Introduction

The Map of the London Labour and the London Poor edition uses the COVE geospatial mapping tool to represent the primary texts of the edition visually and geographically. Below, the Map plots all locations in Phase 1 of the edition onto a global map. Each place plotted on the map lists the primary texts in which that location is present and includes a quotation from that text to offer a sense of the significance of the place to a particular topic or speaker. With thanks to the COVE Master Map, the United Kingdom locations, including London, are plotted onto an 1885-1900 map of England, Scotland, and Wales. Though London Labour and the London Poor predates this map, is offers a closer sense of the neighbourhoods and streets of the nineteenth century.

Furthermore, each of the individual articles of this selected edition includes a micro-map with only the locations from that article. Historical maps are a popular feature of print editions of nineteenth-century texts, and the digital form allows a more precise and interactive engagement with place and the significance of place to London Labour. In what follows, I offer a commentary and interpretive lens on the map resources of this edition.

Mapping London Labour and the London Poor 

London Labour and the London Poor is the study of a people, embedded in a very specific geographical and social environment: the mid-nineteenth-century metropolis of London. Movement and stasis within the metropolis are central to the investigations of London Labour and its texts explore, often in excruciatingly precise detail, the homes, workplaces, and haunts of the street-sellers and working people who are its informants and subjects. The articles in London Labour differ in their description and treatment of place. Some articles, for example, focus on describing and exploring a specific environment, such as "The Sunday Morning Markets," which describes a visit to The Brill, a market in Somers Town. This article offers a feast for the senses as the journalist describes the sounds and sights of this market scene. "The Sunday Morning Markets" then provides a list of the other street-markets in the metropolis, and estimates the "number of costers usually attending" each market. For the readers of the 1850-52 London Labour serial, the focus on place provided information about the markets for interested readers and, perhaps, readers who would like to see the markets for themselves. In contrast, in London Labour's interviews with individuals on their life histories and current labouring practices, place is representative of the individual's movement throughout London, through England, or even international migration.

For example, the map produced from the locations in the article "Of Groundsel and Chickweed Sellers." (Volume 1, first published in the weekly serial, No. 7, 25 January 1851), shows how the seller's weekly movement is focused on north and western London. The seller describes how he visits different areas of London on specific days of the week, focusing on Clerkenwell, Covent Garden, and Marylebone. His products come from only as far west as Kilburn Wells and Notting Hill and he travels farther north to Chalk Farm to gather the chickweed that he sells. The family lives in the slum neighbourhood of Saffron Hill, and using the map a reader can track the seller's movements between Saffron Hill, north to Chalk Farm "down Battle-bridge way," and west to the area of Great Titchfield street in the City of Westminster where the seller gathers nettles and sells turfs, "all about there." By reading the maps in tandem with the primary texts, each selection offers a new way of close reading the articles and understanding how the informants of London Labour interacted and moved through the environment of Victorian London. In other words, as the sheer volume of places described in the primary text might be glossed over by some readers, especially those not familiar with the geography of London, pairing the article's map with its text imbues significance and meaning to place and movement. The map visualizes with data from the source a central anxiety of London Labour itself—the necessary movement and migration that was a consequence and symptom of urbanization, urban poverty, and industrialization. It may also be useful to researchers interested in related topics such as the history of urban expansion, urban farming, or mobility patterns of itinerant workers.

The annotations for each location offer connections between different subjects and articles in London Labour that might not be obvious when looking at the Table of Contents or Publication History resources. For example, Saffron Hill, where the groundsel and chickweed seller lives with his family, is also relevant to five other articles in Phases 1 and 2 of the selected edition (and likely many more in the full text of London Labour). In "Of the Irish ‘Refuse' Sellers," London Labour explains that one of the "best pitches" of the female buyers of refuse, a trade involving the buying and selling of damaged fruit and vegetables to the very poor, is in Saffron Hill. In "The Dancing Dogs," in Volume 3 of London Labour, in an interview originally published in the Morning Chronicle "Labour and the Poor" series, the elderly Italian speaker who trains and exhibits costumed dogs explains that he has lived in Saffron Hill since moving to London. As well as providing links between these different articles and offering a focus on a specific area frequented and inhabited by the informants of London Labour, the connections between the texts hint at the recruiting practices of the London Labour journalist team and suggests that they might have become familiar sights in areas like Saffron Hill when interviewing residents for the London Labour series in the early 1850s. We therefore gain information about Henry Mayhew's networks of informants and the communities where he and his collaborators most commonly intervened.

The unsurprising centrality of London and its surrounding areas to London Labour are contrasted by the occasional national and international presence in some articles. This selected edition features the movements of people who migrated from India (e.g., "Tom-Tom Players"), Europe (e.g., "Italian with Monkey"), Jamaica (e.g., "The Negro Crossing-Sweeper, who had lost both his Legs.") and elsewhere. The maps for these articles show the international migration characterizing the nineteenth century and the British Empire. In "Statement of a Returned Convict," the informant describes his deportation to New Zealand penal colonies and time on British prison ships; similarly, "Meeting of Ticket-of-Leave Men" shows how as a group, the informants have been in several prisons across Britain and the article, which features several statements, serves as a micro-map of Victorian penal establishments. Meanwhile, a map in the study of bird-catchers in "Of the Street Sellers of Live Birds" takes its readers on a journey of bird-catching locales in the natural spaces on the outskirts of London, offering a wider range of London than the travel of the groundsel and chickweed seller above. The story presented in "The Negro Crossing-Sweeper, who had lost both his Legs" presents the story of a Black navy sailor, born in Kingston, Jamaica, whose work took him to South America and California.

At times, the places plotted on the maps are not concrete but imaginative. In texts such as "A Visit to the Cholera Districts of Bermondsey" and "London Considered as a Great World," countries and cities outside of England are used as comparisons or metaphors for the motif through which Mayhew presents London and its people. These places have been annotated and their annotations offer insight into how the place is being used in that text, be that as a physical location significant to a speaker or trade, or as a way of communicating an idea or argument. 

The London Labour Map, below, plots all of these locations from all of the selections of this edition. Readers are encouraged to see this Map as a snapshot of the selections, while also acknowledging that the edition does not include the entirety of London Labour and its many paratexts.

Annotating the locations of London Labour 

This section explains the methodology used when producing the mapping resources of this edition.

Selecting locations for annotation and inclusion in the maps:

In general, all of the locations in a particular article were selected for annotation. These include countries (i.e., Holland), national regions (i.e., Leicestershire), cities (i.e., Portsmouth),  districts of a city (i.e., Whitechapel), streets (i.e., St. John Street), and specific buildings or business (i.e., the Belle Sauvage/Bell Savage coaching inn). This selection principle required annotating all locations and linking them back to the COVE Master Map if the place had already been annotated there. The Master Map places are especially useful because they those places to other resources on COVE and BRANCH. What the London Labour maps as stand-alone features do not quantify or justify is the significance of the location to its textual origins beyond the quotation from the primary text that is included. For example, a location might be very significant, such as the home of an informant, or of minimal significance, such as a place mentioned in passing where the informant or journalist has not actually been. When reading the maps, readers should consider the maps in conjunction with the article instead of a stand-alone resource to determine why that location is in the article and what its potential meaning (or lack of meaning) is. These quotations help to contextualize the significance of that place to the article, whether that be a familiar place significant to the speaker or subject at hand, or a comparison or reference to a faraway place.

Annotating countries, cities, counties and boroughs mean that the exact placement of the location point on the map is not entirely accurate. Again, I emphasize that readers should use the text and be critical of this lack of exactitude when reading the maps.

Exceptions: In some cases, it was necessary to make a judgement call on what is considered a location that required annotation. For example, "Wakefield" is a location, but it was not marked for the map when appearing in book title The Vicar of Wakefield. Places in the names of a particular nationality (e.g., Tyrolese) were not annotated as locations.

Locations in statistical tables or lists were not annotated. "London" was not annotated. "England," "Scotland," and "Ireland," were not annotated due to the high number of more precise locations coming from these countries. "Wales" was annotated as it was rare to have any specific places in Wales appear as their own location in the primary texts. 

Unclear references: London has remarkably kept many historic street names and even locations such as pubs and coaching inns can sometimes be traced. However, there are some locations in London Labour that no longer exist due to development, slum clearance, losses due to bombing during World War II, and changing street names. I have noted when possible if a street or square has been lost and located it as closely as possible to its original site. See, for example, many of the streets in "Rosemary-Lane" and "A Visit to the Rookery of St. Giles and its Neighbourhood," both areas which were heavily redeveloped. Often, a search for a lost street in these articles leads us back to London Labour itself as source material.

On rare occasions, a location was not possible to trace, potentially due to an informant's pronunciation or misinformation, or a mistake on the part of the London Labour journalists and transcribers. These I have left unidentified.

The offices of London Labour and the London Poor: 

The map includes two extra places that are not explicitly mentioned in the primary texts selections: 69, Fleet Street, and No. 16, Upper Wellington Street, in London. These are the addresses of the London Labour and the London Poor office that produced the material of the London Labour serial. The office was located on Fleet Street from December 1850 to April 1851, and Upper Wellington Street from April 1851 until the office closed in February 1852. If a selection has been traced to being published during one of those two timeframes, then I have included the office location on the map of that selection in order to give a sense of where the journalists of London Labour were working from at the time that article was produced and circulated. 

Annotations:

The COVE Master Map locations, upon which this edition's Mapping function is based, usually provides a short, high-level description. When writing the annotations for the London Labour maps, I followed this principle. If a location is already annotated on the COVE Master Map, I have linked to its entry, in order to facilitate hypertextual connections to COVE's other texts and resources.

All of the locations on the London Labour map have long, rich histories and it is not necessarily feasible to do justice to these histories in the annotation format. I encourage readers to do further research on entries that interest them. When possible and beneficial, I have added more detail on specific locations in London that are important to London Labour.

To help situate locations in London within this expansive metropolis, my annotations of places in London include the modern borough within which the place is situated. While the boundaries of the City of London and the City of Westminster, the two ancient cities of London, have remained somewhat consistent since Mayhew's time, other areas in the metropolis are divided into administrative "boroughs" such as the Borough of Tower Hamlets, comprising much of the historic East End of London, and the Borough of Southwark on the south bank of the Thames. By including these modern boroughs, I hope to give a legibility to the different districts of London and how they have evolved in contemporary times and might be recognizable to contemporary readers.

When historic or archaic names are used for locations, I have specified both the current and past name in the annotation. Examples include Pekin (Beijing) and Bombay (Mumbai).