ABSTRACT
In a short, but very interesting section of his essay on ‘youth surveillance and display’, Dick Hebdige draws attention to the fact that a history of concern for problems of juvenile delinquency can be traced back at least as far as the midnineteenth century.1 Hebdige specifically mentions the work of Henry Mayhew as a ‘celebrated’ instance of this concern. A man of many parts and several careers, Mayhew was primarily a journalist who began to publish his own survey of urban poverty and conditions of labour in the London Morning Chronicle during 1849-50.2 Subsequently, in his book London Labour and the London Poor (1851), Mayhew extended the poverty survey to include details of domestic life, moral attitudes and what today we might recognize as aspects of the ‘lived culture’ of sections of the metropolitan working class. Indeed another commentator on Mayhew, Eileen Yeo, has suggested that this later work, especially the study of costermongers, amounts to a ‘full blown cultural study, treating them at length as a group with distinctive social habits’. She argues that Mayhew was groping ‘towards the concept of sub-culture which he could not, in the end, successfully formulate’.3
