Mayhew on Sawyers

MAYHEW ON SAWYERS

One of the ongoing efforts on the site is adding Mayhew's Letters to the Morning Chronicle - which were, in effect, the first draft of London Labour and the London Poor, his ground-breaking study of the working classes. Heavy on statistics and numbers, as well as amazing interviews with ordinary working people, Mayhew is hard to transcribe - which perhaps explains why only one cumbersome etext exists online for London Labour, at the Bolles Collection. Nonetheless, I am doing my bit with the Letters (essays, in actual fact) - here's number 59 ... detailing, in large part, how the occupation of sawyer was made redundant by the introduction of the steam-powered saw-mill.