The London Labor and the London Poor

[Dieppe]

I ran across this interesting story while searching for "concertina" in Google Books. It's from a book "London Labour and the London Poor," by Henry Mayhew, and William Tuckniss published in 1861.

 

Concertina Player on the Steamboats

[Leo]

I ran across this interesting story while searching for "concertina" in Google Books. It's from a book "London Labour and the London Poor," by Henry Mayhew, and William Tuckniss published in 1861.

 

Concertina Player on the Steamboats

Hi Patrick

 

That's a nice little story. I kind of wish kids today could do the same thing, but I'm afraid they would be arrested. Too bad.

 

Thanks

Leo

[MarkvN]

Thanks, that's a nice find!

I wonder whether the stories are fact or fiction? The comments at the bottom of the page of googlebook seem to point in both ways. Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia....the_London_Poor) mentions 'interviews', and indeed it seems impossible to make up stories with so many seemingly factual details?

Cheers, Mark

[Guest HallelujahAl!]

Dan Worrall (of this parish) quotes extensively this account and a number of other similar accounts in his 'Anglo-German Concertina History', it's just come out in a third/revised edition, and makes for fantastic reading. I thoroughly recommend it - it's available from www.amazon.com

[Dan Worrall]

Thanks for the plug, Al!

 

Mark, of course they are factual. Mayhew worked on these stories for years, at first as a reporter for a daily newspaper. Allan Atlas wrote a bit about Mayhew, and his Steamboat concertina-player story, in PICA a few years back

http://www.concertina.org/ica/index.php/pica/subject-index/39-historical-documents/92-mayhews-concertina-player-on-the-steamboats

 

The pervasive and staggering poverty of London in the Victorian era is difficult to come to grips with today. There was little of what we would recognize as middle class...perhaps 15% of the population...and other than the 1-2% wealthy this left everyone else in the working class, looking for their next meal. Many if not most of the street people were refugees from rural England, where agriculture was withering under the dual threat of global competition and mechanizations. Mayhew wrote voluminously on the poor, and to read through much of it, it must indeed seem like another universe. Especially because at that time the British Empire was at the height of its global power.

 

He wrote quite a lot on street buskers. There is a good story of a blackface minstrel band that played concertina...I included some of that in my books. Others have written quite a lot about professional buskers of that day, and from period divorce court proceedings I even put together some notes about the economics of street busking...much more lucrative than it would be today, when we have so much free entertainment.

 

If you are interested in reading more about the poverty and teeming streets of London in Victorian times, check out a 2008 non-fiction book by Jerry White titled "London in the 19th Century." I highly recommend it; there is a cheap paperback version available.

 

There are of course places today in the third world whose descriptions resemble the massive poverty in a megacity that Mayhew and Jerry White describe of 19th C. London. In the 1990s I spent some time in Lagos Nigeria....a town with 8 million folks and, at that time, no traffic lights or street lights. The streets were thronged with costermongers of various types, and at night the only light seemed to be that which emanated from the charcoal hibachi-style grills on which the street vendors were cooking up their wares. On the way through the city to the hotel, we passed beggars, lepers, and the working poor by the thousands. Individuals selling tires, vegetables, haunches of meat, housewares and the like walked in between the cars, oblivious to the dangers of rush hour traffic in the dark. The only lights from the traffic consisted of red brake lamps; Nigerian drivers didn't use headlamps (a waste of the battery, I was told!) Meanwhile, those very few with money lived in vertical high rise palaces, heavily guarded. I was reading Mayhew at the time, and Victorian London seemed to make sense.

 

White's book describes the long term steps London took to deal with that teeming poverty, and the slow change of that city and others into the modern, mostly middle-class places that they are today...where remaining poverty has been on the decline for decades. Part of that struggle involved raising the expectations of the poor for something better...and making the rich aware of their responsibilities for the public good. The Salvation Army and other temperance organizations were doing much of the heavy lifting, more so than the government back then....all those concertinas were being used for a good cause!

 

Cheers,

Dan

[MarkvN]

Hi Dan,

Thanks a lot!

Mark