The Victorian City

by Judith Flanders

  Here the young Dickens walked along ‘streets of dirty, straggling houses, with now and then an unexpected court composed of buildings as ill-proportioned and deformed as the half-naked children that wallow in the kennels’. This was no journalist’s exaggeration – or if it was, it afflicted all journalists in the same way. In the previous decade, Flora Tristan had seen children in St Giles ‘without a stitch of clothing...nursing mothers with no shoes...wearing only a tattered shift which barely covered their naked bodies...young men in tatters...dismayingly thin, debilitated, sickly’.60 Yet, as Dickens reported, the inhabitants might not conform to the usual expectations. In one house a shopkeeper’s family lived in the shop and the back parlour, with an Irish labourer and his family in the back kitchen, and a ‘jobbing man – carpet-beater and so forth’ and his family in the front kitchen.61 ‘In the ‘front one-pair’ lived another family, and, in the back one-pair ‘a young ’oman as takes in tambour-work [embroidery], and dresses quite genteel’; another family occupied the front attic, and ‘a shabby-genteel man’ in the back attic. Every single one of them was in employment. They were not, by any means, the type of people that most writers, and most readers, thought of when they heard the word ‘slums’: the unnuanced idea of a seething population consisting entirely of layabouts, drunkards and thieves.

  A look at a small slum in Kensington at mid-century affirms what Dickens found in St Giles. In Jennings’ Buildings – made up of eighty-three two-storey late-eighteenth-century houses built around five small courts off Kensington High Street – 1,000 residents lived with no running water, no drains and forty-nine privies between them.62 The inhabitants were mostly Irish: the men seasonal labourers, the women laundresses and other daily workers. Despite being unskilled, many were long-term employees, not casual labour, and the courts supported social clubs, pubs and a savings club. The residents resorted to the magistrates to bring cases against neighbours who were behaving in a manner considered unacceptable – that is, they saw themselves not as the middle class saw them, as an unruly and potentially dangerous underclass, but as part of the law-abiding majority. There was almost no record of arrests for prostitution connected with these residents; children were baptized and couples married at the local Catholic church. Nevertheless the density of overcrowding was appalling, and there was no running water of any sort until 1867 (when a cholera epidemic finally compelled the vestry to provide outdoor standpipes). But slum conditions did not necessarily mean criminality, except, perhaps, to journalists.

  Even among the gainfully and regularly employed poor, thirty or more people might live in six or eight rooms, and as their jobs waxed and waned, they too might occasionally have to take in lodgers. In Bemerton Street, off the Caledonian Road, in King’s Cross, at mid-century there lived in one eight-room house: in the basement, an old man and his wife in the front room, with two lodgers at the back; in the two rooms on the ground floor, a couple and their eight children; on the first floor in the front room, a couple and their baby, plus their lodgers: in the back, two sisters and sometimes their mother, two women and their three children; on the second floor, in the front, a couple, their two adult sons, a baby ‘and a brood of rabbits’, with two women and two boys in the back. The cellars were generally the worst, being at best both damp and dark; in particularly bad lodgings, the liquids from the cesspools seeped up into them. In a court in Nichol Street, in Whitechapel, a cellar had a single opening for a window, measuring three feet by 4.5 inches. The mildewed walls ran with water; the ceiling, six feet high, was half fallen-in. This was home to nine, who between them paid rent of 3s a week. A Covent Garden porter lodging near by earned 3s a week in a good week: a fraction of a room was all he could ever hope to afford, and that only for as long as he was strong enough to work.

  Even for those not in cellars, sanitation was an insuperable problem. In Oliver Twist, Oliver washes himself ‘and made everything tidy by emptying the basin out of the window’, as directed by Fagin. This no doubt raised a smile in middle-class readers, but what else was Fagin to do in his Clerkenwell slum? Few houses had any drainage, water supplies ranged from scarce to non-existent, and there were few privies. It was not what the residents wanted, but what the landlords supplied, and most inhabitants made efforts to keep their living quarters as clean as possible, given their meagre resources. Sometimes landlords let an elderly or infirm person have a bed (rarely a room) rent-free in return for washing down the privy daily. When the landlord made no such provision, the residents arranged for the most impoverished of them to take on the task and as payment ‘the people what lives there gives her their cinders’ – the broken bits of leftover coal. No matter how clean the inhabitants may have wanted to be, it was a losing battle. In one alley behind Farringdon Street as late as the 1860s, there was one privy for a court with 400 residents. Landlords who thought 400 people needed only one privy were not going to pay to have it emptied regularly. In 1849, a letter signed by fifty-four people appeared in The Times :

  Sur, – May we beg and beseach your proteckshion and power, We are Sur, as it may be, livin in a Willderniss, so far as the rest of London knows anything of us, or as the rich and great people care about. We live in muck and filthe. We aint got no priviz, no dust bins, no drains, no water-splies, and no drain or suer in the hole place. The Suer Company, in Greek St., Soho Square, all great, rich and powerfool men, take no notice watso-medever of our cumplaints. The Stenche of a Gully-hole is disgustin. We all of us suffur, and numbers are ill, and if the Colera comes Lord help us.

  Some gentlemans comed yesterday, and we thought they was comishoners from the Suer Company, but they was complaining of the noosance and stenche our lanes and corts was to them in New Oxforde Street. They was much suprized to see the seller in No. 12, Carrier St., in our lane...and would not beleave that Sixty persons sleep in it every night...but theare are greate many sich...Sur, we hope you will let us have our cumplaints put into your hinfluenshall paper, and make these landlords of our houses and these comishoners...make our houses decent for Christions to live in.

  Preaye Sir com and see us, for we are living like piggs, and it aint faire we shoulde be so ill treted.

  We are your repeckfull servents in Church Lane, Carrier St., and the other corts.63

  This particular court lay in St Giles, just steps away from Tottenham Court Road, and the letter was written after the area had been ‘improved’ – in fact, the courts’ single privy had been removed to make way for the improvements. The Times followed up this letter and recorded, in one room, a child naked but for a sack, eaten up with fever, watched helplessly by his parents, and lying next to a woman with cholera. ‘A strange boy’ was also sleeping in the room; no one knew where he had come from, or what his name was: ‘He had had nothing to eat for two days except a crust of bread given him by a woman who pitied him, though she could ill-spare the morsel.’ It is hard to imagine that Dickens, with his confirmed interest in slums and living conditions, did not see this Times article; Bleak House, with its picture of the slum of Tom-all-Alone’s, and the fever-racked Jo helped by the brickmakers’ wives who can ill spare him food, springs obviously to mind.

  Population growth, the Famine, the Hungry Forties: all contributed to this state of affairs, with the result that the poor lived ‘like piggs’. But the precipitating factor was the slum clearances themselves. Most people failed, or refused, to make the connection. The Illustrated London News, antipathetic to the Poor Laws and sympathetic to the poor, nevertheless strongly approved of the ‘improvements’ (always their word), even as they condemned the increasing misery they saw in the streets. In one week in February 1847, they reported that up to 4,000 starving people had arrived nightly at just three Asylums for the Houseless Poor. The following week, the magazine noted with exasperated relief that ‘finally’ the work to eradicate the Devil’s Acre slum was about to begin.

  From the 1840s, the railways drove these clearances at an ever faster pace. St Giles and Saffron Hill were no longer
the worst parts of London; the new slums had all been created by the railways. Property owners and long lease-holders were compensated if their buildings were destroyed, but those who rented day to day, or even week to week, received nothing. They simply had to shift for themselves, finding new lodgings, which were likely to become more expensive as nearby cheap rooms became scarcer. In 1846, a Parliamentary Select Committee heard that ‘the rents of the wretched hovels of the poor increased 10, 15, 20 and 25 per cent in all the surrounding districts where these improvements have taken place.’ Behind Farringdon Street station, a resident of an alley claimed that ‘a thousand houses have been pulled down for the railway within half a mile’, and those residents had all moved into his street, ‘because there’s nowhere else’.

  Other ‘improvements’ were created as London was transformed from an eighteenth-century city to a modern one. In the 1860s, 500 people were displaced from Ship Yard, off the Strand, with more from the surrounding courts, as the area was cleared for the preliminary groundwork for the building of the new Royal Courts of Justice (which still stand). Four months later, another 4,000 were evicted. Ultimately eight acres were completely razed: thirty-three streets, 343 houses, 170 or so stables, plus numerous warehouses and shops. The newly homeless, crowding in with their neighbours, were no doubt unmoved that the Courts, when they were completed fifteen years later, were impressive, as were the buildings lining the many new wide roads that had displaced the homes of the poor. The slums continued to exist but were just better hidden and broken up by streets that the respectable were happy to walk down.

  By the 1860s, the harsh times of the Hungry Forties had returned once more. Newspapers reported on the hundreds of starving in the street, even of instances when ‘thousands’ broke into bakers or eating houses, not to rampage, but to get bread to keep them alive. The Poor Law had 23,000 paid officers and produced 12,000 annual reports, but whatever relief the system had once offered, had now broken down entirely. As a result, ‘Dorcas societies, soup-kitchens, ragged-schools, asylums, refuges’ and other benevolent societies were ‘strained to the utmost’, attempting to ameliorate the very worst conditions.64

  Charities such as the Ragged School concentrated on trying to educate the poor so that they could support themselves. The first Ragged School had originally been a single schoolroom in a back-court in Saffron Hill in 1841; a decade later there were 110 schools, where nearly 2,000 children were taught trades, and dormitories were available to those who attended school regularly. Here around 200 boys and men slept together, in ‘narrow pathways’ that had been ‘partitioned off into wooden troughs, or shallow boxes without lids’. Similar accommodation was offered by the privately endowed Asylums for the Houseless Poor, sometimes also known as the Refuges for the Destitute. These were set up in 1820, with branches near Blackfriars, Smithfield and Marylebone. In the early 1850s, on winter nights ‘a large crowd of houseless poor [are] gathered about the asylum at dusk, waiting for the first opening of the doors...with their blue, shoeless feet, ulcerous with the cold, from long exposure to the snow and ice in the street...To hear the cries of the hungry, shivery children, and the wrangling of the...men assembled there to obtain shelter for the night, and a pound of dry bread, is a thing to haunt one for life.’

  Then there were Night Refuges, privately supported and open only in winter, where residents could stay for up to a month, coming and going as they pleased. Casual Wards, or strawyards, were subsidiaries of the workhouses, and just two nights’ stay was allowed at one time. By the 1850s, these Casual Wards had become a matter for journalistic examination. Mayhew visited one and listed one night’s residents, by age. The youngest was six, with another twenty-four boys and girls under fourteen; altogether, there were 152 children, half of whom had no parents. In 1865, the journalist James Greenwood, possibly the first journalist to go undercover, visited a Casual Ward in Princes Road, Lambeth, in the guise of a labourer out of work. He and his fellow indigents had their clothes taken away, and, dressed only in their shirts, were sent out to a yard where thirty men were given bags of hay to sleep on, in a shed closed in on only three sides. He was too late to get dinner, but one boy told him he had missed a treat: ‘There’s skilly [gruel, or thin porridge], nights as well as mornin’s now...and spoons to eat it with, what’s more.’ There was a single pail of drinking water (and if there was another to serve as a chamber pot, Greenwood was too reticent to tell his readers). At seven in the morning they were roused to wash and dress in their own clothes, before waiting in the yard for a breakfast of bread and skilly. Then, before they were permitted to leave, they were forced to take turns cranking a flour mill. This was make-work, intended to inculcate the indigent in middle-class ways of industry, for the flour that resulted was too poor in quality to be used. The idle did as little as they could get away with, while the men who truly wanted to look for work were prevented from doing so: by the time they were released, the day-workers had all been chosen at the casual hiring stands.

  Greenwood’s report caused a sensation, even toned down as it had been by the Pall Mall Gazette’s editor, ‘to avoid suspicion of exaggeration’. Much of the discussion focused on the institutionalized contempt shown to the inmates, the sham work forced upon them, the cruelty through regimentation, such as making men stand barefoot and in nightshirts outdoors. But these men had at least managed to gain admittance, and were fed.

  The conditions in the 1860s for many were no better than when Oliver asked for ‘more’ in 1838. In the 1840s, the Illustrated London News reported numerous inquests on those who had died after being refused relief by the parish. Twenty years later, over a third of the children at the Great Ormond Street Hospital suffered from that disease of malnutrition, rickets. Dickens saw these walking dead and, through the decades of his writing life, made sure his readers saw them too. In 1852, at a Ragged School dormitory, an elderly alcoholic printer was dying of starvation and next to him ‘was an orphan boy with burning cheeks and great gaunt eager eyes, who was in pressing peril of death too’. Both were taken to the workhouse to die. Or, as Dickens addressed the authorities directly, after Jo dies in Bleak House of a similar fever: ‘Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen...Dead, men and women, born with heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.’

  8.

  THE WATERS OF DEATH

  Death from lack of food was ever-present for the majority of London’s population. However, death from water was even more likely, and not by drowning in it, but by drinking it. The rivers of London have so far vanished from sight that today it is hard to remember how much they defined London’s shape and history. In 1810, a labouring man visiting London for the first time went to see ‘the metropolitan curiosities...a glimpse of the public buildings, the river, and the shipping; together with the docks and their warehouses’, before walking up to Hampstead to view ‘the noble river, with its “forest of masts”’, and then rowing out to see Greenwich Hospital from the river. For him, the sights of London revolved around the Thames, as Dickens’ fiction emphasizes: three out of his fifteen novels – Bleak House, Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend – begin with a scene on the river.

  Had the visiting labourer but known, in going to Hampstead from his lodgings he was crossing even more rivers, for London, built on a flood plain, is saturated with rivers that debouch into the Thames. By the nineteenth century most of them had been built over and made invisible. On the north side of the river, from west to east, Stamford Brook runs from Wormwood Scrubs to Chiswick; Counters Creek covers the same districts; the Westbourne runs from Hampstead to Chelsea; the Tyburn, along part of its route renamed the Aye, from Hampstead to Westminster; the Fleet, from Highgate and Hampstead to the City; the Walbrook, from Islington to Cannon Street; the Black Ditch, from Stepney to Poplar; and Hackney Brook from Hornsey to the River Lea. South of the river, from west to east, Beverley Brook runs from Wimbledon to Barnes; the Wandle, from Merton to Wandsworth; the Falconbrook, from T
ooting to Battersea; the Effra, from Norwood to Vauxhall; the Peck, joined by Earl’s Sluice to the Neckinger, from East Dulwich to Bermondsey and Rotherhithe; and the Ravensbourne from Bromley to Deptford.

  Most of these rivers have entirely disappeared, both from our sight and from our consciousness, except for small breaks where from time to time one briefly surfaces, or when perhaps the name of a street or district reminds us of what lies underneath. For in London, these names are legion, evidence that the ground beneath our feet is rarely as solid as we think. Many roads or districts are named for the rivers they are built over or beside: Fleet Street, Place and Road, Effra Road, Neckinger Street, the districts of Wandsworth (‘Wandle-worth’) and Peckham. There is also more generic naming, such as Angler’s Lane, Creek Road, Pont Street, and Brook Street, Brook Green and Brook Drive. Conduit Street, Mews, Place, Drive and Way all mark river culverting. Then there are Bayswater and Coldbath Fields, and all the ‘bournes’ and ‘burns’: Bourne Street, Marylebone (a corruption of Mary-le-bourne), Kilburn, Holborn, Langbourne, Westbourne Grove. There are ‘bridge’ names: the generic Bridge Street, Place, Road and Lane, and Knightsbridge, Uxbridge and Stamford Bridge (originally Stanbridge, or ‘stone bridge’, it became Sandford, indicating the ford in the river, then Stamford); as well as all the ‘fords’, too: Hungerford, Dartford, Deptford, Romford and Brentford. Dozens of springs are marked by their surface eruption as wells: Wells Street, Way and Terrace Mews; Chadwell Street, Amwell Street, Sadler’s Wells, Bagnigge Wells, Shadwell, Camberwell, Stockwell, Clerkenwell, Bridewell, Muswell Hill.