introduce the question of genre.
not simply to add a literary dimension to a complex prose documentation of urban life, but to
explain its direct affect and ambivalence toward the subject itself as in the case of Mayhew's
exhaustive documentation of "unreal facts" in relationship to a feeling of terror as well as fantasy
(see page 108). At one level, Mayhew is trying to persuade his readers to accept his middle-class
reformist values, but, in fact, what he creates is a tension between his poor and the middle-class
readers. and that this inteltectual tension is central to the way Mayhew uses the Menippea. For
Mayhew, the satirist. the genre of the Menippea (cornic/grotesque) was able to create a broad-
brush, panoramic view of London from both inside and outside the city with the whole Victorian,
middle-class world as its target. These, then. are some of these critical issues that are discussed in
Chapters 4, 5,6.
'' Ibid.