The Victorian City
Judith Flanders, a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Buckingham, is the author of the bestselling The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed (2003); the critically acclaimed Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (2006); A Circle of Sisters (2001), which was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award; and, most recently, The Invention of Murder (2011). She lives in London.
ALSO BY JUDITH FLANDERS
The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed
Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain
A Circle of Sisters: Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne-Jones, Agnes Poynter and Louisa Baldwin
The Invention of Murder
First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Atlantic Books,
an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © Judith Flanders, 2012
The moral right of Judith Flanders to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-84887-795-5
E-book ISBN: 978-0-85789-881-4
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For Ravi
With thanks
One may easily sail round England, or circumnavigate the globe. But not the most enthusiastic geographer…ever memorised a map of London…For England is a small island, the world is infinitesimal amongst the planets. But London is illimitable.
FORD MADOX FORD, The Soul of London
Cityful passing away, other cityful coming, passing away too: other coming on, passing on. Houses, lines of houses, streets, miles of pavements, piled up bricks, stones. Changing hands. This owner, that. Landlord never dies they say. Other steps into his shoes when he gets his notice to quit…Pyramids in sand. Built on bread and onions. Slaves. Chinese wall. Babylon. Big stones left. Round towers. Rest rubble, sprawling suburbs, jerrybuilt…built of breeze. Shelter for the night.
No one is anything.
JAMES JOYCE, Ulysses
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
A Note on Currency
Maps
List of Illustrations
Introduction
PART ONE: THE CITY WAKES
1810: The Berners Street Hoax
1. Early to Rise
2. On the Road
3. Travelling (Mostly) Hopefully
4. In and Out of London
PART TWO: STAYING ALIVE
1861: The Tooley Street Fire
5. The World’s Market
6. Selling the Streets
7. Slumming
8. The Waters of Death
PART THREE: ENJOYING LIFE
1867: The Regent’s Park Skating Disaster
9. Street Performance
10. Leisure for All
11. Feeding the Streets
12. Street Theatre
PART FOUR: SLEEPING AND AWAKE
1852: The Funeral of the Duke of Wellington
13. Night Entertainment
14. Street Violence
15. The Red-Lit Streets to Death
Appendix: Dickens’ Publications by Period
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book is the product of a lifetime of London-loving and Dickens-loving, and I must first and foremost thank those great London and Dickens scholars who have enriched my reading: Peter Ackroyd, Philip Collins, John Drew, Madeline House, Susan Shatto, Michael Slater, Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson.
As always, I am indebted to the members of the Victoria 19th-century British Culture and Society mailbase for their tolerance of my seemingly random queries, and for their vast stores of knowledge. And to Patrick Leary, list-master extraordinaire, go not merely my thanks for creating such a congenial environment, but also for pointing me towards the Regent’s Park skating disaster.
I am grateful to my agent Bill Hamilton for his skill, and for his patience and tolerance.
I thank, too, all those at Atlantic Books, past and present: Alan Craig, Karen Duffy, Lauren Finger, Richard Milbank, Sarah Norman, Bunmi Oke, Sarah Pocklington, Orlando Whitfield and Corinna Zifko. My thanks too to Jeff Edwards, Douglas Matthews, Lindsay Nash, Leo Nickolls and Tamsin Shelton. The wonderful pictures were found by Josine Meijer, while Celia Levett, with her sensitive and rigorous copy-editing, improved every sentence of the text.
Finally, I owe my career to Ravi Mirchandani, now my publisher but, before I became a writer, my friend. ‘Stop talking about it,’ he told me then. ‘Write it.’ So I have. This book is for him.
A NOTE ON CURRENCY
Pounds, shillings and pence were the divisions of the currency. One shilling is made up of twelve pence; one pound of twenty shillings, i.e. 240 pence. Pounds are represented by the £ symbol, shillings as ‘s’, and pence as ‘d’ (from the Latin, denarius). ‘One pound, one shilling and one penny’ is written as £1 1s 1d. ‘One shilling and sixpence’, referred to in speech as ‘one and six’, is written as 1s 6d, or ‘1/6’.
A guinea was a coin to the value of £1 1 0. (The actual coin was not circulated after 1813, although the term remained and tended to be reserved for luxury goods.) A sovereign was a twenty-shilling coin, a half-sovereign a tenshilling coin. A crown was five shillings, half a crown 2/6, and the remaining coins were a florin (two shillings), sixpence, a groat (four pence), a threepenny bit (pronounced ‘thrup’ny’), twopence (pronounced tuppence), a penny, a halfpenny (pronounced hayp’ny), a farthing (a quarter of a penny) and a half a farthing (an eighth of a penny).
Relative values have altered so substantially that attempts to convert nineteenth-century prices into contemporary ones are usually futile. However, the website http://www.ex.ac.uk/~RDavies/arian/current/howmuch.html is a gateway to this complicated subject.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Street traders, sketches by George Scharf, 1841 (© The Trustees of the British Museum)
Two drawings of wooden street paving by George Scharf, 1838 and 1840 respectively (© The Trustees of the British Museum)
Anonymous photo of the Kennington turnpike gate, c.1865 (London Metropolitan Archives)
Figures with water carts at a pump in Bloomsbury Square. Drawing by George Scharf, 1828 (© The Trustees of the British Museum)
Construction of the Holborn Viaduct. Anonymous engraving, 1867 (© Illustrated London News/ Mary Evans Picture Library)
Departure of the Army Works Corp from London for the Crimea. Anonymous engraving, 1855 (© Illustrated London News/ Mary Evans Picture Library)
The Omnibus brutes…which are they? By George Cruikshank, 1835 (© Look and Learn/ Peter Jackson Collection)
Anonymous photo of hansom cabs in Whitehall Place, Westminster, 1870–1900 (© English Heritage. NMR)
Royal Mail Coaches leaving The Swan with Two Necks Inn, Lad Lane. Engraving by F. Rosenberg after James Pollard, 1831 (Guildhall Library, City of London/ Bridgeman Art Library)
Station Commotion. Engraving by W. Shearer after a drawing by William McConnell, 1860 (Getty Images)
Parliamentary Train: Interior of the Third Class Carriage. Undated lithograph by William McConnell from ‘Twice Around the Clock’ (© Look and Learn/ Peter Jackson Collection/ Bridgeman Art Library)
Plan of Buildings destroyed at Chamberlain’s Wharf, Cotton’s Wharf and Hay’s Wharf. Lithograph by James Thomas Loveday, 1861 (© Guildhall Library, City of London/ Bridgeman Art Library)
The funeral procession of James Braidwood. Anonymous engraving, 1861 (© London Fire Brigade)
The construction of Hungerford Market. Drawing by George Scharf, 1832 (© The Trustees of the British Museum)
Anonymous photo of a London match seller in Greenwich, 1884 (Francis Frith Collection/ Mary Evans Picture Library)
The Fleet Prison, watercolour by George Shepherd, 1814 (Greater London Council Print Collection)
Interior of a lodging house. Anonymous engraving, 1853 (© Illustrated London News/ Mary Evans Picture Library)
View from Jacob’s Island of old houses in London Street, Dockhead. Anonymous engraving, 1810 (Wellcome Library, London)
The water supply in Frying Pan Alley, Clerkenwell. Anonymous engraving, 1864 (Private Collection/ Bridgeman Art Library)
The Chelsea Embankment looking East. Photo by James Hedderly, c. 1873 (Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Libraries)
Street musicians. Sketches by George Scharf, 1833 (© The Trustees of the British Museum)
Joseph Johnson with his Nelson hat. Engraving by John Thomas Smith, 1815. (From: John Thomas Smith, ‘Vagabondiana’, Chatto & Windus, London 1874)
Northumberland House. Anonymous, undated engraving (© Museum of London)
Hot-potato seller. Sketch by George Scharf, 1820–1830 (© The Trustees of the British Museum)
Dinner Time, Sunday One O’Clock. Sketches by George Scharf, 1841 (© The Trustees of the British Museum)
The City Chop House. Print by Thomas Rowlandson, 1810–1815 (© Museum of London)
Crowds watching the house of Robert Peel. Anonymous engraving, 1850 (© Illustrated London News/ Mary Evans Picture Library)
Episode During a Brief Visit to London. Anonymous engraving, 1885 (Private Collection/ Bridgeman Art Library)
Anonymous photo of the nineteenth century Willesden Fire Brigade (© London Fire Brigade)
Scene in a London street on a Sunday morning. Anonymous engraving, 1850 (© Museum of London)
The Coal Hole, undated watercolour by Thomas Rowlandson (Blackburn Museums and Art Galleries/ Bridgeman Art Library)
Peace illuminations in Pall Mall at the end of the Crimean War. Anonymous engraving, 1856 (© Illustrated London News/ Mary Evans Picture Library)
Scaffold outside Newgate Prison. Anonymous print, 1846 (© The Trustees of the British Museum)
Capture of the Cato Street Conspirators. Engraving after a drawing by George Cruikshank, 1820 (Peter Higginbotham Collection/ Mary Evans Picture Library)
Haymarket prostitutes. Anonymous engraving, c.1860 (Mary Evans Picture Library)
Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park arrested for wearing women’s clothes. Anonymous engraving, 1870 (Mary Evans Picture Library)
Illustration to Thomas Hood’s poem ‘The Bridge of Sighs’ by Gustave Doré (From: Thomas Hood, Hood’s Poetical Works, 1888)
Colour Plates
1. Benjamin Robert Haydon, Punch, or May Day, 1829. Oil on canvas. Tate Gallery, London (© Tate, London 2012)
2. Eugène Louis Lami, Ludgate Circus, 1850. Watercolour drawing. Victoria & Albert Museum, London (© Victoria & Albert Museum, London)
3. William Parrott, Pool of London from London Bridge, 1841. Lithograph (Guildhall Library, City of London/ Bridgeman Art Library)
4. George Scharf, Betwen 6 and Seven O’Clock morning, Sumer, undated. Drawing. British Museum (© The Trustees of the British Museum)
5. Thomas Rowlandson, A Peep at the Gas Lights in Pall Mall, undated. (Guildhall Library, City of London/ Bridgeman Art Library)
6. George Cruikshank, Foggy Weather, 1819. Hand-coloured etching. British Museum (© The Trustees of the British Museum)
7. Anonymous lithograph, The Tooley Street Fire, 1861. Museum of London (© Museum of London)
8. Frederick Christian Lewis, Covent Garden Market, c.1829. Oil on canvas. (Reproduced by kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Bedford and the Trustees of the Bedford Estates, and that copyright remains with His Grace the Duke of Bedford and the Trustees of the Bedford Estates)
9. George Shepherd, Hungerford Stairs, 1810. Watercolour. (Guildhall Library, City of London/ Bridgeman Art Library)
10. E. H. Dixon, The Great Dust-Heap, 1837. Watercolour. (Wellcome Library, London)
11. Fox Talbot, Nelson’s Column Under Construction, c.1841. Photograph. (Stapleton Collection/ Bridgeman Art Library)
12. George Scharf, Building the New Fleet Sewer, undated. Drawing. British Museum (© The Trustees of the British Museum)
13. George Scharf, Workmen on London Bridge, 1830. Drawing. The British Library. (© The British Library Board)
14. George Scharf, Old Murphy, 1830. Watercolour. The British Library. (© The British Library Board)
15. George Scharf, Chimney Sweeps Dancing on Mayday, undated. Watercolour. British Museum. (© The Trustees of the British Museum)
16. George Scharf, The Strand from Villiers Street, 1824. Watercolour. British Museum (© The Trustees of the British Museum)
17. Henry Alken, Funeral Car of the Duke of Wellington, 1853. Coloured engraving. (Victoria & Albert Museum, London/Bridgeman Art Library)
18. William Heath, Greedy Old Nickford Eating Oysters, late 1820s. Hand-coloured etching. British Museum. (© The Trustees of the British Museum)
19. Henry Alken, Bear Baiting, 1821. Coloured engraving. (Mary Evans Picture Library)
20. Rowlandson & Pugin, Charing Cross Pillory, 1809. Aquatint. (Mary Evans Picture Library)
21. George Cruikshank, Acting Magistrates Committing Themselves being Their First Appearance on this Stage as Performed at the National Theatre Covent Garden, 1809. Hand-coloured etching. British Museum. (© The Trustees of the British Museum)
INTRODUCTION
‘A Dickensian scandal for the 21st century’ blares one newspaper headline. ‘No one should have to live in such Dickensian conditions,’ says another. Today ‘Dickensian’ means squalor, it means wretched living conditions, oppression and darkness.
Yet Dickens finished his first novel with a glance at the sunny Mr Pickwick and his friends: ‘There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast. Some men, like bats or owls, have better eyes for the darkness than for the light. We, who have no such optical powers, are better pleased to take our last parting look at the visionary companions of many solitary hours, when the brief sunshine of the world is blazing full upon them.’ The brief sunshine of the world blazed out in full in Dickens’ work and, early in his career in particular, that was the way his contemporaries saw it. For them, ‘Dickensian’ meant comic; for others, it meant convivial good cheer.1 It was not until the twentieth century, as social conditions began to improve, that ‘Dickensian’ took on its dark tinge. In Dickens’ own time, the way that people lived was not Dickensian, merely life.
The greatest recorder the London streets has ever known – through whose eyes those streets have become Dickensian – was not born in London at all, but in Portsmouth, on 7 February 1812, where his father, a clerk in the navy pay office, was working. Apart from a brief foray to the capital as a toddler, Dickens moved to the city that gave meaning to his life and his fiction only when he was ten, arriving from Chatham, where his father had been posted, on the Commodore stagecoach, ‘packed, like game – and forwarded, carriage paid’, at the coaching inn in the heart of Cheapside, in the City of London.2 In 1815, he and his family had lodged in Norfolk Street, near Tottenham Court Road, just steps away from the grim-faced Cleveland Street Work
house. On their return to London in 1822, they moved to the newly developing, lower-middle-class district of Camden Town slightly to the north. Bayham Street was still rural enough for grass to grow down the centre of the road, and the houses that lined the street were new. This is not to say the Dickenses lived lavishly. Dickens’ parents, five children, a servant and the stepson of Mrs Dickens’ deceased sister were all crammed into the little two-storey, yellow-brick house. Dickens’ authorized biographer and lifelong friend, John Forster, called Camden Town ‘about the poorest part of the London suburbs’ and described the house as a ‘mean small tenement, with a wretched little back-garden abutting on a squalid court’. (The word ‘court’ in nineteenth-century London always meant a dead-end alley that housed slum lodgings.) Yet the residents listed by one of Dickens’ childhood neighbours – small shopkeepers; the local building contractor – do not bear this out, nor does the rent of £22 per annum – well beyond the reach of the washerwoman Forster claimed was their nearest neighbour. It seems as if, unconsciously, ‘Dickensian’, meaning the dark without the light, was retrospectively being imposed on Dickens himself.
The dark came soon enough. In December 1823, the Dickens family moved to Gower Street North, to a house double the size of the one in Bayham Street. Mrs Dickens was hoping to start a school for young ladies to supplement John Dickens’ income. While not poor, the Dickenses had by now an even larger family – seven children – and could never manage to live within their income. In the quasi-autobiographical David Copperfield, Mr Micawber – a surprisingly affectionate portrait of John Dickens from an author more usually exasperated or enraged by his feckless father – famously pronounced, ‘Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.’3 And despite the comically pompous tone, the Dickenses’ lives were indeed made miserable, particularly young Charles’s. As the debts mounted, Mrs Dickens’ step-nephew offered to help. He was the new office manager of Warren’s Blacking Factory, near the Strand, which manufactured shoe polish and the blackleading applied to fire grates and kitchen ranges.
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