Be no longer a chaos, but a world, or even worldkin. Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a product, produce it in God’s name! ’Tis the utmost thou hast in thee: out with it, then.
—Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (1834)

Get leave to work
In this world,—’tis the best you get at all;
For God, in cursing, gives us better gifts
Than men in benediction.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (1856)

There is a cant abroad at the present day, that there is a special pleasure in industry, and hence we are taught to regard all those who object to work as appertaining to the class of natural vagabonds; but where is the man among us that loves labour?
—Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (1861–62)

In 1851 Queen Victoria opened the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations. The Crystal Palace (as it came to be dubbed) housed 13,000 exhibitors—an amazing collection of human labor and ingenuity. But readers of a local London paper already had a good sense of the extraordinary variety of human labor right in their own backyard. Beginning in 1849, the Morning Chroniclepublished two or three installments a week from their metropolitan correspondent Henry Mayhew in which he presented his reports on “the industry, the want, and the vice of the great Metropolis,” “from the lips of the people themselves,” “in their own ‘unvarnished’ language.” Mayhew walked among