The Victorian City Page 21

  Several of these districts were used in Oliver Twist: Fagin’s ‘ken’ is ‘in the filthiest part of Little Saffron-Hill’, and his second hideout is ‘in the neighbourhood of Whitechapel’, while Sikes lives in Bethnal Green, possibly in Old Nichol Street itself, while his final hideout was Jacob’s Island. The tone was set for readers when Oliver first walks into London: the route he follows is ‘across the classic ground which once bore the name of Hockley-in-the-hole’, which many would have then recognized as a district in The Beggar’s Opera, that eighteenth-century celebration of rogues and thieves.

  These areas were presented to middle-class readers as a voyage into the unknown, with myriad references to the confusion created by the mazes of courts and alleys. In Sketches by Boz, a stranger in Seven Dials is faced with alleys that ‘dart in all directions’ before they vanish into an ‘unwholesome vapour’, like a ship at sea moving into the foggy distance. Anyone even attempting to navigate the courts, warned Sala, was liable to become ‘irretrievably lost’; despite living in Great St Andrew Street (roughly where Charing Cross Road is today), he wrote: ‘I declare that I never yet knew the exact way, in or out of that seven-fold mystery.’ And the way itself was always presented as dangerous. Donald Shaw, a sporting upper-class gent with a military background, described going to the ‘dens of infamy’ in the 1860s, where he enjoyed himself enormously by imagining that the ‘motley groups’ of drunken sailors he passed all had ‘deadly knives at every girdle’, watched by ‘constables in pairs’ – that is, these were supposedly places where constables were not able to patrol singly because of the danger. He and his friends were taken to an East End pub said to be ‘the most dangerous of all the dens’, and he was thrilled to be told, ‘We’ve got a mangy lot here tonight; they won’t cotton to the gents. If they ask any of their women to dance it will be taken as an affront, and if they don’t ask them it will be taken as an affront.’ Yet the leader of his clique, the Marquess of Hastings, had only to shout out, ‘What cheer...my hearties,’ and everyone settled down amicably to drink together. (Shaw appears not to notice that this rather invalidates his shivery thrill at the danger.) More realistic was Dickens, mocking that sort of fearful gloating when he wrote to a friend: ‘I...mean to take a great, London, back-slums kind of walk tonight, seeking adventures in knight errant style.’

  Field Lane was renowned as being ‘occupied entirely by receivers of stolen goods, which...are openly spread out for sale. Here you may re-purchase your own hat, boots, or umbrella.’ Thomas Trollope claimed that in 1818, aged eight, he had visited the notorious street, drawn by adult stories of its wickedness. It is notable that, if his story is true, an eight-year-old child could venture there without hindrance, much less violence. Dickens was sharp on the notion of no-go areas. Even in failing health, in the year before he died, he routinely visited these districts with no trouble at all: ‘How often...have I been forced to swallow, in police-reports, the intolerable stereotyped pill of nonsense, how that the police-constable informed the worthy magistrate how that the associates of the prisoner did...dwell in a street or court which no man dared go down.’ He was aware, however, that both the public and many magistrates believed such stories.

  Dickens walked at night for journalistic purposes, and in his sympathetic portrait of a night-walking doctor in Bleak House – ‘he often pauses and looks about him, up and down the miserable by-ways. Nor is he merely curious, for in his bright dark eye there is compassionate interest; and as he looks here and there, he seems to understand such wretchedness and to have studied it before’ – it is hard not to see a portrait of the night-walking author. In Household Words the previous year, he had described going to St Giles to see a tramps’ lodging house, where, as the door opens, the visitor is ‘stricken back by the pestilent breath that issues from within’: ‘Ten, twenty, thirty – who can count them! Men, women, children, for the most part naked, heaped upon the floor like maggots in a cheese!’57 These lodging houses were different from ‘lodgings’. Many of the comfortably middle class, and even rich, lived in lodgings, or rooms rented in a house, while lodgings for working people were single rooms converted for a whole family, perhaps several families. In Nicholas Nickleby, in the poor clerk Newman Noggs’ lodgings, ‘the first-floor lodgers, being flush of furniture, kept an old mahogany table – real mahogany – on the landing-place...On the second storey, the spare furniture dwindled down to a couple of old deal chairs...The storey above, boasted no greater excess than a worm-eaten wash-tub; and the garret landing-place displayed no costlier articles than two crippled pitchers, and some broken blacking-bottles.’ (The blacking bottles were Dickens’ own secret poverty indicator, a reminder of his days in the blacking factory.)

  Lodging houses, by contrast, provided beds that were rented by the night, each room having several beds occupied by people who were strangers to each other. In The Pickwick Papers, written in 1836, Sam Weller told of a ‘twopenny rope’ in some lodging houses where the beds were made of coarse sacking, stretched across ropes: ‘At six o’clock every mornin’ they let’s go the ropes at one end, and down falls the lodgers.’ While I have found no mention of this outside fiction, many lodging houses were brutally basic in their amenities, as well as desperately overcrowded.

  Often, lodging houses were regular small terraced houses, letting out beds in a few rooms. In the 1840s, one lodging house comprised a shop in its front room; a parlour behind, which the lodgers used as a communal kitchen; two rooms with two beds at 6d each for married couples; and two rooms for single people, housing altogether twenty-four lodgers (plus children, uncounted, sleeping on the floors). Another small house offered six rooms, for men only: two rooms with six double beds, sleeping three each, at 2d per person, and four rooms sleeping ten each, at 3d. Most people in lodging houses were transients. For their nightly 3d-worth in a vast, hundred-bed house in Holborn, lodgers received a rushlight in a piece of broken crockery to light them up to their rooms (or the first forty did: the remainder presumably had to make do with reflected light, as there were only forty available). They had the use of a communal kitchen, as well as access to the fire, a pot, a gridiron and a toasting-fork, plates, benches, and two or three deal tables; in the yard behind was a shed with water and a sink.

  In 1868, Arthur Munby went to see what was called the Thieves’ Kitchen, in Fulwood’s Rents, also off Holborn: ‘Up an alley...through an iron gate, down a narrow passage, down a rude old stair, across a rude lobby; and opening a door, we entered at the dark end of a large long antique cellar.’ There he found a dozen men and boys, while upstairs he counted 180 beds, with one bedroom containing eleven beds and nothing else. As late as the 1870s, even after legislation had been passed regulating the number of people per room, in Flower and Dean Streets in the East End, thirty-one lodging houses were occupied by 902 lodgers paying 4d a night, or 2s a week, two to a bed. Of these, sixty-eight, or one out of every dozen residents, were aged under fourteen, living there without a parent.

  The words ‘rents’ or ‘courts’ were enough to identify a slum in nineteenth-century London, meaning as they did housing built behind other buildings, using the passageway that had originally been designed to give access to stabling, ‘a covered alley, not wider than an ordinary doorway’, or even half that, compelling visitors ‘to walk in sideways’. The entrance to Frying-pan Alley, one of Field Lane’s nearly three dozen courts, measured two feet six inches across – not wide enough to get a coffin through, exclaimed a scandalized reporter. Twenty feet long, the court nevertheless contained twenty houses, with more courts beyond. Around these dead-end courtyards stood ‘black and crumbling hovels, forming three sides of a miserable little square’, built against three walls, and so having windows on just one side. Sometimes behind these courts more buildings were thrown up, in what had been the yards of the houses opposite: buildings, therefore, with no windows at all. Having windows that received some ambient light after dark was a luxury. In Bleak House, when the orphaned twelve-year-o
ld Charley locks her baby brother and sister in their room while she is at work, she notes with pride, ‘When it comes on dark, the lamps are lighted down in the court, and they show up here quite bright – almost quite bright.’ The fact of its being ‘almost quite bright’ made their room a desirable one and not a slum at all, but ordinary working people’s lodgings.

  The very worst lodgings offered nothing more than patches of floor space. Children often lived together, as protection. In the 1870s, in two streets in the East End, one in every dozen lodgers was an abandoned or orphaned child.

  By the time Dickens wrote this, the separation of many of the middle and upper classes from the lives, and locations, of the working poor, was complete. When in Bleak House the lawyer Mr Tulkinghorn tells Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock of the death of the pseudonymous Nemo in his barren lodgings (not a lodging house, but a respectable lodging for those with steady if small incomes, like Charley), Sir Leicester’s response is that even to mention ‘this sort of squalor among the upper classes is really – really – ’, while Lady Dedlock asks whether the man’s name had not been known to whoever had ‘attended on him’. Sir Leicester wants to reject all knowledge of even honest poverty; Lady Dedlock cannot imagine a world where a person has no one to ‘attend’ on them – that is, no servant. The Dedlocks live in a fashionable but unnamed location, probably Mayfair, but little that happens in the novel occurs more than half a mile or so away. Nemo’s rat-infested graveyard is a matter of steps from the austere beauty of Lincoln’s Inn Hall, which in turn is around the corner from the home of Mr Tulkinghorn, lawyer to the grandest families, which itself is hard by the slum of Tom-all-Alone’s, and Charley’s and Nemo’s lodgings off Holborn.58

  The quarantining of the poor soon became more consciously planned. Two words were used regularly to describe the destruction of neighbourhoods where the poor predominated: ‘improvements’ and ‘ventilation’. Both involved the building of wide new streets through a poor district, to allow the prosperous access to better areas on either side and, more specifically, to drive the poor out. As early as 1826, the author of Metropolitan Improvements boasted that ‘Among the glories of this age, the historian will have to record the conversion of dirty alleys, dingy courts and squalid dens of misery...into stately streets...to palaces and mansions, to elegant private dwellings,’ and forty years later the Times’ leader writer still took the view that ‘As we cut...roads through our forests, so it should be our policy to divide these thick jungles of crime and misery.’ He could not, he said, understand why the poor chose to live in such squalid conditions and locations: it must be the ‘attraction of misery to misery’.

  Like the Times writer, few considered where the poor were to go once they were pushed out of these newly tidied-up areas. There was no expectation that mixed neighbourhoods would develop: indeed, the purpose of the ‘improvements’ was to separate even further the prosperous from the poor. At best, the hope was that by ‘ventilating’ the slums, by running new roads through previously tiny back-courts, according to the Select Committee on Metropolis Improvement in 1840, these once-hidden areas would be opened to inspection by their social superiors, which through their judicious oversight would lead to improvements. In 1845, the route of the new Victoria Street in Westminster was approved to take ‘the channel of communication in a direction further south [than was originally suggested], into a more imperfectly drained, a more densely peopled, and consequently a more objectionable portion of the district’, obliterating much of the slum around Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament known as the Devil’s Acre.

  Once an area ‘improved’, however, its original residents were priced out, and the problem was simply moved elsewhere. Without inexpensive public transport, workers were forced to live within walking distance of ‘their bread’: if labourers were not near their work, they were not in work. As late as 1900, 40 per cent of Westminster residents were costers, hawkers and cleaners living near their employment. Clearances simply increased crowding in nearby neighbourhoods, turning them into slums in turn, or worsening their conditions if they were slums already. In 1841, in Church Lane, near the Pye Street slum, 655 people were crammed into twenty-seven houses; six years later, after Victoria Street had been built, the same number of houses were occupied by 1,095 people. And throughout the city the pattern was repeated. Between 1838 and 1856, the first major incursion into the slums – New Oxford Street, to ventilate St Giles – saw up to 5,000 people left homeless. Victoria Street encompassed the destruction of 200 houses, displacing nearly 2,500 people. Commercial Street, to ventilate Spitalfields market and Whitechapel, caused 250 houses to be razed; and Farringdon Road, Queen Victoria Street and Cannon Street, to ventilate City slums, laid to waste hundreds more. Dickens raised the issue in Household Words : ‘What must be the results of these London improvements, when the roofs of a hundred wretched people are pulled down to make room for perhaps ten who are more prosperous’? His answer came with Jo the crossing-sweeper in Bleak House, which was written at the culmination of this destruction:

  ‘This boy,’ says the constable, ‘although he’s repeatedly told to, won’t move on – ’

  ‘I’m always a-moving on, sar,’ cries the boy, wiping away his grimy tears with his arm. ‘I’ve always been a-moving and a-moving on, ever since I was born. Where can I possibly move to, sir’...

  ‘He’s as obstinate a young gonoph as I know.59 He WON’T move on’...

  ‘Well! Really, constable, you know,’ says Mr. Snagsby wistfully, and coughing behind his hand his cough of great perplexity and doubt, ‘really, that does seem a question. Where, you know?’

  ‘My instructions don’t go to that,’ replies the constable.

  For ‘we make our New Oxford Streets, and our other new streets’, Dickens had written, ‘never heeding, never asking, where the wretches whom we clear out crowd.’ Jo, and the many thousands like him, were driven as were the cattle at Smithfield, which, ‘over-goaded, over-driven...plunge, red-eyed and foaming, at stone walls, and often sorely hurt the innocent and often sorely hurt themselves. Very like Jo and his order, very like.’

  Some, like Our Mutual Friend’s Mr Podsnap, refused to believe that anyone was starving. When ‘a stray personage of a meek demeanour’ makes a

  reference to the circumstance that some half-dozen people had lately died in the streets...It was clearly ill-timed after dinner...It was not in good taste.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ said Mr Podsnap, putting it behind him.

  The meek man was afraid we must take it as proved, because there were the Inquests and the Registrar’s returns.

  ‘Then it was their own fault,’ said Mr Podsnap...

  The man of meek demeanour intimated that truly it would seem from the facts, as if starvation had been forced upon the culprits in question – as if, in their wretched manner, they had made their weak protests against it – as if they would have taken the liberty of staving it off if they could – as if they would rather not have been starved upon the whole, if perfectly agreeable to all parties.

  Podsnap was considered by many to be a portrait of Dickens’ friend, John Forster (who was, happily, apparently entirely unaware of the resemblance). But perhaps Dickens was also having a little fun at the expense of Sir Peter Laurie, a magistrate and once Lord Mayor, who had claimed that Jacob’s Island, which Dickens had described in Oliver Twist, ‘only existed in a work of fiction, written by Mr. Charles Dickens’. In Oliver Twist, he had painted it as a place of ‘Crazy wooden galleries...with holes from which to look upon the slime beneath; windows, broken and patched...rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the air would seem too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they shelter...dirt-besmeared walls and decaying foundations’. But Jacob’s Island, that spit of land in Bermondsey, truly existed: in the same year that Sir Peter rejected its existence, Henry Mayhew visited and found ‘The water of the huge ditch in front of the houses is covered with a scum...and prismatic with grease. In
it float large masses of green rotting weed, and against the posts of the bridges are swollen carcasses of dead animals, almost bursting with the gases of putrefaction. Along the banks are heaps of indescribable filth...In some parts the fluid is almost as red as blood, from the colouring matter that pours into it from the reeking leather-dressers close by...the air has literally the smell of a graveyard.’

  The slum district of Jacob’s Island, where Bill Sikes made his last stand in Oliver Twist, was a warren of ‘crazy wooden galleries’ hanging over a slimy, stagnant ditch filled with dead animals and effluent from the nearby tanneries. The residents, for lack of alternatives, used the ditch to dispose of their waste – as well as for their drinking water.

  Oliver Twist was concluded in 1839; Mayhew reported in the Morning Chronicle in 1849; both descriptions were very much part of the political discussion. In 1847, the Town Improvements Clauses Act gave parishes the right to demolish any buildings they judged to be insanitary, and further Acts provided ways of using taxpayers’ money to do so. St Giles, in the centre of the West End, was one of the first areas where an attempt was made to eradicate a slum district entirely. The area covered sixty-eight acres, with 90 per cent of the population living in multiple-occupancy housing. And that housing was poor: particularly around Drury Lane, many of the buildings were over a hundred years old, some dating back to before the Great Fire in 1666, possibly even to the sixteenth century.