Hybrid Photographies in London Labour and the London Poor

2 Hybrid Photographies in London Labour and the London Poor It would be a work of supererogation to extol the utility of such a publication as ‘London Labour and the London Poor,’ so apparent must be its value to all classes of society. It stands alone as a photograph of life as actually spent by the lower classes of the Metropolis.1 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. Critics have tended to vary in their assessment of Mayhew’s journal- ism depending upon which part of his voluminous output they are examining. They have been more or less united, however, in ignoring or denigrating London Labour’s images. Sean Shesgreen’s assessment that the poor in Mayhew’s daguerreotypes are ‘sullen, lifeless lumps’ is fairly 24 O. Clayton, Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850–1915 © Owen Clayton 2015 Hybrid Photographies in London Labour 25 typical, as is Wolfgang Kemp’s insistence that the photographs do not merit consideration within the social documentary tradition.3 Even gen- erally sympathetic scholars have overlooked the techniques employed in the pictures’ production. For instance, while Thomas Prasch notes that Mayhew’s images are based on a ‘three-step process’, he does not go into detail regarding the differences between the daguerreotype and other photographic technologies, or the effect of the daguerreotypes being illustrated and engraved.4 A lack of methodological analysis has led to Mayhew’s images being relegated to a more or less peripheral place in his project. At least some of Mayhew’s contemporary readers saw a direct con- nection between his work and the work of photography. Recalling the text’s impact, Charles Mackay wrote that it was ‘as if some unparalleled photographic apparatus was brought to portray fresh from the life the very minds … of the people’.5 As well as being important for the way that the text was received, photography was influential in how Mayhew himself saw the related processes of writing and recording. For example, in his preface to The Upper Rhine, a travel narrative published in 1858, he argued that writing was analogous to painting. He then compared this ‘word painting’ to photography: the photograph gives but the particular and accidental look of an individual for the mere moment that he is in front of the camera, whilst high class portraiture [in paint] depicts the general expression distinctive of the character of the man, and thus points [to] his very spirit as it were.6 Mayhew distinguishes between two different forms of visual media, suggesting that photography captures the surface appearance of things in an ‘accidental’ manner while the human arts (painting and writing) reveal the ‘very spirit’ of a person. Although apparently second- ary in this formulation, photography is still an important part of the information-gathering process. Extolling his ability to detect a person’s character, Mayhew uses a metaphor that combines painting with the photographic: ‘if you be at all skilled in moral photography, you require to see them only for a short time afterwards just to know the precise colours in which to paint them’.7 For Mayhew, ‘moral photography’ captures raw fact while ‘word painting’ interprets those facts. This mixed metaphor is not an accident: he had already combined the two arts in a previous work, The Rhine and its Picturesque Scenery (1856), in which he described vision as a ‘tiny photograph, painted on the retina’.8 26 Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850–1915 As we shall see, he had become familiar with synthesising media through his work on London Labour. London Labour’s daguerreotype-engravings encapsulate Mayhew’s methodology as a reporter. They combine the verisimilitude of photography with picturesque illustration, helping him to provoke sym- pathy while also providing a vivid and entertaining tour of London’s poorer areas. As we shall see, Mayhew exerted directorial control over his lower-working-class subjects, putting them into deliberate poses, and at the same time claiming that his pictures (and by extension, the text) were scientifically impartial. Yet his photographs were, of course, far from neutral. They inherited different visual traditions, including photographic realism, ethnology, typology, and the picturesque. After examining the first three of these visual modes in the opening half of this chapter, I will outline the history of the picturesque and its prob- lematic engagement with poverty, particularly in relation to the city. I will argue that Mayhew utilised the picturesque in the illustrated sec- tions of his images, as well as in his written interviews. In presenting the individuality of his subjects, he went beyond the generic picturesque depiction of urban poverty. Mayhew exploited photography’s cultural status to give his study the appearance of objectivity, using illustration to provide more subjective details. As we shall see, however, this approach ran into difficulty around 1856. During an investigation of the industry that grew up around wet-plate collodion photography, he visited several working-class photographers and observed the various ways in which they cheated their customers. This led him to reassess his own use of photographic illustration. As he saw it, these working-class practitioners devalued and demeaned photography. As a result, using picturesque images to represent destitution no longer had the same validity for him. By 1861 he had changed his outlook completely. In his later work, he discussed photography’s claims to realism with anger and explicitly denied that the picturesque was a suitable visual mode for examining poverty. His rejection of photography looked ahead to its com- mercial expansion in conjunction with a more superficial version of the picturesque. Photography and objectivity Mayhew began his journalistic odyssey in 1849, when he reported on a severe outbreak of cholera for the Morning Chronicle newspaper. He received huge publicity for these articles, which ran from September 1849 to December 1850. The series’ popularity encouraged him to Hybrid Photographies in London Labour 27 expand his investigations. After leaving the Chronicle, he self-published London Labour in weekly parts between December 1850 and February 1852. During this period, he engaged Richard Beard to take pictures of his working-class subjects. Mayhew printed one image with each weekly edition. As author, editor, and publisher of London Labour, he exercised enormous control over these images. Early photography was associated with modernity, progress, verisimilitude, and positivism. Thus Mayhew, who compared his work with that of a ‘natural philosopher or a chemist’, used photographs because they gave his text scientific credibility.9 As daguerreotypes could not be printed on paper, they had to be reproduced using wood engraving. That he chose to illustrate the text in this way, rather than using draw- ings or engravings not from photographs, shows his determination to publish pictures that were as close to daguerreotypes as possible. In contrast, sketches were added to the Chronicle articles when they were reproduced in The Penny Illustrated News. Of course, Mayhew’s engravers could have worked with subjects directly in front of them, but he chose to give them photographs. The photographic source was in this sense the ‘original’, replacing the flesh-and-blood person. For Mayhew, and for his readership, an engraving ‘from a daguerreotype’ conveyed a more accurate sense of what he saw in the slums than one from other sources. To make their provenance clear, his engravings have an italicised note at the foot of each page, stating ‘From a daguerreotype by Beard’. Mayhew could also have chosen to illustrate his pages using Fox Talbot’s calotype. Indeed, given that the calotype printed onto paper, we might find Mayhew’s choice initially surprising. There are practical reasons why he did not do so – for one thing, print- ing photographs directly was expensive, and Talbot had imposed strin- gent patent conditions on his invention. However, given that Mayhew could still have had the images engraved, and that the daguerreotype was also under patent in England, these reasons are not wholly suffi- cient. His decision is explained by the fact that the calotype had come to be associated more with artistic or painterly images, whereas the daguerreotype’s greater level of detail seemed to fit it more for scientific work.10 According to Margaret Denton, critics who were interested in claiming photography for art tended to privilege the grainier calotype.11 At the Great Exhibition of 1851, for example, photographs printed on paper were more often noted for their ‘artistic effects’ than were their daguerrean rivals.12 It is true that there were aesthetically adventurous daguerreotypists, but Richard Beard and his assistants were not among them. Indeed, Mayhew’s reference to Beard distanced his images from 28 Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850–1915 the daguerreotypes of Antoine Claudet, whose images tended to be more aesthetically complex.

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