Volume 6, Number 4 · March 17, 1966
True to Life
By V.S. Pritchett
Selections from London Labour and the London Poor
by Henry Mayhew, edited by John L. Bradley
Oxford (The World's Classics), 288 pp., $2.75
Mayhew is the unique 'short and simple' analyst of the lives of the London poor in the nineteenth century. The historians still consult him; the novelists and the journalists of his own time helped themselves to the strange material he collected from the mouths of dismal or cheerful wretches between 1849 and 1862. Interest in him was revived in the Thirties of this century when the documentary movement in journalism and cinema was tormented by the difficulty of being both earnest and true to life. How did this Victorian philanthropist escape sentimentality? How did the verbatim disentangle itself from the verbose? Why was Mayhew so alive and real, and documentary so worthy and yet so dead?
Review, 2271 words
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