Henry Mayhew and the Participatory Reading Culture of Victorian Investigative Journalism

Book History, vol. 25, no. 1 © 2022 The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing In the winter of 1849–50, the Metropolitan Correspondent for the Morning Chronicle visited the Asylum for the Houseless Poor at Playhouse-Yard, London. One of the hundreds of destitute people finding refuge at the Asylum was a young woman who worked at velvet embossing. In Henry Mayhew’s account of the visit for the “Labour and the Poor” series on the Metropolitan Districts, he describes the woman as “comely, and modestly spoken . . . She was scrupulously clean and neat in her dress; indeed it was evident, even from her appearance, that she belonged to a better class than the ordinary inmates of the Asylum.”1 As she spoke with the journalist, she sighed heavily, and stared at the ground, speaking in a “very sorrowful” voice: