The Victorian City

by Judith Flanders

  And yet, inside was a considerable improvement on outside. Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) described a ride on the Tally-ho stage with ‘your feet dangling six inches from the floor. Then you knew what cold was, and what it was to be without legs, for not a bit of feeling had you in them after the first half hour.’ Tom rides on a fairly empty stage, and the guard helps him pack his feet in straw for warmth, as well as giving him a piece of sacking to cover himself with. A queasy passenger complained that on his first stagecoach ride, in 1835, the choices were sitting facing the horses, ‘but without anything against my back (for the iron bar...four inches above the seat, can hardly be called a resting-place)’, or facing backwards, ‘but secured from falling over...and breaking my neck’.43 In either case, all that protected him from the bare boards was a cushion, which ‘is, alas, soaking from the previous day’. This misery was replicated in fiction. When Mr Pickwick and his friends take a stage to Birmingham, Bob Sawyer ends up with rain ‘streaming from his neck, elbows, cuffs, skirts, and knees...his whole apparel shone so with the wet, that it might have been mistaken for a full suit of prepared oilskin’.

  Whilst a wetting was miserable enough, Dickens’ novels are filled with much more serious stagecoach accidents. in Nicholas Nickleby, the London–Yorkshire stage overturns, with the result that ‘the lady inside had broken her lamp, and the gentleman his head...the two front outsides had escaped with black eyes, the box [passenger] with a bloody nose, the coachman with a contusion on the temple, Mr Squeers with a portmanteau bruise on his back’. In Martin Chuzzlewit, a storm made the horses uneasy even before they set off; once on the road, ‘they gradually became less and less capable of control; until, taking a sudden fright at something by the roadside, they dashed off wildly down a steep hill, flung the driver from his saddle, drew the carriage to the brink of a ditch, stumbled headlong down, and threw it crashing over,’ while a boy is ‘thrown sheer over the hedge...and was lying in the neighbouring field, to all appearance dead’.

  Dickens had extensive experience to draw on, for his career as a journalist for the Morning Chronicle, from 1834 to 1835, had been in the surprisingly short golden age of coaching, from the spread of macadamized roads in the mid-1830s to that of the railways in the early 1840s. In 1841, in Scotland, he found himself in a coach with a broken drag, forcing the passengers to get out ‘every now and then’ and hang on to ‘the back of the carriage to prevent its rolling down too fast’. It was, naturally, also raining, even before the carriage broke a spring, and was ‘in a ditch and out again, and [having] lost a horse’s shoe. And all this time it never once left off raining.’

  Other natural hazards included fog. In 1840, one coaching enthusiast remembered ‘seven or eight Mails following one after the other’ in a particularly dense fog: the guard on the first coach held up a flare at the rear of his coach, which could just be seen by the driver of the next, whose guard in turn held up his own flare, ‘and so on till the last’. In this manner one ten-mile stretch took three hours, instead of the more usual one, and even then one coach ended up in a ditch, where its wheelers – the pair of horses nearest the stage’s wheels – drowned, while the outsides were ‘thrown into the meadow beyond’, and the insides ‘extricated with some difficulty’.

  Even without fog, writers listed an array of accidents: from obstructions on the road that could not be seen by the driver; to horses that ran up a bank, upsetting the coach into the road; broken reins; a broken pole, which tipped the coach over; horses that jammed together and, with their heads turned the wrong way, could no longer be controlled by the coachman; a lead horse falling, and the wheelers in turn stumbling over it; a driver hitting his head on an overhanging branch and falling off, upon which the horses then bolted; a driver being jounced off the coach by a rut or an obstacle; outsides falling off regularly (‘It’s like helping an outside passenger up ven he’s been pitched off a coach,’ says Tony Weller in Pickwick aphoristically); or horses shying and running off. All of which makes Dickens – ‘I do verily believe I have been upset in almost every description of vehicle known...I have been...belated on miry by-roads...in a wheelless carriage, with exhausted horses and drunken postboys’ – seem positively understated.

  The romance nonetheless survived. In 1860, Dickens recalled his childhood: ‘The coach that had carried me [to London as a child], was melodiously called Timpson’s Blue-Eyed Maid, and belonged to Timpson, at the coach-office up-street; [while] the locomotive engine that had brought me back [as an adult] was called severely No. 97, and belonged to S. E. R. [the South-Eastern Railway], and was spitting ashes and hot-water over the blighted ground.’ Dickens never quite made up his mind about trains. He used them frequently, travelling to seaside holidays, to the continent, to his house in Kent; and then relentlessly once he started his famous reading tours, repeatedly criss-crossing the country. Yet long before he was in a terrible train crash in 1865 – in which ten people died just outside Staplehurst, in Kent, and which left him with a fear of train travel that lasted the rest of his life – long before this, while he welcomed the railways as a convenience and a sign of modernity, he also regretted them as symbols of a time that was passing, or past.

  Thackeray, his elder by a year, wrote elegiacally: ‘what a gulf between now and then! Then was the old world. Stagecoaches...riding-horses, pack-horses, highwaymen, knights in armour, Norman invaders, Roman legions...all these belong to the old period...But your railroad starts the new era and we of a certain age belong to the new time and the old one.’ Looking both backwards and forwards from the start of his career as an author, writing in 1836–7, Dickens set his first novel, Pickwick Papers, a decade earlier, opening in 1827, before the arrival of the railways, but one chapter was nevertheless entitled ‘Strongly illustrative of the Position, that the Course of True love is not a Railway’. Ten years later in Dombey and Son, he was still looking both ways: he described the savage destruction that the building of the railways caused, but he also saw that ‘The miserable waste ground, where the refuse-matter had been heaped of yore, was swallowed up and gone; and in its frowsy stead were tiers of warehouses, crammed with rich goods and costly merchandise...the new streets...formed towns within themselves, originating wholesome comforts and conveniences...Bridges that had led to nothing, led to villas, gardens, churches, healthy public walks.’ Even so, he finishes: ‘But Staggs’s Gardens had been cut up root and branch. Oh woe the day when “not a rood of English ground” – laid out in Staggs’s Gardens – is secure!’

  In some ways, the arrival of the railways didn’t shrink London, but made it appear to be expanding at the seams. Trains made areas seem suburban that had previously been rural, while suburbs became part of the city; Dickens wrote in 1847, ‘places far apart are brought together, to the present convenience and advantage of the Public’. At a time when an exasperated commuter claimed that it was quicker to walk the two and a half miles from London Bridge to Trafalgar Square than to take a bus, Max Schlesinger praised the marvels of the suburban line, ‘a miraculous railway’ that ran from Blackwall and Greenwich in the east and over the northern section of the City to north-west London: every quarter of an hour, ‘from early morn till late at night’, the ten-mile journey took twenty minutes. Schlesinger was not alone in his attitude. Within a quarter of a century, 160 million journeys a year were made by rail within London itself. Many places that had recently been quiet suburbs were heavily visited. After the Great Exhibition in 1851, the Crystal Palace was relocated to Sydenham and, with new, elaborately laid out gardens, it opened to the public in 1854. At first trippers had to take the train to the suburb of Penge and walk up a hill, but such was the volume of visitors that the Crystal Palace company set up its own railway branch line. This was so successful that it was soon taken over by the London and Brighton Railway, which built a substantial station, linked to Crystal Palace ‘by long glass corridors embellished with flowers and climbing plants’. By the 1860s, Crystal Palace afternoon concerts were drawing audienc
es brought by special express trains from Kensington, over twelve miles away.

  The railways also transformed people’s notion of what could be considered a commuting distance. Until 1844, trains were too expensive, even in third-class, to be used by the working classes for their daily commute. In that year, however, the government, in exchange for lifting a tax on third-class carriages, laid down that all railway companies had to run at least one train daily with fares of no more than 1d per mile. Even so, average fares still mounted up to £1 weekly, the entire weekly income of many skilled, well-employed artisans. But slowly workers did begin to move out of the city centre, as these so-called parliamentary trains (also known as working-men’s trains) gradually made it possible for them to live in slightly more salubrious conditions for the price of an inner-city slum rent, or perhaps even less, funds that could then be reallocated to travel. Even so, these working-men’s trains were not attractive in and of themselves. Officially they were required to travel at a minimum of twelve miles per hour, but they were notorious for being regularly shunted on to sidings to give priority to trains carrying first- and second-class passengers. The companies initially saw these working-men’s trains as a political gesture and did not expect them to make a profit. The day’s single parliamentary train was usually scheduled to arrive at the London stations well before dawn, to get the legal requirement out of the way, with the service from Ludgate Hill to Victoria, for example, departing at 4.55 a.m. and arriving at Victoria at six.

  By mid-century a day out and the railways were inseparable. Here holiday crowds leave the Crystal Palace in Sydenham.

  For the privilege of being shunted aside, until the 1850s the passengers in the third-class carriages stood in cars without benches or even roofs, exposed to rain, sleet and snow as well as the soot and smoke from the engine. There were no doors either, but as in cattle-cars a flap on one side of the carriage folded down to provide access. (The conditions gave rise to a series of jokes along the lines of ‘A man was seen yesterday buying a third-class ticket...The state of his mind is being inquired into.’) These carriages were more dangerous than the trains in general – in 1841, eight labourers from the building site at the new Houses of Parliament were thrown out of their open wagon and killed when the train they were travelling on ran into a landslide.44 Some passengers actively enjoyed this form of travel: ‘the jolly part was coming down in the train we were in an open carrage the thurd class...but some times the sparks flu about and one woman got a hole burnt in her shawl. there was no lid to our carrage like some of them.’ However, the author of this paean was Sophia Beale, aged eight, to which she added the proviso, ‘I should not like to go in these carrages in winter.’ Second-class was little better, with bare benches holding five a side facing each other. Ventilation came via a small square of wooden louvres on the door, sometimes, but not always, covered by a pane of glass. ‘Smoking, snuff-taking, tobacco-chewing are all allowed,’ said one visitor sourly. Despite these habits, he added, only the ‘nobility and the wealthy’ travelled first class, as it was so expensive. In 1856, a ticket from Liverpool to London on the accommodation train – that is, a stopping train, not an express – cost 37s, or nearly a week’s salary for a well-paid clerk. Even the best-selling novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe declared, ‘first-class cars are beyond all praise, but also beyond all price,’ although she conceded, ‘their second-class are comfortless, cushionless, and uninviting.’ In first class, the passengers sat in ‘luxuriously upholstered’ seats in ‘nicely carpeted’ compartments, with plate-glass windows to let in the daylight, while after dark these carriages were lit first by rape-oil lamps, later with gas.

  Until the 1850s, third-class passengers had no seating at all; after that wooden benches were provided, although there were no other comforts. The windows were simply openings, with wooden shutters to keep out bad weather: the choice was darkness and lack of air, or rain and cold.

  Omnibus travel and mailcoaches had increased the average speed of travel to nearly six miles an hour; with the railway this figure rose to over twelve, sometimes double that. By the late 1840s, therefore, areas that had traditionally been on the edges of London now housed commuters: Bow, Greenwich, Blackheath, Croydon, Woolwich, Gravesend and Charlton. By 1856, a town known as ‘Kingston on Railway’ made its priorities clear. (It later changed its name to Surbiton.) In 1851, there were 120 trains daily carrying commuters to and from Greenwich alone. Early railway lines, built to transport freight from Camden to the East and West India Docks, were soon transformed into commuter lines and promoted an east–west spread, via Canonbury, Kingsland, Homerton and out to Bow. By 1851, this North London Railway transported 3.5 million commuters annually, half of whom were City commuters.

  The first London station opened on the south side of London Bridge, and its twelve-minute trip to Greenwich replaced a one-hour coach journey. In 1837, Euston station opened, followed by a series of others: in 1838, Paddington and Nine Elms; in 1840, the Shoreditch/Bishopsgate terminus, which carried passengers to Romford, in Essex; in 1841, the station at Fenchurch Street in the City. In 1846, one contemporary estimated that, at the height of railway fever, if every company that had wanted to run a railway line into London had been given permission, over 30 per cent of the city would have been excavated for the purpose. To prevent even a fraction of this, in 1848 a Royal Commission on Metropolitan Termini drew a circle around the inner city, past which no railway would be permitted to run. In a shorthand description, it ran: Euston Road, City Road, Borough Road, Kennington Lane, Vauxhall Bridge Road, and Park Lane up to the Euston Road again. This boundary was breached almost immediately by a line from Nine Elms, at Battersea, to York Road (which became Waterloo) in 1848, but this was south of the river, and so somehow, mystically, to the West End and City men, it didn’t quite count. And despite two further breaches – Charing Cross (1864) and Liverpool Street (1874) – that line has held for 165 years: instead of lines coming into the city, as in most other European centres, London is ringed by railways.45 (The underground, too, silently conforms to this loop.)

  Initially, money was lavished on the construction of the railway lines, not on the stations. While many of London’s railway stations today have some Victorian elements remaining, they are all from the later part of the century. In the 1830s and 1840s, the stations started off very humbly indeed. Euston in 1838 had two platforms: the ‘arrival stage’ and the ‘departure stage’ (note the coaching word), from which three outward and three inward trains arrived and departed daily. (‘Inward’ and ‘outward’ were quickly superseded by ‘up’ and ‘down’ trains, meaning to and from London respectively, terms that survived until sometime after World War II.) In 1850, the Great Northern Railway’s station at Maiden Lane (the street is now York Way, while the station has become King’s Cross) was a temporary structure with two wooden platforms on the down side, between a gasworks and the tunnel for the new line. London Bridge in the 1860s had three stations: the Brighton station, the South-Eastern station and the Greenwich Railway station, the latter ‘a mean structure’.

  As trains became more heavily used, attention turned to the stations. In 1849, Euston opened its Great Hall, a concourse and a waiting room, all poorly designed, because when they were planned no one quite knew how a railway functioned, nor what needs had to be served. (Most stations, for example, found space for stands on which were chained large Bibles, ‘for the use of the passengers while waiting for the train’.) At Euston, the new hall was vast – 125 by 61 feet, and 62 feet high – but the booking office was tucked into a cramped corner, with a secondary booking hall separated from the main concourse by the parcels office. Initially tickets could not be purchased on the train, and in some stations the booking office opened for just fifteen minutes before each train’s departure, causing great bottlenecks. At Euston a large area was given over to the Queen’s Apartments, a lounge for the use of the royal family should they be happening to pass through. It was rarely used and soon came down in the w
orld with a bump, to become the ‘additional parcels office’.

  Passengers too needed to learn how the system operated. Guides instructed them that, once they were on the train, ‘A glove, a book, or anything left on a seat denotes that [a seat] is taken’. Luggage, it was explained, was placed on the roof of each carriage (it was not until the early 1860s that specially designated luggage vans appeared). Until the 1880s, each carriage had doors opening only on to the platforms, with no connection from one carriage to the next. As a result all trains halted somewhere along the line to permit the conductor to walk along the track from carriage to carriage to check tickets. On the trains coming into Waterloo, the pause was made ‘on the high viaduct over the Westminster Bridge Road’; by Euston ‘outside the engine-house’ (the Roundhouse at Camden); while outside London Bridge they stopped ‘close to the parapet of the 20-feet-high viaduct’ in Bermondsey. The Frenchman Francis Wey, in the 1850s, complained that his train was stopped while the tickets of nearly 2,000 passengers were checked: in third-class carriages, which were still mostly open-sided carts (‘in a country where it rains perpetually’, he wailed), the passengers were forced to wait ‘unprotected in the broiling sun between a rock and a brick wall’.