London Labour And The London Poor Selection Classics Mayhew by Mayhew, Henry 9780265590898, 0265590892 instant download after payment.

Excerpt from Mayhew's London: Being Selections From London Labour and the London Poor

Henceforward, the majority of writers, by necessity or habit, would be first and foremost city-dwellers; and urban life would give their work a very definite, at times harsh, but extremely individual colouring. They 'would love the city as much as they hated it. Among French writers we think immediately of Charles Baudelaire, whose imagination was deeply stirred by the spectacle of mid-nineteenth century Paris, in which the ancient and intimate metropolis of his boyhood was dissolving and disappearing; and, on this side of the English Channel, London was at once the nursery and the forcing-house of Charles Dickens's utterly dissimilar and completely anglo-saxon genius. Though it may be wrong to assert that, without London, there would have been no Dickens, it is undoubtedly true that, had he been brought up in any other city or any other period, his novels would have lost something of their peculiar strangeness. Eighteenth-century London was still small enough to be compact and personal; its industries were localized; the structure Of its social life was relatively uncomplicated. During Dickens's lifetime, however, a tremendous influx of population brought with it a corresponding loss of freedom, health and dignity. The individual was submerged in the mass of anonymous toilers, whose whole world was circumscribed by the bricks-and-mortar of whatever nook or cranny they had been shoved into by circum stance. From the ranks Of these little people, these waifs and Oddities and misfits, human rubbish thrown up by the struggle for existence conducted on principles of economic laissez faire, the novelist drew the raw material of those fascinating minor personages who consti tute the all-important background Of any Dickens story - the creepers and the climbers, the grovellers and the schemers, scramb ling over one another in the dark confusion of their pestiferous urban ant's-nest.

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