HENRY MAYHEW (1812-1887) AND

form of aati-culture, an aaoj-pactice, a Libeating escape fmm &cia1
instimtions." " Maykw's
pwtchinellos, fa example, exposed t t c01lVemioaal ~ mask of life though the carnivalesque; in
effim, his street people were 'life's wrrnaskers who do not belag to any social categary, but
exist in homeless. dm- opposition to rhcm"
In dux wordr. Mayhew's nomadic characters
parodied civihd, bourgeois pattans of thought and bebaviout in captivating and yet
carnivalesque ways.
Mayfiew's adveantres into unhmMl space were thus objects of literary consumptiar. He
went to the markaplace to supposedly just red the life and times of Ladon's strm-fdk, but
in reality, with his idea already in h d in 1849, Mayhew, thflaneur, went to the Morning
Chronicle offices as a reports "'to fiml a buyer" 32 as well as an audieace. Readers uxresporded
directly with Mayhew through tk newspaper, as we have seen Ad the Wvidual bourgeois who
fdt the need to comment publicly on issues of &ate
Lnew that a letter sent by him to the offices
of the Morning Chronicle 'hit the stnxts' completely on tk strength of his sranrting as an
individual alone." Hae was a divase audience of imasecting geaaatioas and social classes that
was created by this growing literate, Victorian popular culture, which, in turn, was part of the
European bourgeois self-image. Fa tk popular classes fell under the influence of this dominant
bourgeois culture because it was, in a sense, the only culture that operated as such The very
construction of a standard oatioaal language and the very processes of writing aad schooling
belonged, in fact, to them Intaspersed throughout London Labour's pages was Richard Beard's
'' bid. When Rabelnis Md His World MiLbnil Bslrbtin's first book to be published in English, appwd in
1968, the autha was unknown in the west. Today* Balchtin (1895-1975) became widely known in the
humanities generally f a his "language obsession" as tbe scholar, Michael Holquist called it (Bakhtia, 1984,
p. viii): "bis fundamental roots in fdk culture with carnival as its indispensable canpoaent insists that art is
oriented towards cammwicatioa, that is human behaviour is cammunicaticm and that it is always 'goaldireaed"'.