Henry Mayhew was a journalist, novelist, dramatist, and social investigator, born in London in 1812. He was one of the founding editors of Punch and went on to produce some of the most important journalism of the nineteenth century. His series of articles on 'Labour and the Poor' attracted wide notice and eventually grew into a massive four-volume work. He died in 1887.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst writes regularly for the Daily Telegraph and Times Literary Supplement and has previously edited Dickens's A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Books and Great Expectations for OWC. He is the author of Victorian Afterlives: the Shaping of Influence in Nineteenth-Century Literature (OUP, 2002).