The Sun.
London, England, 1856-03-19 00:00:00

Judging the work, that is to say, from its first in-
stalment* as an extended and eneyelopmdiao

periodical.

A preliminary glimpse of " The

Great World of London"—revealing it to us,
for example (just to begin. with), as seen
Once upon a time by Mr. MAYHEW from
the car of a balloon ! "Londres n'est plus une

ville : c'est une province converte de maisons." It
is the opinion put forth epigrammatically
by M. HORA.OE SAY, the great French eco-
nomist. Mr. MAYHEW thinks it a very
inadequate tribute, indeed, to the great
capital, considered solely in reference to its
superficial magnitude. Instead of likening it to
a " shire" or a " department" he would prefer
talking of it rather as a kingdom, or, better

still, according to the suggestion of the
very title he has selected for it, as—a great

world !

Our vast metropolis, covering—he

,akes particular care to reentioß at the out

set—an area of no less than 122 square

miles, or, in other terms, 78,029 statute
acres, containing 327,391 houses, and number-
ing as many as 2,362,236 souls within its

enormous boundaries ! A capital comprising up•
wards of 10,500 different thoroughfares, some of
them (as Oxford-street, for example) measuring
upwards of a mile in length—the mere paved
roadways costing as much as 14,000,0001.
in the aggregate, and requiring an annual ex-
penditure for repairs alone of over 1,800,0001.!
A. city the inhabitants of which, if drawn up in
marching order, two and two, would extend over
a distance of 670 miles, and who, if moving at
the rate of three miles an hour, it is calculated
would require more than nice days and nights (a
veritable nine days' wonder) to pass by in awful
procession ! The literary showman of this huge
marvel Mr. HENRY MAYHEW - introduc es
" the Great World of London" to observation
from all sorts of directions. He brings his
reader into it " By Rail "—and then whisks him
out again and carries him into it through the
" Port of London "—and then whew ! presto !

whirls him up on the broomstick of Mother SHTr-
TON or onthe crutch of AS➢iODEUS, after the fashion
of one DON CLEOPHAS PERAN DE ZAMBULO, until

he perches him in nubibus hard by the Golden
Cross in the Golden gallery of Sir CHRISTOPHER—
showing him " The Great World of London,"
framed by the dim horizon and mapped out mi-
nutely far below as seen from the top of St.
Pail's Cathedral. Nothing seems too enormous
or too paltry as a subject for his skill in delinea-
tion. After describing the vast city as it lay
stretched out beneath the soaring silk and gas of
the Great Nassau, he descends to such nainutice
as the record of the amount of food consumed in
one year by the voracious Londoners—
butchers' meat, for instance, " to the tune" of
from 7,000,0001. to 8,000,0001. strictly—
including calves, to the number of 30,000, pigs
to that of 34,000, bullocks to that of 277,000,
and sheep to that' of 1,480,000 ! Besides
fruit in such quantities, as (taking one item as in
itself sufficiently illustrative) 1,527,500 potties
of strawberries ! Washing all these solids down
with 65,000 pipes of wine, and 2,000,000 gal-
' lons of spirits, and 43,200,000 gallons of
malt liquor, and (some small consolation to
the Teetotallers !) water to such an inconceivable
aggregate of gallons as-19,215,000,000 ! Tell-
ing us, moreover, that for the simple purposes of
heating and lighting alone, not less than
3,000,000 tons of coals are annually consumed by
the Londoners ! As if to enliven the pages stored
with these statistics, Mr. MAYHEW condescends to
distinguish between the various modes of
speech peculiar to different classes of the in-
habitants of the metropolis the London
vulgarian who talks of his " Hetalian Willer"—
the London exanisif..-}in lisnA about his " after-
noon s wide—aw—in Wotton
the London gent declaring of the crib where he
hangs out that " it isn't the Stilton"—the Lon-
don cadger's cant, and coster-slang, and the other
varieties of Metropolitan language. Beyond
all which, it should be observed, that
Mr. MAYHEW has provided himself with his
own skilled photographer—who adorns his initial
chapters, just by way of a pleasant foretaste, with
a life-like sketch of those very' amiable gentlemen
—the Ticket of Leavers ! Gentlemen who remind
us at once of another and a very remarkable evi-
dence of the amplitude of Mr. MAYHEW'S
investigations, with a view to securing
for his work the merits of authenticity and exac-
titude. Allusion is here made, of course, to the
curious system indicated by the very remarkable
meeting convened on Wednesday evening, the
12th inst., by the author of "The Great World
of London," the meeting at which some fifty
Ticket-of-LeaveMen assembled together in answer
to Mr. MAYHEW'S invitation. Conspicuous among
the speakers upon the occasion appears to have
been a certain little costermonger(name unknown)
who stated his case somewhat plausibly—a ticket-
of •leaver and a dealer in hare and rabbit skins.
Hear him!—
, " While passing through Tothill-street, West-
minster, one day, two policemen came up to him
and wanted to search his sack, which was full of
skins, because they said he was a ticket-of-leave
man, and suspected that he had something not come
honestly by. Rather than allow them to look into
his sack he went to the police court in their custody,
and insisted on seeing the magistrate. Before he
could say a word to his worshipaboutthetreatment
he had received, the inspector spoke first, called
him a " ticket-of-leave,' and stated that he had
been very violent and saucy. Instead of listening,
under such circumstances, to what he had to say
for himself, the magistrate also burst out, " Oh,
you are an insolent fellow and a disgrace to society
—if the Secretary of State knew of your doings he
would banish you ; and, as his worship also mutter-
ed something about sending him to quod' for con-
tempt of Court, he thought it best to 'hook it.'"
Well, really, this seems to us a very prepos-
terous case indeed—and one altogether charac-
terised by a pretty considerable amount of hum-
bug ! Fancy a ticket-of-leave man—who had
(three and a half years before) been justly sen-
tenced to seven years' transportation for thieving
—so exquisitely sensitive as to the indignity
of a couple of " Bobbies" prying into his imma-
culate sack of hare and rabbit skins that he keeps
it sacred from their eyes, and insists upon being
carried forthwith to a police-court- to have the
matter at once submitted to the judgment of the
sitting magistrate ! Whereupon the inhuman
" beak" burst out, instanter, with—" You are an
insolent fellow," and so forth, muttering something
about sending my gentleman to " qnod" until he
(the ticket-of-leave) deems it prudent to follow the
advice tendered to poor Jo by Mr. BUCKET, viz.,
to "hook it !" After a consideration of all
which facts we shrewdly suspect that the sack
would have been found on investigation to have
contained something else besides the skins
of hares or rabbits ! Conjecturing, mean-
while, that the magistrate was altogether
by no means so much "out " in his opinion,
and that the two policemen were anything
but acting so much amiss when they kept a vigi-
lant eye upon the doings of this exceedingly
tetchy little costermonger—Ex disce omnes.
And so with the rest of the high-mindgd wit-
,
n esses self-elected as champions of the cause of

* The Great World of London. By Henry Mayhew,
Part I. David Bogue, 86, Fleet•street. Bvo., pp. 86.
1556.