Henry Mayhew led an interesting life, to say the least, and co-founded Punch, the famous satirical magazine, in 1841. In his multivolume study London Labour and the London Poor (1851, 1861-62), he gives us a look at England’s early sociological thinking. The impulse we find in Mayhew and others to categorize and taxonomize various poor Londoners exists alongside the English drive towards reform legislation, blue-ribbon commissions to study this or that social problem, and so forth.
Mayhew offers quite a lot of useful information on the lives of the people he interviews, and while his work isn’t the product of modern, reliable statistics, it’s a plus that he doesn’t high-handedly “speak for” poor people but instead draws from them their own stories, in anecdotal form. Alongside this healthy practice is some admixture of what we would call racist or otherwise biased, essentialist assumption-making regarding why disadvantaged people live the way they live.
Even so, Mayhew seems aware that it’s mainly people’s circumstances that make them act and think they way they do—not some innate, ineradicable curse upon their ancestry, their alleged biological inferiority, or anything of that sort. This insight (one that Marx and Engels demonstrate to a more radical degree—they say “consciousness is determined by life”) somewhat slips away from Mayhew when he uses terminology such as “nomad” and “savage” to describe struggling Londoners. Even so, we should credit him with genuine insight and with a willingness to accept middle-class and upper-class moral responsibility for the poor’s misery. (See pg. 336 middle for this acceptance.)
In Carlyle and Ruskin, we see moralist Victorian sage-writers develop their own solutions to Victorian Britain’s troubles, and we find J. S. Mill the Utilitarian philosopher promoting liberty and a refinement of the Benthamite “greatest happiness principle” (a very present- and future-oriented approach, as opposed to Carlyle and Ruskin’s tendency to praise past social arrangements for their stability). We can now add to these writers the proto-sociologist Henry Mayhew working out a first draft, so to speak, of the modern sociological approach to poverty and unemployment.