Henry Mayhew was both a founder of Punch; or, The London Charivari (1841) and a preeminent investigator of poverty in nineteenth-century London. While his association with this humorous magazine was brief, Mayhew's interviews with the poor provide historians with a rich source of information into the attitudes, beliefs, and problems of working-class Londoners. Although his work was not free from bias, he was the first social investigator to attempt to let the poor tell their stories in their own words. His investigation for the London Morning Chronicle, in particular, was popular, and his work also sheds light on upper-class attitudes toward poverty during the mid nineteenth century.

Henry Mayhew was the fourth son of Joshua Dorset Joseph Mayhew, a prosperous London solicitor, and Mary Ann Fenn Mayhew, his wife—a couple who were parents of seventeen children. Joshua Mayhew was the archetypal straight-laced Victorian father, and Mayhew spent much...