Mayhew, Horace I Horace Mayhew I, 1816–1872, author. Wrote for Punch; was for some years subeditor of the periodical. Contributed to George Cruikshank's Table-Book; also to Bentley's Misc., Ladies' Companion, Lloyd's Weekly, Illus. London News, and other periodicals. Edited Cruikshank's Comic Almanack, 1848, 1849. Published Change for a Shilling, 1848; Letters Left at the Pastry-Cook's, 1853; and other books. His pantomime Plum Pudding produced at Olympic Theatre, 1847. During about last fifteen years of his life was in easy circumstances and wrote comparatively little. Was a bon vivant of Bohemian London, well known and very popular in society; a friend of Dickens.

Mayhew's H.W. contribution ["Chip: Corporation Dreams", VII, 512–13. July 30, 1853] touches the subject dealt with in his brother Henry's London Labour and the London Poor. It pictures the poverty-pinched tradesmen and costermongers whose pennies of City tax and toll go toward providing the turtle and venison with which the Lord Mayor regales his guests at the Mansion House. The item appears in H.W. immediately preceding Miss Costello's "A Literary Lady's Maid." The juxtaposition of the two pieces made Dickens "thrill and shudder with indescribable anguish" (to Wills, July 25, 1853).

Author: Anne Lohrli; © University of Toronto Press, 1971

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography