The Five

by Hallie Rubenhold

  The homes of her youth could offer few other comforts. The Walkers never lived far from Shoe Lane or High Holborn. From Dawes Court they moved to Dean Street, Robinhood Court, and Harp Alley. Space and privacy were almost unknown in the dwellings clustered along the slender medieval streets in the parishes of St. Bride’s and St. Andrew’s. An 1844 inquiry undertaken into the state of housing in populous London districts found that buildings situated in enclosed courts and narrow alleys, like those in which the Walkers lived, were some of the “worst conditioned . . . badly ventilated and filthy . . . in the entire neighbourhood.” Most families shared one room; the average size “measured from 8 to 10 feet, by 8 feet, and from 6 to 8 feet from floor to ceiling.”3 In these compact rooms entire families were squeezed together. Dawes Court, once a large half-timber-and-plaster house, had been subdivided into three separate dwellings, before being apportioned once more into individually rented rooms, inhabited by no fewer than forty-five people. One bed may have sufficed for an entire household, with younger children sleeping on makeshift truckle beds stowed beneath. A table and a few chairs served as parlor, dining room, and wardrobe. Every corner would contain something of use, from brooms, pots, and buckets to sacks of onions and coal. Social campaigners worried about the impact that such living conditions had on the morals and sense of decency of the hardworking artisan class. Parents, children, siblings, and members of the extended family dressed, washed, engaged in sex, and, if no “adjacent conveniences” were available, defecated in full view of one another. As one family member prepared a meal, a sick child with a raging fever might be vomiting into a chamber pot beside them, while a parent or sibling stood by half-naked, changing their clothes. Husbands and wives made future children while lying beside present ones. Little about the human condition in its most basic form could be concealed.

  Even at a rent of four shillings a week, these buildings had little to recommend them. Tenants might expect damp interiors, soot-blackened ceilings with peeling plaster, rotting floorboards, and broken or ill-fitting windows with gaps that allowed in the rain and wind. Blocked chimneys blew smoke back into the rooms and contributed to a host of respiratory illnesses. The internal corridors and stairwells were not much better; some were positively hazardous. One such building was described as having “a handrail broken away” and the stairs no better, “a heavy boot has been clean through one of them already, and it would need very little . . . for the whole lot to give way and fall with a crash.”4

  However, what concerned the inhabitants most frequently was not the crowded living conditions or the ramshackle buildings, but rather access to clean water, sufficient drainage, and fresh air. The city’s little courts suffered the worst, and inspectors regularly found that only one source of water served a number of households. Almost all of the barrels were tainted by “a filthy accumulation on the surface.” In some cases, residents had to use “refuse water,” gathered from stationary pools that stank in the summer, for cooking and cleaning. Many of these buildings lacked cesspools, so the contents of emptied chamber pots “ran into the courts or streets where they remained until a shower of rain washed them into the gutters.”5 Unsurprisingly, deadly outbreaks of cholera, typhus, and what medical inspectors described broadly as “fever” were rife, especially in the warmer months.

  As the capital’s laboring classes knew too well, filthy, overpopulated dwellings made a comfortable home for nothing but disease. Smoke-filled rooms, as well as London’s noxious yellow “fogs,” further impacted the health of the overworked and undernourished. Polly was to learn of this even before she had reached her seventh birthday. In the spring of 1852, her mother began to sicken. At first, Caroline would display the symptoms of what appeared to be the flu, but the cough she developed would grow worse. As the tuberculosis, which had settled in her lungs, gradually began to consume them, her dreadful hacking became blood-laced. Feverish, thin, and weary, Caroline continued to waste away until November 25.

  At her death, she left behind a widower and three children; the youngest of whom, Frederick, had not yet passed his third birthday. At a time when workingmen were not expected to undertake the sole care of small children, it is a testament to Edward Walker’s affection for his family that he persisted in doing so. Rather than leave his sons and daughter with relations or even at the local workhouse (a not uncommon eventuality), Walker was determined to give them a home. As he never remarried, it appears that Caroline’s elder sister, Mary Webb, may have taken on the task of rearing of the children and tending the hearth.*

  At the time of Caroline’s demise she did not know that she had communicated her illness to her son Frederick, nor endangered her children by her constant close proximity to them. Little about the pathology of tuberculosis would be understood until the end of the nineteenth century. The disease, spread via airborne particles over a period of regular exposure, remained one of the Victorian era’s greatest killers, especially within family groups. Women, who assumed the burden of nursing their ailing relations and neighbors, often unwittingly introduced the infection into their own household. Less than eighteen months after his mother’s death, Frederick too began to sicken. Sensing that the boy would not live, Edward and Mary had him baptized on March 14, 1854. A month later, Frederick was laid to rest alongside his mother at St. Andrew’s Church, in Holborn.

  Despite the support of her aunt or other female relations, Polly had to grow up quickly. According to commentators of the era, the daughter of a bereaved husband was expected “to be a comfort to her widowed father” and “to keep his house and take care of his family.” In the absence of her mother, Polly’s first duty, even above acquiring an education, was to the home, whether she herself wished to fulfill the role of the “woman of the house” or not. This expectation also would exclude her from seeking full-time employment, especially in domestic service, with its requirement that she live elsewhere.6 Certainly by the age of nine, Polly had mastered the basic skills necessary to keep house and cook meals for the family. Much as convention dictated, she apparently remained beneath her father’s roof throughout her teenage years, rather than take work eventually as a servant, as girls of her age and class regularly did. Edward Walker’s wages covered the expenses of his reduced household, so Polly’s days were divided between her household duties and the luxury of prolonged schooling into her teenage years.

  It seems that misfortune fostered a strong bond between Polly and her father, one that endured for most of her life. While Polly was expected to assume the physical burden of her mother’s former role in the home, Victorian society also looked to the widower’s daughter to provide her father with the emotional support he now lacked. The era’s literature regularly depicted the daughters of bereaved men as paragons of selfless devotion: perfectly behaved, devoid of childish cares, resourceful, gentle, and innocent. Charles Dickens’s Florence Dombey, of Dombey and Son, a story written the year after Polly’s birth, was one such irreproachable character. Having lost her mother, Florence strove successfully to win and secure her widowed father’s love through her moral strength and self-sacrifice. In the case of Polly and Edward Walker, evidently the devotion and moral strength were equally distributed between the two.

  For most of her life, Polly rarely strayed far from her father, even in her choice of spouse. In 1861, nineteen-year-old William Nichols was living in a men’s lodging house at 30–31 Bouverie Street and working as a warehouseman, most likely in the printing trade. Nichols was the son of a herald painter. By tradition, this type of artisan applied coats of arms to carriages and signs; over the course of the nineteenth century, herald painters moved into printing stationery and bookplates. At some time prior to the spring of 1861, William had set out from his birthplace in Oxford to begin a career as a printer. Bouverie Street placed him directly at the heart of the scene. No fewer than seven magazines and newspapers had offices between numbers 10 and 25, including theDaily News, once edited by Dickens, and Punchmagazine, cofound
ed by the journalist and social reformer Henry Mayhew. The London chronicled by both of these writers was the London of William Nichols and the Walkers. Mayhew, like Dickens, had experienced debt and poverty, had known the precariousness of life along with much of the area’s print fraternity. The world of “Grub Street,” as the area had been called since the seventeenth century, was comprised of a close community of men from a variety of backgrounds who scribbled, read, produced, and sold text, who drank together, borrowed money from one another, and married into one another’s families.

  In this Dickensian story, the motherless blacksmith’s daughter, who dutifully kept house for her father and elder brother, met William Nichols, a young man with a broad, sunny face and light hair. Aware that he needed to ingratiate himself to the two male guardians of this small, dark-haired, brown-eyed young woman, William would have carefully sought their friendship and approval. And he succeeded. Shortly before Christmas in 1863, a marriage proposal was made and accepted. The banns were read, and on January 16, 1864, eighteen-year-old Polly and her beau were married at St. Bride’s, also known as “the Printer’s Church.” William proudly entered that precise profession as his on the register.

  Polly and William’s marriage brought change to everyone in the family. Polly’s father and brother, who had come to rely on her, had to welcome another man into their household, with the full understanding that a succession of children would likely follow. The newly expanded Walker-Nichols clan moved to lodgings at 17 Kirby Street, situated in the down-at-heel area known as Saffron Hill, just north of High Holborn. As two households living as one, they would have sought two, if not three, separate rooms, so that the married couple might enjoy some degree of privacy. However, the building on Kirby Street, with three floors each occupied by one family, would not be much of an improvement.

  Much as anticipated, three months after the nuptials, Polly was expecting the couple’s first child. On December 17, 1864, the cries of William Edward Walker Nichols filled the rooms of 17 Kirby Street.7 By the autumn of 1865, Mrs. Nichols was pregnant once more, and the need for larger accommodation grew as obvious as her maternal belly.

  By the 1860s a working-class family’s budget would have been better spent living south of the Thames in Southwark, Bermondsey, Lambeth, Walworth, or Camberwell than it would have near Fleet Street in the areas of Holborn and Clerkenwell. For four to five shillings a week, one might rent a small house, with three to four rooms and possibly a yard at the back. However, the quality of the housing south of the river was not entirely superior to that of the north, nor would it be an economical choice unless equally well-paid work could be procured close by. By the summer of 1866, the Walker-Nichols household went to Walworth, the part of London where Polly’s father, Edward Walker, had spent his youth. The family, now six in number, took a house at 131 Trafalgar Street, on what was described as “a terrace of two-story brick cottages.” Although the road and its dwellings had been constructed relatively recently, shortly after 1805, they had not weathered the passage of sixty years especially well. The insatiable demand for affordable housing meant that homes once designed for the Georgian middle classes were now, in the Victorian era, divided up and occupied by multiple households. William and Polly’s neighbors were carpenters, machinists, shopkeepers, and warehousemen whose large families lived in homes only marginally more spacious than those she would have known in Holborn. The Walker-Nicholses, with three male wage earners—Polly’s husband, brother, and father—were more fortunate than many. They could afford to inhabit all four rooms of their house. However, this situation was not to last.

  In the Victorian working-class household, a family’s level of comfort rose and fell like the tide with each birth or death. As the Nich­olses’ brood of children expanded, their means of supporting themselves would be stretched. Infants arrived and, tragically, departed at intervals. Polly and William’s eldest child failed to live more than a year and nine months, but the family was soon joined by others. Edward John was the first child to be born at the home on Trafalgar Street, on July 4, 1866. He was followed two years later by George Percy, on July 18, and by Alice Esther in December 1870. Shortly after the birth of this daughter, Polly’s brother left home to begin a family of his own. The loss of Edward’s financial contribution, and the addition of another mouth to feed, tightened the household’s purse strings and caused the Nicholses to fret about their future prospects.

  The Peabody Worthies

  In January 1862, it was difficult to be an American in London. Only a few months earlier, the Civil War had erupted in the United States, dividing the country into the Union and the Confederacy. In the drawing rooms of Mayfair, London’s small expat community of Yankees and Southerners underwent a similar split. To complicate matters, recently, in November 1861, the Union navy had forcibly boarded a British ship, the Trent, in order to apprehend Southern envoys traveling to London. Parliament, the press, and the newspaper-reading public were up in arms at the Union’s flagrant act of aggression. As Virginia businessmen based in Grosvenor Square broke off their friendships with New York investors and as Londoners cursed the name of Abraham Lincoln, the American financier George Peabody sat in his Broad Street office, despairing. Shortly before the Trent affair, Peabody had intended to make a generous philanthropic gift to his adoptive city’s “poor and needy . . . to promote their comfort and happiness.”1A variety of possibilities had been discussed—a donation to charity schools or an investment in municipal drinking fountains—but Peabody wished to directly address what he felt to be the most pressing concern among the working classes: housing.

  Peabody himself had come from humble beginnings; he had worked his way up from an apprenticeship at a Massachusetts dry goods store to ownership of an international import and export business. In 1838, he moved his headquarters to London and eventually expanded into banking. Upon his retirement, in 1864, control of his merchant banking firm, Peabody & Co., was assumed by his partner, J. S. Morgan, of the Morgan family of bankers. As Peabody neither married nor had legitimate children, he wished to bequeath his own considerable fortune to good works and alighted on the idea of creating a number of low-cost dwellings for London’s laboring families. Preparations were being made to announce his gift of £150,000 in the newspapers when the Trentaffair so soured relations between the United States and the UK that Peabody feared his donation might be rebuffed.

  In his founding letter, George Peabody made only a handful of stipulations as to who should benefit by his new model of social housing. He required that in addition to being a Londoner “by birth or residence,” “the individual should be poor, have moral character, and be a good member of society.” “No one,” he further stated, “should be excluded on the grounds of religious belief or political bias.” The Peabody Buildings would offer housing for all.

  After several anxious months, Peabody finally disclosed his intentions to the press on March 26, 1862, and work began on the first block of Peabody Buildings, to be situated on Commercial Street in Spitalfields. Ultimately, George Peabody’s gift of £150,000 grew to £500,000, a sum worth roughly $60 million today. His generosity humbled the British public, helped heal a rift in Anglo-American relations, and prompted a personal letter of gratitude from Queen Victoria. It also would eventually help over thirty thousand Londoners out of the slums.

  The Peabody trustees received more than one hundred applications for the fifty-seven available apartments before the Commercial Street block was opened in 1864. Much as George Peabody had imagined, demand was intense. More sites were acquired and ground broken for further tenement blocks in Islington, Shadwell, Westminster, and Chelsea. In 1874, work began on a site in Lambeth, off Stamford Street, just adjacent to the large print works owned by William Clowes and Sons.

  Because Peabody’s aim was to promote the health, happiness, and moral well-being of the working classes, he intended that his tenements should offer accommodation superior to anything otherwise available to the labori
ng population. Unlike the moldering ceilings and verminous interiors of most housing for artisans, the Peabody Buildings were built from brick, with board floors and white cement walls. At Stamford Street, the four-story blocks, consisting of one-, two-, three-, and four-room gaslit apartments, were arranged around a courtyard and boasted modern conveniences. “There are several cupboards, one in the kitchen having over it a meat safe, with doors of perforated zinc. In the passage outside is a coal-bin of neat and ingenious construction, capable of holding half a ton,” wrote the Daily News of Stamford Street’s neighboring development on Southwark Street. In the multiroom tenements, one room was “fitted up for a kitchen . . . with a range in it, an oven, boiler, etc.”2 Stamford Street even provided residents with picture rails, “to avoid the necessity of driving nails into the walls.” With a central room designated for cooking, eating, and living, family members could enjoy the privacy afforded by separate bedrooms, or might even choose to use a room as a parlor.3 Although middle-class journalists often remarked on the smallness of the rooms, which ranged from “14 or 15 feet long by 11 to 12 feet wide,” these dimensions offered a considerable improvement on the living space that most of the residents had contended with in slum dwellings.

  Hygiene factored significantly into the design of George Peabody’s tenements, especially at Stamford Street, where “closets” (indoor toilets) as well as “water sinks” were installed in the corridors, each to be shared by two apartments. The ground floor of each block also contained “a spacious bath”; its gas-heated water was provided “at the expense of the trustees.” The tenants could enjoy access to this facility “free of charge and as often as they please, there being no other necessary preliminary than that of calling at the superintendent’s office for the key.” As one journalist reported, the residents “will have no excuse for not keeping themselves and their clothes thoroughly clean,” especially as an extensive laundry room was provided in the attic, which was at least one block in length in each development. At Stamford Street, this space included not only “tubs with water taps . . . and three large coppers for boiling” but also a tiled room with “8 large light windows” designated for clothes drying.4 It was believed that residents of the Peabody Buildings, inspired by their well-scrubbed bodies and fresh-smelling clothes, would maintain their healthful surroundings by decorating their apartments with wallpaper and whitewash and by keeping them tidy and free of filth. To this end, Cubitt and Co., the architects of the Lambeth development, patented a waste disposal system consisting of a shaft that ran through the center of each building. There, residents could dispose of their rubbish, which was captured in a hopper below. This system was necessary to preserve standards of health, wrote theCircle, particularly “when considering the very large number of persons who will all be living upon the same premises.”