There are only a handful of cities which, during particular moments in time, shone so brightly as to forever capture the imagination. Vienna in the 1890s. Paris in the 1920s. New York throughout the early 20th century. Much further back, of course, there was Periclean Athens, Rome at the time of Augustus and Baghdad in its golden age.
Victorian London was one such city, although we actually picture two different eras when we use the phrase, the Dickensian city of the first railways and the later – and much richer and safer - city of Sherlock Holmes. Judith Flanders’s atmospheric The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens’ London is about the former, and what a remarkable city it was, truly Dickensian.
Curiously, she points out, while the Oxford English Dictionary first lists this term in 1881, newspapers had been using it since 1842, but in a completely different sense to us, so that ‘Dickensian meant comic; for others, it meant convivial good cheer.’ It was only in the 20th century that it came to have a pejorative meaning, as a new generation looked back darkly on that era, one of workhouses, street urchins and squalor.
Certainly, early Victorian London was squalid, and there was no escaping it, even for the Prime Minister, and in 1839 even Downing Street was home to ‘a dirty public-house [and]…. a row of third-rate lodging houses’. (Imagine Keir Starmer exiting Number 10 to announce the latest policy relaunch while down the road within earshot a bunch of yahoos are stumbling out of the pub singing abusive songs about him.)
The Westminster area in general was notoriously slummy, much of it torn down to make way for Victoria Street, built in 1851; even the Catholic Cathedral was built on the site of the former Tothill Prison.
It was Peter Ackroyd who observed that London’s slum-clearing thoroughfares are invariably soulless and don’t quite work, New Oxford Street being the other notable example. That extension was built to clear away another famously insalubrious neighbourhood, St Giles, one of the worst Victorian slums.
Flanders quotes Flora Tristan, a French visitor who saw 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.’
St Giles attracted many Irish incomers in particular, especially after the Great Famine, and they could be found in large numbers in the poorest areas of a city with much poverty. There was Jennings’ Building on Kensington High Street, close to the current location of St Mary Abbots and now an ultra-expensive part of town, where 1,000 residents lived with no running water - and these weren’t even the underclass.
‘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.’
Many areas had an especially melancholy feel. Old Waterloo Bridge was a popular suicide spot, especially for prostitutes, and known as ‘ ‘Lover’s Leap’, the ‘arch of Suicide’ and ‘the Bridge of Sighs’ and featuring in Thomas Hood’s 1844 poem of that name.
Until the late 18th century, Rosamond’s Pond in St James Park, named after Henry II’s mistress and associated with tragic romance, had been the place where ‘forsaken women go to die’, until the royals had it filled in.
The more recent Serpentine, sculpted out of the Tyburn River the previous century, might not have been a suicide spot but probably killed as many people. A lake made of ‘nine feet of mud’ under ‘eighteen inches of water’ and ‘not mud of an ordinary description, but a compound of decayed animal and vegetable refuse’, it was still used as a source of drinking water, serving Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey and Kensington Barracks.
Such insanitary conditions were clearly a cause of excessive mortality but the Illustrated London News dismissed suggestions of a link, reasoning that the Dragoons and Cavalry had lower death rates than the Foot Guards based at the royal palaces because looking after horses gave them ‘cheerful occupation’ and ‘escape [from'[ some of the killing ennui’. The capacity of journalists to avoid reaching for the obviously correct conclusion is surely an eternal feature of the discourse throughout time.
Indeed, water was the major issue with an early modern city of that size, a danger brought into sharp relief with the cholera epidemic of 1831. In October the first case appeared in Sunderland; a medical officer who had worked in India noticed the symptoms and warned the authorities, but was told it was just gastroenteritis; then it hit London, and within four months there were 4,266 deaths. The Government responded with a Day of Fasting and Humiliation.
The problem was famously resolved by John Snow, who noted geographical patterns in the distribution of the illness, and Joseph Bazalgette, who built a modern sewage system. The Victorians were immensely effective at dealing with grave threats that had just been a part of life for the entirety of human existence, but it took time, and the city for now remained a place of death. Of Londoners who died in one week in 1869, 40 per cent were children under 5, and of adults, just 5 per cent died of old age.
Life for the poor was so grim that there was even a trade in second-hand tea leaves, which people scooped out of pots. At 7.30am each morning the docks would be crowded with a ragtag of thousands of casual workers; once the foreman came out, a contemporary recalled, ‘then begins the scuffling and scrambling, and stretching forth of countless hands high in the air, to catch the eye of him whose nod can give them work… some men jump up on the back of others, so as to lift themselves high above the rest and attract his notice. All are shouting.’
It was a city with a clear hierarchy, and status even determined how one would knock at someone’s door: ‘Foreigners were amazed to discover that there was a recognised, if unspoken, hierarchy of doorknocks in the city.’ Tradesmen rang the bell, the postman gave two loud raps, while the Master of house would perform a tremolo crescendo.
People were sensitive to this status, and at Billingsgate food market ‘the auctioneers themselves wore frock coats and waistcoats, street clothes, to indicate they were middle class – Dickens called them “almost fashionable” – but, as a nod to practicality, over their coats they tied heavy aprons.’
This market sounded like an electric, hectic place, and included such curiosities as ‘wink men’, who sold dried fish and had a very eccentric calling cry that went ‘winketty-winketty-wink-wink-wink – wink-wink – winketty-winketty-wink – fine fresh winkettty-winks wink wink’, all of which must have added to the feel of a Lionel Bart musical.
Foreigners were not always impressed by the food, however. Friedrich von Raumer strayed into a Drury Lane ‘soup house’ in 1835, assuming that this was just a starter. As with so many overseas visitors to this great city, he was left disappointed with its culinary offerings. ‘No table-cloth… [only] an oil-cloth; pewter spoons, and two-pronged forks; tin saltcellar and pepper-box’. For 3d he got a piece of bread, ‘two gigantic potatoes’ and ‘a large portion of black Laconian broth’ with some items inside which he identified as ‘something like meat’.
In the 1850s ice cream first appeared, sold by Italians, although locals had their own alternative. In Houndsditch a girl with ‘a horse-pail full of ice’ offered something that looked like ‘frozen soap suds’; there were also ‘hokey-pokey men’ from Whitechapel who sold ‘Neapolitan’ ices that were rumoured to be frozen mashed turnip.
Italians were among the most notable of foreign groups, and had formed their own enclave in Clerkenwell by mid-century – their last Corpus Christi procession was held as late as 2018. There were also Swiss and Tyrolese monkey organists, and so-called handbarrow organists, usually ‘sickly Savoyards’ who wheeled instruments in a barrow.
Diarist Arthur Munby even observed how he watched five ‘Ethiopian Serenaders’ in Scotland Yard - but they turned out to be Englishmen who had blacked up, inspired by the popular figure of Joseph Johnson, a black sailor who had been wounded in the French wars. Walking long distances between Staines, Romford and St Albans, Johnson wore a model of Nelson’s ship on his head which ‘sailed’ as he sung.
If all this immense poverty was getting you down, you could always drink yourself to death. Most pubs evolved from private front rooms and from the 1830s became more formal, with a public area for customers and a private arena where selected guests might be invited in; customers could also fill up their jugs to take home, just like we did during lockdown.
Despite this, the Regency age was giving way to a far more sober atmosphere, even if there were still figures like Henry Beresford, 3rd Marquess of Waterford, described by the Dictionary of National Biography as ‘reprobate and landowner’. She writes how ‘it amused him to challenge passers-by to fight him, to break windows, to upset (literally) apple carts. He painted the Melton Mowbray toll bar red; he fought a duel; he painted the heels of a parson’s horse with aniseed and hunted him with bloodhounds’. He was even rumoured to be the mysterious Spring-heeled Jack. Beresford died like any true Regency aristocrat, in a hunting accident.
The power of the mob, a terrifying fixture of Georgian London, was also in retreat. Back in 1809 an increase in the price of theatre tickets led to the ‘Old Price Riots’ in which theatregoers went on the rampage, resulting in 20 deaths; despite this disorder, the theatre backed down and apologised, and the following week the mob turned up with a banner declaring ‘We are satisfied’. Ticketmaster, take note.
In 1810, after a gay brothel called the White Swan was investigated, they received ‘a volley of mud, and a serenade of hisses, hooting and execration’ as well as ‘dead cats and dogs, offal, potatoes, turnips’ while a ‘howling mob circled and bayed, continuing to pelt the prisoners with ordure’.
Disorder was often fuelled by a fear of the authorities. The first wave of cholera had coincided with the 1832 Anatomy Act, which entitled medical schools to dissect anybody buried at parish expense; it was commonly believed that the poor were going to be deliberately killed in hospitals, and in June 1832 a hospital porter was assaulted in Oxford Street as he brought along a cholera victim to receive treatment. A surgeon making a house call in Vauxhall was attacked, and it later transpired that the body of the deceased had been hidden for fear of dissection.
Such disorder could only be kept in check by a ferociously harsh criminal justice system, although it was mellowing at a steady pace. Charles Dickens wrote that ‘those good old customs of the good old times which made England, even so recently as in the reign of the Third King George, in respect of her criminal code and prison regulations, one of the most bloody-minded and barbarous countries on the earth.’
London was still home to 19 prisons, perhaps the most famous being the Fleet, originally built in 1197 by the banks of the Thames’s unbelievably filthy tributary from which it got its name, known as the ‘Black River of North London’. Many debtors ended up there, but the one upside was that it had an address, 9 Fleet Market, so that people could still correspond with prisoners, sometimes even ignorant of their current residency. When the Fleet closed in 1842, one debtor had been there since 1814.
Pillories had been a feature since the Middle Ages, but from 1816 their use was limited to perjurers, and they were abolished altogether in 1837. Although the British justice system became far less sadistic in the early 19th century, what was more notable was the changing attitude of the public. People used to viciously pelt rotten vegetables at the pilloried; now, journalist Henry Vizetelly recalled, the crowds were ‘more curious than vindictive’.
Public executions would last until the 1860s, providing a brief crossover with the first underground trains, but the public were also losing their appetite for this sort of violence amid a spirit of moralisation.
In 1840 William Makepeace Thackeray was among the crowd witnessing the execution of a Swiss valet convicted of murdering former MP Lord William Russell, uncle of the future prime minister (Dickens was also in attendance). Thackeray’s essay ended up helping to turn the tide against the practice, and in it he described how when the executioner lifted the decapitated head of the third victim, he accidentally dropped it, someone shouted out ‘butter fingers’ and everyone laughed. Great banter.
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