Figures, Types, and Images of the Social in the 19th and 20th Century: Practices of Social Imagining in the History of Knowledge and the Sciences

“It is no easy matter […] to arrange the several varieties of work into ‘orders’, and to group the manifold species of arts under few comprehensive genera, so that the mind may grasp the whole at one effort – it is a task of most perplexing character”, Henry Mayhew wrote in his London Labor and the London poor (1849–1851). Mayhew’s early London social research is well known, while it is less well known that he lived in Paris at the end of the 1830s, when the new medium of illustrated journals and collective publications was at its peak, bringing together images and texts, artistic-literary and (popular) scientific circles in a new, creative way.