Showing London characters and crooks by Henry Mayhew

The first two volumes of "London Labour and the London Poor" were first published in 1851; the third volume was first published in 1861 and the fourth in 1862. This edition is based on the first editions of these volumes, and on the following books edited by Peter Quennell: "Mayhew's Lnodon, first published by Spring Books, and "Mayhew's Characters" and "London's Underworld," both first published by Kimber. From the Introduction: "In 1851, the year the Great Exhibition was held in Hyde Park, a book was published which revealed the dark side of a city which most of the tens of thousands of visitors who had come to London that summer scarcely knew existed....It cannot be claimed for 'London Labour and the London Poor' that its publication led to immediate, specific reforms. Many of his readers, in their selfishness or complacency, comforted themselves with the belief that, shocking though poverty was in London, poverty in most large cities in Britain was quite as bad, and that in industrial north it was even worse....But there were others, gradually growing in number, to whom Mayhew's work was an inspiration, who recognized that the lives of the poor could no longer be disregarded. And in later Victorian times, as slums were cleared away and institutions founded, as new housing projects got under way, reformers like Lord Shaftesbury, Sir Edwin Chadwick, and Octavia Hill lived to see the beginning of new hope for those whom Mayhew had so vividly and piteously depicted walking the 'cold, wet, shelterless midnight streets' of London."