ABSTRACT
The representation of class and youth is at the heart of the urban exploration narrative, a form of sociological journalism that proliferated in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. The Victorian exemplar of this genre, Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1861–1862), seeks to offer exhaustive information regarding the working classes, as transmitted from the pen of “the traveller in the undiscovered country of the poor” 1 to middle-class readers who can construe themselves as armchair ethnographers studying an exotic culture existing within the imperial metropolis itself. Mayhew further advertises the ethnographic novelty of his project thus: “It surely may be considered curious” because it supplies “information concerning a large body of persons, of whom the public had less knowledge than of the most distant tribes of the earth” (LL 1:xv). Mayhew here anticipates a metaphorical parallel that will become common in the latter half of the nineteenth century—a parallel between the urban “savages” of “darkest England” and the non-white “savages” of “darkest Africa.” This parallel is (as we will see in Chapter 4) most explicitly articulated in William Booth's In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890), the title of which sensationalizes Booth's topic (urban poverty) by borrowing from Henry Morton Stanley's bestseller of the same year, In Darkest Africa. In Mayhew, this racialist parallel reveals a problem of both national and imperial importance. According to Mayhew, the chief characteristic of the London poor is their uncontrolled wandering, a mobility not subject to the self-regulation that characterizes middle-class men and women who navigate the city space. For Mayhew, this unregulated mobility disqualifies the working classes from full and normative civic participation, as citizens of the English nation, in the life of the imperial metropolis. And because London is the heart of the British Empire, it is but a short discursive leap for Mayhew to compare the London poor to more “distant tribes” similarly subject to British rule without the privilege of citizenship.
