‘Victorian Journalist of Genius’? Henry Mayhew as Character in Neo-Victorian Fiction and Drama

Cette communication a été filmée dans le cadre du colloque international  "Writers in Neo-Victorian Fiction" organisé par l'équipe anglophone ERIBIA le 11 octobre 2019 à la Maison de la Recherche en Sciences Humaines de l'Université Caen Normandie, sous la responsablilité d'Armelle Parey (ERIBIA, Caen) et Charlotte Wadoux (19-21, Paris 3).

Chris Louttit is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. He researches Victorian fiction and its afterlives, and has published an article on neo-Victorian fictional responses to Mayhew’s work. Other recent publications include a co-edited special issue of Neo-Victorian Studies on screen Victoriana and a Gothic Studies piece on Tim Burton and the neo-Victorian.

Abstract

LondonLabour and the London Poor (1850-1862), the magnum opus ofVictorian social investigator and miscellaneous writer Henry Mayhew,has been mined as a source of period detail by neo-Victorian authorssince the 1980s. Matthew Kneale’s Sweet Thames (1992) andTerry Pratchett’s Dodger (2012) are even dedicated to thepioneering work of this ‘Victorian Journalist of Genius’. Morerecently, Mayhew has started to appear as a character in a variety ofneo-Victorian texts, from Pratchett’s Dodger to MichelleRoberts’s The Walworth Beauty (2017) and Penny Gold’s BBCRadio 4 Drama A Chaos of Wealth and Want (2010). My paper willexamine this intriguing textual afterlife of Mayhew, a figurewell-known to Victorianists but less familiar to the general public.It will consider the representation of Mayhew in relation to theperiod’s securely canonical authors such as Charles Dickens,Charlotte Brontë, Henry James and Oscar Wilde. Theneo-characterisation of Mayhew, I will suggest, provides insight intoresponses to the more marginal forms of authorship of the period. InMayhew’s case, it is difficult to disentangle the man from his mostfamous work. Unlike canonised authors such as Dickens and James,those representing Mayhew show little interest in his romantic life,preferring instead to view him through the lens of socialinvestigation. His authorial afterlife is a deeply metatextual onethat, in line with other forms of neo-Victorian rewriting, probes andreassesses his complex, ambiguous interactions with the Victorianworking poor from the perspective of the present day.