Lily of the Alley was experimental in form, with Edwards attempting the innovation of producing a coherent screen narrative entirely without the use of intertitles.

The film's release was greeted with great interest, but contemporary reviews seem to suggest the finished product to have been a praiseworthy attempt rather than an unqualified success, with the subject matter of the ups and downs of a husband/wife relationship lending itself less well to the absence of titles than a more visually driven action or comic storyline would have.

The Bioscope felt that Edwards' self-imposed restriction "leads to some rather far-fetched ways of conveying simple ideas", although The Times considered that the film was still "an intrinsically absorbing drama, coherently presented".

Lily becomes desperately anxious about him, and one night has a terrible nightmare in which she dreams that he loses first his sight and then his life (either in a fire, or by being robbed and murdered, depending on the source).

The film stock was then melted down to release its marketable silver nitrate content and it is presumed that most of the Hepworth company's full-length features of the 1910s and early 1920s were irretrievably lost at this time.