London Labour and the London Poor (Classics of World Literature)

Mayhew, Henry

ISBN 10: 1840226196 / ISBN 13: 9781840226195

Edité par Wordsworth Editions, 2008

A propos de cet article

Most items will be dispatched the same or the next working day. A copy that has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

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Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: London Labour and the London Poor (Classics of World Literature)
• Éditeur: Wordsworth Editions
• Date de parution: 2008
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN à 10 chiffres: 1840226196
• ISBN à 13 chiffres: 9781840226195
• Reliure: Couverture souple
• État de l'article: Very Good
• Poids: 420 grammes

A propos de ce titre

Synopsis

With an Introduction by Rosemary O'Day.

London Labour and the London Poor is a masterpiece of personal inquiry and social observation. It is the classic account of life below the margins in the greatest Metropolis in the world and a compelling portrait of the habits, tastes, amusements, appearance, speech, humour, earnings and opinions of the labouring poor at the time of the Great Exhibition.

In scope, depth and detail it remains unrivalled. Mayhew takes us into the abyss, into a world without fixed employment where skills are declining and insecurity mounting, a world of criminality, pauperism and vice, of unorthodox personal relations and fluid families, a world from which regularity is absent and prosperity has departed. Making sense of this environment required curiosity, imagination and a novelist's eye for detail, and Henry Mayhew possessed all three.

No previous writer had succeeded in presenting the poor through their own stories and in their own words, and in this undertaking Mayhew rivals his contemporary Dickens. 'To pass from one to the other', writes one authority, ' is to cross sides of the same street'.

Biographie de l'auteur

Henry Mayhew, journalist and social investigator, humorist, dramatist, novelist, and author of works of travel and popular instruction, was born in 1812. The son of a London solicitor, he was educated at Westminster School, from which he eventually ran away. Mayhew then went to sea and traveled to India before entering his father’s office, which, however, he soon quit to embark on a long and prolific literary career. He wrote a very successful farce, The Wandering Minstrel, in 1834, and was one of the cofounders of Punch in 1841. His famous book London Labour and the London Poor began publication in 1849 in The Morning Chronicle and in 1851 was released in a collected, incomplete edition, which was completed in 1861. He was also the author of The Criminal Prisons of London in 1862 and German Life and Manners in 1864. He died in 1887.

Victor E. Neuburg was born in Sussex in 1924. He was a senior lecturer at the University of North London, and a visiting professor at State College, Buffalo, Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, and Ruhr University, Bochum, as well as the Simon Foster Haven Fellow of the American Antiquarian Society. His publications included Popular Education in Eighteenth Century England, Popular Literature, The Batsford Companion to Popular Literature, and A Guide to the Western Front. He died in 1996.