The Victorian City

by Judith Flanders

  There were, however, some who enjoyed the music. Since children adored performers of all sorts, many of the shows were geared towards them. Punch and Judy shows were generally elaborate street performances, requiring at least two men: one to work the puppets, one to play the drum and mouth-organ beforehand, and to collect the money during the action. In the 1840s, Mayhew spoke to one man whose first Punch and Judy show had consisted of ‘twelve figures…Punch, Judy, Child, Beadle, Scaramouch, Nobody, Jack Ketch, the Grand Senoor, the Doctor, the Devil (there was no Ghost used then), Merry Andrew and the Blind Man…The heads…was all carved in wood…A set of new figures, dressed and all, would come to about fifteen pounds…A good show at the present time will cost three pounds odd for the stand alone…including the baize, the frontispiece, the back scene, the cottage, and the letter cloth.’ Given this outlay, Punch and Judy shows stuck to the more prosperous areas. Dickens wrote that in Camden in his childhood, ‘they knew better to do anything but squeak and drum…unless a collection was made in advance – which never succeeded’. Many did what they called ‘dwelling on horders’ (orders): performing outside a family’s house by request, with the children watching from a window. If there were no orders they performed a ‘long-pitch’, or thirty-minute show, at a busy junction. Because it was a rich man’s toy, in the summer ‘Punch mostly goes down to the seaside with the quality.’

  Joseph Johnson, a sailor injured in the French wars, made his living as a street musician. As he sang, he dipped and swayed his head to make his model of the Nelson ‘sail’ in time to the music.

  There were other kinds of puppet shows as well, including fantoccini, which were marionettes similar in size to Punch and Judy, wheeled about on a cart. Various types of dancing puppets also appeared, such as sailors doing a hornpipe, or a skeleton that came apart as it danced, until only the skull was left, ‘footing it…merrily’. Most popular, with adults as well as children, were raree-, or peep-shows. The father of George Sanger (later ‘Lord’ George Sanger, the self-ennobled owner of one of the largest circuses in Europe) was an itinerant showman with a small peep-show: ‘a large box carried on the back, containing some movable and very gaudy pictures, and having six peep-holes fitted with fairly strong lenses. When a pitch was made the box was placed on a folding trestle and the public were invited to walk up’ and look at the various scenes depicted within. ‘My father…could “patter” in the most approved style, especially about the battle of Trafalgar [he had served on the Victory with Nelson]…In his white smock-frock, beaver hat, knee-breeches, with worsted stockings and low-buckled shoes’, he travelled the fairs in season and worked as a costermonger in the winter. By 1833, he had bought a much larger box, with twenty-six holes in the side, for twenty-six simultaneous viewers, ‘the pictures being pulled up and down by strings’; at night they were lit by candles inside the box. The most popular scenes for these raree-shows were battles, famous (or local) murders, the death of William IV, Napoleon’s return from Elba, or at Waterloo, the death of Nelson and ‘The Queen embarking to start for Scotland, from the Dockyard at Voolich’, as well as famous scenes from popular melodramas and Christmas pantomimes.

  Animal shows were also in demand. In the 1820s, there had been a famous dancing-bear and monkey team: the monkey, dressed as a soldier, danced on the bear’s head, and the bear tumbled and danced. But this was unusual, and generally the animals used were more domestic. In the mid-1830s, George Sanger himself began to work, aged about eleven, buying canaries, redpoles and white mice, which he taught to do tricks: the birds drew and fired a cannon, rode in a miniature coach, walked a tightrope and danced; the mice climbed poles, fetched flags ‘and other tiny tricks’. A few carts housed ‘Happy Families’, a number of unlikely animals living happily together in one cage: dogs, cats, monkeys, various types of bird, rats, guinea pigs and so on, which performed tricks. One Happy Family exhibitor even claimed to have been invited to show his ‘Family’ to Queen Victoria.

  Some shows needed less money to set up. Street conjurors and acrobats travelled in pairs, dressed in overcoats, one carrying a drum, the other a ladder. If a crowd gathered, they put down the drum and rolled out a mat; then the conjuror brought out ‘cards, cups and balls’. Their coats came off to display a red-and-white motley for the clown and ‘a loose pair of white tights, garnished with strips of red and green tape’ for the conjuror. They did a comic cross-talk act – Conjuror: ‘Beat the drum.’ Clown: ‘Beat the donkey?’ – after which the conjuror juggled, balanced balls, swords and sticks, and did card tricks, all the while keeping up his comic dialogue with the clown, who meanwhile had the important role of taking up the collection in the crowd. After ten or fifteen minutes, they picked up their mat, put on their coats and headed for a new pitch. Sometimes the group was larger, comprising a strong man, a juggler, ‘a snake, sword, and knife-swallower’ or a contortionist; sometimes the clown was dressed as a soldier, and his comic business consisted of riddles, jokes, songs and, ‘where the halfpence are very plentiful’, a funny dance.

  As with the singers, many performers were street entertainers because they had no other way of earning a living. A showman’s child in the 1830s did a ‘Cackler Dance’, skipping blindfolded between twenty eggs. Sala remembered a man who stood outside St Martin’s-le-Grand with a piece of paper, shaping and reshaping it, calling out, ‘It forms…now it forms a jockey-cap, now a church-door, a fan, a mat, the paddle-boxes of a steamer’, hoping for a few coins. Profile cutters created paper silhouettes. Pavement chalkers were obviously beyond all possibility of work: one who had a pitch in the New Kent Road had been an usher (a junior teacher) until he had a stroke. Children danced, sang or turned cartwheels. Many congregated by the riverside pubs, hoping that sporting gentlemen sitting on balconies would throw pennies into the river for the amusement of watching the children dive for them. In the 1850s, children also stood under the viaduct at Bermondsey, where the Greenwich excursion train stopped for ticket inspection, shouting, ‘Throw down your mouldy coppers!’ Cheery and slightly drunk, the day-trippers obeyed.

  The leisure industry and the street world intersected here informally, but more often the two worlds met in more planned ways.

  10.

  LEISURE FOR ALL

  A morning walk in the park: what could be more ordinary? But London, today considered to be one of the world’s cities most generously provisioned with public parks, did not historically have this largesse available to all. Its nineteenth-century development can be seen, in some ways, as a narrative of how green spaces were gradually made accessible to the masses. As late as 1855, in Trollope’s The Warden, the Revd Mr Harding spends a day in London being constantly harried from place to place: there were few locations where one might sit without paying for the privilege by buying something to drink or eat. Gentlemen might walk in the park, but sitting on a bench was not respectable. Both St James’s Park and Green Park were officially private Crown land, where access could be arbitrarily withdrawn.81 In reality, even though their gates were locked nightly at ten, by the seventeenth century there were over 6,500 keys to the gates of St James’s alone, and the walls were easily scaled, too. When George II lived at Kensington Palace in the eighteenth century, Kensington Gardens was open to the public only at weekends. After the court moved elsewhere, the public hours were increased, but regulations, enforced by park-keepers, were designed to keep the masses out.

  Similarly, London’s unique green spaces – its squares, so prominent a part of the city today – were either not open to the public or were not planned to be green. In the seventeenth century Inigo Jones designed the first London square, Covent Garden Piazza, in the Italianate style: as a paved space. After the Restoration, more paved squares were built, such as Lincoln’s Inn and Leicester Fields (where, in 1760, George II, as he was soon to be, lived in Savile House; he was proclaimed king in the square itself ). But throughout the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the paving gave way to grass as a vogue for planted squares sp
read: first in Soho Square, St James’s Square and Panton Square, all in Westminster; in Bridgewater Square, near the Barbican; and in Queen Square in Bloomsbury. By the start of the nineteenth century, there were about fifty squares in London; forty years later there were 200; by 1928 the figure had risen to 461.

  At the time, London’s garden squares were an urban oddity, following the European tradition of a public space in a city centre, usually containing a church or civic buildings, but miniaturizing it and making it private. Even as the squares were being built, there was uncertainty as to their purpose, or indeed whether they even had a purpose. In 1819, Leigh’s New Picture of London opined, ‘they add so essentially to the healthful and pleasing appearance of so many parts of London’. By 1839, the same book had changed its mind: now the squares were valued for their history and ‘peculiar beauty’. It is too easy to forget that not only were these squares created without a single overriding aim, but that there is an inevitable gap between how we see them and how they were viewed by their contemporaries. One contemporary garden historian suggests the squares of Bloomsbury are linked both by their ground-landlord (the Bedford Estate) and by colour, via their trees, visible from one square the next. So they are, in the present day. But at the time, as engravings show, the trees, newly planted, were completely invisible over the rooftops: the secret green spaces we know today are the unplanned by-product of nearly two centuries of growth.

  While the idea of squares was taken up across the city, they were created by a wide range of builders and therefore in a wide range of styles. Great swathes of land were owned by wealthy landlords and either were developed directly in a unified style, or were leased out in parcels to be developed by builders, who either created entire districts themselves or subcontracted to smaller companies. The landowners were, in effect, in the building business, sometimes contracting out the work to the great builders of the day, as the Bedford Estate did in Bloomsbury from the late 1770s to about 1840, hiring first James Burton, then Thomas Cubitt to build to their own specifications, dictating street plans, building type, density and even the details of the façades, developing a series of squares on Georgian grid patterns, ‘all comely, and some elegant, but all modern and middle class’.

  As this guidebook quote suggests, the uniformity produced by these estates gave various neighbourhoods different socio-economic profiles, while leading contemporary observers to impose on them almost human characteristics. One book outlined its own readings. The West End squares were ‘fashionable’, so much was obvious, but the northern ones were ‘genteel’: a nice distinction. Holborn and Oxford Street on the south side were ‘obsolete and antiquated spots’, while on the north side Portman Square was considered ‘as imposing’ as that pinnacle of Mayfair-dom, Grosvenor Square. Moving down in the world were ‘the respectable and genteel squares’ in Bloomsbury and north of Oxford Street. After these come the City squares, ‘old and desolate’, which could be compared with the ‘obsolete, or “used up” old Squares…which have mostly passed from fashionable residences into mere quadrangles, full of shops, or hotels, or exhibitions, or chambers’, referring to Soho, Leicester and Golden Squares, Lincoln’s Inn and Covent Garden. Finally, almost shame-facedly, came ‘the pretentious parvenu-like suburban squares’ in Chelsea, Kensington, Islington, Stepney and south of the river, neatly describing a ring around central London.

  A closer examination shows that none of the squares was all, or only, one thing. Leicester Square was for most of the century a byword for raffishness, for slightly dodgy goings-on, or just for disrepair. In 1860, a conman at the Thames Police Court was referred to as ‘a Leicester-square adventurer’. No evidence was presented to indicate that this was where he lived or operated; the term simply defined his shady activities. In Bleak House, when Dickens placed Mr George’s shooting gallery (a place where men went to practise target shooting) in ‘that curious region lying about the Haymarket and Leicester Square’, he was giving his readers a hint that perhaps Mr George was not what he seemed. It has been suggested that the shooting gallery was in Panton Square (on the west side of Leicester Square, demolished in 1868). The streets around Panton and Leicester Squares certainly are mentioned more than regularly in the memoirs of that erotomaniac ‘Walter’ as a site of brothels and accommodation houses. In 1853, an attempt was made to blackmail Gladstone simply for being seen here, talking to a woman alone on the streets. But at the beginning of the century, Leicester Square was mostly made up of private houses set around their own enclosed garden. The land was owned by one family, who leased it out to developers, and only slowly did it stop being residential: the house of the painter Joshua Reynolds, on the west side, became a bookseller’s auction rooms; the house Hogarth had lived in on the opposite side became the Sabloniere Hotel. Savile House, long vacated by nobility, was turned into Lever’s Museum, containing, among other items, Miss Linwood’s Gallery of Needlework Pictures, in which famous works of art were reproduced in embroidery. The square became ‘unlike the other squares of London’, filled with ‘hotels with foreign names’, with ‘Polish exiles, Italian supernumeraries of the opera, French figurantes of the inferior grades, German musicians, teachers and translators of languages, and keepers of low gaming-houses’. Then in 1865 a gas explosion destroyed all the buildings along one side of the square. Instead of being an opportunity for a fresh start, the decaying ruins and rubble were simply left. To add insult to injury, pranksters topped the statue of George I in the middle of the square with a dunce’s cap before painting red spots all over his horse.

  Even the great aristocratic redoubts of Belgrave and Berkeley Squares, routinely presented as solely the homes of the gentry and the moneyed, were not homogeneous. An 1844 guidebook stated flatly that Belgrave Square was entirely made up of detached villas, surrounded by gardens, even as its own engravings show a solid row of terraces all along the north and west sides (the south and west sides may have been occcupied by villas, but the engravings claimed to show the most exclusive housing). Neither mentioned in the guidebook nor revealed in the engravings was the fact that Belgrave Square was also the location of the Pantechnicon, ‘a vast establishment, uniting a bazaar, exhibition-rooms, wine-stores, and carriage-repository’, as well as a huge storage facility for furniture. Berkeley Square did indeed house some of the richest and the most aristocratic families in the country, but it was also the site of a row of shops, a hotel and Gunter’s, a confectioner and caterer to the upper classes. In season the square was filled with delivery vans and carts, with ‘thousands of white paper parcels’ coming and going to the sounds of ‘clatterings of china and glass, [and] cross porters swearing under their great trays’.

  These squares – which were less unified architectural objects and more mixed environments in permanent flux – are useful reminders when studying the development of Regent’s Park, for it too was a private commercial development by a landowning estate, in this case the Crown. ‘The main object of the Crown, I conceive it to be,’ wrote John Nash, the Prince Regent’s architect, was ‘the improvement of their own Estate.’ Just as with the squares on the Bedford Estate in Bloomsbury, or the Grosvenor Estate in Belgravia, the main aim of the Regent’s Park development was not to create a green oasis for public use, nor an area of beauty, but to maximize the landowner’s revenue.

  Most of the land in Marylebone had been leased out to farmers, market gardeners and other smallholders. As the leases expired in 1811, John Fordyce, the Crown surveyor, presented a plan to entice the prosperous classes to the area by creating, in a single scheme, a modern infrastructure. It would include churches, shops, sewers, lighting and, most important, a major thoroughfare to connect the residents to the sites of government and consumption in the West End. Regent Street was to run from the home of the Prince Regent – Carlton House, set at the end of what is now Lower Regent Street, between Pall Mall and the Mall – up to what was to become the new pleasure and recreation ground of Regent’s Park, where the prince was to have a rusti
c summer pavilion surrounded by his friends’ villas in a rus in urbe setting.

  John Nash modified the original Georgian grid-plan by adding two circuses (in effect, round squares), plus crescents and avenues, to create a more countrified feel. Fordyce had imagined Regent Street as a straight line, ploughed through the slum and working-class districts that were Soho, but Nash moved the street eastwards, edging it around the slum in Swallow Street, neatly creating a border between the homes of the upper classes and the ‘meaner’, working-class districts. Piccadilly Circus and the beautiful swoop of Regent Street were the creation of social rather than aesthetic engineering. Within these constraints, Nash planned the street itself as one cohesive piece of architecture, giving the Quadrant, the swoop, a columned, arcaded walkway on both sides, lit from above by long skylights, to create an area for prosperous loungers and window-shoppers. Where Regent Street and Portland Place meet, before the straight run up to the Park, there is a kink in the road, caused by the refusal of a landowner to sell. Nash solved the problem by creating the little round All Soul’s Church, its shape echoing his two circuses – the Regent’s Circus (today’s Piccadilly Circus) and Oxford Circus – along the new street.

  Marylebone Gardens was then redeveloped into Regent’s Park. From the beginning, the Crown’s plan – to create a countrified retreat for the Prince Regent’s aristocratic friends, with middle-class housing in terraces surrounding the park – caused outrage. In Parliament, Lord Brougham denounced the Crown for ‘trenching on the comfort of the poor for the accommodation of the rich’. Both Nash and the Surveyor General of the Crown Lands were shareholders in the company that was constructing the Regent’s Canal, and both parties stood to make a profit from the enclosure of land to which the public had previously had access. Popular disgust forced the Crown to throw open 510 acres of land to the public, rather than constructing houses on it to be sold for its own profit. After peace with France was declared in 1815, a slump in the market led to the number of houses planned in the park diminishing from forty to twenty-six, then to eight, while the number of terraces around the park similarly dwindled; the prince’s pavilion was never even begun, and one of the two barracks planned was replaced by a zoo.82 At the same time plans for the great ceremonial route at the south end of Regent Street began to go awry. Nash had expected the full-stop there to be Carlton House, with the spire of St Margaret’s and Westminster Hall in the distance: royal, ecclesiastical and governmental power seen in a single glance. But in 1820 the Prince Regent became George IV and moved to Buckingham Palace, previously the residence of Queen Charlotte, the wife of George II, who had died in 1818, the year before her husband. Carlton House was demolished and Nash created on its site Carlton Gardens and Carlton House Terrace, and, from these streets a set of stairs leading down to the Mall and to St James’s Park.