Dickens's England: Life in Victorian Times

by Pritchard, R. E.

  Young sempstresses and milliner’s girls, barmaids and shopwomen, pent up all day in a hot and close atmosphere, have risen an hour or two earlier, and made a party of pleasure to come to Covent Garden market to buy flowers. It is one of heaven’s mercies that the very poorest manage somehow to buy these treasures . . . Crowds more of purchasers are there yet around the violet baskets; but these are buyers to sell again. Wretched-looking little buyers are they, half-starved Bedouin children, mostly Irish, in faded and tattered garments, with ragged hair and bare feet. . . . They cry violets! They cried violets in good Master Herrick’s time. . . .

  It is past six o’clock, and high ’Change in the market. What gabbling! what shouting! what rushing and pushing! what confusion of tongues and men and horses and carts! . . . Bow Street is blocked by a triple line of costermongers’ ‘shallows’, drawn by woebegone donkeys; their masters are in the market purchasing that ‘sparrergrass’ which they will so sonorously cry throughout the suburbs in the afternoon. . . . Early coffee-shops and taverns are gorged with customers, for the Covent Gardeners are essentially jolly gardeners, and besides, being stalwart men, are naturally hungry and athirst after their night’s labour. There are public-houses in the market itself, where they give you hot shoulder of mutton for breakfast at seven o’clock in the morning!

  Seven o’clock a.m. – Under way; and a Parliamentary train

  Potboys, rubbing their eyes, take down the shutters of taverns in leading thoroughfares, and then fall to rubbing the pewter pots till they assume a transcendent sheen. Within, the young ladies who officiate in the bar, and who look very drowsy in their curl-papers and cotton print dresses, are rubbing the pewter counters and the brasswork of the beer-engines, the funnels and the whisky noggins, washing the glasses, polishing up the mahogany, cutting up the pork pies which Mr Watling’s man has just left, displaying the Banbury cakes and Epping sausages under crystal canopies. . . . I like the barmaid, for she is often pretty, always civil, works about fourteen hours a day for her keep and from eighteen to twenty pounds a year, is frequently a kinless orphan out of that admirable Licensed Victuallers’ School, and is, in nine cases out of ten, as chaste as Diana. . . .

  The Prime Minister is dressed, and poring over a savage leader in the ‘Times’, denouncing his policy, sneering at his latest measure, and insulting him personally in a facetious manner. . . .

  There is Millbank, where the boarders and lodgers, clad in hodden [coarse woollen] grey, with masks on their faces and numbers on their backs, have been up and stirring since six. And there, north-west of Millbank, is the Palace, almost as ugly as the prison, where dwells the Great Governess of the Land. She is there, for you may see the standard floating in the morning breeze; and at seven in the morning she too is up and doing. . . . There are despatches to be read; private and confidential letters to foreign sovereigns to be written; the breakfast, perchance, of the little princes and princesses to be superintended; the proofs, probably, of the last Royal etching or princely photograph to be inspected; a new pony to be tried in the riding-house; a new dog to be taught tricks; a host of things to do. Who shall say? . . . For my part, I often wonder how kings and queens and emperors find time to go to bed at all. . . .

  I think the Euston Square Terminus is, for its purpose, the handsomest building I have ever seen, and I have seen a few railway stations. . . . Let us follow the crowd of third-class passengers onto the vast platform. There the train awaits them, puffing and snorting, and champing its adamantine bit, like some great iron horse of Troy suddenly gifted with life and power of locomotion. . . . Very few first or even second-class carriages are attached to the great morning train. The rare exceptions seem to be placed there as a concession to the gentilities, or the respectabilities, or the ‘gigabilities’ as Mr Carlyle would call them, than with any reference to their real utility in a journey to the north. . . .

  But what a contrast to the quietude of the scarcely patronised first and second class wagons are the great hearse-like caravans in which travel the teeming hundreds who can afford to pay but a penny a mile! . . . What a motley assemblage of men, women and children, belonging to callings multifariously varied, yet all marked with the homogenous penny-a-mile stamp of poverty! Sailors with bronzed faces and tarry hands, and those marvellous tarpaulin pancake hats, stuck, in defiance of all the laws of gravity, at the back of their heads; squat, squarely-built fellows, using strange and occasionally not very polite language, but full of a simple, manly courtesy to all the females, and marvellously kind to the babies and little children; gaunt American sailors in red worsted shirts, with case-knives suspended to their belts, taciturn men expectorating frequently, and when they do condescend to address themselves to speech, using the most astounding combination of adjective adjurations, relating chiefly to their limbs and their organs of vision; railway navvies going to work at some place down the line, and obligingly franked thither for that purpose by the company; pretty servant-maids going to see their relatives; Jew pedlars; Irish labourers in swarms; soldiers on furlough, with the breast of their scarlet coatees open, and disclosing beneath linen of an elaborate coarseness of texture – one might fancy so many military penitents wearing hair tunics; other soldiers in full uniform with their knapsacks laid across their knees, and their muskets – prudently divested of the transfixing bayonets – which the old women in the carriage are marvellously afraid will ‘go off’, disposed beside them, proceeding to Weedon barracks under the command of a staid Scotch corporal, who reads a tract, ‘Grace for Grenadiers’ or ‘Powder and Piety’, and takes snuff; journeymen mechanics with their tool-baskets; charwomen, servants out of place, stablemen, bricklayers’ labourers, and shopboys.

  Eight o’clock a.m. – St James’s Park; opening shop

  At this early eight o’clock in the morningtide, see, perambulating the Mall, a tremendous ‘swell’. No fictitious aristocrat, no cheap dandy, no Whitechapel brick or Bermondsey exquisite, no apprentice who has been to a masquerade disguised as a gentleman, can this be. Aristocracy is imprinted on every lineament of his moustached face, in every crease of his superb clothes, in each particular horsehair of his flowing plume. He is a magnificent creature, over six feet in height, with a burnished helmet, burnished boots, burnished spurs, burnished sabre, burnished cuirass – burnished whiskers and moustache. He shines all over, like a meteor, or a lobster which has been kept a little too long, in a dark room. He is young, brave, handsome and generous; he is the delight of Eaton Square, the cynosure of the Castor and Pollux Club, the idol of the corps de ballet of Her Majesty’s Theatre, the pet of several most exclusive Puseyite circles in Tyburnia, the mirror of Tattersall’s, the pillar and patron of Jem Bundy’s ratting, dog-showing, man-fighting, horse-racing and general sporting house in Cat and Fiddle Court, Dog and Duck Lane, Cripplegate. Cruel country, cruel fate, that compel Lieutenant Algernon Percy Plantagenet, of the Royal Life Guards, the handsomest man in his regiment, and heir to £9,000 a year, to be mounting guard at eight o’clock in the morning! . . .

  There is another ceremony performed with much clattering solemnity of wooden panels, and iron bars, and stanchions, which occurs at eight o’clock in the morning. ’Tis then that the shop-shutters are taken down. The great ‘stores’ and ‘magazines’ of the principal thoroughfares gradually open their eyes; apprentices, light porters, and where the staff of assistants is not very numerous, the shopmen, release the imprisoned wares, and bid the sun shine on good family ‘souchong’ [tea], ‘fresh Epping sausages’, ‘Beaufort collars’, ‘guinea capes’, ‘Eureka shirts’ and ‘Alexandre harmoniums’. In the smaller thoroughfares, the proprietor often dispenses with the aid of apprentice, light porter and shopman – for the simple reason that he never possessed the services of any assistant at all – and unostentatiously takes down the shutters of his own chandler’s, greengrocer’s, tripe, or small stationery shop. In the magnificent linen-drapery establishments of Oxford and Regent Streets, the vast shop-fronts, museums of fashion in
plate-glass cases, offer a series of animated tableaux of poses plastiques in the shape of young ladies in morning costume, and young gentlemen in whiskers and white neckcloths, faultlessly complete as to costume, with the exception that they are yet in their shirtsleeves, who are accomplishing the difficult and mysterious feat known as ‘dressing’ the shop window.

  Nine o’clock a.m. – Clerks

  If the morning be fine, the pavement of the Strand and Fleet Street looks quite radiant with the spruce clerks walking down to their offices, governmental, financial and commercial. Marvellous young bucks some of them are. These are the customers, you see at a glance, whom the resplendent wares in the hosiers’ shops attract, in whom those wary industrials find avid customers. These are the dashing young parties who purchase the pea-green, the orange, and the rose-pink gloves; the crimson braces, the kaleidoscopic shirt-studs, the shirts embroidered with dahlias, death’s heads, racehorses, sunflowers, and ballet girls; the horseshoe, fox-head, pewter-pot-and-crossed-pipes, willow-pattern plate and knife-and-fork pins. These are the glasses of city fashion and the mould of city form, for whom the legions of fourteen, of fifteen, of sixteen and of seventeen shilling trousers, all unrivalled, patented and warranted are made; for these ingenious youths coats with strange names are devised, scarves and shawls of wondrous pattern and texture despatched from distant Manchester and Paisley . . . These mostly turn off in the Strand, are in the Admiralty or Somerset House. As for the government clerks of the extreme West End – the patricians of the Home and Foreign Offices – the bureaucrats of the Circumlocution Office, in a word – they ride down to Whitehall or Downing Street in broughams or on park hacks. Catch them on omnibuses, or walking on the vulgar pavement, forsooth! . . .

  ‘Every road,’ says the proverb, ‘leads to Rome’; every commercial ways leads to the Bank of England. And there, in the midst of that heterogeneous architectural jumble . . . the vast train of omnibuses . . . with another great army of clerk martyrs outside and inside, their knees drawn up to their chins, and their chins resting on their umbrella handles, set down their loads of cash-book and ledger fillers. What an incalculable mass of figures there must be collected in those commercial heads! What legions of £.s.d.! . . . They plod away to their gloomy wharves and hard-hearted counting-houses, where the chains from great cranes wind round their bodies, and the mahogany of the desks enters into their souls. . . .

  Ten o’clock a.m. – The Court of Queen’s Bench

  Parliament Street and Palace Yard are fair to see this pleasant morning in term time. The cause list for all the courts is pretty full, and there is the prospect of nice legal pickings. The pavement is dotted with barristers’ and solicitors’ clerks carrying blue and crimson bags plethoric with papers. Smart attorneys, too, with shoe-ribbon, light vests, swinging watch-guards and shiny hats (they have begun to wear moustaches even, the attorneys!) bustle past, papers beneath their arms, open documents in their hands, which they sort and peruse as they walk. The parti-coloured fastenings of these documents flutter, so that you would take these men of law for so many conjurors about to swallow red and green tape. And they do conjure, and to a tune, the attorneys! . . .

  The great solicitors and attorneys, men who may be termed the princes of law, who are at the head of vast establishments in Bedford Row and Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and whose practice is hereditary, dash along in tearing cabs . . . The briefless barristers would like to patronise cabs, but they can’t afford those luxuries. They walk down Parliament Street arm in arm, mostly men with bold noses of the approved Slawkenbergius pattern, and very large red or sandy whiskers. . . .

  In with ye, then, my merry men all, to the Hall of Westminster, for the Court of Queen’s Bench is sitting. It is not a handsome court; it is not an imposing court. . . . The bench looks but an uncomfortable settle! The floor of the court is a ridiculous little quadrangle of oak, like a pie-board; the witness box is so small that it seems capable of holding nothing but the shooting ‘Jack’ of our toyshop experience; and the jury-box has a strong family likeness to one of the defunct Smithfield sheep-pens, where sit the intelligent jury, who have an invincible propensity, be the weather hot or cold, for wiping their foreheads with blue cotton pocket handkerchiefs. . . . But the usher has sworn them in that they ‘shall well and truly try’ the matter before them; and try it they must. . . .

  But only wait till the chiefs on both sides have concluded their eloquent bamboozling of the jury; mark my Lord Owlett settle his wig and his petticoats, then sort and unfold the notes he has lazily (or so it seemed) scrawled from time to time, and in a piping, quavering voice begin to read from them. You marvel at the force, the clarity, the perspicuity of the grand old man; you stand abashed before the intellect, clear as crystal, at an age when man’s mind as well as his body is oft-time but labour and sorrow; you are astonished that so much vigour, so much shrewdness, so much eloquence, should exist in that worn and tottering casket.

  Eleven o’clock a.m. – Street Life

  So sure as the clock of St Martin’s strikes eleven, so sure does my quiet street become a pandemonium of discordant sounds. My teeth are on edge to think of them. The ‘musicianers’ . . . begin to penetrate through the vaster thoroughfares and make their hated appearance at the head of my street. First, Italian organ-grinder, hirsute, sunburnt, and saucy, who grinds airs from the ‘Trovatore’ six times over, follows with a selection from the ‘Traviata’ repeated half a dozen times, finishes up with the ‘Old Hundredth’ and the ‘Postman’s Knock’, and then begins again. Next, shivering Hindu, his skin apparently just washed in walnut juice, with a voluminous turban, dirty white caftan, worsted stockings and hobnailed shoes, sings a dismal ditty in the Hindustani language, and beats the tomtom with fiendish monotony. Next comes a brazen woman in a Scotch cap, to which is fastened a bunch of rusty black feathers, apparently culled from a mourning coach past service. She wears a faded tartan kilt, fleshings [a close-fitting flesh-coloured garment], short calico trews, a velveteen jacket, tin buckles in her shoes, and two patches of red brick-dust on her haggard cheeks, and is supposed to represent a Scottish highlander. She dances an absurd fling, interpolated occasionally with a shrill howl to the music of some etiolated bagpipes screeded by a shabby rogue of the male sex, her companion, arrayed in similar habiliments. Next come the acrobats – drum, clarinet and all. You know what these nuisances are like, without any extended description on my part. Close on their heels follows the eloquent beggar, with his numerous destitute but scrupulously clean family, who has, of course, that morning parted with his last shirt. Then a lamentable woman with a baby begins to whimper ‘Old Dog Tray’. Then swoop into the street an abominable band of ruffians, six in number. They are swarthy villains, dressed in the semblance of Italian goatherds, and are called, I believe, pifferari. They play upon a kind of bagpipes – a hideous pig-skin-and-walking-stick-looking affair, and accompany their droning by a succession of short yelps and a spasmodic pedal movement that would be a near approach to a sailor’s hornpipe if it did not bear a much closer resemblance to the wardance of a wild Indian. Add to these the Jews crying ‘Clo’!’, the man who sells hearthstones and the woman who buys rabbit-skins, the butcher, the baker, and the boys screaming shrill Nigger melodies and rattling pieces of slate between their fingers in imitation of the ‘bones’, and you will be able to form an idea of the quietude of our street.

  Noon – The Justice Room at the Mansion House

  Did it never strike you, in a criminal court of assize – ‘the judges all ranged, a terrible show’, the solemn clerk of the assigns gazing over the indictment, the spectators almost breathless with excited curiosity, rays from opera glasses refracted from the gallery, Regent Street bonnets and artificial flowers relieving the dark mass of the menfolk’s dress, the bar bewigged, the eloquent advocate for the defence thundering forth genteel philippics against the eloquent counsel for the prosecution – did it never strike you, I say, what a terrible fuss and bother, and calling on Jupiter to
lift a waggon wheel out of a rut, what a waste of words, and show, and ceremonial all this became when its object, the End to all these imposing means, was one miserable creature in the dock, with spikes, and rue, and rosemary before him, accused of having purloined a quart pot? As for the prisoner who is this day arraigned before the mighty Lord Mayor – but first stand on tiptoe. There he is, God help him and us all! A miserable, wizened, ragged, unkempt child, whose head, the police reports will tell us tomorrow, ‘scarcely reached to the railing of the dock’. He has been caught picking pockets. It is not his first, his second, his third offence. He is an incorrigible thief. The great Lord Mayor tells him so with a shake of his fine head of hair. He must go to jail. To jail with him. He has been there before. It is the only home he ever had. It is his preparatory home for the hulks [prison ship]. The jail nursing-mother to thousands, and not so stonyhearted a stepmother as the streets. He is nobody’s child . . .

  One o’clock p.m. – Dock London

  I speak of Dock London in its entirety: of the London and St Katherine’s, of the East and West India, and the Victoria Docks – what huge reservoirs are they of wealth and energy and industry! See those bonding warehouses, apoplectic with the produce of three worlds, congested with bales of tobacco and barrels of spices; with serons [animal-hide packages] of cochineal and dusky, vapid-smelling chests of opium from Turkey or India; with casks of palm-oil and packages of vile chemicals, ill-smelling oxides and alkalis dug from the bowels of mountains thousands of miles away, and which, ere long, will be transformed into glowing pigments and exquisite perfumes . . . See the sugar warehouses, dripping, perspiring, crystallising with sugar in casks, and bags, and boxes (free-grown sugar in the first two; slave-grown sugar in boxes). How many million cups of tea will be sweetened with these cases when the sugar is refined! . . . And the multitudinous, almost uncataloguable, mass of other produce: shellac, sulphur, gum-benzoin . . . muslin from Smyrna; flour from the United States . . . timber from Canada and Sweden . . . saffron, magnesia, leeches, basket-work and wash-leather! The ships vomit these on the dock quays, and the warehouses swallow them up again like ogres. . . .