Daily Inspiration Quote by Henry Mayhew

Mayhew’s line lands like a sly field note from inside Victorian London’s moral machinery: the poor may hustle, but they still keep rules. “I am informed” is doing quiet work here, a journalist’s shrug that both signals reportage and lets him keep a strategic distance from the claim. He’s not sermonizing; he’s cataloging a code.

The apparent paradox - “cheat their employers” yet “do not steal from them” - exposes how slippery middle-class virtue talk becomes when applied to street economies. Mayhew separates cheating from stealing because his subjects do. In the costermonger world, shaving pennies, short measures, or working angles can be framed as tradecraft, even survival. Theft, by contrast, violates a social relationship: it’s personal, it risks retaliation, it breaks the thin trust that keeps informal labor running. The subtext is that morality isn’t absent among the working poor; it’s localized, pragmatic, enforced by reputation and consequence rather than by law or polite opinion.

Context matters: Mayhew was documenting London Labor and the London Poor, a project that fed a growing Victorian appetite for “the condition of England” stories - half reform, half voyeurism. His phrasing gently refuses the era’s easy stereotype that poverty equals criminality. At the same time, he doesn’t romanticize. He accepts exploitation as ambient - employers expect a certain amount of “cheating,” workers expect a certain amount of being cheated - and shows how a community draws lines even inside a rigged game. The sentence is a critique of the moral categories used to govern the poor: the real scandal isn’t that they lack ethics, it’s that their ethics are shaped by scarcity.