Henry Mayhew at 200 - the 'Other' Victorian Bicentenary

The New Agenda introduction puts forward the case for a much-needed revision of the scholarship devoted to Henry Mayhew - journalist and wit, playwright, co-founder of Punch, educational writer, novelist for children, travel writer, hack, social explorer and author of London Labour and the London Poor. It argues for a more intertextual and contextual reading of his major and minor works, and presents the articles contained in this new agenda special issue. The complex publishing history of Henry Mayhew's work and of London Labour and the London Poor in particular are explored in part one. The second part surveys the scholarship so far devoted to Mayhew and sketches out a new agenda for research based on a wider intratextual and intertextual approach to Mayhew's corpus. It is time, the introduction urges, for Victorianists to revisit Henry Mayhew.