London: The Biography

by Peter Ackroyd

  The ragged children of the streets have a vivid emblematic quality, therefore, but in the photographs of nineteenth-century London they become more recognisable and more sorrowful. These are no longer characters or caricatures, but somehow familiar human faces, soft or plaintive, sorrowful or bewildered. It has been suggested that the philanthropic instinct had changed by the end of the eighteenth century, towards a more benign dispensation, but the actual conditions of London had not altered. “The amount of crime, starvation and nakedness or misery of every sort in the metropolis,” Dickens told a journalist in the mid-nineteenth century, “surpasses all understanding.” It surpassed understanding because that starvation and misery affected the very youngest and most vulnerable. In 1839 almost half the funerals in London were of children under the age of ten, and it was a pretty conceit of early photographers to pose small children among the tombstones of the city graveyards; it represents the brutality of Victorian naïveté.

  In another genre of photograph three little girls sit in the street, their feet in the gutter and their bodies upon the flat stone pavement; one girl looks round with surprise at the camera, but the most striking impression is of their dark and faded clothes. It is as if they were mimicking the dark and cracked stone all around them, so that they might become almost invisible. It is often forgotten how drab and dirty the Victorian capital was; the thoroughfares were always filled with litter, and there was a general air of grime and grease. As Dickens wrote: “How many, who, amidst this compound of sickening smells, these heaps of filth, these tumbling houses, with all their vile contents, animate and inanimate, slimily overflowing into the black road, would believe that they breathe this air?”

  There is another photograph, of seven little boys who have obviously been arranged in a tableau by the photographer; but it is a tableau of want. All of them are barefoot; one child is wearing a battered hat but his trousers are in rags and falling off at the knee. How they managed to live is something of a mystery still; they look careworn, but they are not starving. There is a famous picture of a boy selling Bryant amp; May matches; he holds up a box with an air of solemn defiance, as if to say-Take it or leave it, I shall survive.

  In the early part of the century, Prince Herman Pückler-Muskau saw a child of eight driving his own vehicle, in the middle of a whirlpool of carriages, and commented that “such a thing … can only be seen in England, where children are independent at eight and hanged at twelve.” There is indeed the famous description by a traveller in 1826 of a group of twelve-year-olds, sitting in the condemned cells in Newgate, “all under the sentence of death, smoking and playing very merrily together.” In 1816 there were 1,500 inmates of London gaols who were under the age of seventeen. “Some were barely nine or ten,” according to the Chronicles of Newgate. “Children began to steal when they could scarcely crawl. Cases were known of infants of barely six charged in the courts with crimes.” Children formed regular gangs, “each choosing one of their number as captains, and dividing themselves into reliefs to work certain districts, one by day and by night.” Their favourite tricks were those of picking pockets, or shop-lifting, smash and grab where a young thief would “starr” a window pane, and robbing drunkards. In this last occupation, “The girls attacked him, and the boys stripped him of all he had.”

  The street children of the nineteenth century were known as “little Arabs,” a title that indicated in jingoistic terms their propensity for savagery. It is perhaps appropriate to note in this context that the recalcitrant children of more affluent families were known as “little radicals,” as if to identify the source of social unrest in the energy of the young. Three different books were published in the 1870s and 1890s, each with the title The Cry of the Children, confirming the prevalence of that anxious note; it could be interpreted as a cry of battle as much as a cry of woe. Tolstoy visited London in 1860, and remarked that “When I see these dirty tattered children, with their bright eyes and angels’ faces, I am filled with apprehension as if I were seeing drowning people. How to save them? Which to save first? That which is drowning is that which is most valuable, the spiritual element in these children.” Charles Booth came across a group of “cockney arabs,” “small rough-looking children”-“I suggested they would be better at home and in bed at this time of night; to which a girl of about eight (and little at that) replied in saucily precocious style, speaking for herself and a companion, “Garn, we’re ahrt wiv ahr blokes; that’s my bloke.” “Yus,” says the other girl, “and that’s mine.” At this there was a general shout of laughter, and then came a plaintive plea. “Give us a penny, will you, Guv’nor?”’

  London children were a paying proposition. “No investment,” wrote the author of The Children of the Poor in 1892, “gives a better return today on the capital put out than work among the children of the poor.” Some young children became “errand boys” or the carriers of beer; others donned a red uniform and were employed to clean up the horse manure in the busy streets. They held horses for those who wished to make a purchase; they carried trunks to and from the railway, or parcels for omnibus passengers; they stood at the doors of theatres and public places ready to call a cab, especially when the night “turned out wet”; and they helped porters whose duties had become too onerous, or cab-men who were befuddled with drink. It is possible to envisage a city of children-the number occupied in street-work was estimated between ten and twenty thousand-watching for work and taking it up with eagerness and alacrity when it was offered. They were the true progeny of London.

  Others became street-sellers, and were recognisable figures with nicknames such as the Cocksparrow or the Early Bird. They were envied by “unemployed little ones, who look upon having the charge of a basket of fruit, to be carried in any direction, as a species of independence.” This is an interesting vision which these children possessed; to have even the smallest means of earning a living allowed you to become master or mistress of the streets, to wander as you will. Small boys and girls, known as “anybody’s children,” were hired by costermongers or small tradesmen to sell stock upon commission. Each child would undertake to bring back an amount for the wares he or she had been given, and could keep as “bunse” anything earned beyond that figure. At first light the children would assemble in the various street-markets. A boy would run up to the barrows of costermongers with the plea, “D’you want me, Jack?” or “Want a boy, Bill?” They waited all day to “see if they’re wanted” and, if they were fortunate, became the favourites of certain costermongers. A boy was often employed at “crying” the goods which he and his master were pushing in a barrow. This might appear to be a charming custom, except that “we find the natural tone completely annihilated at a very early age, and a harsh, hoarse, guttural, disagreeable mode of speaking acquired.” Here the physical effects of living in the city are clearly delineated; London wearied even the voices of the young, and turned high notes into harsh ones.

  Another occupation for the children of London was to provide light entertainment for the citizens. Many small boys, for example, used to keep pace with the trams “not merely by using their legs briskly, but by throwing themselves every now and then on their hands and progressing a few steps (so to speak) with their feet in the air.” The favourite locale for this energetic activity was Baker Street, where the children cartwheeled “to attract attention and obtain the preference if a job were in prospect; done, too, in hopes of a halfpenny being given the urchin for his agility.” This display in the streets is an aspect of theatrical London, too, but the spectacle had its consequences. Mayhew examined the hands of one “urchin” and noticed that “the fleshy parts of the palm were as hard as soling-leather, as hard, indeed, as the soles of the child’s feet, for he was barefooted.” So the city hardened its street children in every sense. The unhappy process is complemented by the description of their “stolid and inexpressive” countenances.

  When the children worked “on their own hook” there were certain items which they could
not sell. No child could master the sale of patent medicines because they did not have the experience to gull the public, nor were they skilful at selling “last dying speeches.” More curious, however, is the evident fact that these street juveniles did not sell such childish items as marbles or spinning tops. The reason here may be more profound. Who would wish to purchase items of childhood innocence and play from those who had always been denied such things?

  Street children had their penny gaffs, commonly known as “low” theatres, where amateur dramatic representations were performed for an audience which also came from the street. They became a byword for filth and indecency. There were other forms of drama for more affluent London children, however, principal among them the toy theatre. It was sold with characters “penny plain and two pence coloured” which were cut out, pasted on to cardboard, glued to wires or sticks, and then pushed upon a wooden or cardboard stage. Play-acting was essentially a London pastime crucially combining the tradition of the caricature or satirical print, to be seen in the windows of every print-seller, with that of the London drama or pantomime.

  The earliest of these childhood spectacles was manufactured in 1811, and they soon became immensely popular. When George Cruikshank was dilatory in their publication “the boys used to go into his shop and abuse him like anything for his frequent delays in publishing continuations of his plays.” The toy theatre was part of the history of London spectacle, in other words, emerging from the gothic and the phantasmagoric. It imitated the humour and heterogeneity of the London stage, also, with burlesques and buffooneries: The Sorrows of Werther became The Sorrows of Water, or Love, Liquor and Lunacy.

  It was a city of melodrama in many respects, where the young loved to act and to recite. One of the daily reading lessons at London schools was taken from the drama, and there was a perfect “itch for acting” among the young boys and girls. In Vanity Fair (1847-8) Thackeray depicts two London boys as having a pronounced “taste for painting theatrical characters.” Another Londoner, writing of the early 1830s, stated that “nearly every boy had a toy theatre.”

  There is a picture, composed in 1898, of “Punch By Night” which depicts a group of tiny children looking up in wonder at a Punch and Judy booth illuminated by oil-light. Some are barefoot, and some in rags, but as they stand on the rough stones their eager attentive faces are bathed in light; yet it may be that the illumination is emerging from them on this dark London night. A similar sense of the numinous emerges in descriptions of children at play in the streets of the city. Theodore Fontane, the German author, wrote of spring in the rookeries of St. Giles when “The children have taken their one, pitiful toy, a home-made shuttlecock, into the street with them and while, wherever we look, everything is teeming with hundred of these pale children grown old before their time with their bright, dark eyes, their shuttlecocks fly up and down in the air, gleaming like a swarm of pigeons on whose white wings the sunlight falls.” There is a sense of wonder, and mystery, vouchsafed in the wave of happiness and laughter emerging from the foul and squalid tenements of the poor. It is not a question of innocence contrasted with experience, because these children were not innocent, but somehow a triumph of the human imagination over the city. Even in the midst of filth, they have the need and the right to be joyful.

  That sense, that human aspiration, is also present in the many descriptions of children dancing in the street. In A.T. Camden Pratt’s Unknown London there is an account of Holywell Street in the late nineteenth century with “the curious sight of the children in lines across the roadway at either end of the row, dancing to the music of a barrel organ that never seems to go away … It is noticeable that they all dance the same simple step; but the grace of some of these unkempt girls is remarkable.” It is as if it were some ritual dance, the dance of the city, to a music that never seems to fade. Evelyn Sharp, in The London Child, records how “sometimes, they danced in unison, sometimes as a kind of chorus to a little première danseuse in whirling pinafore and bare feet; and always they betrayed their kinship with the motley crowd that dances in wild abandonment to the jingle of the street organ.” Once more the street organ betrays its persistent presence, as if it were the music of the stones, but the simple ritualised step of the children has made way for wildness and “abandonment”; they are giving themselves up to forgetfulness and oblivion because in the savage dance they can ignore the conditions of their ordinary existence. Implicitly they are defying the city. If we can dance like this, what harm can you do us?

  A poem of 1894 depicts “a City child, half-girl, half elf … babbling to herself” while playing hopscotch on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral. London “roars in vain” to catch “her inattentive ear” and she does not bestow one glance upon the great church rising above her. Here the dignity and self-sufficiency of the “City child” are being celebrated, quite removed from all the demonstrations of power and business around her. She would appear to have been created out of the very conditions of the streets, and yet there is something within her which is able to ignore them. It is a mystery vouchsafed to the late nineteenth-century poet Laurence Binyon, who depicts two children in an alley once more dancing to the sound of a barrel organ-“face to face” they gaze at each other, “their eyes shining, grave with a perfect pleasure.” Their mutual enjoyment and understanding rise above the sordid material world that surrounds them. In George Gissing’s novel Thyrza (1887), Gilbert Grail turns into Lambeth Walk and as “he did so, a street organ began to play in front of a public house close by. Grail drew near; there were children forming a dance, and he stood to watch them. Do you know that music of obscure ways, to which children dance … a pathos of which you did not dream will touch you, and therein the secret of hidden London will be revealed.” It is the great secret of those who once existed in the dark heart of the city. It is defiance, and forgetfulness, compounded. It is the London dance.

  Lambeth is now, like much of London, quieter than once it was. There seem to be no children on the streets, but a small green named Pedler’s Park in Salamanca Street has been classified as a “children’s play area”; where once all London was a “play area” now zones have been segregated for that purpose. Lambeth Walk, once the centre of Old Lambeth, is now pedestrianised with three-storey council houses of dark brick along it. It leads to a shopping mall, albeit a dilapidated one, down which staggers a drunken man cursing to himself; shops are boarded up, and some are derelict. But above the mall itself have been painted murals of children. One shows Lambeth Ragged School, in Newport Street, and is dated 1851. Another is of children, with their legs bare, exuberantly dancing after a watering cart; the image is taken from a photograph by William Whiffin, dated c. 1910, which showed some small boys playing in the spray. And then suddenly, on 1 July 1999, four young girls bring out a skipping rope and begin to play in the middle of Lambeth Walk.

  Continuities

  George Scharf ’s drawing of “The Original Oyster Shop” in Tyler Street; the shop itself has gone but all the buildings on the same site have followed its contours.

  CHAPTER 69. Have You Got the Time?

  The nature of time in London is mysterious. It seems not to be running continuously in one direction, but to fall backwards and to retire; it does not so much resemble a stream or river as a lava flow from some unknown source of fire. Sometimes it moves steadily forward, before springing or leaping out; sometimes it slows down and, on occasions, it drifts and begins to stop altogether. There are some places in London where you would be forgiven for thinking that time has come to an end.

  In medieval documents ancient London customs were declared to be “from time out of mind, about which contrary human memory does not exist”; or an object might be classified as standing “where it now stands for a longer time than any of the jurors can themselves recall.” These were ritualised, or standardised, phrases suggesting that the earliest measure of time was human memory itself. In an anonymous medieval poem on the life of St. Erkenwald there are vers
es which concern the masons rebuilding St. Paul’s Cathedral in the fourteenth century; they discover a great tomb within the ancient foundations of the church, in which rests the unblemished corpse of a pagan judge who speaks thus: “How long I have lain here is from a time forgotten. It is too much for any man to give it a length,” although even in that distant period London was “the metropolis and the master town it evermore has been.” The corpse is baptised, its soul saved, and at the close “all the bells of London rang loudly together.”

  Beyond the time measured by human memory there exists, therefore, sacred time invoked by the sound of these bells. The visions of Our Lady in the church of St. Bartholomew, or the miracles surrounding the shrine of Our Lady of Willesden, suggest that London was also the harbour of eternity. The bells provided that sonority where sacred and secular time met. Yet for many centuries a form of communal memory was also commonplace-“In the great hard frost … in the late dreadful storme … ever since the sicknesse yeare … two or three dayes after the great high wind”-when the events of London mark out an imprecise but useful chronology. Public gatherings also measured London time, in “sermon time” or “at Exchange time when the merchants meet at the Royal Exchange.” There was a human scale, also, in the measurement of light and shadow in the city as an index of time: “about candlelighting in the evening” or “when it was duskish.”