Wulgarity and Witality: On Making a Spectacle of Oneself in Pickwick

Abstract

In Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1861), a massive, four-volume survey of urban workers living on the economic margins of Victorian society, city streets offer up plenty of appalling working-class vulgarity – strident voices, coarse language, gaudy clothing, and brazen behavior undisciplined by bourgeois standards of decency and reticence.1 But even as these crimes against propriety sharpen the contrast between the privileged observer and “the poor,” they also disturb the power relations between Mayhew and the subjects of his investigations. While vulgarity is generally understood as a lack of good taste and propriety, it can also result from an unwillingness to make an appropriate show of deference to one’s superiors. As James C. Scott argues, subordinate classes can subtly withhold deference in everyday practices such as speech, clothing, gestures, tone of voice, and word choice. These “hidden transcripts,” as he calls them, represent local, relatively safe assertions of power in a stratified society. Seen in this way, vulgarity – bad manners, slang, obscenity, sexual indecency – arises not from a lack of sophistication but from a deliberate intention to offend, resting on an awareness of the power dynamics of class relations. Scott quotes Pierre Bourdieu’s observation, “[t]he concession of politeness always contains political concessions ... the symbolic taxes due from the individual” (Bourdieu, Outline 4; qtd. in Scott 47-8). For some of Mayhew’s subjects, vulgarity is a form of tax evasion, amounting to an oblique protest against the would-be hegemony of bourgeois standards and a defense of their own territories, customs, and traditions.

In London Labour and the London Poor, currents of power, speech, and judgment do not run in only one direction, and vulgarity often supplies the energy that turns these currents back on the observer.