HENRY MAYHEW (1812-1887) AND

issues of mobility and freedom, But in tfreir private spaces and private realms of "primary
affections and allegiances in family and aeighbourhood"
these practices proved more
effective in promoting resistance, than did the rational perceptian of class interest as
Raymond Williams has argued. Mayfiew's panerers combined in other words. their own
indigenous cultural leadership with their own sense of prestige and culture. Mayhew
recorded how:
the patterers laugh at telegraph and express trains for rapidity of communication,
boasting that the press strives in vain to rival them - as at a 'hang@ match", for
instance. that the pattaers has the full particulars, dying speech and confission
included - if a cdession be feasible - ready fa the customers the moment the
drop falls, and while the criminal may be struggling. at the very scene of the hanging.
At a distance, he sold it befae the hanging: "if the Times was aoss-examirred about
it", observed oae patterer, "he must confess he's outdone, Wgh he's a rich Times,
and we is pm-fellows." "
Mayhew r8cocded a number of other battles, both public and private, concaning
resistance. outright intimidation, and subordination. Typically, Mayhew found that
bureaucracies wasted his time suppressing or withholding the very information he
required: "Finding my time. therefme, only wasted in dancing attendance upon city coal
officials, I made the best of my way down to the Coal-whippers' Office. to glean
distribution, amsumptim. and reproductim." Each practice retains its own uniqueness and its own
"specific modality, its own forms and conditions of existence" (Hall, 1980, 128).
l9 Williams, Raymoad, 1973. 31.
'O Mayhew, I, 229.