Abstract
Current scholarship on walking in literature has focused on the reflective walks of middle-class subjects, which may resemble either the rural excursions of the Romantic poets or the urban perambulations of the flâneur. Henry Mayhew’s depiction of laboring walkers in his London Labour and the London Poor offers a different perspective, which Womack examines in this chapter. She explores the implications of Mayhew’s reminder that while the middle-class walk of leisure is associated with observation and reflection, the lower-class walk is correlated with suspicion, scrutiny and regulation. As Womack shows, the labourer’s walk, even for Mayhew, communicated a message of humility, industry and physical need: a set of qualities inconsistent with the rumination almost universally embodied by the writing, walking subject.
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Notes
- 1.
Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 4 vols. [1861–2] (New York, 1968), I, 151. Future references to volume and page number appear parenthetically in the text.
- 2.
Anne D. Wallace, Walking, Literature, and English Culture: The Origins and Uses of Peripatetic in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1995), 3.
- 3.
For one example of this phrase used in context, see Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood (New York, 2009), 22.
- 4.
Wallace, Walking, Literature, and English Culture, 166; see also Jeffrey Robinson, The Walk: Notes on a Romantic Image (Norman, 1989), 6, 25.
- 5.
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’, in his The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire (Cambridge, MA, 2006), 66.
- 6.
William Wordsworth, ‘Preface’, in his Lyrical Ballads with Pastoral and Other Poems (London, 1802), vii.
- 7.
Benjamin, ‘Paris of the Second Empire’, 67–8.
- 8.
Anne Humphreys, ‘Henry Mayhew (25 November 1812–25 July 1887)’, in Ira Bruce Nadel and William E. Fredeman (eds), Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 18, Victorian Novelists after 1885 (Detroit, 1983), 167–71.
- 9.
See, for example, vendors of Christmas greenery (I, 142), a stationery seller (I, 271), sellers of tan-turf (II, 88), matchsticks (I, 329), and the nutmeg-grater seller (I, 432).
- 10.
Paul Slack, The English Poor Law, 1531–1782 (Cambridge, 1995), 51.
- 11.
Samuel Mencher, Poor Law to Poverty Program: Economic Security Policy in Britain and the United States (Pittsburgh, 1967), 127.
- 12.
Ibid., 16.
- 13.
Ibid., 127.
- 14.
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo4/5/83 (accessed 15 August 2015).
- 15.
Donna Landry, ‘Radical Walking’, Open Democracy, 19 December 2001, http://www.opendemocracy.net/ecology-climate_change_debate/article_465.jsp (accessed 15 August 2013).
- 16.
Haia Shpayer-Makov, The Making of a Policeman: The Social History of a Labour Force in Metropolitan London, 1829–1914 (Aldershot, 2002), 5.
- 17.
Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York, 1983), 31.
- 18.
The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. I, The Table of the Springs of Action (Edinburgh, 1838), 214, quoted in Catherine Gallagher, The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel (Princeton, 2006), 24.
- 19.
John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (Amherst, 2004), 51, quoted in Gallagher, Body Economic, 59–60.
- 20.
According to Boyd Hilton, nineteenth-century evangelical thought inflected economic discourse, suggesting that competition and want reflected God’s will, and, moreover, that economic fluctuations promoted ‘moral and spiritual benefits’: B. Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865 (Oxford, 1988), 32. Carlyle’s version of this doctrine had less to do with salvation than with human potential. According to Carlyle, ‘a man perfects himself by working’; ‘[E]ven in the meanest sorts of Labour, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony’: Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (London, 1894), 169; on Carlyle’s influence, see Walter Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870 (New Haven, 1957), 251.
- 21.
Gallagher, Body Economic, 24.
- 22.
See, for example, Mayhew’s note regarding such a donation following his accounts of a ‘groundsel and chickweed seller’ and a ‘standing patterer’ (I, 153–5, 233–4).
- 23.
A search for the phrase ‘as you walk’ in the Chadwyck-Healey Early English Books Online (EEBO) database generates over 100 hits. One of these is a guide to Italian art that invites viewers to consider ornamentation ‘as you walk’: Giacomo Barri, The Painters Voyage of Italy in which All the Famous Paintings of the Most Eminent Masters are Particularised, as They are Preserved in the Several Cities of Italy, trans. W. L. (London, 1679), 45. Another is a guide to surviving a plague epidemic that recommends that readers hold a clove in their mouths ‘as you walke in the streets’: Francis Herring, Certaine Rules, Directions, or Advertisements for This Time of Pestilentiall Contagion With a Caveat to Those that Weare about Their Neckes Impoisoned Amulets as a Preservative from the Plague (London, 1636), B1.
- 24.
An authorial audience is the imagined audience projected by a specific text. The term is common in narratological studies. For an example of a critical text that discusses the actual versus the authorial audience, see Brian Richardson, ‘Reception and the Reader’, in David Herman, James Phelan, Peter J. Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson and Robyn Warhol (eds), Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates (Columbus, 2012), 155.
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Womack, E.C. (2016). Walking as Labour in Henry Mayhew’s London. In: Bryant, C., Burns, A., Readman, P. (eds) Walking Histories, 1800-1914. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48498-7_5
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