The interviews generally appear as seamless monologues: Once Henry Mayhew's subjects begin to talk, it seems, Mayhew remains silent, allowing them to present their lives and opinions directly to the reader. But this striking immediacy between interviewee and reader, an immediacy still apparent today, is illusory. London Labour and the London Poor is a heavily edited record of verbal interactions between a middle-class interviewer and the poor of London. If we consider Mayhew's text to be a collection of monologues--self-contained utterances, unprompted by any outside voice--we are bound to end up with a distorted sense of the views and the lives of the subjects Mayhew interviews, for the text is dialogic. The utterances of the poor are shaped by Mayhew's own utterances, and therefore by his biases and preconceptions about his subjects. His interviewees are as busy responding to and reacting against Mayhew's ideas about them as they are presenting their own sense of self. The purpose of this essay is to distinguish Mayhew's voice from the voices of his subjects. Throughout his interviews, Mayhew offers a number of clues that allow us to reconstruct his voice: Clues about the way he sets up an interview, about the ways he attempts to put his subjects at ease, about the types of questions he asks, and about the types of answers he likes to hear. These clues suggest that while Mayhew had a strongly-held sympathy for his subjects, he continually confronted his interviewees with his belief in their moral and intellectual inferiority, both as individuals and as a group. While his subjects' utterances, packaged as monologues, often seem to support Mayhew's notions, these same utterances, considered as half of a dialogue, often actively resist those notions, and offer instead an alternative view of the moral and intellectual standing of the London poor. **********
