SOURCE: Guillaume, André. “Jewish Immigrants in Mayhew's London.” Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens 48 (1998): 119-58.

In the following essay, Guillaume discusses Henry Mayhew's observations about Jewish immigrants living in London, focusing on issues of labor and trade. Guillaume notes that Mayhew expressed sympathy for the poor “street Jews” in the lower classes and contempt for wealthy Jews whom he considered greedy and selfish.

The “Condition of England Question”, the social disruption caused by accelerating urbanization and industrialization in Victorian Britain was a major theme of contemporary literature, with such famous novels as Dickens's Oliver Twist (1837-38), David Copperfield (1849-50), Hard Times (1854), Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848), North and South (1854-55), and Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke (1850). Henry Mayhew, a minor writer of plays, fairy tales and cheap novels, was also a freelance journalist of genius, who contributed sociological series on London labour for the Morning Chronicle in 1849-1850, which he later published...