Victorian London
THIS is the latest of the three volumes in which Mr. Quennell has revived Mayhew's classic, London Labour and the London Poor, for a new generation of readers. It was an excellent idea, which has certainly succeeded in its main purpose of re-establishing Henry Mayhew as a social investigator and descriptive writer of outstanding importance, but which might have been carried out still more effec- tively if greater attention had been paid to the details of editing and production. As it is, each of the three new volumes seems to have grown up without much reference to the other two. In his introduction to the first, Mayhew's London (issued by the Pilot Press in 1949), Mr. Quennell did not appear to envisage any further instalments ; he derived his text from the three-volume edition of 1861. and stated that he had intended " to concentrate on the more graphic and personal side of Mayhew's massive survey, and, with the help of these extracts, to provide a detailed panorama of
London in the 'fifties." Mr. QuennetNerformed his task of abridge- ment with the sympathetic skill that was expected of him, though there were some puzzling features, to which a reader familiar with the original volumes might have demurred. The second volume, London's Underworld—issued, like the third, by William Kimber, and perhaps inspired by the success of Mayhew's London—consisted of selections from the additional fourth volume (published-in 1862) of Mayhew's original work, a volume entirely devoted to prostitutes, thieves, beggars, and so on. As Mayhew wrote very little of this volume himself, it was disappointing to find his three collaborators deprived of the credit they deserved. The last volume, Mayhew's Characters, represents another, and presumably the final cut at Mayhew's original three-volume joint (unless it sells superlatively well, when there may be a call for yet another selection ?).
As a result of this unmethodical treatment, we are left with three volumes of different sizes, bound in cloth of different colours. The first two are squat, bulky volumes, poorly designed. By contrast, the new volume, Mayhew's Characters, can be read and handled with pleasure, its appearance suggesting that criticism of the earlier volumes has taken effect. Very properly, Mayhew's original preface, previously omitted, has been included, with its call to those in high places "-to bestir themselves to improve the condition of a class of people whose misery, ignorance, and vice, amidst all the immense wealth and great knowledge of ' the first city in the world ' is, to say the very least, a national disgrace to us."
A conviction, of the justice of Mayhew's challenge is perhaps the dominant impression that will be received by any reader of Mayhew's Characters. Tempting as it may be to lament the passing of much that was curious and quaint and picturesque, yet the appalling poverty and misery, the sickening stench of the overcrowded lodging- houses (real enough for anyone who spent a night in a tube station during the " blitz ") must rise up like-a malignant cloud to blot Out any romantic escapist hankerings for those " good old days." A second impression, equally strong, might be of the great amount of good that somehow lived on amid so much that was evil—in the heart of the orphan flower girl, for instance, who `.never troubled,the parish," or of the sick and dying old man who said that his wife's "tenderness and care has been such that a man never knew from woman before." Turning the pages, we linger for a few moments with the " running patterer "who sold lurid broadsheets of murderers or " a most beutiful helegy " of the great departed (" Poor Sir Robert Peel,—he was some good ; indeed, I think-he was as good as 5s. a day to me for the four or five days when he was freshest "). We pause sympathetically beside a street boy as he strives to answer Mayhew's questions: " He had heard that the earth went round the sun, but from what he'd noticed, shouldn't have thought it." Critics, as the publishers' advertisements continually remind us, are all too prone to find that the bolt they review are " fascinating "; but it is difficult to find snot r adjective for Mayhew's masterpiece. Mr. Quennell has revived for us the gusto and humour, the tragedy and pathos of the mass of the English people as they enjoyed the period of our greatest national prosperity. And, looking through these unsparing volumes, the most surprising thing is that enjoyed "
seems, somehow, to be the right word. DEREK HUDSON.
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