Curious Conversations: Henry Mayhew and the Street-Sellers in the Media Ecology of <i>London Labour and the London Poor</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Henry Mayhew is renowned as the chronicler and historian of London street-sellers and poor labourers. However, Mayhew’s relationships with his subjects, and their influence on the development of London Labour and the London Poor, is less often discussed. This article examines Mayhew’s productive and disruptive friendships, collaborations, and disagreements with the London poor, and situates these exchanges within the layered print and oral texts that comprise the extensive media ecology of London Labour. I argue that through their disruptive collaborations with Mayhew, some street-sellers, including Charles Alloway, memorialized as ‘The Crippled Street-Seller of Nut-Meg Graters’, strategically harnessed the media forms of London Labour for profitable self-representation. In contrast, a group of street-sellers known as the Street Traders’ Protection Association mobilized against Mayhew and critiqued his representations of their class. These disruptive collaborations reveal underlying kinships and conflicts between Mayhew and the street-folk, thus destabilizing his reputation as a neutral and authoritative observer in the history of poverty.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".