The case proved to be a complicated one, although the sums involved were small – in one instance there was the matter of an unauthorized increase of £1 per week in Howden’s salary. Woodfall had in fact attempted to reach a settlement before going to court, but Mayhew either neglected the matter or refused to cooperate. As a result, when the case was concluded in 1852 London Labour and the London Poor ceased publication. The first edition in book form with that year’s date consisted of the two volumes so far completed.

Why did Mayhew behave in this way? Perhaps he was tired of the whole undertaking and wanted to end it, or perhaps it was an example of his instability and unwillingness to see a long-term project through to its end. Whatever the reason, a promising enterprise had been killed off, and little is known of Mayhew’s activities between 1852 and 1854.

In 1856, however, his thoughts returned to the idea, and there were plans for David Bogue, a publisher with premises at 86 Fleet Street, to reissue and continue London Labour and the London Poor. They came to nothing when Bogue died in November of the same year, and Mayhew seems not to have persisted in the search for a new publisher and to have turned his mind to other things. In 1857 he began writing another novel, Paved with Gold, in collaboration with his brother Augustus, but he dropped out after the first five numbers and when the novel was eventually published in 1858 with illustrations by H. K. Browne (‘Phiz’), the title page said ‘by Augustus Mayhew’. It is a good novel, and demonstrates vividly the extraordinary fascination which the London streets held for the brothers Mayhew.

Henry, in the meantime, drifted from project to project. Nothing really seemed to interest him. He edited Morning News for the month of January 1859, after which the paper ceased publication; and his book Young Benjamin Franklin came out in 1861. However, at about this time – though nothing seems to be known about the circumstances surrounding the decision – the publishing firm of Griffin Bohn undertook to complete and issue London Labour and the London Poor in four volumes.7 Three of these appeared in 1861 and the final volume came out in 1862. In this year also The Criminal Prisons of London, by Henry Mayhew and John Binny, was published. In 1865 the four volumes of London Labour were reprinted under the imprint of Charles Griffin.

Mayhew’s best work was done, and the last decades of his life were marked by a steady decline. He made abortive efforts to keep going. During the mid 1860s he pondered starting a rival to Punch, but such plans as there were came to nothing. At about this time, too, he brought out a series of monthly parts called The Shops and Companies of London, designed as a tribute to British industry. He was for a brief period Editor of a magazine called Only Once a Year, and he went to Germany again – in 1870 he was in Metz, where, with his son Athol, he acted as a foreign correspondent. Pretty well his last literary effort seems to have been made in 1874 when he and his son wrote a play called Mont Blanc, which turned out a failure. Mayhew’s name appeared on the title page of a book called London Characters in 1874, but his involvement in it is problematic.8

After this, there was nothing. Mayhew died of bronchitis on 25 July 1887, and an obituary in the Illustrated London News commented, by the by, upon the Mayhew brothers:

But all of them being dead except Henry, who in his later years moved in rather a small circle, it was but natural that the world should regard the literary Mayhews as extinct. If the author of London Labour and the London Poor had died earlier, many people would have been present at his funeral in Kensal-Green Cemetery on Saturday last. As it was, those for whose causes he had so valiantly contended seem to have forgotten him.9

A sad comment, this, and all the sadder for being essentially true.

II

In their sheer bulk the four volumes of London Labour and the London Poor are both impressive and daunting. Printed virtually throughout in double column, averaging about five hundred pages per volume, they represent a tremendous achievement; and it is neither a denigration nor a devaluation of Mayhew’s work to ponder its nature, more particularly since, as we have seen, his own approach to it, as indeed to all his work, was somewhat dilatory. Clearly, however, the great study of London (including of course The Criminal Prisons of London, published in 1862) compelled his mind and created its own momentum to enable him to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion.

This work represents Mayhew’s journalism at its best. He provides us with a stunning and detailed panorama of what life in the streets of London during the early Victorian period was like for a wide range of hucksters, pedlars, poor, destitute and unprivileged people; but unlike Frederick Engels, who had been exploring the slums of Manchester some years before him and who was primarily interested in the physical environment of poverty, Mayhew’s focus was upon people. It is this which gives his writing its immediacy and its vividness.

Then, too, Mayhew was unencumbered by political theory and conscious ideology. His aim was to study the London poor, occupation by occupation, trade by trade, and he also explored the worlds of those who had neither trade nor occupation. What he did bring to this monumental survey was a deep sense of compassion for those he talked to, a reluctance to moralize and a mistrust for the kind of evangelical philanthropy which he described in these words:

There is but one way of benefiting the poor, viz.