Work, Poverty and Modernity in Mayhew's London
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12554010 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Donna Loftus (0009-0005-7411-8364, Hong Kong Metropolitan University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2014 |
| Volume | 19 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 507-519 |
| Publication date | 2014-10-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Victorian Culture (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1355-5502 • E-ISSN: 1750-0133 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1080/13555502.2014.967547 |
| OpenAlex | W1969104931 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 5 |
At the end of his inquiry into work in late-nineteenth-century London for the second series of Life and Labour of the People in London, Charles Booth noted that his extensive interviews and detailed statistics confirmed the impression of life that one gets from a London street corner: of an 'energetic people', most of whom are 'keenly pursuing some aim'. He was uncertain as to whether the fast-paced metropolitan economy that his inquiry revealed, characterized by small business, insecurity, low wages and intense competition, was good or bad or simply inevitable. He asked his readers 'must we learn patiently to endure the evils we cannot cure?' 1 Forty years earlier, Henry Mayhew's investigation of London trades also revealed a world of work that pitted workers against each other in a competitive struggle driving down prices and wages. Like Booth, Mayhew was uncertain as to what it all meant. At times he was sure that 'over toil and under pay' would spiral down dragging the wider population of workers into poverty; at other times he expressed hope in a future of enlightened capitalism that put well-managed, interdependent capital and labour at the centre of prosperous and peaceful communities. In this context, Mayhew's revelations of a London manufacturing economy composed of small masters and trading operatives who produced articles for immediate sale, sometimes directly through hawking on the street and sometimes to middlemen, sometimes working alone and sometimes subcontracting, presented what looked like a stubborn barrier to progress. Without factories and with an apparently declining number of artisans, with a work force that was neither capital nor labour, the labour question in London seemed irresolvable. Mayhew resorted to fear-mongering, castigating the small master as a new social evil that needed to be eradicated
Ambivalence · Capital (architecture · Capitalism · Contradiction · Demonization · Economic growth · Economics · Modernity · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Poverty · Sociology · Speculation · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Political Economy and Marxism
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,33 |
| Citation span | 2020 - 2022 (3) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |