Reviewed by:

• London Labour and the London Poor: Selections by Henry Mayhew
• Tamara Kaminsky (bio)

Editing and abridging Henry Mayhew’s journalistic opus, London Labour and the London Poor (1861), is no enviable task. Mayhew’s ambitious project began with an unassuming, if colourful, stand-alone article for the Morning Chronicle, “A Visit to the Cholera District of Bermondsey” (1849), and led to a renowned series in the newspaper before the enterprise developed into its own micro-industry. The print history of the work is complicated by Mayhew’s numerous assistants, multiple publishers, and various disruptions to its publication, due largely to his fractious relationships with the publishers. Its more than two million words continue to mutate with every new edition. The initial series in the Morning Chronicle [End Page 641] (September 24, 1849–October 31, 1850) consisted of seventy-six entries intimately detailing the lives and livelihoods of the poor in London. The project was plagued throughout its decades-long history with accusations that inaccuracies, exaggerations, and deliberate manipulation of statistics and quotes portrayed a bleaker and more prurient vision of London life. Such accusations led to Mayhew’s unceremonious exit from the Morning Chronicle.

It would take another decade before the full four volumes appeared in print under Mayhew’s name in 1861, though the fourth volume had multiple authors. Between 1850 and 1861 the text was transformed into various formats and serialisations, including its own twopenny publication; incorporated into the serial novel Paved with Gold (1857), largely written by Mayhew’s brother but based on material garnered from the initial project; and adapted for two theatrical tours during which Mayhew performed gratuitous impersonations of his interviewees, emulating Charles Dickens’s treatment of his own fictionalised characters. Following Dickens’s model of journalistic success and industry was an obvious trajectory for a writer whose prose read anecdotally, despite Mayhew’s insistence on the accuracy of his information gathering and interviewing techniques. Mayhew created such vivid portraits of his subjects and their decaying surroundings that his readership remained loyal to the London Labour enterprise despite its chequered publication history. The work continues to draw parallels with Dickens’s Sketches by Boz (1836) due to their descriptions of a desolate economic underclass combined with endearing characters. Whilst Mayhew and his large roster of assistants attempted to position the project as a Blue Book survey, its novelistic writing style appealed to the masses. The writing endures as a prime example of the potency of narrative journalism.

Whereas recent editions of London Labour and the London Poor have offered a neatly edited version of Mayhew’s work with beautifully rendered illustrations of his subjects, Janice Schroeder and Barbara Leckie deliberately scale back the text to its rougher origins. Instead of a small selection of completed sketches, this edition provides a wider range of Mayhew’s subjects by cutting and abridging his work into bite-sized examples. The illustrations include several pages of Mayhew’s doomed twopenny paper, its packed double-columned pages laying out prices of stationery and the income of street stationers. The editors’ chronology provides an exhaustive list of the author’s misadventures in publishing as well as his eventual successes, and detailed appendices lay the groundwork for critical study of Mayhew and his methods. For example, the complete list of chapter titles across all four volumes of London Labour and the London Poor, including their expansive subcategories, indicates that Mayhew’s taxonomical approach veered toward the fanciful rather than the scientific. Contemporary [End Page 642] reviews from both quarterly and popular publications invite important questions about the writer’s agenda. Letters from Mayhew’s subjects highlight a complex relationship between interviewers and interviewees. This edition even extracts Mayhew’s limited contributions from the fourth volume of the series, which was largely written by other authors but marketed and sold under his name. Another appendix delineates what of Mayhew’s material was reconfigured for his brother’s novel.

This recycling of text into novel is reflected, as the editors note, in the London...

审核人：

• 伦敦劳工与伦敦贫困人口：亨利·梅休（Henry Mayhew）的选集
• 塔玛拉·卡明斯基（Tamara Kaminsky）（生物）

编辑和废除亨利·梅休的新闻作品《伦敦劳工和伦敦穷人》（1861年），并不是一项令人羡慕的任务。Mayhew的雄心勃勃的项目始于一份不起眼的，色彩艳丽的独立文章，《早晨纪事报》（A849）访问贝霍姆塞霍乱区，并在企业发展成自己的报纸之前在报纸上引起了轰动。微型工业。Mayhew的众多助手，多家出版商以及出版的各种中断，使作品的印刷历史变得复杂，这在很大程度上是由于他与出版商之间的关系脆弱。它的超过200万个单词在每个新版本中都会继续发生变化。《晨晨编年史 》的初始系列[结束第641页]（1849年9月24日至1850年10月31日）包括76条详细记录了伦敦穷人的生活和生计的条目。该项目在其长达数十年的历史中一直饱受困扰，指责是对准确性和准确性的不正确，夸大和故意的操纵，以及对伦敦生活的模糊和更加敏锐的描述。这样的指控导致梅休毫不客气地退出了《晨晨编年史》。

整整四卷本都需要花十年的时间才能在1861年以梅休（Mayhew）的名字出版，尽管第四卷有多位作者。在1850年和1861年之间，文本被转换为各种格式和序列化，包括其自己的一分钱出版物。纳入连载小说《铺金》（1857），主要由梅休（Mayhew）的兄弟撰写，但基于从最初项目中获得的资料；并进行了两次戏剧巡回演出，在那次巡演中梅休（Mayhew）模仿了查尔斯·狄更斯（Charles Dickens）对他自己的虚构人物的对待，对被采访者进行了无用的模仿。尽管梅休坚持他的信息收集和采访技巧的准确性，但遵循狄更斯的新闻业成功和行业模式对于一个散文阅读的作家来说是一条明显的轨迹。梅休（Mayhew）创作了如此生动的人物肖像及其周围环境的衰落，以至于尽管其出版历史悠久，但他的读者群仍然忠于伦敦劳工组织。这项工作继续与Boz的狄更斯的素描相提并论。（1836）归因于他们描述了一个荒凉的经济下层阶级与可爱的人物。尽管Mayhew和他庞大的助手名册试图将该项目定位为“蓝皮书”调查，但其新颖的写作风格吸引了广大群众。写作作为叙事新闻学潜能的主要例证而持久。

鉴于伦敦劳工和伦敦贫困人口的最新版本Janice Schroeder和Barbara Leckie特意为Mayhew的作品提供了经过精心编辑的版本，并绘制了精美的插图，Janice Schroeder和Barbara Leckie故意将文本缩小到更粗糙的原点。此版本不是一小部分完整的草图，而是通过将Mayhew的作品切割和简化成一口大小的示例，从而提供了更广泛的Mayhew主题。插图包括Mayhew几本注定要失败的两便士纸，几页包装成两列，列出了文具的价格和街头文具的收入。编辑者的年表提供了作者在出版中的不幸经历以及他最终的成功的详尽清单，详细的附录为对Mayhew及其方法的批判性研究奠定了基础。例如，所有四个卷中的章节标题的完整列表伦敦工党和伦敦贫困人口，包括其广泛的子类别，表明梅休的分类方法转向了幻想而不是科学。季刊和热门刊物的当代[End Page 642]评论都对作者的议程提出了重要问题。Mayhew主题的来信强调了访调员和被访者之间的复杂关系。该版本甚至从该系列的第四卷中摘录了Mayhew的有限贡献，该系列主要由其他作者撰写，但以他的名字销售和出售。另一个附录描述了梅休为他弟弟的小说重新编排的材料。

正如编辑所指出的那样，这种文字到小说的再循环反映在伦敦。