Henry Mayhew
So, when not writing the adventures of Matthew Swift as Kate Griffin, I write children’s books – the adventures of Horatio Lyle – as Catherine Webb. (Which you may or may not enjoy, I dunno…?) These are stories set in Victorian London about a part-time detective and his unlikely mates, but the real point of this entry, apart from to say all of the above, is to talk about Henry Mayhew.
With my historian’s nerdy hat on, I gotta say right now, I love primary sources. It’s all very well being told by historians of today that in the dark old days the streets of London were knee-deep in horse manure, but when you read the actual documents written by the people of London who lived in London at the time, you get so much more. You get a sense of the stink of it, the feel of it, the noise and the bustle, the casual attitude of the inhabitants towards filth and the outrage of the people towards the conditions they live in, all jumbled up together; you get street seller’s cries and verbatim stories of nasty things done by improbable characters – you get, in short, a fantastic story, that has the added benefit of being real. And Henry Mayhew, praised be to historical fore-thought, left posterity one of the most comprehensive, most exciting accounts of Victorian London as he was living in it that I have ever read.
That said, the guy suffers from statistics, and in doing so arguably proves the point that there are lies, damn lies, and statistics – but he also spent years walking the streets of London and talking to everyone and everything from every class and every walk of society, going into places where even Charles Dickens (a man who prided himself on being indomitable) would hesitate to wander. The London of Mayhew reads like another world, full of rookeries and slums, no-go areas and vast contrasts and, if you ever find yourself contemplating the history of London and wanting to get to know it a little bit more, I heartily recommend the works of Henry Mayhew as an entertaining and wonderfully enlightening read.
