ABSTRACT
Historiography has considered Henry Mayhew’s inquiries into the London manufacturing trades and London street people. These inquiries were initiated in serial publications between the years 1850 and 1852. The texts considered by historiography are only a small portion of Mayhew’s huge and remarkably diverse published output which included plays, novels, biographies, travelogues, and educational philosophy. A methodological credo is always present and always the same in all Mayhew’s texts, in the Morning Chronicle letters, in London Labour, and in Criminal Prisons. Radical historiography has praised Mayhew’s treatment of dual-sector trades as an analysis of the unacceptable face of mid-Victorian capitalism. Mayhew began to consider the theory of low wages in some of the later Morning Chronicle letters and in his speech to the tailors. Mayhew provides the economic theory of the artisan manufacturing trade as surely as Marshall provides the economic theory of the Lancashire cotton firm.
