Henry Mayhew - Influence

Influence

Mayhew's work was embraced by and was an influence on the Christian Socialists, such as Thomas Hughes, Charles Kingsley, and F. D. Maurice. Radicals also published sizeable excerpts from the reports in the Northern Star, the Red Republican and other newspapers. The often sympathetic investigations, with their immediacy and unswerving eye for detail, offered unprecedented insights into the condition of the Victorian poor. Alongside the earlier work of Edwin Chadwick, they are also regarded as a decisive influence on the thinking of Charles Dickens.

Mayhew often appears as a character in television and radio histories of Victorian London, played by Timothy West in the documentary London (2004), and David Haig in the Afternoon Play A Chaos of Wealth and Want (2010). In the 2012 novel Dodger by Terry Pratchett, set in 1840s London, fictionalised versions appear of the characters of Mayhew and his wife.

Mayhew was the great-grandfather of Audrey Mayhew Allen (b. 1870), an author of a number of children's stories published in various periodicals, and of a book Gladys in Grammarland, an imitation of Lewis Carroll's Wonderland books.

Read more about this topic:  Henry Mayhew

Famous quotes containing the word influence:

    “They tell us that women can bring better things to pass by indirect influence. Try to persuade any man that he will have more weight, more influence, if he gives up his vote, allies himself with no party and relies on influence to achieve his ends! By all means let us use to the utmost whatever influence we have, but in all justice do not ask us to be content with this.”
    —Mrs. William C. Gannett, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 5, ch. 8, by Ida Husted Harper (1922)

    “Power lasts ten years; influence not more than a hundred.”
    —Korean proverb, quoted in Alan L. Mackay, The Harvest of a Quiet Eye (1977)

    “No power on earth or above the bottomless pit has such influence to terrorize and make cowards of men as the liquor power. Satan could not have fallen on a more potent instrument with which to thrall the world. Alcohol is king!”
    —Eliza “Mother” Stewart (1816–c. 1908)