"All Talk": Conversing with Henry Mayhew

"All Talk":Conversing with Henry Mayhew Barbara Leckie (bio) and Janice Schroeder (bio) The common phrase "all talk and no action" is misleading; talk, after all, often takes effort and planning, and is a constitutive part of both political organizing and intimate life. To open one's mouth to speak is a complex, bodily process that engages multiple organs and senses of both speaker and listener simultaneously. When we first hear someone speak, we may notice the body before the meaning of the speaker's words: their vocal quality, accent, facial expression, or accompanying bodily gestures, such as speaking with their hands. But as Mladen Dolar writes, "soon we accommodate to it and concentrate only on the meaning that is conveyed" (15). The embodied voice "vanishes," and the meaning conveyed in language takes over. We would argue that something similar takes place with many kinds of talk: we organize ourselves so that scholarly talk can take place (attending a campus lecture, launching a Zoom meeting, travelling to a conference), but as soon as the talk begins, we forget that what we are doing ("simply" talking) required an enormous amount of infrastructure and resources, both personal and collective. In this brief reflection, we think together about that infrastructure of talk through the lens of Henry Mayhew, a figure whose work is so infused with talk that it calls us to address what is often missing in the scholarly conversations that underpin our work too: talk about talk itself. London Labour is, in large part, a record of talk, speech, and voice as "transcribed" by Mayhew. That said, much of the talk that forms the scaffolding and context for these volumes is identifiable only by its traces. With Mayhew's questions omitted from the transcripts of the interviews, his speakers seem to speak alone and unprompted in "smooth prose" (Seed 538), although it is often easy enough for the reader to infer Mayhew's questions. Mayhew's accounts also include embedded conversations supplied by his interlocuters: conversations within conversations. We may also surmise that much discussion must have predated the "formal" interviews but those conversations are lost to us, other than through the occasional clue. Further, Mayhew himself, celebrated as a prolific and energetic talker, worked with a team and discussed his process with his collaborators,1 but very little evidence of this talk remains. In his History of Punch, M.H. Spielmann recalls that Mayhew rarely put pen to paper himself, preferring to walk and talk as his wife, Jane Jerrold, recorded (268). In one of the few recollections of May-hew's process, we learn that he spoke to interviewees in his Morning Chronicle office, "where they told their tales to Mayhew, who redictated them, with an added colour of his own, to the shorthand writer in waiting" (Edwards 60). The famous claim in Mayhew's preface to volume 1 that London Labour contains the "'unvarnished' language" of the poor has always been received End Page 214 with some skepticism by Mayhew's readers. Yet to imagine that there could be a space of "pure" unmediated talk if only we had access to it is misleading. London Labour provides us, then, with a rich resource for tracking how conversation gets "translated" from the spoken word to print; what is omitted from the record—the infrastructure required for talk to take place, and for knowledge to be shared—is telling. To invite someone to talk to you, one on one, as Mayhew did repeatedly in his research on Victorian London street life, is both a political and an intimate gesture. He did this with strangers who had no particular reason to answer his demand for their talk. The self-consciousness engendered by the act of talking is evident, for example, in the interview entitled "The Life of a Coster Girl," in volume 1 of London Labour. Mayhew provides two paragraphs of introduction to the conversation, including intimate details about her fidgeting, her clothing, her refusal to make eye contact. "Her voice was husky from shouting apples," Mayhew notes (45). In his discussion of this interview, John Seed claims Mayhew provides no physical description of her, but we hear more detail...