In the following essay I compare and contrast an extract from 'London Labour and the London Poor' (1851), a report by Henry Mayhew with an extract from 'The Prelude'(1805) by William Wordsworth. This close-reading task was performed in preparation for the English Literature Admissions Test, and is a response to the 2011 past paper available on their website. This was written in timed conditions so is by no means perfect, but thought it might help someone else who is preparing for the exam to see my take on the two texts. Both texts can be found on pages 7 and 8 of this document: https://www.admissionstesting.org/Images/47478-elat-past-paper-2011.pdf
The desperate injustice of poverty is explored in both ‘London Labour and the London Poor’ and the extract from ‘The Prelude Bk. IX’. While Wordsworth’s tone is theoretical, even initially appearing idealistic, Mayhew’s ‘report’ elicits sympathy, not assurance of hope, as it cynically exposes the undignified truths of living in poverty. While they differ in style, both texts tackle the destitution of our society itself, in which people can be forced to live in such reductive circumstances due only to misfortune.
Wordsworth’s image of a “hunger-bitten girl” - the indefinite article implying a wider community of such children whose hunger seems to extend to the point of aggressive injury - has the same effect as Mayhew’s assertion that the impoverished are of “all ages”, emphasising their frailty and vulnerability in the extremities of the phrase “mere childhood to positive decrepitude”. Both writers are illuminating the scope of poverty, Wordsworth giving us one description to represent the masses, Mayhew expressing this through his report that depicts everyone from “crowds of boys and little girls” to “old men and many old women”. This conveys the indiscriminate quality of poverty that takes anyone, only on the condition that they are vulnerable.
The reader gleans a sense of their vulnerability as Mayhew and Wordsworth depict these “poor creatures” - the dehumanising quality of this phrase emphatic of vulnerability and a lack of dignity in itself - as physically “low”. Wordsworth’s girl “crept along” with a “languid gait”, physically lower than the more fortunate onlookers (the poetic voice and his “friend”); she is literally low, or “lowly” in the way she composes herself, indicative of her frailty and subsequently the injustice of the aging of the young girl by poverty. Mayhew uses this same imagery of being physically low to represent a figurative unjustified inferiority; the reductively named “mud-larks”, “crawling” and “bent nearly double” either “with age” or as they “peer anxiously about”. This language of abjection is sustained throughout the passage as the “feeble old creatures...stoop” for the valuable discarded objects of the fortunate; even the tide is “low” when they are able to access the “refuse” they seek, and the areas in which they seek it are as “low down as Woolwich”. Mayhew steeps the report in language of lowness and inferiority, reinforcing the figurative lowness of the poverty-stricken “class” to which he refers. The lack of dignity in this description however does not place the blame on the “mud-larks” themselves, however much this might initially appear to be the case as they are described as “dull and apparently stupid”, as the tone changes at the end of the report. Mayhew presents us with the idea that the “liberty” of the unfortunate is more punitive than “imprisonment in the House of Correction”, as they are imprisoned by their circumstances. Wordsworth and Mayhew - despite the former doing so more directly than the latter - both blame the “institutions...that legalised exclusion” (Wordsworth).
While Mayhew’s report, as a result, appears to contrast Wordsworth’s ‘The Prelude Bk. IX’, as the tone of the poetic voice in the latter seems more hopeful - as it depicts an idyllic world in which people have more agency in the “laws” that govern them, thus implicating “better days to all mankind” - there is still a cynicism in Wordsworth’s tone, in the verse that mirrors ‘London Labour and the London Poor’. Wordsworth’s syntactical choices, particularly at the end of the extract, reinforce this, as “should cease”, for example, begins a line, implying that this idyll will remain ‘in theory’ (as the conditional verb suggests), and is unattainable; the line itself never ends with the “ceas[ing]” of the “captivity” described.
In this sense, while the texts differ in their styles, being prose and verse, Wordsworth appearing less cynical than Mayhew, it soons becomes evident that both texts are condemning the same thing in a similar cynical manner: the poverty of a society that punishes the vulnerable with a “deplorable” (Mayhew) quality of life that is as perpetual and unforgiving as the flowing and “retiring” of a “tide”.
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