Hybrid Photographies in London Labour and the London Poor

Abstract

This advertisement for Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1850–62) attempts to disguise its purpose by claiming that its ‘value’ is manifestly true. That a newspaper advert would use photography as a figure for the self-evident suggests the status that it had achieved as a representational mode by 1861. Thanks to its unsurpassed level of mimetic accuracy, photography had become a common metaphor for fidelity. London Labour was not only advertised using the metaphor of photography; as we shall see, the work itself had a particularly intimate relationship with photography. 2 If the text is ‘a photograph of life’, then do the book’s actual photographs tell us something about the text itself? In particular, do they help to explain the differences between Mayhew’s earlier and later writings? It is my contention that they do. I will show that the distinctive nature of Mayhew’s images, the fact that they are hybrid daguerreotype-engravings, was concomitant with his desire to represent the poor according to an aesthetic of picturesque nobility. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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