"But the branches of industry are so multifarious, the divisions of labour so minutes and manifold, that it seems at first almost impossible to reduce them to any system"
About this Quote
Mayhew is staging a classic Victorian problem: modern life has gotten too big to narrate. The sentence opens with a bureaucrat's dream of tidiness ("reduce them to any system") and then lets that dream collapse under the weight of its own vocabulary. "Multifarious", "minutes", "manifold" - the piling up is the point. He makes complexity feel not just real but slightly oppressive, as if language itself is running out of filing cabinets.
The specific intent is journalistic, but also methodological. Writing about labor in mid-19th century London meant confronting an economy that had stopped resembling the older moral fables of honest crafts and legible trades. Industrial capitalism is portrayed as a branching organism: not a single factory, but an ecosystem of niches, sub-roles, subcontractors, and survival strategies. Mayhew signals that any attempt to map it will be incomplete from the start, which doubles as a preemptive defense against critics who might demand neat categories.
The subtext is a quiet warning about what division of labor does to human comprehension - and, by extension, to empathy and governance. If work is sliced into ever thinner tasks, society also becomes harder to see whole. The phrase "at first" is doing sly work: it promises that he will attempt the impossible anyway, positioning the reader to admire the labor of classification while also recognizing its limits.
Context matters: Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor tried to catalog street sellers, casual workers, and the semi-invisible poor created and discarded by industrial expansion. This line is the thesis behind his reporting style: obsessive taxonomy as a response to a city that no longer fits inside common sense.
The specific intent is journalistic, but also methodological. Writing about labor in mid-19th century London meant confronting an economy that had stopped resembling the older moral fables of honest crafts and legible trades. Industrial capitalism is portrayed as a branching organism: not a single factory, but an ecosystem of niches, sub-roles, subcontractors, and survival strategies. Mayhew signals that any attempt to map it will be incomplete from the start, which doubles as a preemptive defense against critics who might demand neat categories.
The subtext is a quiet warning about what division of labor does to human comprehension - and, by extension, to empathy and governance. If work is sliced into ever thinner tasks, society also becomes harder to see whole. The phrase "at first" is doing sly work: it promises that he will attempt the impossible anyway, positioning the reader to admire the labor of classification while also recognizing its limits.
Context matters: Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor tried to catalog street sellers, casual workers, and the semi-invisible poor created and discarded by industrial expansion. This line is the thesis behind his reporting style: obsessive taxonomy as a response to a city that no longer fits inside common sense.
Quote Details
| Topic | Work |
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