Cultural Studies

Volume 4, Issue 2

Lawrence Grossberg, Janice Radway, Andrew Tolson, Lawrence Grossberg, Janice Radway, Andrew Tolson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134940066
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

This issue of Cultural Studies will deal with the broad range of subjects that typify this journal.

ARTICLES

SOCIAL SURVEILLANCE AND SUBJECTIFICATION: THE EMERGENCE OF ‘SUBCULTURE’ IN THE WORK OF HENRY MAYHEW

ANDREW TOLSON

1

In a short, but very interesting section of his essay on ‘youth surveillance and display’, Dick Hebdige draws attention to the fact that a history of concern for problems of juvenile delinquency can be traced back at least as far as the mid-nineteenth century.¹ Hebdige specifically mentions the work of Henry Mayhew as a ‘celebrated’ instance of this concern. A man of many parts and several careers, Mayhew was primarily a journalist who began to publish his own survey of urban poverty and conditions of labour in the London Morning Chronicle during 1849–50.² Subsequently, in his book London Labour and the London Poor (1851), Mayhew extended the poverty survey to include details of domestic life, moral attitudes and what today we might recognize as aspects of the ‘lived culture’ of sections of the metropolitan working class. Indeed another commentator on Mayhew, Eileen Yeo, has suggested that this later work, especially the study of costermongers, amounts to a ‘full blown cultural study, treating them at length as a group with distinctive social habits’. She argues that Mayhew was groping ‘towards the concept of sub-culture which he could not, in the end, successfully formulate’.³

I think it is significant, to say the least, that Yeo and now Hebdige are locating the discovery of subcultures in this mid-nineteenth-century context. For on one level this is to radically recast the assumption, in several classic cultural studies accounts, that the emergence of spectacular urban subcultures is a distinctively postwar cultural phenomenon. It suggests that subcultures are not an effect of the new consumer society, nor are they simply a symbolic response to the postwar restructuring of working-class communities.⁴ I want to suggest that it is possible to develop Hebdige’s general point, to trace the visibility of subcultures, in the public domain, to the formation of a particular kind of social perspective, a ‘sociological gaze’, which has its origins in the 1830s and 1840s. In the postwar period, youth subcultures may have re-emerged in their characteristic modern forms; but the conditions and criteria for their recognition seem to have a much more extended history.

For, as Hebdige also observes, the conditions within which subcultures first appear as spectacular are themselves related to a variety of strategies for social intervention—in nineteenth-century practices of philanthropy, moral reform and education. The important point here is that an early form of cultural studies is generated within what Foucault has described as the distinctively modern approach to ‘governmentality’.⁵ Mayhew himself was clearly at the liberal, reformist end of the spectrum, but he was none the less operating in the ‘domain of the social’, which Paul Hirst has identified as a distinctively new discursive formation, permitting a range of approaches to the classification, supervision and policing of urban populations.⁶ In this light, subcultures can be regarded as one way in which such populations become socially visible and in terms of which they can be categorized. In short, the prehistory of urban cultural studies, in the recognition it gives to cultural diversity, is part and parcel of the exercise of new forms of social power.

Perhaps these are elementary points, but they are often lost, it seems to me, in the relentless drive of cultural studies to engage with the ‘contemporary’ (nowadays, the ‘postmodern’). More particularly, if certain ways of doing cultural studies have involved, and possibly still do involve, an element of social surveillance—then there are clearly major questions to be answered about the politics of these kinds of research. For instance, what exactly is going on when the ‘ethnographic’ study of youth subcultures involves ‘working with’ young people in youth clubs? I think this kind of question should be debated much more extensively in the pages of Cultural Studies, as it has been occasionally elsewhere.⁷ However, there are more or less manageable ways into a critical investigation of the practices of cultural research. It is certainly possible to ask difficult questions about its institutional functions; but it is also possible to look at the techniques involved in different research activities, and to consider their practical effects for the populations thus ‘discovered’.

Having mentioned Mayhew’s pioneering study of the costermongers, Hebdige proceeds to discuss the most novel nineteenth-century technique for ‘surveillance and display’—that is, the use of photography. But Mayhew of course was not a photographer; rather his principal method for making his subjects socially visible was the interview, more or less faithfully transcribed. On the pages of London Labour and the London Poor, and since then in innumerable similar studies, what appears for public examination and scrutiny is the speech of individual members of the working class, generated in particular and somewhat peculiar circumstances. In this article, looking in some detail at Mayhew’s work, I want to make some critical observations about the development of the interview as a research technique. In particular my attention will be focused on the criteria through which working-class people have become visible in interviews, in so far as particular kinds of social and (sub)cultural identity have been attributed to them.

2

It is instructive, first of all, to reflect that there once was a period of history, perhaps 200 years ago, when interviewing was not yet an established or widespread social practice. It begins to emerge in its modern forms in the early to mid-nineteenth century, but there is much unresolved debate as to the precise ‘origins’ of the interview. Historians of journalism in the United States have differed over the question of the first published newspaper interview, with Nilsson (1971) contradicting Turnbull’s (1936) argument in favour of an interview between Horace Greely and Brigham Young, head of the Mormon church, which appeared in the New York Tribune in 1859.⁸ In view of the fact that Mayhew’s first interviews appeared in the Morning Chronicle a decade earlier, it is difficult to see how Turnbull’s argument could ever have been taken seriously. In fact Nilsson shows that James Gordon Bennett, of the New York Herald, was publishing interviews as early as 1835–6, with exchanges rendered verbatim in the manner of a court report. Certainly, the newspaper interview was regarded in Britain as an American invention and was resisted as such. It was not until 1870, for example, that William Henry Russell interviewed Bismarck for the London Times.

At any rate, ‘mid-nineteenth century’ (1835–70) seems to cover most suggestions for the emergence of the newspaper interview. This emergence would seem to be generally related to the foundation of a ‘fourth estate’, and to the new professional confidence which Anthony Smith has described as ‘a journalism which recognised a special relationship between itself as an activity and certain categories of events and information’. Smith discusses the introduction of ‘specific techniques of collection’, of which the interview may be counted as one, which ‘gave journalists an outlook —a specialised role within the social observance of reality’.⁹ In this respect it is interesting to note that the actual meaning of the word ‘interview’ changes during this period. Early examples, such as the ‘Interview with the King of the Sandwich Islands’, published in the New York Herald (7 September 1835), retain a sense of the interview as a meeting, or the record of a meeting, involving face-to-face conversation.¹⁰ It is in this sense perhaps that James Boswell can be said to have ‘interviewed’ Dr Johnson: indeed the Life (published in 1791) contains many examples of directly reported conversation. (This also might be an instance of an eighteenth-century literary genre which prefigures the modern interview: ‘table-talk’ etc.). But in the mid-nineteenth century, as Nilsson indicates, ‘interview’ becomes a term for a ‘special journalistic genre’. It is no longer a record of a meeting or conversation, but a method of journalistic inquiry.

Now, however, a difficulty arises. In tracing the history of the sociological interview, which also emerges in this period, it is important to recognize that interviewing was not only established as a journalistic practice, even though Mayhew, himself a journalist, published his ‘sociological’ interviews in a newspaper. Historians of journalism, perhaps inevitably, have taken a rather narrow view of the ‘origins’ of the interview. Nilsson, for example, suggests that it is a consequence of popular journalism itself adopting the conventions of courtroom interrogation, given the ‘human interest’ in crime stories and ‘more or less sensational trials’.¹¹ This may well be an important influence, but it cannot for the type of sociological interviewing practised by Henry Mayhew. What is missing from the conventional histories of journalism is a recognition that interviewing was simultaneously developing as a technique of social investigation in other, more or less related, professional fields. Specifically in the British context, modern practices of interviewing have their origins, not in popular journalism, but rather in two distinct fields of social research: (i) in the reports of various parliamentary select committees, factory inspectors etc. into the moral condition of the working class; and (ii) in the development of a new kind of ‘criminological’ interest in the reform of ‘delinquents’. It was these two traditions which Mayhew merged and popularized in the 1850s and within which a new kind of ‘social visibility’ was constructed.

Mayhew’s debt to the first of these traditions is well established, since it is foregrounded in Yeo’s discussion of his importance as a social investigator. Again, the development of the interview is related to established legal techniques of cross-examination, but designed in this case to produce a public testimony without the ‘human interest’ associated with the sensational trial. However it is within a second, less familiar field that the human element is more clearly foregrounded. Here, the development of certain kinds of criminological inquiry must be identified as an equally important site for the development of the interview—where its form is not so much derived from procedures of public cross-examination, as from the intensive, individualized, private practice of confession. And there is another kind of professional competence which now enters the field: for not only the judge and the inspector, but also the clergyman, must be counted as making an influential contribution.

For instance, James Bennett’s important study of the development of the life-history interview summarizes the significant work of the Revd John Clay, as recorded by his son Walter Lowe Clay (1861).¹² In the early 1840s, Clay set himself the task of obtaining and subsequently publishing ‘cell confessionals’ from prisoners at Preston gaol, where he was prison chaplain. According to his son, an interview method was derived from the 1839 Report of the Constabulary Force Commissioners, which quoted extracts from a confession obtained at Salford gaol by one Revd Bagshaw, in response to ‘a set of fixed interrogatories which we had prepared for guiding the course of similar inquiries’, and which were advocated as ‘a means of obtaining highly valuable information for the prevention of crime’.¹³ Clearly a standardized methodology was in the making, and both W.L.Clay and James Bennett claim that it was perfected by the Revd John Clay. As W.L.Clay puts it: ‘he soon discovered the curious autobiographical tendency of convicts, a tendency which solitary confinement was found to stimulate greatly’.¹⁴

Some of Clay’s ‘confessions’, first published in annual reports to local magistrates, appeared in newspapers, and were subsequently quoted in Mary Carpenter’s influential book, Juvenile Delinquents (1853). They thus achieved wide, including parliamentary, circulation.¹⁵ Carpenter herself (‘the acknowledged authority on the treatment of the perishing and dangerous classes during the mid-century’) also took some cursory notice of Mayhew’s work on ragged schools.¹⁶ The point is, I think, that the sociological interview seems to emerge from several simultaneous sources, through a variety of routes, which are independent of each other, but which overlap to some extent. To adopt another Foucaultian concept, it seems appropriate to recognize that Mayhew was working within a mid-nineteenth century discursive formation— that is, a ‘systematic dispersion of statements’,¹⁷ which can be located in newspapers, in literary discourse, in official reports and essays. It is a configuration of these elements in Mayhew’s work that makes a certain kind of sociological interview possible.

In the end, the search for the ‘origins’ of the sociological interview is probably fruitless. It is not possible to privilege any one of these various sources (legal interrogation; journalistic ‘human interest’; social investigation; ‘cell confession’) over the others. What we have in Foucaultian terms are various ‘surfaces of emergence’ for the interview. And of course it does not diminish the significance of Mayhew’s achievement to recognize that it was accomplished on the basis of these prior institutional conditions. There is, in the American histories of journalism, an inflated claim for James Gordon Bennett as the ‘inventor’ and even as the ‘father’ of the newspaper interview.¹⁸ The suggestion that Mayhew was a pioneer of the sociological interview need not take us that far. He was simply in the right place at the right time; but the scope of his achievement is certainly worth closer examination.

3

For it is under these general conditions that new forms of public statement begin to appear in the mid-ni...