ABSTRACT
A bohemian journalist and writer of light fiction, Mayhew was just the man to breathe life into the dry bones of social investigation. He became the Chronicle’s ‘Special Correspondent for the Metropolis’, and his ‘letters’ which ran for just over a year, were an enormous popular success. London was a city rapidly polarising between the fashionable town life of Kensington and Belgravia and the vicious low life of the East End. In ‘Outcast London’, on the other hand, Mayhew, Charles Dickens and other explorers attempted to penetrate the thickets of class prejudice and reveal, from below, the rough comedy of low life. Slummers generally stand in opposition to those optimistic writers who stress the finer features of city life. They are natural allies of the ‘knockers’, the prophets of doom and disillusionment who decry the pretensions of real estate promoters, business tycoons and other city boosters.
