The Victorian City

by Judith Flanders

  ‘without some result’: Mayhew, London Labour, vol. 1, p. 346.

  ‘fronds in their carts’: draught excluders and fly-catchers: Bennett, London and Londoners, p. 52; flowers in spring: Mayhew and Binny, The Criminal Prisons, pp. 172–3; gravellers: Smith, Curiosities, p. 339; ice sellers: ILN, 5 January 1850, p. 2; other seasonal greenery: Charles Hindley, History of the Cries of London, Ancient and Modern (London, Reeves and Turner, 1881), p. 221.

  ‘regarded as his’: Hyde Park: Amy Grinnell Smith and Mary Ermina Smith, ‘Letters from Europe, 1865–6’, ed. David Sanders Clark (Washington, DC, 1948; typescript in British Library), p. 24; Our Mutual Friend, pp. 52–3.

  ‘as fertilizer’: Mayhew, London Labour, vol. 2, pp. 343, 357, 360.

  ‘and her meals’: Welsh dress: John Leighton, London Cries & Public Edifices from Sketches on the Spot (London, Grant and Griffith [1847]), p. 19; dress otherwise: Bennett, London and Londoners, p. 40, and Sala, Twice Round the Clock, p. 72; cans, yokes, lowering milk, working hours and pay: Hudson, Munby, pp. 167, 99, 178–9.

  ‘all wearing caps’: costers: Mayhew, London Labour, vol. 1, pp. 51ff.; butchers’ boys: Bennett, London and Londoners, p. 41.

  ‘for resale’: footnote on clothing: Our Mutual Friend, p. 72, Bleak House, p. 180.

  ‘miles a day’: Mayhew, London Labour, vol. 1, p. 367.

  ‘respectable householders’: hats: Bennett, London and Londoners, p. 39; secrecy: Phillips, Wild Tribes, p. 58.

  ‘lately swept up’: Great Expectations, p. 196; wash men: Mayhew, London Labour, vol. 2, p. 132; hare skin sellers: Bennett, London and Londoners, p. 39; tea leaves: Mayhew, London Labour, vol. 2, p. 133. Mayhew claims this trade is ‘extensive’, yet his is the only mention of it I have found.

  ‘1d a door’: chairs to mend: Bennett, London and Londoners, p. 52; prices for grinders: Jackson, George Scharf’s London, p. 53; sharpening penknives for office workers etc.: Leighton, London Cries, p. 21; knife-cleaning machine: Mayhew, London Labour, vol. 1, p. 27; step washing: Garwood, Million Peopled City, p. 80.

  ‘GOES MAD’: Punch, ‘The Demons of Pimlico’, 21 November 1857, p. 215.

  ‘from the damp’: Thomas Rowlandson, Rowlandson’s Characteristic Sketches of the Lower Orders (London, Samuel Leigh, 1820), no page; carrying methods: Mayhew, London Labour, vol. 1, pp. 26–50, 367; delivery boys’ containers: A. Mayhew, Paved with Gold, p. 2.

  ‘penny a bit’: Schlesinger, Saunterings, p. 23.

  ‘Underground for it’: three o’clock: Sala, Twice Round the Clock, pp. 160–63; Shepherdess Walk seller: ILN, 18 January 1845, pp. 34–5, and a similar case in the Queen Street police office, ibid.; underground: Punch, ‘Metropolitan Improvements’, 17 January 1885, p. 34.

  ‘the public streets’: Drury Lane: MacKenzie, The American in England, vol. 1, p. 207; rhubarb seller: Phillips, Wild Tribes, p. 80. Phillips states the man was not a Turk, but an East End cadger. I can find no evidence either way, but throughout his book Phillips finds all the poor he writes about distasteful: the Irish, the Jews, or the plain poverty-stricken are all dubious at best, or thieves most likely.

  ‘an oil-painting’: stagecoach offices: ‘The Streets – Morning’, Sketches by Boz, p. 72; railway stations and penknives: Bennett, London and Londoners, p. 149; Dombey and Son, p. 237.

  ‘or a bird-warbler’: jewellery: Mayhew, London Labour, vol. 1, pp. 346, 348; Oliver Twist, p. 400; malacca canes etc.: Andrew Tuer, Old London Street Cries (London, Field & Tuer, 1885), p. 50–51.

  ‘scraped them in return’: water pistol: Tuer, Old London Street Cries, p. 44; ‘All the Fun of the Fair’ is frequently reported: Tuer, ibid., p. 50; ‘a mischievous little’: David Masson, Memories of London in the ’Forties, ed. Flora Masson (Edinburgh, William Blackwood & Sons, 1908), p. 145, ‘These are for sale’: Colman, European Life and Manners, vol. 2, pp. 73–4, also reported by Nathaniel Hawthorne in Hawthorne in England: Selections from Our Old Home and The English Note-books, ed. Cushing Strout (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1965), p. 172.

  ‘on their earnings’: ‘Japan your shoes’: Tuer, Old London Street Cries, p. 44; footnote on the two Warrens: Altick, Presence of the Present, p. 232; Shoeblack Society: Garwood, Million Peopled City, pp. 74–9.

  ‘on their rounds’: two currents: J. MacGregor, ‘Ragamuffins’, Leisure Hour, 15 (1856), pp. 455–60; number of London papers: Richard Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 329; newsboys’ day, in this paragraph and the next two: Smith, Curiosities, pp. 90ff.; rental prices: Schlesinger, Saunterings, p. 213.

  ‘possibility of truth’: Old Curiosity Shop, pp. 162, 594; Dombey and Son, p. 383; Badcock and Rowlandson, Real Life in London, vol. 1, p. 522.

  ‘householders’ buckets’: the chemist’s shopboy: A. Mayhew, Paved with Gold, p. 85; Haymarket boys: ibid., p. 108; the crippled knife cleaner: Mayhew, London Labour, vol. 1, p. 171; water boys: Smith, Little World of London, p. 66.

  ‘y’r honor pleases’: G. A. Sekon, Locomotion in Victorian London, pp. 90–91, which reflects the attitude that the boys were aggressive bullies; the American tourist: Joshua White, Letters on England, Comprising Descriptive Scenes (Philadelphia, privately printed, 1816), vol. 1, p. 5.

  ‘tear on his boots’: Smith, Curiosities, pp. 138–9.

  ‘state of exhaustion’: porters: Freeman and Aldcroft (eds), Transport in Victorian Britain, p. 136, and Walter M. Stern, The Porters of London (London, Longmans, Green, 1960), pp. 181ff.; Dickens, ‘The Chimes’, in The Christmas Books, vol. 1: ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘The Chimes’, ed. Michael Slater (first published 1843, 1844; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985); David Copperfield, p. 340.

  ‘out the rags’: the history of the development of the match in this and the next paragraph: Hall, Retrospect of a Long Life, vol. 1, p. 2, Hayward, Days of Dickens, p. 14, ILN, 13 October 1860, p. 352, [Charles Knight], ‘Illustrations of Cheapness: The Lucifer Match’, Household Words, 13 April 1850, pp. 54–6, and Trey Philpotts, The Companion to Little Dorrit (Robertsbridge, Helm Information, 2003), p. 306.

  ‘with magical rapidity’: lament for tinderbox: Sala, Gaslight and Daylight, p. 61.

  ‘the café door’: Rosamond Street explosion: ILN, 12 August 1843, p. 103; Haymarket street children: A. Mayhew, Paved with Gold, p. 108.

  ‘but as beggars’: cost of matches: Knight, ‘Illustrations of Cheapness’.

  ‘lucifers and onions’: outside the gin palace: John Fisher Murray, ‘Physiology of London Life’, London Journal, 16 October 1847, p. 103; Godwin, London Shadows, p. 22.

  ‘a living unviable’: John Thomas Smith, Vagabondiana; or, Etchings of Remarkable Beggars, Itinerant Traders and other Persons ... in London and its Environs (London, no publisher, 1817), pp. 41–3, and Mayhew, London Labour, vol. 2, pp. 136–40.

  ‘to the cold: ILN, 14 December 1844, p. 371.

  ‘for their donkeys’: the Watford labourers: Smith, Vagabondiana, p. 32; groundsel, chickweed and duckweed sellers: Smith, Curiosities, pp. 20–22; groundsel sellers also appear in Bennett, London and Londoners, p. 53; rheumatic chickweed seller: Smith, Cries of London, pp. 73–4; simplers: ibid., pp. 77–8; reeds for donkeys: Smith, Curiosities, p. 142.

  ‘a bare living’: pins and ink: Hindley, History of the Cries of London, p. 101; the idea of modernism pushing street sellers aside is elaborated in Richard Maxwell, ‘Henry Mayhew and the Life of the Streets’, Journal of British Studies, 17: 2 (spring 1978), pp. 87–105.

  ‘the financial system’: Weale, London Exhibited in 1852, p. 107.

  ‘Road among others’: skilled-labour clubs: [T. Carter], Memoirs of a Working Man (London, Charles Knight, 1845), p. 122; hiring stands: Smith, Vagabondiana, p. 46.

  ‘4d an hour’: dockyards: Mayhew and Binny, The Criminal Prisons, p. 35.

  ‘to the post’: W. Warrell, Scribes Ancient and Modern (Otherwise Law Writers and Scriveners), (1880), cited in Michael Paterson, Voice
s from Dickens’ London (Cincinnati, OH, David and Charles, 2006), p. 93; the night officer: Dickens, ‘A Sleep to Startle Us’, Household Words, 13 March 1852, in Dickens’ Journalism, vol. 3, pp. 55–6.

  ‘more in demand’: pea-picking: Raphael Samuel, ‘Comers and Goers’, in H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff (eds), The Victorian City: Images and Realities (London, Routledge, 1973), vol. 1, p. 135.

  ‘the fair season’: the trampers’ life here and in the next two paragraphs: Samuel, ‘Comers and Goers’, vol. 1, pp. 123–60 unless otherwise stated; footnote on brickmaking pubs: Smith, Little World of London, pp. 129ff.

  ‘twopence for it’: occasioning: John Brown, Sixty Years’ Gleanings from Life’s Harvest: A Genuine Autobiography (Cambridge, J. Palmer, 1858), p. 31; William Lovett, The Life and Struggles of William Lovett, in His Pursuit of Bread, Knowledge, and Freedom ... (London, Trübner & Co., 1876), pp. 24–5; sackmakers: Knight (ed.), London, vol. 3, p. 31; ‘she can’t carry’: ‘Walter’, My Secret Life, vol. 2, p. 33.

  7. SLUMMING

  ‘of slums themselves’: word derivations and citation from Oxford English Dictionary, with interdating from the British Library’s Nineteenth-Century Newspaper database.

  ‘capital every day’: population figures and percentages in urban and rural districts: F. S. Schwarzbach, Dickens and the City (London, Athlone Press, 1979), pp. 7–9.

  ‘author and his readers’: Rowlandson, in R. Ackermann, Microcosm of London, 3 vols. (London, Ackermann’s Repository of Arts [1808–10]), vol. 3, p. 240; Oliver Twist, p. 14; Mayhew, London Labour, vol. 1, p. 338; the ideas in this paragraph and the next two draw heavily on Lynn Hollen Lees, ‘Poverty and Pauperism in Nineteenth-century London’, The H. J. Dyos Memorial Lecture, May 1988 (Leicester, University of Leicester, 1988), pp. 2–9, 13, 37–52.

  ‘into the workhouse’: this paragraph and the next draw on Stephen Halliday, The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of Victorian London (Stroud, Sutton, 1999), pp. 128–9; Oliver Twist, p. 59.

  ‘with a Pauper’: Dickens, Little Dorrit, pp. 416, 418.

  ‘off to the workhouse’: responsibilities and payment of workhouse masters: Lees, ‘Poverty and Pauperism’, pp. 115ff.; A Christmas Carol, pp. 50–51.

  ‘friendless and unprotected’: Dickens’ Norfolk Street lodgings and the Cleveland Street Workhouse: Ruth Richardson, Dickens and the Workhouse: Oliver Twist and the London Poor (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012), passim. The workhouse, until the 2005 closure of the Middlesex Hospital, was the hospital’s Outpatients’ Department. There is an account of its rescue at http://clevelandstreetworkhouse. org. Although the workhouse in Oliver Twist is outside London, it seems difficult to believe that the one in Cleveland Street could not have been, at least in part, in Dickens’ mind as he wrote; Our Mutual Friend, pp. 199–200, 498; The Times, 6 December 1836, p. 4.

  ‘these slum dwellings’: Pierce Egan [and George and Robert Cruikshank], Life in London, or, The Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq., and his Elegant Friend Corinthian Tom ... (London, Sherwood, Neely, & Jones, 1821), pp. 344–5; Bermondsey slum: ‘Every Man’s Poison’, All the Year Round, 13, 11 November 1865, pp. 372–6.

  ‘would give him’: pub saveall: J. C. Loudon, An Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture and Furniture ... (London, Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, & Longman, 1833), p. 689; Henry Dupuis: ILN, 21 August 1852, p. 135, and many cases of child stealing, e.g., ILN, 27 November 1869, p. 535; workhouse clothes: ILN, 9 September 1843, p. 167; sheets: Dickens, ‘On Duty with Inspector Field’, in Household Words, 14 June 1851, in Dickens’ Journalism, vol. 2, p. 365 and vol. 2, p. 369; breaking street lights: ILN, 21 March 1868, p. 271.

  ‘small air-hole’: Geo. Alfd Walker, The First of a Series of Lectures ... on the Actual condition of the Metropolitan Grave-Yards (2nd edn, London, Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1849), p. 30.

  ‘be none the wiser’: views of Tothill prison: Hepworth Dixon, The London Prisons (London, Jackson and Walford, 1850), p. 248; 9 Fleet Market: J. F. C. Phillips, Shepherd’s London (London, Cassell, 1976), p. 18.

  ‘benefits of modernity’: Great Expectations, p. 165; Thurlow Weed, Letters from Europe and the West Indies, 1843–1862 (Albany, NY, Weed, Parsons and Co., 1866), p. 82; Pardon, Routledge’s Popular Guide, p. 50; Sun Fire-Office and Pentonville: ILN, 18 August 1842, p. 217.

  ‘to have money’: verse: [Frederic William Naylor Bayley], ‘Scenes and Stories by a Clergyman in Debt ... (London, A. H. Baily and Co., 1835); costs: Brothers Mayhew, Living for Appearances (London, James Blackwood, 1855), pp. 181–2, Dickens, ‘Passage in the Life of Mr Watkins Tottle’, in Sketches by Boz, p. 519, and [Anna Atkins], The Colonel ‘by the author of “The perils of fashion”’ (London, Hurst and Blackett, 1853), p. 68.

  ‘in Bleak House’: Benjamin Disraeli, Henrietta Temple: A Love Story (Leipzig, Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1859), p. 376; Thackeray, Vanity Fair, ed. J. I. M. Stewart (first published in 1848; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985), p. 614.

  ‘most of London’s debtors’: White, London in the Nineteenth Century, p. 219.

  ‘in his pocket’: Dickens, Pickwick Papers, p. 565; footing and chummage: James Grant, Sketches in London (London, W. S. Orr, 1838), p. 52; Pickwick Papers, p. 563; Oliver Twist, p. 363.

  ‘and a pie seller’: Great Expectations, p. 260; Nicholas Nickleby, pp. 695–6; deputy coachman: Revd J. Richardson, Recollections ... of the Last Half-century (London, Savill & Edwards, 1855), p. 22; Lovett, Life and Struggles, pp. 28–9; Queen’s Bench shops: Grant, Sketches in London, pp. 54–6.

  ‘carried to the kitchen’: ‘oblong pile’: Little Dorrit, p. 97; Pickwick Papers, p. 279; description of the Marshalsea and its rules in this paragraph and the next: Trey Philpotts, ‘The Real Marshalsea’, Dickensian, Autumn 1991, pp. 133–46. Ackroyd, Dickens, p. 76, gives a slightly smaller size of rooms: eight by twelve feet; this may well be correct, but as Ackroyd lists no sources, it cannot be verified; Philpotts uses the Select Committee Report on the State and Management of Prisons in London and Elsewhere, which covers the Marshalsea in 1815–18.

  ‘those of any slum’: the extent of the rules, and liberty tickets: Dixon, London Prisons, pp. 114–15.

  ‘the whole place’: Pentonville: Dixon, London Prisons, pp. 150–56; Millbank, ibid., pp. 132ff.; David Copperfield, pp. 625ff.

  ‘with paid workers’: Dixon, The London Prisons, p. 127.

  ‘of homelessness’: ‘thrown away’: Forster, Life, vol. 1, p. 49; ‘but for the mercy of God’, ibid., vol. 1, p. 2; David Copperfield, p. 192.

  ‘let us go’: ‘A Nightly Scene in London’, Household Words, 26 January 1856, in Dickens’ Journalism, vol. 3, pp. 346–51.

  ‘been one of them’: ‘On an Amateur Beat’, 27 February 1869, All the Year Round, in Dickens’ Journalism, vol. 4, p.318; the source of Dickens’ identification with the beggars I owe to Michael Slater, Intelligent Person’s Guide to Dickens (London, Duckworth, 1999), p. 103.

  ‘the new suburbs’: destruction of houses: Lees, ‘Poverty and Pauperism’, p. 9.

  ‘an alien race’: population density: Mayhew and Binny, The Criminal Prisons, p. 15.

  ‘rogues and thieves’: Oliver Twist, pp. 63, 153, 417; Hockley-in-the-Hole: ibid., p. 63; link to Beggar’s Opera: Tambling, Going Astray, p. 64.

  ‘knight errant style’: ‘Seven Dials’, Sketches by Boz, p. 92; [G. A. Sala], ‘Bright Chanticleer’, in Household Words, 11, 31 March 1855, p. 204; [Donald Shaw], London in the Sixties (With a Few Digressions) ‘by one of the Old Brigade’ (London, Everett and Co., 1908), pp. 92–4. I have approached these memoirs with more than usual caution. While there is little that can be verifiably checked in them, what there is tends to be misremembered. For example, Shaw writes of Valentine Baker, who was discharged from the British army after a scandal; he joined the Ottoman army, before becoming head of the Egyptian police. Shaw claimed to have seen him in Egypt in 1894 and, seemingly unaware of his post-British career, described
his friend as ‘a broken man’, as well he might have been, for when Shaw supposedly saw him Baker had been dead for seven years. I have therefore relied on Shaw not for facts, but simply for how people remembered, or wanted to remember, people or events; Dickens to Daniel Maclise, 20 November 1840, Letters, vol. 2, p. 152.

  ‘believed such stories’: Field Lane: Trollope, What I Remember, p. 11; Dickens, ‘On an Amateur Beat’, in Dickens’ Journalism, vol. 4, pp. 380–81.

  ‘the blacking factory’: Bleak House, pp. 683–4; St Giles: Dickens, ‘On Duty with Inspector Field’, in Dickens’ Journalism, vol. 2, pp. 356–69; Nicholas Nickleby, p. 228.

  ‘desperately overcrowded’: Pickwick Papers, pp. 212–13.

  ‘and a sink’: small terraced houses: Thomas Beames, The Rookeries of London: Past, Present, and Prospective (London, Thomas Bosworth, 1850), p. 79; Holborn lodging house: Thomas Archer, The Pauper, the Thief, and the Convict: Sketches of Some of their Homes, Haunts, and Habits (London, Groombridge and Sons, 1865), pp. 140–41.

  ‘without a parent’: Hudson, Munby, p. 248; Flower and Dean Streets: White, London in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 236, 324.

  ‘working people’s lodgings’: ‘a covered alley’: Archer, The Pauper, the Thief, and the Convict, p. 11; Field Lane: Smith, Little World of London, p. 135 (Smith calls it Lagmansbury, but it is clearly Field Lane); Frying-pan Alley: Godwin, London Shadows, p. 13; Bleak House, p. 263.

  ‘off Holborn’: footnote: Bleak House, p. 215; it is Tambling, Going Astray, pp. 136ff., who suggests Forster’s house; E. Beresford Chancellor, London’s Old Latin Quarter, Being an Account of Tottenham Court Road and its Immediate Surroundings (London, Jonathan Cape [1930]), p. 206, suggests the Inigo Jones house next door.

  ‘misery to misery’: James Elmes, Metropolitan Improvements; or, London in the Nineteenth Century ... (London, Jones & Co., 1829), pp. 1–3; The Times, 2 March 1861, p. 8.

  ‘the Devil’s Acre’: Select Committee: cited in Donald J. Olsen, ‘Victorian London: Specialization, Segregation and Privacy’, Victorian Studies, 17: 3 (March 1974), pp. 265–78.