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 in book form (London Labour and the London Poor, London, J. Howden, 1851, 3 vol.; and Griffin, Bohn & C^o, 1861-62, 4 vol.). As a social investigator of the London lower classes and underworld, he proved a pioneer in applied sociology. He did not write like Engels, a committed revolutionary¹, even though, as a wealthy Conservative solicitor's son, he was an emotional rebel against the social order, remaining a conformist only in morality, as a Victorian puritan fascinated by vice. Like the novelists already mentioned, he valued literature and style, but even if his rhetorical effects are sometimes Dickensian (he and Dickens were both contributors to the Morning Chronicle and they knew and admired each other), he succeeded in being a scientific, empirical observer of important sections of the London world. His enquiries, based on critical interviews with innumerable Londoners of various origins, are unique primary sources for the historian of society. With his acumen and gift for sympathy and empathy, he goes far deeper than the enquiries of Royal Commissions and Select Committees. As Eileen Yeo shows², Mayhew's vision of society obviously reflects his preconceptions and value judgments. Moreover, when he published his books in 1851, he had broken with The Morning Chronicle and the supporters of laissez-faire and classical economy, angered by the hypocrisy of the Nicoll brothers, the wealthy owners of a tailoring establishment in Regent Street³. This is inevitable since, in these matters, as in social sciences, a physicist's objectivity is impossible. But unbiassed Mayhew undoubtedly is, within his beliefs and those of his times, which he honestly confesses and to which, like every “freeborn Englishman”, he is entitled to.

Mayhew's ideological transparency is complete, as he never hides his sympathy for the poor, and his pragmatic, radical and humanitarian reforming ends, to be reached through persuasion, like Dickens's. But first and foremost, he makes the London poor and those close to them, speak, confidently, he records their words and behaviour conscientiously, thereafter only passing his critical judgments, separate from his observation.

Mayhew's method was scientific judging by the scientific criteria of his times. His survey in nascent applied sociology was coherently framed within the London environment, and he followed the method of biology, by classifying people and their way of life through “a correct grouping of objects into genera, and species, orders and varieties”⁴. Fifty years before Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree⁵ and their team of statisticians, he supported his personal, qualitative research among London labour by the accurate, critical use of statistics (with the help of his brothers Augustus and Horace and his friends Richard Knight and Henry Wood) collected from the figures delivered by the census of 1841, the parish and workhouse (union) records, the police and court returns, the estimates of local people, clergymen, publicans, tradesmen and employers and also of contemporary scientists and philanthropists. Moreover, in the decade long course of his investigations, he became thoroughly acquainted with the many trades of lower class Londoners, whose techniques he understood accurately and upon which he based the categories of his classification.

The division of Mayhew's reports is generally based on social classes, categories, trades and sexes, not on ethnic or national origins. There are two main exceptions however to this rule: 1) the street-Irish⁶; 2) the street-Jews⁷; and a few short odd ones⁸.

It is not surprising that the Irish and the Jews are dealt with as such, as opposed to English, Welsh, Scottish Londoners and foreign immigrants in London, who are mixed together in their trades or social categories. Indeed, both Irish people and Jews were specific communities, belonging each to a particular diaspora. Moreover both the Irish and the Jews among the London poor had kept their own cultural and ethnic characteristics: religion, ethics, way of life, food, trades, charities, and their own hopes and ways of rising in society. Besides, the relationship between these two communities was strong, on account of their competition for customers in the street and because so many of them were newcomers in London. In mid-XIXth century, the new massive immigration of destitute Irish people was unique on account of the Great Famine, but half a century later, at the turn of the XIXth century, a comparable flood of refugees hit the Jewish community, with the arrival in the East-end of so many Polish and Russian Jews persecuted by the Tsar's government.

Mayhew's surveys of the street-Irish and of the street-Jews have approximately the same length⁹, and many more pages are scattered throughout his work, on both peoples¹⁰.

For Jewish as for Irish Londoners, Mayhew uses the same heading, with the epithet “street”, so focussing his enquiry on the poorest in these two communities, those selling their wares in the street to earn their living. At the start of his study of the Jews, more than two pages are devoted to a historical introduction, which records well-known facts about the Hebrew people in Western Europe from the VIIIth to the XVIIIth centuries. He reminds the reader that many immigrant Jews have been street-traders in the course of centuries, in addition to the money-lenders to the courts or to other people, that popular feeling often ran high against them in England, as it did against Roman Catholics. Both the street-Irish and the street-Jews were the targets of native Londoners' hostility, ranging from diffidence to the envious hatred of rivals in trade, made worse by religious differences¹¹.

At the outset of his study on contemporary street-Jews, the author gives us the number of Jews residing in England¹² and in London (18000, more than half the total in England). Obviously, they were not all street-sellers, but many of them were, at the time of writing; however the foreign Jews, “numerous”, in the number given, were “a fluctuating body”. According to him, “two thirds resided in the City, or the streets adjacent to the eastern boundaries of the City”¹³. Their numbers compared with those of the poor Irish in London, reckoned to be “upwards of 10000”¹⁴.

Some of the causes of the excessive number of street-sellers in mid-XIXth century London, throughout the second half of the century and beyond¹⁵, are shrewdly analyzed by Mayhew in his three volumes of 1851. Briefly, one can blame the permanent glut of the supply of unskilled labour in the metropolis on some dominant economic circumstances:

—labour was plentiful on account of the decline of the silk industry, of engineering and the disappearance of former trades, on account of the closure of the London shipyards, replaced by those of the North, Scotland and Ulster. In spite of this consequent fall in the number of jobs on offer, the supply of cheap labour increased dramatically, with Irish, Jewish and other immigration. In The Unknown Mayhew, the cause of Jewish chain immigration from the continent into London is explained by a Hungarian Jew, the owner of a small sweatshop in the East-end¹⁶. Most of the available labour was casual, unskilled, and much of it was feminine—an inexhaustible industrial reserve army for the sweatshops. In the street, many seasonal workers crowded in order to survive by selling various wares, or fruit and vegetables as improvised costermongers: the fruit and hop pickers in the nearby counties, the unemployed navvies after the end of the first railway construction boom, the temporary immigrants before they left for the United States, Canada, Australia and New-Zealand. Mayhew dwells at length on the seasonality and casualness of work and emphasizes the fierce competition and unemployment they create¹⁷. He points out that

“the ranks of the Irish street-sellers are recruited every winter by the slackness of certain periodic trades in which they are largely employed—such as hodmen, dockwork, excavating, and the like. They are, therefore, driven by want of employment to the winter sale of oranges and nuts. These circumstances have a doubly malefic effect, as the increase of costers accrues in the winter months, and there are consequently the most sellers when there are the fewest buyers.”¹⁸

Indeed, the Jews did not ply the same seasonal trades as the Irish, but those, many of them, who sold fruit or other commodities in the street suffered from the seasonal invasion by Irish steet-sellers.

Throughout his work, Mayhew stresses the fierce competition between the poorest Londoners scraping up a living in the street. A telling example is expounded in the third part of the enquiry on “the street-Irish”: “How the street-Irish displanted the street-Jews in the orange trade”¹⁹:

“The trade was, not many years ago, confined almost entirely to the Jew boys, who kept aloof from the vagrant lads of the streets.”

A person experienced in the “coaching inns” told Mayhew that the Jewish lads established a monopoly of selling oranges and lemons in the street from 1810 to the end of the 1830s. From the start, the young Jews were shrewd enough to pick up the more profitable street trade and to relinquish “the more ponderous and least profitable articles of the (costermongers') trade, such as turnips and cabbages.” When compared to the other London poor, British or Irish, the Jews seemed to be an élite, a relative street aristocracy. The fastidiousness as well as superior ambition of the street-Jews caused them to lose to the Irish their monopoly of selling oranges and lemons.

These young Jews began to sell more profitable goods than oranges: pencils, sealing-wax, pen-knives, combs, razors, strops, braces and sponges²⁰. Gradually the sale of oranges and lemons was abandoned to the Irish wives and children of Irish labourers in the building trade. “From 1836 to 1840, (Mayhew) was informed, the Irish superseded the Jews in the fruit traffic about the coaching houses”²¹ for several reasons: on account of their sheer numbers and greater poverty, driven abroad as they were by the Great Famine²²; moreover, those Irish people who had been employed in the Home Counties in summer and autumn for the harvest and fruit picking, made for London in winter time. They competed successfully with the Jews “in the fruit-traffic about the coaching-houses” because “they were far more eloquent, begging pathetically, and with many benedictions on their listeners. The Jews never begged, … they were merely traders”²³. By begging, the Irish also supplemented the meagre receipts of their trade. Indeed the Jews were as obstinate in pursuing this street commerce, and as ready to cut their profit on their sales, but they suffered, even more than the Irish, from the xenophobic prejudices of the English natives. These generally despised and disliked the Irish, always regarded as foreigners, not as British compatriots, but they distrusted, feared and hated the Jews even more:

“The old feeling against (the Jews) seems to have lingered among the English people … They were considered—and with that exageration of belief dear to any ignorant community—as an entire people of misers, usurers, extortioners, receivers of stolen goods, cheats, brothel-keepers, sherrif's—officers, clippers and sweaters of the coin of the realm, gaming-house keepers; in fine, the charges, or rather the accusations of carrying on every disreputable trade, and none else, were bundled at their doors …”

This ill-feeling was often vented in the street-Jew, considered as too untrustworthy to buy from²⁴. This rabid prejudice was supported by Charles Dickens in Sketches by Boz²⁵ and in Oliver Twist²⁶. Indeed, this popular view, mostly opposed by Mayhew, was controverted by the same Dickens, who perhaps wanted to make amends, in the character of the good Jew Riah²⁷, and even more by George Eliot²⁸.

The Jewish boys were undersold by the Irish, children and adults of both sexes, because the Irish could live harder than the Jew²⁹. Even the poorest, city-bred Jew insisted on living on better food than the Irish, objected to sleeping in the open air, revolted against walking barefoot, wanted to drink tea and coffee when his Irish rival was content with water, worked shorter hours than his Irish competitor and “required some evening recreation, the penny or two-penny concert, or a game of draughts or dominoes”, whereas the Irish immigrant, country bred, had “for his sole luxury … a deep sleep” after a long day's work³⁰. Lastly, Mayhew writes, “the Irish, men or lads, who had entered into the fruit trade in the coach yards, would not only sell and beg, but were ready to lend a hand” to any coach porter or inn staff, helping them to carry packages or to do menial tasks. This the Jews never did, and in that way the people of the yard encouraged the Irish at the expense of the Jews.

“At present”, (Mayhew add) “… with a few exceptions, no Jews vend oranges in the streets, and the trade is almost entirely in the hands of the Irish … Thus, as the Munster or Connaught lad could live on less than the young denizen of Petticoat-lane, he could sell at smaller profit, and did so sell, until gradually the Hebrew youths were displaced by the Irish in the street orange trade.”³¹

Mayhew's Jews had not lost all street-traffic, but only their old-time monopoly. Before the mid-XIXth century, the old-clothes trade used to be “a sort of birthright among the Jews”³², from which they evolved the wholesale bespoke tailoring and slop-trade of the City and East-end sweatshops. In Mayhew's time, English or other British traders came to compete with the Jews in the old-clothes trade. These traders, Mayhew writes, barter glass or crockery-ware for second-hand clothes; as there are more and more “ladies” (i.e. idle, moneyed women) in London, the offer, to many of them, of ornamental glassware, glass or spath trinkets, glass beads, or “beautiful and fragrant plants”, is more tempting than some money, “for the purchase of the left-off garments of the family”³³. And Mayhew thinks that the Jews became “incompetent or disinclined” to work as crockmen,

“who (were) generally strong and in the prime of youth or manhood, and … capable of carrying heavy burdens of glass or chinawares.” (Consequently, in Mayhew's time, the main street-trades of the Jews became) “in sponges, spectacles, combs, pencils, accordions, cakes, sweetmeats, drugs and fruits of all kinds.”³⁴

But in all these trades, “unless perhaps in drugs”, he thought they were in a minority compared to the street-sellers belonging to a Christian denomination.

This does not mean however that their community as a whole was impoverished by this retreat from street-selling. On the contrary, this change resulted in the betterment of many Jews' condition, as far as they concentrated their ambition on the more lucrative wholesale trade in foreign commodities. Mayhew noted that the imports and exports of these were principally or solely in the hands of the Jews: watches and jewels, sponges, fruits, especially green fruits, such as oranges, lemons, grapes, and walnuts, cocoa-nuts, dates among dried fruits, as well as most other foreign commodities, such as shells, tortoises, parrots and foreign birds, curiosities, ostrich feathers, snuffs, cigars and pipes, cigars far more extensively³⁵. This improvement of many Jews' condition, this upward movement in society of the Jewish community, Jews of foreign or of British origins, testifies to their flexibility in business and their adaptation to changing circumstances.

Since Mayhew was merely concerned with “London labour and the London poor”³⁶, he devoted the greater part of his study of the Jews in vol. II and the notes on the Jews scattered through his work to poor labouring Jews, “the Jew old-clothes men”³⁷, the sellers of used metal articles³⁸, of glass and crockery³⁹, “the Jew boy street-sellers”⁴⁰, the slop-workers and tailors⁴¹, the cigar-makers, the pencil-makers, the pastry cooks, and the dolly-shops⁴². He was bound to situate these lower class Jews within the diversified environment of English Jewry, with its various classes, trades, professions, and its organized, self-governing bodies, but he only made passing references to wealthy Jews, and deprecatingly so.

Old-clothes men are a centre piece in Mayhew's gallery of poor London Jews; a typical portrait occupies more than two pages in the division on “Of the Street-Jews”⁴³, some information on the old-clothes trade is scattered through this division, a description of the Old-Clothes Exchange, Houndsditch, is made in vol. I⁴⁴, and a much longer one in vol. II⁴⁵:

“The trade in second-hand apparel is one of the most ancient of callings, and is known in almost every country, but anything like the Old-Clothes Exchange of the Jewish quarter of London, in the extent and order of its business, is unequalled in the world … The Old-Clothes Exchange is the latest of the central marts, established in the metropolis. But it did not acquire its regulated proceedings until 1843.”⁴⁶

The Jews used to control the Old-Clothes Exchange, Houndsditch, as well as nearby Petticoat Lane, Rosemary Lane and Holywell Street, although not the more venerable “emporium for second-hand wearing apparel” of Monmouth Street⁴⁷.

“At one time,” says Mayhew, “there might have been 1000, … I am informed that of the Jew Old-Clothes men there are now only one-fourth Jews”⁴⁸.

And more than half the remainder, he adds, are Irish; since the export of second-hand clothes to Dublin had been flourishing since the beginning of the century, the Old-Clothes Exchange and the wholesale business of old-clothes fell largely into the hands of Irish buyers. This does not mean that the Jews were displanted by the Irish in the old-clothes trade as in the orange trade. Before the establishment of regular proceedings in 1843, says Mayhew, there used to be constant clashes between Jews and Irish buyers, but now policemen are no longer needed to keep the peace.

In mid-century, the old-clothes trade remained a typical, outstanding activity of the Jewish community, and it kept a strong hold on it, though no longer its control. A Jew, “Mr L. Isaac”, was “the present proprietor” of the houses that “formed one of the present Old-Clothes Exchanges”⁴⁹. One of the two Exchanges is named “Isaac's Exchange” once, and its importance is repeatedly emphasized, its dimensions accurately given; it has three departments, two for wholesale business, one for retail. The second Old-Clothes Exchange, wholesale and retail too, was also in Jewish hands⁵⁰, selling “collections of unredeemed pledges in wearing apparel, consigned there by the pawnbrokers, or the buyers at the auctions of unredeemed goods”, with many Jews among these two categories of dealers⁵¹. Plenty of information was given to Mayhew by a “Hebrew trader, whom (he) conversed with on the subject”⁵². As a matter of fact, the street-Jew “engaged in the purchase of second-hand clothes” was a legendary figure with “his distinctive garb and aspect of a foreigner. He not unfrequently wore the gabardine” as late as the beginning of the XIXth century, but it was never seen 50 years later in the streets,

“but some of the long loose frock coats worn by the Jew clothes buyers resemble(d) it.”⁵³

Otherwise the street-Jew was unchanged, with his monotonous cry, like a bleat, of “Clo'! Clo'!”, with a picture from a daguerreotype⁵⁴. Another of Mayhew's informants gave him a thorough account of Jewish old-clothes men:

“The itinerant Jew clothes-man, he told (Mayhew) was generally the son of a former old-clothes man, but some were cigar-makers taking to the clothes business when those trades were slack; but that 19 out of 20 had been born to it. If the parents of the Jew boy are poor, and the boy a sharp lad, he generally commences business at 10 years of age, by selling lemons, or some trifle in the streets, and so, as he expressed it, the boy ‘gets round’, or street connection by becoming known to the neighbourhood he visits …”⁵⁵

Thereby he made his apprenticeship as a buyer of old clothes. This was a passionate commitment to the business, often based on leaving a small earnest to a provider of old clothes and borrowing the remainder of the price agreed from an adult Jew, the latter getting ‘half Rybeck’, i.e. a moiety of the profit⁵⁶. Gradually the street lad acquired enough experience to deal on his own account, sometimes at the early age of 15.

Mayhew insists repeatedly that, from an early age, Jewish lads are prompted by a passion for money⁵⁷. This makes them persevere in their business, even for small profits⁵⁸. More remarkably, it drives them to speculate and gamble: “A Jew,” Mayhew writes, “was of opinion that his people were more speculative than the Gentiles, and therefore the English liked better to deal with them.”⁵⁹ This success of the Jews in speculative deals might be true in London, but it made country people distrustful, according to another Jewish informant,

“… the Jews are the best salesmen; and the fact of their being Israelites is, in many instances, a bar to their success; country people especially are afraid of being taken in by them. The importunities and appeals of the Hebrew, however, are far more urgent than any other tradesman; and they always wait where they think there's the slightest chance of effecting a sale, until the door is slammed in their face.”⁶⁰

That the Jews should love money is not surprising for a people confined for centuries to commerce and money-lending (or usury, forbidden to Christians by canon law). Moreover, even in Mayhew's times, many poor Jews were foreigners⁶¹, Portuguese, Spanish, German and Polish. The diaspora led the Jews to focus on foreign trade, as well as hawking in Britain; now this kind of business is based on risk-taking and speculative enterprise, as opposed to local, staple trade. Hence

“… the trades which the Jews most affect, (Mayhew) was told by one of themselves, are those in which … 'there's a chance’; that is they prefer a trade in such commodity as is not subjected to a fixed price, so that there may be abundant scope for speculation, and something like a gambler's chance for profit or loss …”⁶²

“Their principal characteristic is their extreme love of money”⁶³ …“They are fond of money and will do almost anything to get it … Jews are perhaps the most money-loving people in England”⁶⁴.

This love of money made them abstemious about food and drink:

“They seldom eat anything in their rounds … A Jew clothes man is seldom or never seen in liquor”⁶⁵.

This love of money might induce them to cheat, if they can, like the Jewish boy who sold “a big pottle of strawberries that was rubbish all under the toppers”⁶⁶.

“The faults of the Jew lad are an eagerness to make money by any means, so that he often grows up a cheat, a trickster, a receiver of stolen goods, though seldom a thief, for he leaves that to others. He is content to profit by the thief's work, but seldom steals by himself, however he may cheat. Some of these lads become rich men; others are vagabonds all their lives.”⁶⁷

Though morally strict enough, Mayhew could understand the fraudulent sale by a Jewish street lad of shoddy sponges, 3d.each, “dressed with sulphuric acid”, not only useless, but deleterious; he was indulgent to the latter because he was a poor, ignorant street boy. Mayhew was even more compassionate than Dickens, being more of a dissident than a conformist in wealthy British society⁶⁸, he did not object to vagrancy or begging, but, as an honest man himself, and careless about money, he may have preferred the disinterested, happy-go-lucky, pious Irish, to the money-minded, not so pious Jew. Greed, Mayhew detested, being at odds with the conservative phariseeism of his father, who had made an easy fortune as a successful solicitor. Like the London underprivileged, whether English, Irish or Israelite, he took risks, as a freelance journalist, and a needy writer; indeed he was sufficiently careless about money to run into life-long indebtedness.

Devil-may-care Mayhew made enemies for himself not only of the conservative establishment, but of radically liberal newspapers, The Morning Chronicle—his former employer—and The Economist⁶⁹, and he was the disinterested friend of the outcast and the poor, to the point of sympathizing with a characteristic of the poor Jews he stresses, the passion for gambling:

“A Jew gave me the following account …‘Our people, he said, will be out all day in the wet, and begrudge themselves a bit of anything to eat till they go home, and there … gamble away their crown, just for the love of speculation … They gamble for money, either at their own homes or at public-houses. The favourite games are tossing, dominoes and cards.’”⁷⁰

The stakes could be as high as £2 and the wagers on occasion rose to £30 or even £50 in silver or gold, and on a Saturday (the Hebrew Sabbath), some were seen gambling away the morning and the greater part of the afternoon. When gambling, as when selling their wares, they were tempted to cheat, if they could, “by means of a halfpenny with a head or a tail on both sides, called a ‘gray’”⁷¹. They wanted to win passionately, but were patient sufferers, like Mayhew himself, when they lost, like the Jew street-seller who confided to the investigator:

“I've had as much as £60 of my own, and that more than half a dozen times, but all of it went in speculations. Yes, some went in gambling.”

He had a share in a gambling-booth at the races for three years, but it did him little good⁷².

The chapter “Of the Street-Jews” is mostly concerned with the Jews selling in the street or busy in shops, workshops, houses and asylums connected with the street. So is most of the work London Labour and the London Poor, whose first two volumes almost wholly deal with street people, and whose volumes III and IV still centre on street activities. On the other hand, throughout this work, lodgings and industry are referred to. They are more thoroughly investigated in the letters to The Morning Chronicle in 1849-50, some of them collected in The Unknown Mayhew⁷³. From these sources, complemented by plentiful primary and secondary sources on the poorer classes in Victorian London⁷⁴, we have a general survey of the poor Jews in mid-XIXth century London. Charles Booth's evidence to the House of Lords' Select Committee on Sweating⁷⁵ clearly defines the sweating system in the London clothing industry (slopworkshops, ready-made clothing and bespoke tailoring) during the second half of the century:

“The economy effected under the factory system by a more extensive use of machinery, and by more highly organized and regular employment, seems in London to be replaced by the detailed pressure of wholesale houses, or middlemen acting for them, on master tailors who transmit this pressure to those working under them, masters and men suffering alike from the long hours, insanitary conditions and irregular earnings characteristic of the East-end workshop.”

This is what has been called “vertical disintegration of production”⁷⁶, which enabled London to compete with provincial factory production, impossible in central and inner London. In the East-end workshop, production was reduced to a necessary minimum and a quick expansion of home work. In the clothing and footwear industries, fashion inhibited stockpiling and gave the employer of outworkers flexibility in adapting production to a changing demand, according to the needs of the market. This was a revival of the age-old putting out system within a surviving pre-industrial niche in the metropolis. London Jews happened to be in the very centre of the sweated clothing industry, as middlemen, garret masters and also sweated journeymen tailors and needlewomen⁷⁷. P. G. Hall sums up abundant historical research about the pivotal role of the Jews in Whitechapel sweatshops in the mid- and late XIXth century: the Jewish industry in the East-end was related to British industry in the provinces like a colonial industry; it used huge amounts of labour at the lowest cost in order to compete with the mechanically superior clothing and footwear factories of the Midlands and of the North⁷⁸. Thanks to the invention of the sewing machine and the handsaw (1840-60) and the market demand for ready-made clothing, entrepreneurs putting out diversified tasks, along a vertical division of labour, extracted the most work at the lowest wages from sweated out people working in garret workshops, which were sometimes their homes. In The Unknown Mayhew⁷⁹, the author presents a Jew as a middleman (subcontractor) supplying a West End show-shop with paletots at 7s.6d. apiece:

“The Jew employed all the poor people who were at work for the slop warehouses in Houndsditch and its vicinity. This Jew makes on an average 500 paletots a week. The Jew gets 2s.6d. profit out of each, and having no sewing trimmings allowed to him, he makes the workpeople find them … The Jew who contracts for making the paletots is no tailor at all. A few years ago he sold sponges in the street … (His) profit is 500 half crowns, or £60 odd, per week—that is upwards of £3000 a year. Women are mostly engaged in the paletot work.”

Mayhew discovered “the continual immigration of foreign labour” (Irish and Jewish) “to be part of the system by which the miserable prices of the slop-trade were maintained.” He obtained information both from the sweated labour and from their employers, the “sloppers” or “sweaters”. In The Unknown Mayhew⁸⁰ he reports the evidence of “a Hungarian Jew sweater”, who had first been a sweated journeyman tailor working for an English middleman, the subcontractor of a West End shop. The latter employed between 190 and 300 hands, getting from 3s. to 3s.6d. weekly profit from each. Eventually the sweated Jewish immigrant turned sweater:

“… As a countryman of (his) was doing the same, (he) employed hands, making the best (he) could of their labour. (He has) now 4 young women (all Irish girls) so employed …”

Ambitious Jews tried to become masters like so many English Londoners among whom the competition was strong and fuelled by the seasonality and casualness of work. They often preferred to move up to the status of “middleman” (subcontractor), in which they excelled⁸¹. Indeed the historical and normal path lifting poor Jewish immigrants to this higher, lucrative position in London society was from street old-clothes seller to old-clothes shopowner in Houndsditch or the Minories⁸², then master of a workshop, and eventually middleman, managing slop-workshops, sweating many journeymen and needlewomen and girls in Whitechapel, supplying West End fashion show-shops (like the house of the Nicoll brothers whose greed Mayhew angrily exposed)⁸³. There was a significant correspondence between the district of clothing sweatshops and the old-clothes trade: in the post directory of 1860, out of 50 merchants of garments, 40 were in the City or Whitechapel, and as many as 18 in Houndsditch, the Minories and the neighbouring courts and alleys.

Jews were by no means more proficient than other ethnic groups as sweaters in the clothing industry. The great majority of sweaters were, of course, English natives. In addition quite a few Irish masters allured their compatriots from Western Ireland to East London by the deceitful promises of high wages—this Mayhew calls the “kidnapping” system⁸⁴. He lays no such villainy at the door of London Jews. On the contrary, when he refers to the chain immigration of Eastern European Jews into London, he describes it as established on an honest basis:

“There is a constant communication among the Jews, and when their friends in Poland and other places learn they're safe in England, and in work and out of trouble, they come over too, even if they can earn more at home.”⁸⁵

The Jewish “cousinhood”, so famous in financial circles with the Rothschild family, operated also among the poor, with as much mutual help, resulting in salutary chain immigration.

London Jews belonged to several commercial trades:

“The majority of the swag-shop proprietors are Jews. The wares which they supply to the cheap shops, the cheap John's, and the street-sellers, in town and country, consist of every variety of article, apart from what is eatable, drinkable or wearable … As regards what is wearable … such things as braces, garters, etc. form a portion of the stock of the swagshop.”⁸⁶

‘Slaughterers’ are retailers (owning ‘slaughter-houses’), ‘swag-shops’ sell wholesale “all … low-priced metal things, fancy goods … made in Birmingham;” they are ‘pot’ ornaments, such as coloured glass brooches, time-pieces, French toys, telescopes, American clocks, musical boxes, shirt-studs, backgammon boards, tea-trays, razor-strops, writing-desks, sailors' knives, hair brushes and tobacco boxes; and all kinds of hardware, from cutlery, kitchen utensils to lamps, bags, locks, keys and writing and office articles. Evidencing the control of this trade by Jews, Mayhew locates the swag-shops mostly in the Jewish district or where Jewish tradesmen are numerous: Houndsditch (23), the Minories (4), Whitechapel (2), Ratcliffe Highway (20), Shoreditch (1), Longlane, Smithfield (4), Fleet Lane (2), Holywell Street, Strand (1), Tothill Street (4), Compton Street, Soho (1), Hatton Garden (2), Clerkenwell (10), Kent Street, Borough (8), New Cut (6), Blackman Street (2), Tooley Street (3), London Road (3), Borough Road (1), Waterloo Road (4)⁸⁷. Total: 101. But one could find about fifty others in obscure courts and alleys near Houndsditch, Ratcliffe Highway, etc. This trade was not high class, but highly profitable and, thus for lowly Jews, the way to wealth. One of Mayhew's informants described a swag-shop owned by a Jew, employing 200 hands and whose receipts were upwards of £3000 in an extra week, i.e. more than £1000 net profit:

“(The proprietor) is a great capitalist … a fair man to the trade, and not an uncharitable man—but he will drive a good bargain where it's possible; … the profits must be very great, and they are mostly made out of poor buyers, who sell it to poor people in the streets, or in small shops. It's a wonderful trade.”⁸⁸

On account of the competition and underselling between tradesmen, small and large shops, Mayhew concludes that £3000 a year was the average receipt of each, with profit varying from 20 to 35 and rarely 50٪. And he adds the well-known information that the swag-shop keepers are “hard and grinding men taking every advantage in the way of trade.”

Jewellery comprises more distinguished commodities than the wares sold in swag-shops. It also enabled poor foreign Jews to move upwards more quickly in society, often within the same generation. They might begin their career as penniless pedlar-jewellers, whose better-off brethren supplied them with small quantities of goods, so that they “immediately commence(d) foraging for their own support.” Steadfastly,

“notwithstanding their scanty knowledge of the trade at starting, they have eventually become excellent judges of jewellery; some of them, moreover, have acquired riches in it; indeed from the indomitable perseverance of the Hebrew race, success is genuinely the result of their untiring industry … one of my informants tells me he is acquainted with several Jews, who now hold their heads high as merchants, and are considered very excellent judges of the wares they deal in, who originally began trading with but a small stock of jewellery, and that a charitable donation.”⁸⁹

Mayhew hardly mentions the part played by contemporary London Jews in cigar-making or the commerce of cigars⁹⁰. Yet he locates Jewish “manufacturers of such things as cigars, pencils and sealing-wax … in such parts as Maunsell Street, Great Prescott Street and other parts of the eastern quarter known as Goodman's fields.” Samuel Gompers, a Jewish boy of 10 (born in 1850), whose father was in the trade of cigar-making, became legally indentured as an apprentice to David Schwab, a cigar-maker at Bishopsgate street. Like many London Jews, he left for New York City with his father and family (in 1863) and went on making cigars for years as a worker in East Side New York. He was to become the President of the Cigar-makers International Union, then one of the organizers and the first President of the American Federation of Labor⁹¹. I am alluding to this famous Jewish American trade-unionist because he and his family were typical of immigrant Jews in mid-XIXth century London. Like so many other Jews of low condition living in the East-end, and like so many of their Irish contemporaries, they emigrated to the United States; for the Gompers, “the pull was stronger than the push” (they were at home in London). In those days, for them as for the Irish diaspora, and other migrants from Europe, the United States was truly the promised land.

The ‘wandering Jew’ is a myth to some extent, but largely founded on a historical reality. Judging by Mayhew's enquiry on poor London Jews, this reality was highly topical and relevant to the times. Confronted with the movements of migrants of various origins, among them the forcibly migrant Irish, Mayhew repeatedly highlighted the Jews' mobility, the greatest of all. Not only did they hawk around the United Kingdom, but they changed trades, endeavouring constantly to move up the social ladder, or to make full use, even more than the Irish, proportionately, of their connections abroad and their chain emigration to America. The magnet of the United States for Jewish migrants is confirmed not only by statistics, but by testimonies. Samuel Gompers conveyed this historical fact when he wrote:

“London seemed to offer no response to our efforts towards betterment. About this time (the 1860s) we began to hear more about the United States.” (And he learned to sing the song) “To the West, to the West, to the Land of the Free.”⁹².

So in mid-XIXth century London, geographical migration, over the Atlantic, combined with the social upwards drive to improve the condition of poor Jews. Thus springing from the motive of social betterment, London Jews' famous love of money, stressed by Mayhew, had a wider significance; it was a stepping stone to their relentless ascent in society, their age-old passion for the consideration of others, and the cherished achievement of self-respect for a people downtrodden by foreign masters since the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D.

The consequence of this social and geographical mobility was the thinning out of the ranks of the poorest Jews, often observed by Mayhew; he remarked there were fewer and fewer poor Jews, because their poverty did not last long⁹³:

“Concerning the street-trades pursued by the Jews, I believe there is not at present a single one of which they can be said to have a monopoly; nor in any one branch of the street-traffic are there so many of the Jew traders as there were a few years back.”⁹⁴

Since such street business was the lowest and the least rewarding, they exchanged it as soon as they could for more promising pursuits.

The social mobility already achieved by London Jews made their community socially heterogeneous, with great inequalities, especially compared with the Irish immigrants in mid-XIXth century London. This social diversification, maybe similar to English Victorian society as a whole, was reflected in the location of their homes in the metropolis, as described by Mayhew:

“Of course, a Jew millionaire—merchant, stock-jobber, or stockbroker—resides where he pleases, in a villa near the Marquis of Hertford's in the Regent's park, a mansion near the Duke of Wellington's in Piccadilly, a house and grounds at Clapham or Stamford-hill; but these are exceptions … The trading-class in the capacity of shopkeepers, warehousemen, or manufacturers, are the thickest in Houndsditch, and the Minories … The wholesale dealers in fruit are in Duke's place and Pudding-lane (Thames-street), but the superior Jew fruiterers … are in Cheapside, Oxford street, Piccadilly, and most of all in Covent-Garden market. The inferior jewellers … are also at the East-end, about Whitechapel, Bevis-marks, and Houndsditch; the wealthier goldsmiths and watchmakers having, like other traders of their class, their shops in the superior thoroughfares.” (There are only a few Jews among the working watchmakers in Clerkenwell). “The Hebrew dealers in second-hand garments, and second-hand wares generally, are located about Petticoat lane … The manufacturers of … cigars, pencils and sealing-wax, the wholesale importers of sponge, bristles and toys, the dealers in quills and ‘looking-glasses’, reside in large private-looking houses … in such parts as Maunsell-street, Great Prescott-street, Great Ailie-street, Leman-street and other parts of the eastern quarter known as Goodman's fields. The wholesale dealers in foreign birds and shells, and in the many foreign things known as ‘curiosities’, reside in East Smithfield, Ratcliffe-highway, Highstreet (Shadwell), or in some of the parts adjacent to the Thames. In the long range of river-side streets, stretching from the Tower to Poplar and Blackwall, are Jews, who fulfill the many capacities of slop-sellers, etc., called into exercise by the many requirements of seafaring people … A few Jews keep boarding-houses for sailors in Shadwell and Wapping …”⁹⁵

“… The greater number of (Jewish traders) reside in Portsoken Ward, Houndsditch; and their favorite localities in this district are either Cobb's yard, Roper's-building, or Wentworth-street. They mostly occupy small houses, about 4s.6d. a week rent, and live with their families.”⁹⁶

This poor ‘Jewish quarter’, was even called “the London Ghetto” by S. Gompers⁹⁷, when he lived nearby in the 1860s. The poorest Jews dwelt in the worst slums and rookeries, “as regards ventilation, comfort and cleanliness”⁹⁸. “They seem, says Mayhew, very indifferent to the comforts of a home”⁹⁹, unlike the Irish and even the English of a similar condition. On the other hand, he never found any houseless Jews stranded in the ‘London Vagrants' Asylums for the Houseless’¹⁰⁰. And he explained why in vol. II: “The Jewish charities are highly honourable to the body, for they allow none of their people to live or die in a parish workhouse.”¹⁰¹

As an unbiassed observer, Mayhew either reported his own investigations, or the information and opinions conveyed to him by gentlemen Jews situated in key places, or produced the assessments of official boards. His own interpretations of and reflections on the data he collected were shrewd and thoughtfully formed. He abstained from passing judgments on people's behaviour, and when he seemed to praise or deprecate it, his reaction could be ascribed to his ethical acceptance of English and Christian values, and even more to his personal compassion for and understanding of the poor. He took into account the “old feeling” of his English compatriots against the Jews, which “still flourishe(d) on account of their faith,” and he gave telling examples of it¹⁰², but he never yielded to it himself. When he did find fault with some Jews' lack of charity or compassion, he blamed it on the selfish callousness produced by wealth:

“this feeling … highly reprehensible when it extends to their own people for whom, … say my informants, they care nothing whatever; for so long as they are undisturbed in money-getting at home, their brethren may be persecuted all over the world, while the rich Jew merely shrugs his shoulders. An honourable exception, however, exists in Sir Moses Montefiore, who has honourably distinguished himself in the relief of his persecuted brethren on more than one occasion … The great Jew capitalists, with powerful influence in many a government, do not seek to direct that influence for the bettering of the lot of their poorer brethren, who, at the same time, brook the restrictions and indignities which they have to suffer with a perfect philosophy. In fact, the Jews have often been the props of the courts who have persecuted them; that is to say, two or three Jewish firms occasionally have not hesitated to lend millions to the governments by whom they and their people have been systematically degraded and oppressed.”¹⁰³

Mayhew's opinion about the iniquities of the wealthy Jews thus proclaimed did not express any dislike of the Jews as a people. First he thereby conveyed the disapproval of worthy, generous Jews about some selfish, disreputable coreligionists. Secondly Mayhew himself hardly blamed any poor Jew or Jew of small means for his faults or even criminal behaviour—such as receivers of stolen goods¹⁰⁴. As a compassionate reformer and a philanthropist with a passion for justice, he often vented his anger on the wealthy for their injustice and selfishness. He loved the poor for their misery and hated the rich for their ruthless greed¹⁰⁵.

Mayhew demonstrates in his two surveys of Jewish and of Irish immigrants in London that the Irish community exemplified more cohesion, mutual help, solidarity and communal affection than the Jewish one. The fact that the Jews rose more quickly into society, individually and collectively, and that many more of them were better off than the most fortunate Irish immigrants may account for this. But another cause may be the less important role of the Rabbis among Jews than of the Roman Catholic priests in Irish congregations; and the lack of faith or lukewarm piety of most Jews contrasted with the almost universal religious faith and punctilious piety of the Irish. Indeed, whereas the Irishness of labouring immigrants from “the sister isle” meant staunch spiritual and moral obedience to the Roman Church, Jewishness meant mostly or solely belonging to a wandering community. “A Hebrew gentleman” said to Mayhew:

“Street Jew boys … are Jews by the accident of their birth, as others in the same way, with equal ignorance of the assumed faith, are Christians.”¹⁰⁶

Likewise, a Hebrew merchant declared to Mayhew that, just as a small percentage of English Christians were pious,

(maybe) “out of 100 Jews, you find that only 10 of them care for their religion … they are only nominal Jews, Jews by birth, and not by faith.”¹⁰⁷

The Jewish community in London was in Mayhew's times less tightly bound by its socio-economic position in the metropolis and also by its religion and religious organization than the solidly communal Roman Catholic Irish population. However it formed a distinctive, peculiar fraction of metropolitan society, albeit variegated, from its towering financial and merchant oligarchy down to its destitute members:

“Street Jew boys” (may have been), “the great majority of them, but little conversant with and interested in the religion of their fathers” (according to) “a Hebrew gentleman”¹⁰⁸,

just like English costermonger boys, who cared little or nothing about the Church of their birth. Jewish and English street-sellers

“contrasted strongly in their neglect with the religious intensity” (and love of their priests) “of the majority of the Roman Catholic Irish of the streets”¹⁰⁹.

Poor young Jews, illiterate and ignorant, knew nothing of Joseph and others recorded in the Old Testament¹¹⁰. But, as they were born into Jewry, they had their own role-models, their own morality, culture and religious imperatives. English cockneys may have had their own role-models¹¹¹, whereas the poor Irish in London, indifferent to politics, revered their priests and the Pope. The obvious role-model for a street Jew boy, an orphan, as confirmed to Mayhew by one of them, was Lionel Rothschild (it might have been Sir Moses Montefiore either)¹¹².

“… I've heard of Baron Rothschild. He has more money than I can count in shillings in a year … “I don't know about his wanting to get into Parliament, or what it means;” (He was elected to the House of Commons in 1857, his son Nathaniel was elevated to the peerage in 1885¹¹³) “but he's sure to do it or anything else, with his money. He's very charitable, I've heard. I don't know whether he's a German Jew, or a Portegee (sic), or what. He's a cut above me, a precious sight. I only wish he was my uncle. I can't say what I should do if I had his money. Perhaps I should go a travelling, and see everything every where …”

As for the Christianity of Christians in England, Judaism is part and parcel of the Jewish way of life, even for those who do not attend the synagogue on the Sabbath, or who are ignorant about their faith and do not know a word of Hebrew or the name of one prophet. Mayhew thought that the great majority of Jews did not practise their religion:

“The synagogues are not well attended, the congregations being smaller in proportion to the population than those of the Church of England.”¹¹⁴

And this was saying much, as the dechristianization of labour in London had gone far in mid-Victorian times¹¹⁵.

(And when Jews do attend the synagogue,) “there is a buzzing talk among the attendants during the ceremony, and an absence of seriousness and attention.”¹¹⁶

This lukewarm faith however sets off the eager devotion of a minority of pious Jews: talking to Mayhew, faithful “Hebrews themselves … regretted … this absence of the solemnities of devotion,” considering their coreligionists looked upon synagogue attendance as a matter of business, adding there must be the same spirit in some of the Christian Churches. And right they were, except regarding the Roman Catholic Church in London, as Mayhew stresses again that the neglect of religion by the street-Jews (and the steet-English as well) contrasted strongly “with the religious intensity of the majority of the Roman Catholic Irish of the streets”¹¹⁷. Mayhew highlights the Jews' lack of piety several times:

“The street-Jews, including the majority of the more prosperous and most numerous class among them, the old-clothes men, are far from being religious in feeling, or well versed in that faith, and are, perhaps, in that respect, on a level with the mass of the members of the Church of England; I say of the Church of England, because of that Church the many who do not profess religion are usually accounted members.”¹¹⁸

Judging by Mayhew's information, it seems also that some Rabbis, like many Christian clergymen, pandered to the wealthy Jews' weak, lazy faith. For instance, the West London Synagogue of British Jews, Margaret Street, Cavendish Square, the most aristocratic of all London synagogues, granted devotional privileges to its congregation:

“… The service there is curtailed, the ritual abbreviated, and the days of observance of the Jewish festival reduced from two to one. This alteration is strongly protested against by the other Jews, and the practices of this synagogue seem to show a yielding to the exactions or requirements of the wealthy.”

Here too Mayhew probably expressed his resentment against the whims of the rich and the powerful, whatever their religious denomination, all the more so as he thought wealthy Jews only followed the bad examples traditionally given by “reverenced, privileged potentates” and “the Great” in Christendom, “in every country in Europe.”¹¹⁹

Whereas the Church of Rome in London enjoyed perfect unity with its worshippers, Judaism was split between two brands, “with different daily prayers, and festival and Sabbath rituals … The Spanish and Portuguese Congregation of Jews (… Sephardin) are distinct from the German and Polish Jews in their ritual service …” They had each their own Rabbi whose authority does not extend beyond their particular flocks. “The Portuguese Jews eat some food during the Passover, which the German Jews are prohibited doing by some Rabbis …”¹²⁰ In Mayhew's times there were 8 synagogues in London, which meant plenty for attendance of only a fraction of the 18000 Jews or so residing in London. The magnificence of their costly architecture and ornaments testified both to the wealth and generosity of upper class donors¹²¹.

The wealth of the London synagogues may be evidence of faith; the easy circumstances of the Rabbis and their synagogue staff can be considered as double-edged, however, just as the substantial and as such unchristian livings of Church of England rectors, vicars and higher dignitaries in the XIXth century. One could rightly compare to those livings and stipends the salaries of Rabbis, readers and secretaries of synagogues and Dayanim, ranging from £1200 to £100 a year—amounting altogether to £11700 for all these sacerdotal officials, and raised from the profits of the seats, and voluntary contributions, donations and bequests. This money evidences the piety of the congregation, but may cast doubts on the motives of God's servants.

The dual nature of London Judaism in Victorian times was even threatened with a third division, increasing the absence of unanimity among the professors of the same creed; the members of the Reform Synagogue in Margaret Street, Cavendish Square, were not entitled to vote in the election to the Board of Deputies; worse, the Reform members were formally excommunicated by a declaration of the Chief Rabbi, though they were allowed to partake of all the rites to which orthodox Jews are entitled¹²².

London Jews might be divided in their religion, many of them might be lukewarm in the practice of their faith, but all of them remained fundamentally loyal to their ancient creed, at least in its essence and principles. This means that the ties to their community kept an emblematic religious significance.

All London Jews rigidly observed the Black Fast, in commemoration of the destruction of Jerusalem and the White Fast, in commemoration of atonement. Even those Jews usually indifferent to other observances abstained from food from sunset to sunset, on these two yearly occasions. Likewise, for all Jews (as well as for most human civilizations) a funeral was a matter of high solemnity, and also of equality in the face of death, with no distinctions, no vaults or provisions for aristocratic burials (unlike most other religions)¹²³. The communal ties of faith might be loosened as regarded daily or weekly rituals for the majority of Jews, but they remained strong in those solemn circumstances. They also determined the observance of the Sabbath, abstaining from any kind of work. This did not prevent them from gambling for money on Saturdays, with their favourite games of tossing, dominoes, draughts and cards, in public houses or at home¹²⁴. The Hebrew Sabbath caused the retail departments of the Old-Clothes Exchange to stop business on Saturdays, but not on Sundays, as Christian East-Enders disregarded the Christian Sabbath¹²⁵. Jewish Sabbath observance was strict since the Jews in Rosemary Lane and Petticoat Lane sometimes called in Christian street-people

“to light their fire for them, or take off the kettle, since they must not do anything themselves on the Sabbath; and then they put some food on the footpath and (threw) rags and bones into the street for (those Christians), because they must not hand anything to (them)”¹²⁶.

Many poor Jews, old-clothes men for instance, did not mind eating “tryfer” meat (i.e. not “coshar”¹²⁷) in a Christian cookshop. On the other hand, Mayhew noticed that most of them objected to pork¹²⁸, and also insisted on eating fish, and no other meat on Saturdays and on holidays, so keeping Hebrew law on food to some minimal extent¹²⁹.

All the Jews Mayhew interviewed or by whom he was informed in his survey agreed on one point of faith: they denounced all converts from Judaism, scornfully called “Meshumet”, contemptible apostates, not because they condemned Christianity itself, but because they did not believe such conversions were genuine and sincere:

“No Jew has ever been really converted. He had abandoned his faith from interested motives”¹³⁰.

Mayhew does not comment on “this prevalent feeling among the class (he is) describing.“One can give three explanations to this curious interpretation by Jews of conversions from Judaism: 1) Mayhew's informants were themselves so money-minded that they thought greed was an overwhelming motive of human behaviour; 2) or they confused community and faith, thus blaming converted Jews for abandoning “their own kind”, being guilty of desertion; 3) or, theologically, they believed that Israelites, being God's elect, could not change their faith without forswearing their birth and initiation rites. Anyway, this scorn for “Meshumets” accounts for Disraeli's insistence on the continuity between Judaism and Christianity in the speech (which so shocked Christian M.P.s) that he delivered when he welcomed his friend Lionel Rothschild, newly elected to the House of Commons¹³¹.

Though not a conservative, like his father, in politics and socio-economics, Mayhew accepted Victorian Christian ethics about the family. Hence his regard for the family virtues of the Irish community in London¹³². Likewise he noted with satisfaction the traditional family values and morality of the London Jews, even the poorest:

“Marriage is the rule”¹³³, as even ‘the Jew street-sellers’ do not indulge in “the concubinage or cohabitation common among the (English) costermongers” … “The Jewesses and Jew girls are rarely itinerant street-sellers … The Jewesses and the young Jew girls, compared with the adult Jews and Jew boys, are not street-traders in anything like the proportion which the females were found to bear to the males among the Irish street-folk and the English costermongers.”¹³⁴

The author adds that the few Jewesses he saw as itinerant street-sellers or stall-keepers (“in the proportion perhaps of 1 female to 7 or 8 males”) were accompanied by their brothers, not by boy-friends. The author is positive on the virtue of Jewesses: “although often pert and ignorant, (they) are not unchaste.” Their chastity was confirmed to him “by a medical gentleman”¹³⁵. Other serious evidence on the Jewesses' chastity was conveyed to Mayhew both by a Jew and by a reliable English “wire-worker, long familiar with tramping and going into the country”: they never met young Jewesses “tramping with the juveniles of the other sex”, which “young women of the Christian persuasion commonly did.” This chastity was a virtue common both to Irish¹³⁶ and to Jewish girls and women among the London poor, but it was not valued by the English poor.

In keeping with this feminine virtue of chastity, all the more observed as most Jewesses stayed at home, London Jews proved, “when married, most exemplary family men.” Mayhew praises Jewish fathers' fondness for their children and their wives:

“There are few fonder fathers than they are, and they will starve themselves sooner than their wives and children should want … They are good fathers, husbands and sons.”¹³⁷

Likewise, Samuel Gompers remembers tenderly the love he enjoyed within his family, between three generations and all his relatives¹³⁸. London Jews loved their families and they had large ones, in spite of the dire housing situation of the central and eastern districts where they lived. As a consequence, fathers had to place their boys to learn a trade or make them earn their living in some way¹³⁹.

Jewish family morals seemed satisfactory to a Victorian moralist, since Jews generally strengthened family or community bonds by their sobriety, honesty, thrift, hard work, and mutual help:

“They are generally sober men. It is seldom that a Jew leaves his house and owes his landlord money; and if his goods should be seized, the rest of the tribe will go round and collect what is owing.”¹⁴⁰

Mutual help, i.e. communal self-help praised by Samuel Smiles, testifies to the family, clannish and tribal structure of Jewish society, in spite of their wandering tradition, either forced or voluntary, and in spite of the poverty for the majority in Victorian London. London's poor Jews borrowed from each other, either with no interest, or with a small interest or a share in the profits of trade. What they borrowed, they always paid back¹⁴¹.

Like the Irish¹⁴², and in the same tribal spirit of mutual help, they proved helpful and cooperative in the front of misfortune and poverty, and thereby secured their collective survival. Like the Irish, they practised chain migration on a large scale, either to bring over relatives from Central and Eastern Europe, or to emigrate to America:

“Some of the Jews who have been … displaced (by the Irish) from the street traffic have emigrated to America, with the assistance of their brethren.”¹⁴³

The social ambition of the poor Jews of London is highlighted several times in London Labour and the London Poor, but it seems to have been pragmatic to the point of short-sightedness. Like other very poor people, they could not read or write, they could speak English but were ignorant of Hebrew. On the contrary, Irish parents and their children “wished they could read … and would be better off now”; and there was

“a greater anxiety … among the poor generally to have some schooling provided for their children than was the case a few years back … probably attributed to the increased number of Roman Catholic schools.”¹⁴⁴

Not so with low class Jewish youths, even if they were not orphans; Mayhew considered them as “uncontrolled or incontrollable”, and the parents of “the lowest class … often, (he) was told, cared little about the matter, so long as the child could earn his own maintenance.” The account received from “a Jew boy (aged 12) of his trading pursuits and individual aspirations” mentions he “never was kept to school” and could not read, he could not speak Hebrew either, which he did not mind at all, concerned as he was only with “keeping (his) health” and “making a living” by selling in the street¹⁴⁵. No doubt such low class youngsters were extreme cases, but there were many of them. After a long day's work they resorted to coffee shops, or to cheap concert-rooms or theatres, or spent the evening playing at draughts, dominoes or cribbage, and “betting on the play”. This lack of education did not seem to be due to any ethnic instability or wandering spirit, but rather to great poverty; indeed young Jews “seem to like to receive information,” Mayhew was told by Jewish gentlemen,

(and) “when not thrown in childhood into the vortex of money-making, were very easily teachable, while their natural quickness made them both ready and willing to be taught.”¹⁴⁶

The obvious conclusion on this point is that destitution, for Jewish as well as for English children, was the main, or sole cause of their truancy and illiteracy, whereas many penniless Irish children were saved from this fate by the authority of their priests and the multiplication or Irish schools.

The Jewish community however lavished money on schools and education, as well as on charities for their brethren. In 1850, there were “7 Jewish schools in London, 4 in the City, and 3 at the West-End, all supported by voluntary contributions”¹⁴⁷. One of them, the Jews' Free School in Spitalfields, could teach 1200 pupils, and their clothes were provided yearly by “the Baroness de Rothschild”; in Houndsditch was located an Infant School for 400 little Israelites, in Goodman's fields the Orphan Asylum, with a school attached to it, “built at the cost of Mr A. L. Moses”. Better-off Jewish girls could attend the Western Jewish School in Dean Street and the West Metropolitan School in Little Queen Street, boys one in Greek Street (Soho), and one in High Holborn. Nevertheless, the great majority of the poorer Jews, among them “the Jew boys in the street” could not read, and seemed to Mayhew to be indifferent to the matter, considering “the multiplication table as the acme of all knowledge needful to man.” The author blames the neglect rather than the necessity of the poorer Jews for this irregular or non-existent school attendance: “they take their children away from school to learn and do something for themselves.”

And he hypothesizes another reason for this deficiency, “the strong vagrant spirit” of some of the Jew boys¹⁴⁸. “They will be itinerant, if not wanderers,” like many poor British boys of Victorian times. It was a great pity, implied Mayhew, that the poor Jews should not make full use of the educational opportunities offered them by their community. Even when they were literate, instructed in the three r's (writing, reading and arithmetic), they were neither interested in literature (dear to a writer like Mayhew), nor in politics (neither were the Irish), and Mayhew the radical journalist was sorry for it. They did not take sufficient advantage of

“Sussex-hall, in Leadenhall Street” (close to the Jewish quarter),“chiefly supported by Israelites; there ‘the Jews' and General Literary and Scientific Institution’ is established, with reading-rooms and a library. Of late, on every Friday evening, Sussex-Hall has been thrown open to the general public, without any charge for admission, and lectures have been delivered gratuitously, on literature, science, art, and general subjects, which have attracted crowded audiences. The lecturers are chiefly Jews, but the lectures are neither theological nor sectarian …”¹⁴⁹

This evidence on the Jewish intelligentsia of the City of London testifies to their broad-mindedness, civic sense and will to establish and maintain a friendly relationship with British Gentiles. They are linked to the merchant finance of the City, writes Mayhew, but are not Philistines, and enjoy a great reputation of high intelligence and great respect for science and culture. For instance,

“in the Rabbinical College … is the finest Jewish library in the world. It has been collected for several generations under the care of the Chief Rabbis. The public are admitted, having first obtained tickets, given gratuitously …”¹⁵⁰

In spite of poverty, love of money, and aptitude for pragmatic survival, the poor street-Jews, whichever their humble trade, are no Philistines either: “The Jews, as a people, are musical”, Mayhew declares¹⁵¹; they are fond of music and among them have been “many eminent composers and performers”; even the poor patronize concert-rooms whose “cheap concerts are generally of a superior order”, he adds¹⁵². These praises of their musical talents go far beyond the acknowledgment by Mayhew of the taste of the poor London Irish for dancing, who “jig and reel furiously” at home¹⁵³, or of the implicit fact of their singing at church. Mayhew remembers that some years before his enquiry in London, itinerant Jews used to hawk accordions around the country, including in the streets of the metropolis, and, being good accordion-players, instructed their customers in this practice; then the demand for accordions collapsed on account of the shoddy cheap instruments imported from Germany. Like good accordions sold by Jewish pedlars, Jew-harps were also famous in Victorian times¹⁵⁴. In the course of their history, since antiquity, Jewish people have always acquired a well-deserved reputation for playing various musical instruments and for singing. Their universal gift for music celebrated by Mayhew is testified to by a contemporary Jew in a humble family, Samuel Gompers¹⁵⁵:

(Grandfather) “was very fond of music. Some nights he would take me with him to some London concert hall …, (he) introduced me to a world that brought a life-time pleasure. Music appeals to my whole nature as does nothing else … The beauty of wonderful music would hold me speechless, motionless—only waking at the end to gasp to myself, ‘God, how beautiful’.”

Mayhew emphasizes the exceptional passion and gift of the Jews for music, whatever their class in society:

“At the cheap concert-rooms …, Jews are frequently singers, but rarely the Jewesses, while some of the two-penny concerts at the East-end are got up and mainly patronized by the poorer class of Jews …”¹⁵⁶.

Throughout London Labour and the London Poor, as a social reformer, Mayhew's prevalent feeling is compassion for and love of the poor, and this bias often implies distrust of and resentment against the rich and the well-off, unless they are proven philanthropists. Hence his spite against wealthy Jews, who have served the powers that be and have ignored the persecutions of their poor brethren¹⁵⁷. This radicalism of the investigator should not be mistaken for anti-Semitism, it expresses his general rebellion against the social order of his time or of previous centuries. His target is not wealthy Jews, but all the wealthy, when they are oppressive¹⁵⁸. Since his subject is not a study of the upper classes, but of London labour and the London poor, he seldom refers to upper class Londoners, except when they somehow deal with the lower classes. His strictures on rich Jews, mentioned above, are not convincing however, because they are based on hearsay and external reports, uncontrolled by Mayhew himself. When he does observe by himself the behaviour of upper class Jews, he mostly approves of it: Sir Moses Montefiore, Baron and the Baroness Rothschild¹⁵⁹, and anonymous Jewish “folks”, landlords “kind to an extreme” to a starving unemployed shoemaker's family, to whom they were charitable, “knowing (their) circumstances.”¹⁶⁰ Of course all those who support the many charities and schools of their community in London deserve the reader's respect or admiration. In this particular matter, there seems to be a contradiction between both Mayhew's preconception about the rich in general and his traditional image of the Jew in Christian history, and the Jews and Jewish institutions he surveyed in mid-XIXth century London. Indeed, in the course of these investigations, Mayhew came across grasping usurers, pawn-brokers, receivers, even a “Jew proprietor of a brothel” and convicted of man-slaughter¹⁶¹, but never does he say that wealthy Jews are more selfish than moneyed Christians, rather the opposite.

At the beginning of the long penultimate subdivision of his survey of “the Street-Jews”, on “Of Charities, Schools and Education of the Jews”¹⁶², Mayhew makes a positive, definite statement:

“The Jewish charities are highly honourable to the body, for they allow none of their people to live or die in a parish workhouse …” (This is all the more creditable, as in addition to this voluntary support of) “their own poor and institutions,” (well-off Jews and) “many individual (Jews) of immense wealth … contribute—compulsorily it is true—their quota to the support of the English poor and church; and, indeed, pay their due proportion of all the parliamentary or local imposts. This is the more honourable and the more remarkable among the Jews, when we recollect their indisputable greed of money.”¹⁶³

This slightly qualified praise of wealthy Jews' liberality towards their disadvantaged coreligionists spares them the unqualified blame laid at the door of “many rich Christians who care not one jot for the need of their brethren.”¹⁶⁴. But Mayhew, the social moralist, is severe for all money-minded people, whether Christians or Jews, in keeping with the stricture passed on the latter by a Jewish informant: “the wealthier Jews may be induced to give money towards the support of their poor”, but they are indifferent to them in all other respects, unconcerned as they are about young Jews' illiteracy or poor Jews' unemployment, as they do not promote knowledge “among the middle-classes” and do not give their own “clan” “a judicious preference” in employment¹⁶⁵.

On the whole, however, Mayhew proves the superior liberality of the élite of Jews established in Britain. The Jewish schools, reviewed above, are impressive on account of their number, density and provisions. In London, Jewish voluntary funds maintain a Hospital at Mile end, 2 other asylums, 3 Almshouses, 3 Loan Societies which lend money to the needy with no charge to the borrowers. These loan societies are complemented by wealthy Jewish lenders who also entirely renounce their usurious practices when they lend money to impecunious street-sellers, charging no interest whatsoever¹⁶⁶. Thanks to the Hebrew sense of organization, these charitable bodies must have been efficient; this is proved by poor Jews' keeping away from the Houseless Poor Asylum¹⁶⁷, by the fact that few Jews, if any, were ever taken into custody for vagrancy by the police¹⁶⁸, and begging was unknown among Jews¹⁶⁹. The yearly cost of all voluntary charities and benevolent institutions of the London Jewish community of 18000 amounted to £16000, including free loans, according to Mayhew, i.e. a little less than £1 per person¹⁷⁰. This proves that Jews were at least as generous as Christians, probably more, as their community in mid-XIXth century London had proportionately fewer paupers than others.

CONCLUSION

Judging by the four volumes of London Labour and the London Poor, the Jews, though most of them living in the underprivileged East-end, had a better chance of survival and also of rising in society than their Christian countrymen. Many of them who failed in London, or who were undersold by Irish street-sellers, emigrated to America, helped by the efficient chain emigration of their clans. Many improved their circumstances quickly, rising into the middle classes or even the upper classes within one or two generations, thanks to their quick intelligence, their perseverance in their trades, and also their community spirit. Mayhew implicitly forecast this historical success, which made it possible for “the Jewish quarter” to move from shabby Houndsditch to smart Golders Green within half or three quarters of a century. The author of London Labour and the London Poor of course could not anticipate the events of the late century in Russia and of the 1930s in Germany, that turned the trickle of Jewish immigration in the metropolis into a flood. But, as a witness of the great fortunes made by the Rothschilds, the Montefiores and other City merchants and financiers, by the political fame of a Jew's son, Benjamin Disraeli, and of Lionel and Nathaniel Rothschild, he would not have been surprised by the great role played by Jews in contemporary British history, as well as American history. The Balfour Declaration of 1917, promising “a national home” to the Jewish people in Holy Land after the Great War, was aimed at rewarding the great contribution of the two Sionist leaders, Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild and Chaim Weizmann, to the British war effort, as well as securing the support of English and American Jews. Born in 1870, two decades after Mayhew's survey, the English Jew Herbert Samuel became acquainted with Mayhew's and Ch. Booth's East-end as a social worker. A social philosopher, he was to rise to the height of political fame as the initiator of legislation for juvenile courts and reformatories and as the first British High Commissioner for Palestine (1920-25), so associating British statesmanship with Jewish culture. The present descendants of late XIXth century or early XXth century Jewish immigrants have given the City of London such talented financiers as Warburg and Hirsch, and such political stars as Nigel Lawson and Sir Leon Brittan, perpetuating the tradition of Jewish integration into the country of choice or chance. Whether poor or better-off, London Jews were given by Mayhew, as a Christian Englishman, a special place and consideration in his work; and right he was, as “the chosen people” has had an outstanding share in the ruling élites of contemporary Britain.

Notes

1. The Condition of the Working Classes in England, 1848 in German, 1892 in English.

2. “Mayhew as a social investigator”, in The Unknown Mayhew, London, Merlin Press, 1971, pp. 100-109.

3. R. Pelurson, “Mayhew entre conformisme et dissidence”, in J. Carré & J. P. Revauger, ed., Ecrire la Pauvreté, Paris, L'Harmattan, 1995, pp. 51-80.

4. London Labour and the London Poor, 1851, III, p. 4.

5. Life and Labour of the People in London, London, Macmillan, 1902-1903, 1st vol. 1889.

6. London Labour and the London Poor (henceforth referred to as LLLP), I, 104-120.

7. Ibidem, II, 115-136.

8. Only in subdivisions of his chapters, for instance in vol. III of LLLP, Ethiopian serenaders, p. 190, Scottish, German, French, Italian musicians or singers in “street musicians and street vocalists” (pp. 190-204); and through the whole of vol. IV, all kinds of prostitutes, delinquents and artisans of various historical and geographical origins.

9. About 15 pages on 2 columns, printed in small, dense types.

10. It would be tedious to list them.

11. English ill-feelings against the Jews in London increased at the turn of the century, with the flow of refugees from the ghettos of Eastern Europe. The campaign of the “yellow press” resulted in the setting up of the Royal Commission on Aliens, 1903, the action in Parliament of Sir Howard Vincent, of Major W. Evans Gordon (M. P. for Stepney), and of J. Chamberlain, and the passing of the Aliens Act of 1905. This was the first legal hindrance to free migrations prevalent in XIXth century Britain.

12. LLLP, II, 117: “computed at 35000,” according to the Chief Rabbi's statistics.

13. Ibidem, II, 117.

14. Ibidem, I, 104.

15. Reported in many books, for instance by W. E. Henley in the poems London Types (London, Heinemann, 1898); by Arthur Morrison in Tales of Mean Streets, A Child of the Jago and To London Town (London, Methuen, respectively 1894, 1896 and 1899); by George Moore in Esther Waters (O. U. P. 1894); and especially by Ch. Booth in his survey of 1889, the first two volumes of Life and Labour in London (Macmillan, 1902-3). See also the following studies on the subject: C. S. Jones, Outcast London (O.U.P. 1971), L. C. B. Seaman, Life in Victorian London (London, Batsford, 1973), D. J. Olsen, The Growth of Victorian London (Penguin, 1979).

16. Op. cit., p. 273: “… There are not so many Jews come over from Hungary or Germany as from Poland. The law of travelling three years brings over many, but not more than it did. The revolutions have brought numbers this year and last. They are Jew tailors flying from Russian and Prussian Poland to avoid the conscription. I never knew any of those Jews go back again. There is a constant communication among the Jews, and when their friends in Poland and other places learn they're safe in England, and in work and out of trouble, they come over too, even if they can earn more at home. I worked as a journeyman in Pesth, and got 2s.6d. a week, my board, washing and lodging. We lived well, everything being so cheap. The Jews come in greatest number about Easter. They try to work their way here, most of them. Some save money here, but never go back; if they leave England, it is to go to America.”

17. LLLP, II, 298-312 & 322-27 and III, 228-31.

18. Ibidem, I, 105.

19. Ibidem, I, 106-107.

20. Ibidem, I, 106.

21. Ibidem, I, 106.

22. 1845-48.

23. LLLP, I, 106.

24. Ibidem, II, 117.

25. 1836. In ch. XXIII the pawnbroker's shop looks Jewish.

26. 1837-38. The two Jews are villains, Fagin is a crafty old gang-boss, a receiver of stolen goods, a kidnapper of children, and Barney a villainous lad.

27. In Our Mutual Friend, 1864-65.

28. In Daniel Deronda, 1876.

29. LLLP, II, 119. Italics mine.

30. Ibidem, II, 119.

31. Ibidem, I, 106.

32. Ibidem, II, 119.

33. Ibidem, II, 119.

34. Ibidem, II, 119.

35. Ibidem, II, 118.

36. Italics mine.

37. LLLP, II, 119-122.

38. Ibidem, II, 9-14.

39. Ibidem, II, 15-25.

40. Ibidem, II, 122-23.

41. The Unknown Mayhew, pp. 266-8.

42. LLLP, IV, 373.

43. Ibidem, 119-121.

44. Ibidem, 367-69, under the heading of “Of the Street-Sellers of Crockery and Glasswares”. Crockery and glass wares were the staple commodities for swapping with old-clothes.

45. Ibidem, 25-47.

46. Ibidem, II, 26.

47. Ibidem, II, 36.

48. Ibidem, II, 28, 39.

49. Ibidem, II, 26.

50. Called “Simmons & Levy's Clothes-Exchange”, ibidem, II, 26.

51. Ibidem, II, 26, 27.

52. Ibidem, II, 27.

53. Ibidem, II, 119.

54. Ibidem, II, opposite p. 73.

55. Ibidem, II, 119-20.

56. Ibidem, II, 120.

57. Ibidem, II, 119, 120, 122.

58. For instance, “the profits of the pedlar-jewellers it is almost impossible to calculate, for they will sell at any price upon which the smallest amount of profit can be realized. The foreign Jews, especially, will do this, and it is not an unusual circumstance for one of these men to ask 5s. for an article which originally cost them 3d., and which they will eventually sell for 4d”. (Ibidem, I, 348, under the heading “Of the Pedlar Jewellers”). Likewise, keen on business however small the profit, a Jew, being a hat-furrier, gives a woman selling hare and rabbit skins ‘better prices than Christians and buys readier’” (Ibidem, II, 112).

59. Ibidem, II, 119.

60. Ibidem, I, 348, under the heading “Of the Pedlar-Jewellers”.

61. Ibidem, I, 348; II, 124-25.

62. Ibidem, II, 117-18.

63. Ibidem, I, 121.

64. Ibidem, I, 120.

65. Ibidem,II, 120.

66. Ibidem, II, 123.

67. Ibidem, II, 124.

68. R. Pelurson, in op. cit., pp. 51-80.

69. Cf. supra, pp. 1-2.

70. LLLP, II, 119.

71. Ibidem, II, 120.

72. Ibidem, II, 122.

73. Cf. note 2, p. 1, supra.

74. These are among the most useful: Th. Beames, The Rookeries of London, Past, Present and Perspective, London, Th. Bosworth, 1850; Th. Wright, The Great Unwashed, London, 1868; The Rev. Andrew Mearns, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London. An Enquiry into the Condition of the Abject Poor, London Congregational Union, 1883; G. R. Sims, How the Poor Live, London, Chatto & Windus, 1883; and a secondary source: G. S. Jones, Outcast London, a Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society, O. U. P. 1971, Peregrine Books 1976 & 1984.

75. Pp. 1888, XX.q. 307.

76. G. S. Jones, op. cit., p. 23.

77. The number of this lowest category even dramatically increased at the end of the century with the influx of Eastern European Jewish refugees into London (A. Fried & R. M. Elman, Ch. Booth's London, a Portrait of the Poor at the Turn of the Century, London, Hutchinson, pp. 111, 134-156).

78. Quoted by G. S. Jones, op. cit., note 19 p. 22.

79. Pp. 266, 271-73.

80. Pp. 271-73.

81. Ibidem, pp. 266, 271-73.

82. LLLP, I, 368-69, II, 36-47.

83. Ibidem, II, 316, 329, 331-32.

84. He describes it in The Unknown Mayhew, pp. 268-71.

85. Ibidem, p. 273.

86. LLLP, I, 333.

87. Ibidem, I, 335.

88. Ibidem, I, 336.

89. Ibidem, I, 348.

90. Ibidem, II, 123, 132.

91. Samuel Gompers, Seventy Years of Life and Labor, New York, Dutton, 1925; ch. I, pp. 1-25, “From East Side London to East Side New York.”

92. Op. cit., pp. 18-19.

93. Italics mine.

94. LLLP, II, 118.

95. Ibidem, II, 118, col. 1.

96. Ibidem, II, 121.

97. Op. cit., p. 2.

98. LLLP, II, 124.

99. Ibidem, II, 121.

100. Ibidem, III, 408.

101. P. 127: under the heading “Of the Charities, Schools and Education of the Jews.” Italics mine.

102. Ibidem, II, 117.

103. Ibidem, II, 126.

104. Ibidem, 373-75.

105. Cf. Eileen Yeo in The Unknown Mayhew, p. 83; Pelurson, in Ecrire la Pauvreté, pp. 51-80. As the great majority of Irish immigrants in London were poor and few of them found a way to fortune, Mayhew showed his unbounded sympathy to them. As far as he was less sympathetic to the Jewish immigrants, it might be on account of the comparative social success of so many Jews, no longer poor.

106. LLLP, II, 122.

107. II, 126.

108. Ibidem, II, 122.

109. Ibidem, II, 126.

110. Ibidem, II, 123.

111. Lord George Gordon in the 1780s, William Lovett during the Chartist agitation of the 1840s.

112. Ibidem, II, 123.

113. Lionel was an Austrian baron, his son Nathaniel was made an English one.

114. LLLP, II, 126.

115. Cf. Th. Wright, The Great Unwashed, London, Tinsley Br., 1868, pp. 79-94; G. R. Sims, How the Poor Live, London, Chatto & Windus, 1883, pp. 10-24; The Rev. A. Mearns, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, London, J. Clark, 1883, pp. 4-26.

116. LLLP, II, 126.

117. LLLP, II, 126.

118. Ibidem, II, 126.

119. Ibidem, II, 126.

120. Ibidem, II, 125.

121. Ibidem, II, 125-6.

122. Ibidem, II, 130.

123. Ibidem, II, 131.

124. Ibidem, II, 120.

125. Ibidem, II, 27.

126. Ibidem, II, 140.

127. Mayhew's spelling for “kosher.”

128. LLLP, II, 123.

129. Ibidem, II, 120.

130. Ibidem, II, 126.

131. Benjamin Disraeli, a grandson of Italian Jews, was baptized as a Christian on account of his father's quarrel with the Synagogue; so he was himself somehow a “Meshumet”, by his father's decision, though not his own.

132. LLLP, I, 107-115.

133. Ibidem, II, 119.

134. Ibidem, II, 122-124.

135. Ibidem, II, 124.

136. Ibidem, I, 109.

137. Ibidem, II, 120-121.

138. Op. cit., pp. 1-75.

139. S. Gompers, one of 6 children, was apprenticed to a shoemaker first, then to a cigar-maker, when he was 10. Op. cit., pp. 8-17.

140. LLLP, II, 121.

141. Ibidem, II, 121.

142. Ibidem, I, 104-118.

143. Ibidem, II, 119. Italics mine.

144. Ibidem, I, 108.

145. Ibidem, II, 122.

146. ibidem, II, 123.

147. Ibidem, II, 128.

148. Ibidem, II, 128.

149. Ibidem, II, 127.

150. Ibidem, II, 126.

151. Ibidem, II, 131.

152. Ibidem, II, 127.

153. Ibidem, I, 109.

154. The Unknown Mayhew, p. 337.

155. Op. cit., p. 10.

156. LLLP, II, 132. The author of London Labour and the London Poor does not expatiate on “the superior class of Jew vocalists and composers,” because “they do not come within the scope of (his) present subject.”

157. Ibidem, II, 127.

158. This is why Mayhew has been praised by Marxist historians like E. P. Thompson (cf. The Unknown Mayhew), and E. J. Hobsbawn, Labouring Men, Studies in the History of Labour, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964, pp. 81-82, 279, 321. Mayhew was never a socialist himself, but only a pragmatic reformer and moderate interventionist, opposed to the harmful social consequences of unrestricted laissez-faire.

159. LLLP,II, 126, 129.

160. Unknown Mayhew, p. 315.

161. LLLP, IV, 241.

162. Ibidem, II, 127-130.

163. Ibidem, II, 127.

164. Ibidem, II, 127. Italics mine.

165. Ibidem, II, 128.

166. Ibidem, II, 129.

167. Ibidem, III, 407.

168. Ibidem, III, 377-78.

169. Ibidem, II, 118-119.

170. Ibidem, II, 129.

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