Now that I’ve had my latest collection of stories accepted for publication, I’ve turned my attention to a novel that I’ve been thinking about writing which uses Henry Mayhew, the sociologist and reporter, as a central character. So far, I have found very little biographical material on him, surprising since he was so vocal in his day, say 1850, before and after. At the moment, I’m reading what he himself wrote about the Mormons who were gathering strength at the time, and that is only because I used them as a model so that I could write my novel Under the Exquisite Gaze. The way I read Mayhew is that he was a scatty, complex, compassionate man, who had a huge feeling for struggling people in England. So, I know the Mormons aren’t English, but what caught his attention was the considerable number of people from Ireland and England who were going to Liverpool and emigrating to join the Mormons, and the way in which he describes who and what the Mormons really were, would simply make you wonder how really bad the struggle to survive was in the 19th century in England.If nothing else, it shows how deeply dreams of something good were needed at the time. Most of the converts were farmers, and so how achingly they must have dreamt of a different life. Maybe we’ve got a similar human endeavor going on now in 2016. At any rate, that fine man, Henry Mayhew, wrote, recorded and spoke to an enormous number of different tribes, classes, groups and societal outcasts in his time and I’m looking forward to finding out as much as I can about him and pitting him against a really slippery, roughish,vulnerable other.
