Volume 3

London labour and the London poor : a cyclopaedia of the condition and earnings of those that will work, those that cannot work, and those that will not work. / by Henry Mayhew.

  • Henry Mayhew
Date:
1851
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: London labour and the London poor : a cyclopaedia of the condition and earnings of those that will work, those that cannot work, and those that will not work. / by Henry Mayhew. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    LONDON LABOUR AND THE LONDON POOR. THOSE THAT WILL NOT WORK. INTROD I enter upon this part of ray subject -with a deep sense of the misery, the vice, the I ignorance, and the, want that encompass us j on every side—I enter upon it after much I grave attention to the subject, observing { closely, reflecting patiently, and generaliz- I ing cautiously upon the phenomena and causes of the vice and crime of this city—I l enter upon it after a thoughtful study of the habits and character of the outcast class generally—I enter upon it, moreover, not only as forming an integral and most | Important part of the task I have imposed ] upon myself, but from a wish to divest the ] public mind of certain idols of the plat- I form and conventicle— idols peculiar to ! our own time, and unknown to the great Father of the inductive philosophy—and idols, too, that appear to me greatly to obstruct a proper understanding of the subject. Further, I am led to believe that I can contribute some new facts concerning the physics and economy of vice and crime generally, that will not only make the solution of the social problem more easy to us, but, setting more plainly before us some of its latent causes, make us look with more pity and less anger on those who want the fortitude to resist their influence; and induce us, or at least the more earnest among us, to apply ourselves steadfastly to the removal or alleviation of those social evils that appear to create so large a pro- portion of the vice and crime that we seek by punishment to prevent. Such are the ultimate objects of my present labours: the result of them is given. to the world with an earnest desire to better the condition of the wretched social outcasts of whom I have now to UCTION. treat, and to contribute, if possible, my mite of good towards the common weal. Bat though such be my ultimate object, let me here confess that my immediate aim is the elimination of the truth; without this, of course, all other principles must be sheer sentimentality—sentiments being, to my mind, opinions engendered by the feelings rather than the judgment. The attainment of the truth, then, will be my primary aim ; but by the truth, I wish it to be understood, I mean something more than the bare facts. Facts, according to my ideas, are merely the elements of truths, and not the truths themselves ; of all mat- ters there are none so utterly useless by themselves as your mere matters of fact. A fact, so long as it remains an isolated fact, is a dull, dead, uninformed thing ; no object nor event by itself can possibly give us any knowledge, we must compare it with some other, even to distinguish it; and it is the distinctive quality thus developed that constitutes the essence of a thing—that is to say, the point by which we cognize and recognise it when again presented to us. A fact must be assimilated with, or dis- criminated from, some other fact or facts, in order to be raised to the dignity of a truth, and made to convey the least know- ledge to the mind. To say, for instance, that in the year 1850 there were 26,813 criminal offenders in England and Wales, is merely to oppress the brain with the record of a fact that, per se, is so much mental lumber. This is the very mum- mery of statistics; of what rational good can such information by itself be to any person '( who can tell whether the num- ber of offenders in that year be large or