Mayhew's exploration of the Victorian underclass has long been regarded as a classic of low-life reportage - a canny mixture of oral history and social statistics, with deliberate stress on the sensational. This book offers the re-discovered text of Henry Mayhew's correspondence with the readers of London Labour and the London Poor, letters which promoted the sales of the weekly instalments by becoming a vital link between Mayhew and his mostly working class readership. The letters not only define Mayhew's sociology in the making, they can be used as the undertext of London Labour and the London poor. Bertrand Taithe's analytic introduction reinforces Mayhew's claims to be a pioneer and serious theorist, and places this early militant in his own social context - a bourgeois renegade who still revealed the power of middle-class meanings.