The Victorian City

by Judith Flanders

  Convict prisons remain with us, but debtors’ prisons vanished in the nineteenth century. For much of the first half of the century, however, those who could not pay what they owed were imprisoned until their debts were met. When the debtor’s creditors decided that they had no option but the law, a writ of execution was put in and the debtor was arrested. He or she was usually first taken to a sponging house (sometimes spunging house), so-called for its ability to squeeze money out of debtors, ‘where, like a spunge, they soon begin, you / Find, to suck out whatever you’ve got in you!’ There the debtor was held under the supervision of the bailiffs while, with luck, he might come to an arrangement with his creditors. These houses were commercial propositions run by private individuals, and living costs were charged just as they were in regular lodgings. According to one novel a small room cost 5s a day, while another claimed a fire was an additional 5s. Dickens priced the more luxurious front drawing room at ‘a couple of guineas a day’. To survive decently as a debtor, one had to have money.

  One of the best-known houses was Abraham Sloman’s, at 4 Cursitor Street, off Chancery Lane. In Disraeli’s novel Henrietta Temple, published in 1837, it was described as ‘a large but gloomy dwelling’, providing ‘a Hebrew Bible and the Racing Calendar’ for the ‘literary amusement’ of its inhabitants. In Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847–8), Colonel Crawley is a regular visitor, passing through at least three times; his ‘old bed’, when he returns, has just been vacated by a captain of the Dragoons, whose mother left him to languish there for a fortnight before paying off his creditors, ‘jest to punish him’. Dickens knew Sloman’s in reality, not simply in literature. In 1834, three years before Disraeli’s novel, John Dickens was arrested yet again for debt, and was taken to Sloman’s to wait for his journalist son, now gainfully employed, to extricate him; that same son re-created the house the following year, as Solomon Jacob’s, also on Cursitor Street, in one of his earliest short stories, ‘A Passage in the Life of Mr Watkins Tottle’, as well as, two decades later, more touchingly as Coavinses’ Castle, in Bleak House.

  If no one came forward to pay what the debtors owed, the prisoners were taken from the sponging house to a debtors’ prison, where they were kept until the debts were paid – potentially for ever if the debtor had no means of settling. Like Mr Dorrit in Little Dorrit, a handful of prisoners were unable to untangle their affairs and spent the bulk of their lives in these institutions: when the Fleet closed in 1842, one prisoner had been there since 1814; another, still in the Queen’s Bench prison in 1856, had been arrested for debt in 1812.55 Although there were nine debtors’ prisons in London at the beginning of the century, the ones we know best today are the Fleet and the Marshalsea, mostly thanks to Dickens’ depictions of Mr Pickwick in the Fleet and Mr Dorrit in the Marshalsea. These two, with King’s Bench, in Southwark, and Whitecross Street, in the City, held most of London’s debtors.

  Despite being places for people who were penniless, debtors’ prisons required cash, and rather a lot of it. In the Fleet those who had money to spend lived on one side, where basic services were provided for a fee. In contrast, ‘The poor side of a debtor’s prison is, as its name imports, that in which the most miserable and abject class of debtors are confined.’ Until the 1820s, the latter received the barest minimum of food and were expected to beg in order to supplement their rations. Dickens described the opening on to the street, where prisoners stood in turns behind a grille, ‘rattl[ing] a money-box, and exclaim[ing] in a mournful voice, “Pray, remember the poor debtors; pray remember the poor debtors.”’ But, Dickens added, ‘Although this custom has [since] been abolished, and the cage is now boarded up, the miserable and destitute condition of these unhappy persons remains the same.’ After that date, each prisoner with funds was charged ‘footing’ on entry, to provide food for the destitute inmates. For a ‘chummage’ fee to the chum-master – the prison officer in charge of lodgings – the prisoner was given a room, which, because of habitual overcrowding, always had at least one occupant already. Good chum-masters ensured that a prosperous debtor was quartered with an indigent one, whereupon the prosperous new arrival paid a weekly fee to the poorer to go and sleep elsewhere. The destitute prisoner in turn paid a portion of that fee to an even poorer prisoner for space in the corner of his cell, leaving a few shillings a week for food and other necessities. For the better-off, turnkeys let out furniture for a further sum. Food was brought into the prison by family members, or ordered from a local eating house for another sum; drink was similarly available. In a parody of university life, prisoners also ‘subscribed’, as ‘collegians’, to the cost of the fire in the taproom and the provision of hot water. As Mr Pickwick discovered very rapidly, ‘money was, in the Fleet, just what money was out of it; that it would instantly procure him almost anything he desired’. The same held true in prisons for criminals: in Newgate, when the Artful Dodger is awaiting trial for pickpocketing, Fagin promises, ‘He shall be kept in the Stone Jug...like a gentleman...With his beer every day, and money in his pocket.’

  Tradesmen routinely conducted business in the prisons too, as they did outside. When Pip visits Newgate – a holding prison for those awaiting trial, as well as for convicted prisoners awaiting transportation or death – he sees ‘a potman...going his round with beer’ as such sellers did on the streets (see pp. 287–8; p. 292, top row, centre, shows a picture of one). Debtors were not necessarily kept off the streets altogether anyway. Around most of the debtors’ prisons there was a designated area where, on payment of yet another fee to the prison officials, prisoners could work and even live within what were known as ‘the rules’. They comprised, Dickens wrote in Nicholas Nickleby, ‘some dozen streets in which debtors who can raise money to pay large fees, from which their creditors do NOT derive any benefit, are permitted to reside by the wise provisions of the same enlightened laws which leave the debtor who can raise no money to starve in jail’. One memoir claimed that the rules were so little policed that one prisoner deputed for the stagecoachman on the London–Birmingham route for an entire month without the prison officers being any the wiser. Many prisoners still worked at their old trades: in the 1830s, the cabinet-maker William Lovett was employed by a man who ended up in the Fleet, continuing to work for him in a workshop in the rules. Those in the Queen’s Bench didn’t even need to go outside the prison walls to resume their trades. On the ground floor of the gaol a number of indebted tradesmen turned their rooms into shops: butchers, greengrocers, a barber, tailors and so on. This group rather looked down on the row of rooms at the back of the building, where the poorer prisoners lived, and where ‘there are shops of an humbler class’: sausage seller, knife- and boot-cleaner and a pie seller.

  When Dickens placed the Dorrit family in the Marshalsea prison off the Borough High Street, south of the river, he made it world famous, although at the time readers were unaware of his own intimate childhood experiences within its walls. By the time he began Little Dorrit in 1855, most of the debtors’ prisons had been closed down – the Marshalsea was emptied in 1842 – and there were only 413 debtors imprisoned in London. It is not surprising, given the author’s youthful scarring, that the novel was set during the years that the Dickens family too had suffered. William Dorrit enters the Marshalsea in about 1805, but most of the scenes there take place when he has already been imprisoned for two decades, almost exactly coinciding with the date when John Dickens was there – 1824.

  The prison, wrote his son, was ‘an oblong pile of barrack building, partitioned into squalid houses standing back to back...environed by a narrow paved yard, hemmed in by high walls duly spiked at [the] top’. But the novel barely scratched the surface of the reality that was the Marshalsea. Just over a decade after his father’s imprisonment, Dickens, in The Pickwick Papers, had been more passionate about the conditions in the Fleet: ‘poverty and debauchery lie festering in the crowded alleys; want and misfortune are pent up in the narrow prison; an air of gloom and dreariness seems...to impart.
..a squalid and sickly hue.’ Even this was an understatement. The prisoners’ lodgings in the Marshalsea consisted of fifty-six rooms measuring ten feet, ten inches square, each of which comfortably held one bed, although each routinely housed three prisoners. The narrow paved yard that Dickens mentions was really an alley, five yards wide at the widest point. There was, for the 150-odd prisoners and any additional family members who moved in for lack of funds to live elsewhere – as Mrs Dickens and their younger children had been forced to do – a single water pump, a single cistern to hold the drinking and washing water, and two privies. The yard was flooded with waste water, the open drains were ‘choked and offensive’, the dusthole, where rubbish and fire ashes were thrown, smelt, although not as badly as the privies: they were emptied only once every two months, and their stench carried to the kitchen.

  Little Dorrit presents a rather orderly, domestic image of the prison, where families lived according to middle-class norms as best they could. But the rules of the prison suggest otherwise: there were fines for taking other people’s property; for throwing urine or faeces out of the windows or into other people’s rooms; for making noise after midnight; for cursing, fighting, dirtying the privy seat, urinating in the yard, stealing from the taproom and singing obscene songs. Rules, by their prohibitions, tell us what people really do, as there is no need to create rules for things people do not do. The Marshalsea was clearly not a pleasant place to live.

  Early in the century, like the Fleet and the King’s Bench, inmates could live within the rules outside the Marshalsea, in an area a later writer on prison reform referred to as covering ‘nearly half the south side of London’. The Marshalsea also had a system of ‘liberty tickets’, whereby the indebted prisoner, for sums ranging from 4s 2d to 11s 10d, purchased between one and three days’ leave from the prison entirely. This, however, was abolished once the Marshalsea moved to its new site, and there living conditions mirrored those of any slum.

  Throughout the century there were ongoing attempts to improve conditions. Pentonville, a prison for convicts and for those awaiting transportation, opened in 1842 as a ‘model’ prison. Cells were generously sized, ventilated ‘on the newest scientific principle’ and heated by ‘warm air’, while inmates were supplied with good bedding and food. But others, such as Millbank, also for convicts, remained a blot on the landscape, no matter how good the intentions. Millbank was the largest prison in England, made up of six buildings spread over sixteen acres. (Tate Britain now stands on the site.) The ground in this historically poor district was marshy and considered to promote fevers. One journalist claimed that ‘Here the cholera first appears’. Although cholera had first reached London via the docks (see pp. 216), Pimlico somehow had that feel about it as Dickens describes in David Copperfield:

  The neighbourhood was a dreary one...as oppressive, sad, and solitary by night, as any about London...A sluggish ditch deposited its mud at the prison walls. Coarse grass and rank weeds straggled over all the marshy land in the vicinity. In one part, carcases of houses...rotted away...Slimy gaps and causeways, winding among old wooden piles, with a sickly substance clinging to the latter, like green hair...led down through the ooze and slush to the ebb-tide. There was a story that one of the pits dug for the dead in the time of the Great Plague was hereabout; and a blighting influence seemed to have proceeded from it over the whole place

  Even more blighted, and just as intermingled in the life of the streets, were the prison hulks, which had been established during the American Revolution, when criminals could no longer be shipped off to the colonies. Here prisoners were held in decommissioned ships berthed at Woolwich and other navy yards, in theory on a temporary basis during wartime. But long after transportation to Australia had replaced transportation to the former colonies, the hulks continued to be used. Sometimes prisoners were held on the hulks while awaiting transportation, as was the case with Magwitch in Great Expectations. All the prisoners on those in London worked in the navy yards alongside regular employees, providing free labour that the government found invaluable, loading and unloading ships, hauling coal and doing whatever heavy unskilled work was necessary in tandem with paid workers.

  Thus prisons and slums were equated in people’s minds: the prisons housed the criminally poor; the slums the merely poor. Throughout the century, as many journalists toured the slums as the prisons, describing for their readers what they saw. While these generally middle-class accounts are reports from outsiders looking in, they are with few exceptions all we have

  For poor children, like Oliver Twist, it was often but a short step from poverty to crime, with the punishment being prison, transportation or worse. Accounts of the homeless – particularly homeless children – pervade Dickens’ work, fiction and non-fiction alike.56 Partly this was to do with his own feeling of having been, as he later called it, ‘thrown away’ as a child, when, ‘but for the mercy of God, I might easily have [become], for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a little vagabond’. There is little difference between this response and that of the semi-autobiographical David Copperfield. When David finally finds his aunt after having been thrown away himself, he says, ‘I thought of all the solitary places under the night sky where I had slept, and...I prayed that I never might be houseless any more, and never might forget the houseless.’ The great nineteenth-century creator of the idea of ‘home’ was driven by this childhood sense of homelessness.

  Dickens’ horror at the destitution he saw all about him appears over and over in his accounts of his long night walks, barely changing over the decades. On one evening, in 1856, in a piece he carefully entitled ‘A Nightly Scene in London’, he spotted five ‘bundles of rags’ sleeping on the pavement in the rain outside the Whitechapel Workhouse. Being Dickens, he of course went to question the Master and, being Dickens, he also received a truthful answer: ‘Why, Lord bless my soul, what am I to do? What can I do? The place is full. The place is always full – every night. I must give the preference to women with children, mustn’t I?’ One of the women outside said she hadn’t eaten all day, apart from refuse picked up off the ground at the market. Dickens gave her and her companions 1s each to buy some food and get a few nights’ lodging. A crowd of starving collected around him as he did this, but ‘the spectators...let us pass; and not one of them, by word, or look, or gesture, begged of us...there was a feeling among them all, that their necessities were not to be placed by the side of such a spectacle; and they opened a way for us in profound silence, and let us go.’

  On another night, this respect, or perhaps resignation, was absent:

  I overturned a wretched little creature, who, clutching at the rags of a pair of trousers with one of its claws, and at its ragged hair with the other, pattered with bare feet over the muddy stones. I stopped to raise and succour this poor weeping wretch, and fifty like it...were about me in a moment, begging, tumbling, fighting, clamouring, yelling, shivering in their nakedness and hunger. The piece of money I had put into the claw of the child I had over-turned was clawed out of it, and was again clawed out of that wolfish grip, and again out of that, and soon I had no notion in what part of the obscene scuffle in the mud, of rags and legs and arms and dirt, the money might be.

  The visceral response that is so close to the surface is not just born of his sympathy for these people ‘thrown away’, but derives from the knowledge that, had life turned out only a little differently, he might have been one of them.

  Much of the middle-class disdain for the poor was the result of incomprehension, owing to the increasing separation of the classes. Previously, the rich and poor had lived in the same districts: the rich in the main streets, the poor in the service streets behind. As London expanded, to meet the needs of the growing numbers of workers and residents in the City and the West End the houses of the poor were demolished (up to 25 per cent vanished between 1830 and 1850 alone). Their residents were forced into areas that were already slums, or would soon become so through overcrowding,
while the prosperous, in turn, moved out of the city centre to the new suburbs.

  Slums developed for a range of reasons. In some areas, where speculative building had failed – huge houses were built in Notting Dale for the prosperous who never came, put off by the nearby piggeries and brickfields – the houses were divided up into lodgings for the poor. Some areas failed to attract the affluent for reasons no one quite understood. Portland Town, on the north-east corner of Regent’s Park, never had the cachet of St John’s Wood next door; Pimlico, on the edge of Belgravia, should have been a desirable location for the middle classes, but was not, perhaps because of its marshy ground; Chelsea, despite being near the country and with good roads into town, was low-lying and prone to flooding. Other areas degenerated as employment patterns changed: in Spitalfields, as the weaving industry was destroyed by industrialization and the abolition of import duties on foreign textiles, the once-prosperous workers’ houses were subdivided among multiple tenants. By 1851, Hampstead housed 5.3 people per acre and Kensington 16.2 per acre, while Chelsea accommodated 65.4, Westminster 71.5, St Martin-in-the-Fields 80.8, Marylebone 104.5, St Giles 221.2 and the Strand 255.5. The poor had become an alien race.

  At the beginning of the century, there were a dozen or so large slum districts. In the centre of town, St Giles – sometimes known as the Holy Land, possibly for its large number of Irish residents – ran south from Tottenham Court Road and Bloomsbury, with Soho on its western edge, down to Seven Dials on the east; St Martin-in-the-Fields ran westwards from the church to Swallow Street, off Piccadilly; the Devil’s Acre, around Tothill Fields, and Old and New Pye Streets, clustered near Parliament. Heading east, Clare Market ran from High Holborn to the Strand; Saffron Hill or Field Lane were two names for one slum, in Clerkenwell, bordering the Fleet Ditch. Smithfield held more tenements and back-courts, as did the area around Golden Lane and Whitecross Street. Further east still, around Shoreditch, Old Nichol was a slum district, as were increasing areas of Bethnal Green. In Spitalfields, Rose Lane, Flower Street, Dean Street and Petticoat Lane were the centre of another slum; in Whitechapel, the slum areas developed around Rosemary Lane. South of the river, the slums of Old Mint lay in Bermondsey, as did Jacob’s Island, which was not an island at all but a swampy area where the River Neckinger met the Thames.