Georgian London: Into the Streets

by Lucy Inglis

  Nearby, the medieval Palace of Westminster sat by the river and was used for the two Houses of Parliament. Today, Parliament Square is a jostling roundabout, with police in high-visibility clothing restricting access to only the chosen few. But in the eighteenth century, Parliament struggled on with an increasingly shabby and dilapidated set of buildings surrounded by open ground and mixed housing, much of the latter dating from the Middle Ages. The faded grandeur of the palace and the nearby poverty was revealed nowhere more starkly than just behind Westminster Abbey. Beyond a smattering of new streets were the slums and ugly open ground of Tothill Fields, where boys played football and pigs rooted in the cinder heaps. It was a dangerous area, and Westminster School, whose pupils had included Christopher Wren and John Locke, was not immune to the atmosphere. In the autumn of 1679, a group of ‘Gentleman Schollars’ were tried for kicking to death a bailiff who had entered the school to make an arrest. ‘After some mature consideration of their Youth and Quality’ they were let off, but the young scholars were a constant presence in the taverns and eating houses around the school, where they mixed with every type of Londoner. Near the school, a slum on Pye Street became known as The Devil’s Acre. The palace and the abbey were no more than ‘a stately veneer for the hovels crouching behind’. From these ‘labyrinths of lanes and courts and alleys and slums, nests of ignorance, vice, depravity and crime’ issued forth Westminster’s underclass.

  Westminster, detail from John Greenwood’s map, 1827

  The poorest women of this slum sifted the cinder heaps for anything still worth burning. Some were also the lowest class of prostitute, the filthy scarecrows of caricature, with ragged and toothless mouths. Many were dependent upon charity, and St Margaret’s workhouse was one of London’s oldest. St Margaret’s is the official church of the Houses of Parliament. The associated workhouse moved locations through the century but the institution in Little Almonry pioneered maternity care in the 1740s, offering courses in midwifery at vastly reduced rates for women who were to work amongst the local poor. They were taught alongside the young male students, who paid handsomely for their lessons and would go on to lucrative careers as ‘man-midwives’. The contrast of rich and poor in the area meant the Members of Parliament were reminded constantly of their duties to the less fortunate members of society. They had only to walk out of the Palace Yard to see the cinder-women and infants scavenging on the Tothill laystalls. Gaggles of poor children trailed behind an older brother or sister, left in charge while parents worked. On a Saturday in 1762, in a run-down alley near Tothill Fields, Mary Flarty left her toddler Jerry with five-year-old Anne Ellison. The alley had no traffic, and seemed safe for young children. Jerry tried to use the special low seat for youngsters in the communal privy, and fell into the cesspit. Although the community rallied immediately to retrieve the boy, Jerry was already dead. Cesspits, wells and carriage wheels were all waiting for a moment’s inattention.

  ‘Love and Dust’, by Thomas Rowlandson, 1788, a caricature of paupers on Tothill Fields, Westminster

  The government’s awareness of the social problems of poverty was growing. Urban poverty was becoming more obvious and pressing as the population increased. Riots, though often attached to political causes, were usually closely linked to empty bellies. The greatest of these, the Gordon Riots, where Parliament was attacked by a rampaging mob, made London realize it needed a police force. Although many in the government saw the police as little more than a standing army, they realized by 1780 that without a police force London would be ungovernable. With greater organization came bigger and better prisons, built on new designs. Nearby, to the west, was Millbank, home of the horse ferry and ‘so called from a mill on the bank of the river’. There the forbidding Millbank Prison was built in 1821, to a design by philosopher Jeremy Bentham. It was a terrifying labyrinth in which even the warders got lost, and the prisoners used the bizarre acoustics to communicate between cells. It held large numbers of prisoners waiting for transportation; for many years, a prison hulk lurked On the river outside.

  Behind Westminster, open land lay undeveloped as far as Knightsbridge. When Charles II came to the throne, in 1660, he chose to live in St James’s Palace and left behind the medieval architecture, slums and cinders of Westminster for the countryside. He created the Arcadian St James’s Park, with water features and walks. He also created a demand for new housing of the smartest sort, resulting in the development of St James’s Fields. This was housing for London’s most fashionable, including rich foreign visitors in temporary lodgings. When the business of the day had been dispensed with, including the coffee house visit and parliamentary business:

  … the evening is devoted to pleasure; all the world get abroad in their gayest equipage between four and five in the evening, some bound to the play, others to the opera, the assembly, the masquerade, or musick-meeting, to which they move in such crowds, that their coaches can scarce pass the streets.

  These ‘new rich’ were not entirely self-serving. As in Westminster, there was a growing awareness of the division between rich and poor. The spectre of poverty was never far from even the grandest doorstep, and even the palaces admitted chars to do the washing. The cheek-by-jowl relationship of Westminster and St James’s nurtured some of the country’s most remarkable men and women. Thinkers, politicians and fashionistas all congregated in this rapidly growing district, the polite area of London, so different from the City’s mercantile origins.

  PROVIDING FOR THE URBAN POOR: THE WORKHOUSE ACT

  After the Reformation, Protestant England used local parish officials to distribute part of the land tax as charity, uniting Church and State in providing for the poor. The Poor Law of 1601 meant that to obtain parish charity an individual had to belong to that parish. Belonging was not as simple as taking up residence: poor would-be settlers were often removed by parish officers, and it was a widely held belief that the Poor Law gave those living in poverty an incentive to continue their breadline existence without working.

  Vagrancy was a preoccupation of the Middle Ages, when decent citizens feared tinkers, pedlars and other itinerant workers. Their estrangement from community ties was seen as a threat to society, and they were associated with decayed morality and petty crime. Yet as the country entered the modern era, migration became essential. Seasonal workers, domestic servants and those simply wishing or needing to find employment gravitated towards towns – London, in particular. ‘Settlement’ in a new parish was gained through a complicated system of qualification. By 1700, settlement could be gained through birth, marrying into the parish, serving an apprenticeship there, working there for a year or serving as a parish officer.

  In the medieval period, when towns were small and prosperous, poverty was more a rural phenomenon, experienced when crops failed, or murrains killed off the livestock. The system of poor relief which emerged in the mid-sixteenth century concentrated on taking care of the sick or those who were old and infirm with no one else to care for them. But as towns, and particularly London, grew in the late seventeenth century, urban poverty – unrelated to seasonal highs and lows – became part of the landscape. St Margaret’s parish had built workhouses in Tothill around 1624, to house the old and infirm but not the able-bodied poor, who were supposed to be able to shift for themselves.

  Urban poverty was often more desperate than rural poverty because urban life was more dependent upon money. In the countryside, foraged food and wood for fuel were available, even if in short supply. Those who paid rent paid it quarterly, or exchanged their labour for housing. In the rapidly growing London of the eighteenth century, however, people rented rooms by the month, week or even day. The available fuel was coal, which cost money. Food was brought into the capital and retailed. In order to appear employable, particularly in service, clean linen and tidy clothes were essential. Life in London was expensive.

  Appearing poor was a thing to be avoided at all costs. John Loppenberg was a servant in Westminster and later St James
’s who used to go to the ponds at Paddington early in the morning to wash his linen:

  I was ashamed to be seen doing it by any body, because it was torn and ragged. I went to one Pond, and saw People there, so I went to another … I hung my Shirt up to dry, and walked to and fro while it was drying, and saw two Men walking about; I threw the Shirt from me least they should laugh at me.

  John Loppenberg was typical of many London servants who lived on the edge of respectability and were always in fear of ‘being out of a place’. People arrived from overseas, or elsewhere in Britain, because they were following an employer. Should they fall on hard times and throw themselves on the mercy of a parish within that year, the overseers were perfectly within their rights to move them along – by force, if necessary, though this happened relatively rarely.

  The Season, stretching from March until the end of July, saw peak demand for employment in Westminster and St James’s. Anyone with pretensions to fashion or business was in town for those months, requiring servants, washerwomen, errand boys and porters. They also provided work for shoemakers, tailors, prostitutes and thieves. In the hard winter months, when working the streets was impossible, and there was less demand for jobbing servants, workhouse numbers rose by up to 25 per cent.

  In wealthy London, the urban workhouse developed rapidly after the Workhouse Act of 1723. The Act meant, in brief, that in order for the destitute to claim parish charity they had to enter the workhouse and ‘work’ for the good of the parish. ‘Outdoor relief’ (payments made to people so that they could remain in their own homes) was available, but this didn’t help people like John Loppenberg if they were to lose both their job and accommodation at the same time. But workhouses did acknowledge the new developments in medicine and social welfare. There were wards for pregnant women, as well as labour wards, wards for the sick, the healthy, same-sex wards and rooms for the married. Inmates wore uniforms bearing the parish badge. Unmarried mothers were sometimes made to wear yellow gowns. Those who behaved badly had to wear special uniforms or distinctive badges.

  As the century progressed, workhouses became more developed and more socially conscious; they were no longer housing just the disabled, infirm and aged, but men and women who had fallen on hard times, as well as their attendant children. In 1817, St Martin-in-the-Fields workhouse admitted two-thirds adults and one-third children. The women made up 60 per cent of the adult population and stayed on average for six weeks, two and a half days. In contrast, the men averaged two weeks and six days. It is clear to see that there was a pattern: it was easier for men to get back on their feet. A third of the women of childbearing age who were admitted were in the later stages of pregnancy, and alone.

  Being in the workhouse was undesirable, but it wasn’t seen as a punishment. For many of the poorest families it was viewed as a temporary solution to the temporary problem of destitution. They could, and did, leave when they thought they would be able to make their own way again. It was often far harder to get into the workhouse than it was to get out. There are instances of non-parish women in labour and victims of industrial accidents being turned away. For the duration of their stay inmates had to submit to rules on sobriety, smoking and visitors. Sometimes children were taken in alone, during periods of parental absence or inability to provide care. Sometimes wives and children were taken in when the wife was sick, and the husband would visit once or twice a week whilst continuing to work, trying to get the family back on their feet.

  Workhouses not only provided food and shelter, they were also where medicine and care could be found. Soon after the Workhouse Act, many workhouses introduced separate infirmaries. St Sepulchre’s installed ‘an oven’ in which to heat inmates’ clothing to kill pests, and this was also offered as a public service to the parish poor outside the workhouse.

  Towards the end of the eighteenth century, more and more people had to move to towns to find work, gain skills and better themselves. The young men and women who left their rural backgrounds to take up offers of work in London had no safety net other than friends or family already there. If it didn’t work out, they were faced with a long trudge home or a scramble to find other employment. In 1796, Matthew Martin opened his Mendicity Enquiry Office at 190 Piccadilly. His idea was simple, but effective: he produced 6,000 numbered tickets, each promising the bearer threepence upon its presentation at the Office. To earn their 3d the bearer had to submit to an interview which Martin had devised in order to shed light upon both the causes and conditions of the increase in desperate poverty in London.

  In under eight months, he filled dozens of volumes with the stories of over 2,000 adults and their 3,000 dependent children. He excluded 600 individuals who would not consent to being labelled as beggars. What emerges is that the vast majority of Martin’s poor were single mothers. The numbers are telling: 192 men to 1,808 women. Martin concluded that men were stronger than women, with more resources. Occasionally employers kept women on through illegitimate pregnancies, but we cannot estimate how many there might have been. Above all, a woman was likely to be thrown into a state of advanced or abject poverty by the burden of children for whom she received no support. Martin’s Mendicity Studies are one of the few to make transparent how large the poor female population was.

  In addition, the new theories of Thomas Malthus and Jeremy Bentham were alarming Londoners. Contrary to what they had always thought was a declining population, Malthus told them that soon there wouldn’t be enough food to feed the burgeoning poor. Bentham’s utilitarianism promoted the greatest good for the greatest number. Quasi-charitable bodies were formed in the early nineteenth century, such as the Society for the Suppression of Mendicity, in 1818. The Duke of York was the Patron, the Duke of Northumberland the President, and the officers included four marquesses, eight earls and Matthew Martin. Its philosophy was concerned with the economics of poverty and sifting the ‘deserving poor’ from the ‘vagrants’, much in the same way as we now have the political touchstones of ‘hardworking families’ and ‘benefit scroungers’.

  For the first three decades of the nineteenth century, it was increasingly apparent that something must change. In 1832, a Royal Commission determined that the old system was outdated and not up to the task in hand. In 1834, the Poor Law Amendment Act ushered in a new era. The workhouses became something to be feared: they were to be run on the cheapest terms; food was of poor quality and in short measure; rules were draconian. Miserable and scanty, there was little of charity about them. The old workhouses, designed as a temporary prop to support the lowest classes and thus the city itself, had a humanity to them. In the same way that the 1832 Reform Act enfranchised London’s new middle classes, the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act further disenfranchised her poor. Poverty became a numbers game.

  WESTMINSTER BRIDGE: LOTTERIES AND THE JERNEGAN CISTERN

  Much of the debate surrounding poverty centred on public funds. Public money was historically associated with the parishes, and used on a local level. Urban improvements such as street lighting and paving were initially funded by householders on a street-by-street basis, further adding to the variety of London’s landscape. As the city grew, it became clear that it needed infrastructure. But where to find the money?

  The generation of public funds, and how to spend them, was a puzzle. The story of Westminster Bridge is an example of just how confused the government had become: in the late 1730s, they held a series of lotteries to build the bridge.

  London Bridge connected the City to Surrey in the south, but Westminster had no crossing of its own besides ‘the ancient Horse-ferry between Westminster and Lambeth’. The need for a bridge was pressing, and an Act was passed, as noted in The London Gazette, ‘for building a bridge cross the River Thames, from the New Palace Yard in the City of Westminster, to the opposite Shore in the county of Surrey’. Plans were called for and, in 1736, put out to tender amongst the engineering community. But money for construction was the real sticking point. Around half the money was raised by a
series of five lotteries, one of which offered as first prize the largest known surviving piece of English silver, the Jernegan cistern.

  Henry Jernegan came from a family of Catholic gentry and started out as a banker. He acquired Littleton Pointz Meynell as a client. Meynell was a gambler. His wins were mammoth, his losses likewise. When he was winning, Jernegan made attempts to divert his client’s capital into works of art in solid silver. This helped Jernegan mitigate his losses through commission, and made sure his client had money in commodities. In 1730, Jernegan and Meynell decided to create the biggest wine cistern ever. The cistern holds sixty gallons and is formed from over a quarter of a ton of silver. A piece of silver weighing more than a quarter of a ton takes time to make, and when it was finished, so was Meynell. Jernegan was stuck with an enormous white elephant.

  The government was still short of money for the building of Westminster Bridge. Jernegan petitioned Parliament, where he explained that he had ‘designed and made a silver cistern, acknowledged to excel anything of the kind hitherto attempted, but that four years later, the cistern remained on his hands notwithstanding his best attempts to dispose of it to foreign princes’. In desperation, he offered the cistern as first prize in a lottery in aid of funds for the bridge. In exchange, he would take a cut of the ticket sales in an attempt to recoup some of his losses. A Dorset farmer won first prize but, there being little call for a rococo silver bathtub in Dorset, he sold it. By the following year, it was in Russia in the collection of Regent Anna Leopoldovna. Perhaps Jernegan’s error was in trying to dispose of it to foreign princes, rather than to a princess. It remains in the Hermitage Museum, the largest extant piece of antique solid silver in the world.