The Victorian City

by Judith Flanders

  For the West End men, there were also cigar divans, usually behind or above a cigar shop. A 1s fee obtained a cigar and a cup of coffee, plus access to a comfortable room furnished like a drawing room, with magazines and books. Mr Simpson, before he opened a restaurant in the West End, owned a cigar divan on the Strand, considered ‘one of the most attractive, and by far the most comfortable lounge in the metropolis’. By the 1850s, there was also Gliddon’s Divan, next to Evans’s Supper Rooms (see p. 358), which was ‘conducted in the most gentlemanly style’; Follit’s Old-Established Cigar Stores, near Portman Square; and the Argyle Divan, on Piccadilly. This last opened after the theatres closed, which gives a hint that the divans were not entirely respectable. In Trollope’s 1855 novel, The Warden, Mr Harding, a clergyman from the country, tries to avoid his acquaintances and ends up in a cigar divan; the reader is intended to relish the incongruity of an unworldly cleric in such a place.

  The divans were financially well out of reach of most men. For those with less disposable income, particularly in the City, even lunch was a snatched meal. Edmund Yates said that in the 1840s he and his fellow junior clerks at the main post office were given a quarter of an hour to eat. In smaller offices the younger men ‘merely skat[ed] out…for a few minutes…for a snack’, while the married clerks brought bread and cheese from home or, as Reginald Wilfer does in Our Mutual Friend, got in a penny loaf and milk from a dairy to eat in the counting house. The most junior employees ‘eat whatever they can get, and wherever they can get it, very frequently getting nothing at all’.

  The ‘impecunious juniors’ from the post office went to Ball’s Alamode Beef House, in Butcher Hall Lane (demolished together with Newgate), which sold ‘a most delicious “portion” of stewed beef done up in a sticky, coagulated, glutinous gravy of surpassing richness’, the same dish David Copperfield had chosen for his treat. Other alamode houses offered boiled beef with carrots, suet dumplings and potatoes: more cheap fillers. For these clerks were not much different from David Copperfield and the small boys buying pea soup: they were all trying to stave off hunger as cheaply as possible, and the alamode and boiled-beef houses catered to this need. In the 1820s, the Boiled-Beef House by the Old Bailey was already famous (its owner, later a theatre leaseholder, has come down to history as ‘Boiled-Beef Williams’). By the 1860s, it was almost the definition of an alamode house, being ‘on a much larger scale’ than any others, apart from one near the Haymarket, on Rupert Street. Choice was limited, the waiters asking, ‘Which would you please to have, gentleman, buttock or flank, or a plate of both?’ At lesser houses, the question was even briefer: ‘a sixpenny’ or a ‘fourpenny’?

  Soup houses were one step down the scale. In the window, basins, often blue-and-white, were displayed. Depending on the location of the soup house and the size of the portion, 2d or 3d would buy a bowl of soup, some potatoes and a slice of bread. Friedrich von Raumer strayed into a soup house in Drury Lane in 1835. The sign in the window said ‘Soup’, but he assumed that, while this was the speciality, other dishes would undoubtedly be served. He was rapidly disillusioned by both menu and decor: ‘No table-cloth…[only] an oil-cloth; pewter spoons, and two-pronged forks; tin saltcellar and pepper-box’. For 3d he received a piece of bread, ‘two gigantic potatoes’ and ‘a large portion of black Laconian broth’ with some submerged items he dubiously identified as ‘something like meat’.

  Clerks who could afford it opted for a chophouse, as did their employers, who merely took care to frequent a superior one. In the 1830s and 1840s, chophouse food was ‘principally chops, steaks, kidneys and sausages…leg of beef soup was a staple commodity, so were trotter, so was pease-pudding’: again, meeting the main requirements of being filling and hot. As with the coffee houses, in some chophouses ‘peculiar…to London’, such as the Old Fleece and Sun Tavern, near the Stock Exchange, customers could bring their own meat. The Old Fleece was conveniently situated next door to a butcher’s shop, from which the meat was purchased, to be handed in at the chophouse on the way to work, with information on the hour at which its owner planned to return. Patrons were charged 3d for ‘bread, cooking and ’taters’ any time between one and four, the remaining hours ‘being devoted to serious drinking’. The Bay Tree, in St Swithin’s Lane, also much patronized by clerks, was the only chophouse without seating, although in the 1840s ‘a remarkably cheap and good lunch’ could be bought and eaten standing at the counter: ‘Huge joints of cold roast and boiled meats were cut up by two men…A medium-sized plate of meat, bread, and half a pint of porter or mild’ was 6d, with vegetables, pickles, cheese and salad costing extra. There was a third room where ‘hot joints, chops, and steaks’ were available for those willing to pay more for the privilege of being able to sit down to eat.

  A City chophouse, fitted out with standard booth-style seating, or ‘boxes’, as they were known. The waiter looks anxious to serve: he was not an employee, but instead he paid the chophouse for his place, earning his living from tips.

  Each day 500 or 600 customers might pass through each of these chophouses. The waiters were not paid a salary by the owners; rather, they paid the owner for their places, besides usually providing glasses and table linen, which they had to keep clean. Their tips, a standard penny per customer per meal, regardless of its cost, had to cover their weekly payments to the owners, the laundry of the table linen, and still provide their own upkeep.101 According to Robert Seymour, the illustrator, successful waiters survived by making the customer feel special. If a customer ordered boiled beef, the waiter would say quietly, ‘The beef won’t do for you, Sir…it’s bin in cut a hour.’ Most of the customers were repeat visitors, eating in the same chophouse every day, and they got to know ‘their’ waiter or, in some chophouses, waitress (called a lady waiter). In Bleak House, young Smallweed, anxious to present himself as a man about town, makes sure to address the waitress by name. Calculating the price of the meal for himself and his two friends, he adds to the bill another 3d for Polly the waitress: ‘Four veals and hams is three, and four potatoes is three and four, and one summer cabbage is three and six, and three marrows is four and six, and six breads is five, and three Cheshires is five and three, and four half-pints of half-and-half is six and three, and four small rums is eight and three, and three Pollys is eight and six.’102 Chophouses that attracted less reputable customers may have demanded payment before the food was served, at least late at night: in 1842 a police court heard the case of two men who ordered soup at an eating house near St Andrews, Holborn, at 12.40 on a Sunday morning, and refused to pay when the waiter brought it to them. Respectable clerks on small budgets considered their menus carefully. Dickens describes the prototypical poor clerk in the 1830s at his ‘usual dining-place’: after enquiring ‘What was up last?’ – that is, what has been most recently cooked, so he doesn’t get meat that has been sitting and steaming for hours – ‘he orders a small plate of roast beef, with greens, and half-a-pint of porter. He has a small plate to-day, because greens are a penny more than potatoes, and he had “two breads” yesterday, with the additional enormity of “a cheese” the day before.’

  Given that the waiter paid for laundering the table linen, it is unsurprising that the reputation for cleanliness in chophouses was poor. Yates said that all ‘quaint old City chop-houses’ had ‘sanded floors, hard seats, and mustard blotched tablecloths’. Dickens baptized them more memorably in Great Expectations as ‘geographical’ chophouses, with their ‘maps of the world in porter-pot rims on every half-yard of the tablecloths, and charts of gravy on every one of the knives’. As good a name as this is, the standard one for these poorer eating houses was even better: they were known as slap-bangs, for their method of serving and the speed with which the customers were in and out. Speed was a major selling point. An 1862 advertisement for George Reeves’ City Luncheon Rooms in an alley between Cornhill and Lombard Street promised that, there, ‘a Luncheon or Dinner can be procured of a better quality and in less time than at any ot
her house’, which was no doubt aimed at those workers with just a quarter-hour break.

  The slap-bangs were almost all laid out in rows of wooden booths for four or six. On the wall by each booth was a rack, into which the men slotted their hats, hanging them upside down by the brim. (Although, in Guppy’s slap-bang in Bleak House, the men hang their hats on the corner of their box.) One of the most famous slap-bangs was Izant’s, in Bucklersbury, a single large room with thirty boxes.

  From twelve noon when business begins, until seven evening when it finishes, the room is crammed, and one incessant clatter of knives and forks pervades the place…No sooner are you seated, than you are espied by the head-waiter; that functionary is down upon you in a moment, and in the most mellifluous of voices pours the bill of fare into your ear. ‘Roase beef, roase lamb, shoulder o’ mutton and onion soss, roase veal and bacon, ham an’ peas, stooed steak, mutton cutlets and Tummarter soss, jugged ’are, ’arrico mutton, ’ashed duck, sammon and lobster soss, peas and newpotatoes, sir’ in one long-sustained coo.

  By 1840, a guidebook was explaining to its readers that some places provided ‘a printed bill-of-fare’, which it approved of as ‘the most systematic method’. For those who had never seen such a thing, it elaborated: ‘all the dishes customarily prepared at the house are printed in certain groups, and the prices are written opposite those which are to be had hot on any particular day, so that a customer can at once see what provisions are ready, and how much he will have to pay.’ The menu had just been invented. But most chophouses had no need for menus, priding themselves on serving one dish in particular: Dolly’s ‘has been distinguished for more than a century for its mutton-chops and beefsteaks…the Cock, near the Bank of England, for its ox-tail soup; and the Ship, in Leadenhall Street, for its turtle [soup]’.

  Like coffee houses, chophouses too provided newspapers for their customers. Smallweed, at his favourite slap-bang, is familiar: ‘He has his favourite box, he bespeaks all the papers, he is down upon bald patriarchs, who keep them more than ten minutes afterwards.’ Dickens’ readers would have smiled knowingly, for customers monopolizing the papers was a regular complaint. According to the unwritten code, customers should glance through each paper quickly and hand it on to the next customer, but the number of complaints and jokes suggest that many did no such thing. Sam Weller, two decades earlier, described a civil servant who was ‘so uncommon grand’ that he marched into his chophouse daily, demanding, ‘Post arter the next gen’l’m’n’ – that is, he was reserving the Post as soon as the person currently reading it had finished with it, ignoring the possibility that others had been waiting before him. To add to his rude behaviour, he also hoarded all the papers, which ‘vorked the other customers up to the wery confines o’ desperation and insanity, ’specially one i-rascible old gen’l’m’n as the vaiter wos alvays obliged to keep a sharp eye on at sich times, ’fear he should be tempted to commit some rash act vith the carving-knife’.

  While the French restaurant was distrusted as a word, the French idea of the table d’hôte, or fixed menu at a fixed hour, was enormously popular. Places that followed this system were called ordinaries, and the most famous, as well as the one that led the way to restaurants establishing themselves in London, was a fish ordinary near Billingsgate, down Bell Alley, a thoroughfare so narrow that two people could not pass. A guidebook claimed it was of ‘world-wide repute’ in 1840, so it had evidently been established some time before that. By 1850, Dickens was writing about it in Household Words and calling it Simpson’s, the name of its owner. Simpson served dinners at four o’clock, at one long table with a second smaller side-table for the overflow, and every seat was filled on a daily basis. After ‘A hurried grace…the scramble began’: ‘Suddenly a fine salmon sparkled and twinkled like a silver harlequin before Mr. Simpson. A goodly dish of soles was set on lower down; then, in quick succession, appeared flounders, fried eels, stewed eels, cod fish, melted butter, lobster-sauce, potatoes’, before ‘Boiled beef, mutton, and a huge dish of steaks, were soon disposed of in like manner. Small glasses of brandy round, were gone…Cheese melted away. Crusts dissolved into air.’ Then ‘bunches of pipes were laid upon the table; and everybody ordered what he liked to drink, or went his way…Eighteen pence a-head had done it all – the drink, and smoke, and civil attendance [tip] excepted.’ Dickens may perhaps have been recognized and therefore received better service, for another visitor warned that, to be served, ‘Strangers had to look sharp, and, seizing a waiter by the tail of his once new swallow-tail coat, either implore or threaten.’

  When Billingsgate was renovated, Simpson shut his ordinary, intending to retire, but he soon moved to a tavern, the Queen’s Head, near Bucklersbury, and renamed it Simpson’s. At the same time, Simpson’s brother opened both a supper house called the Albion, near Drury Lane, and, in 1862, a cigar divan in the Strand. The Albion was both ‘a revolution and a revelation. Large tables and comfortable chairs in place of boxes and benches; abundance of clean linen tablecloths and napkins; plated forks and spoons; electroplated tankards instead of pewter pots; finger-glasses; the joint wheeled to your side…a choice of cheeses, pulled bread, and a properly made-out bill: all these were wondrous and acceptable innovations’, as was the quality of the food and the fact that ‘the rooms were large and well ventilated; the attendants were clean, civil and quick’.103

  But for all these institutions, eating on-site was only one option. Every eating place expected to deliver meals, complete with cutlery, dishes and even condiments, which were brought by waiters who then stayed on, if wanted, to serve. Endless processions of meals passed through the streets daily. In Martin Chuzzlewit, a man living in chambers is waited on by the local coffee-house waiter, ‘a being in a white waistcoat, carrying under his arm a napkin, and attended by another being with an oblong box upon his head, from which a banquet, piping hot, was taken out and set upon the table’. Each stage of the meal is brought over hot by a second waiter, while the man in the white waistcoat stays and serves, before packing up the empties and ‘vanish[ing], box and all’.

  Large sums of money were not necessary for this service, although, as with the eating houses who demanded payment up front in some neighbourhoods, they did tend to know their customers. In The Old Curiosity Shop, the indigent Dick Swiveller sends an order to the nearest eating house, but this establishment ‘(having experience of its customer) declined to comply, churlishly sending back for answer that if Mr Swiveller stood in need of beef perhaps he would be so obliging as to come there and eat it, bringing with him…the amount of a certain small account which had long been outstanding’. Not at all dismayed, Dick reorders at another place where he is not known, and is soon rewarded with ‘a small pewter pyramid’ of meat and drink.

  Waiters also delivered to office workers. The post-office clerks were granted a cursory dinner break only because in the late 1840s the Postmaster General of the day was ‘annoyed by encountering strange persons wandering through the lobbies, balancing tin-covered dishes and bearing foaming pewter-pots’. He banned this influx of food from the streets, but other offices were not so particular: George Reeves’ City Luncheon Rooms advertised ‘All Goods delivered free of charge within Ten Miles’. Thus nearly all food might end up being street food, for at least part of its time.

  12.

  STREET THEATRE

  When he was twenty-three, Dickens wrote: ‘We have a most extraordinary partiality for lounging about the streets. Whenever we have an hour or two to spare, there is nothing we enjoy more…We revel in a crowd of any kind – a street “row” is our delight – even a woman in a fit is by no means to be despised, especially in a fourth-rate street, where all the female inhabitants run out of their houses and discharge large jugs of cold water over the patient, as if she were dying of spontaneous combustion, and wanted putting out. Then a drunken man – what can be more charming than a regular drunken man…?’

  In this early piece Dickens used the editorial ‘we’ to signif
y the predilection of much of the populace. Even so, his own delight in a street row was considerable, and remained with him for ever. Twenty years later, when he was planning some private theatricals, he asked advice from Astley’s, which staged theatrical extravaganzas with horses. The next thing he knew, ‘an open phaeton drawn by two white ponies with black spots all over them (evidently stencilled)’ rattled in at his gate at a great rate before circling ‘round and round’ the central flower bed, ‘apparently looking for the clown’. This tickled the fancy of the established, middle-aged author as much as the drunken man had amused the hopeful young journalist. It was, he crowed, ‘One of the finest things…I have ever seen in my life.’

  The carriage had been followed by ‘a multitude of boys’, many of whom, Dickens thought, had run all the way from Astley’s, south of the river, to his Marylebone house, nearly three miles in all. This was neither surprising nor unexpected. Amusement was found on the streets by rich and poor alike, and boys were at the forefront of what might be termed street theatre, creating drama, watching it and enhancing it. If they found nothing to entertain them, such as an artificially spotted pony, they were happy to manufacture their own amusement. When a tray of wedding rings was removed from a jewellery store window for customers’ inspection, boys gathered outside and made ribald comments audible to the abashed couple inside. Men standing at oyster bars in the Haymarket and other nightspots were hardened to boys sharing their thoughts on their eating habits and manners: ‘He don’t take no winegar with his’n,’ and, ‘Look at that chap, he swallows ’em like soup!’ Boys were not alone in openly showing curiosity. Adults of all sorts felt it entirely natural to take an interest in the goings-on in the streets. When a police van carrying prisoners became stuck in a traffic jam, the bus driver as a matter of course chaffed the van driver: ‘What’s yer fare…?’ Meanwhile the cad added to the merriment by paraphrasing to the prisoners his standard request to his inside passengers: ‘Won’t any of your inside gents be so good as to ride outside to obleege a lady?’ Prisoners being moved around the city were of abiding interest. A van daily transported prisoners from Bow Street magistrates court to the various gaols. Daily the street outside would be ‘studded with a choice assemblage’, just as the departure of the mailcoaches also summoned a throng.