The Victorian City Read online

  All of these buyers, sellers, touters and hawkers contributed to the many voices of the street, voices which in Dickens’ fiction become fixed and create a sense that we know what these people sounded like. The most famous of them all was that of the cockney servant, Sam Weller: ‘Vy didn’t you say so before...For all I know’d he was one o’ the regular threepennies...If he’s anything of a gen’l’m’n, he’s vurth a shillin’ a day.’ Or Sam describes his hat: ‘’Tain’t a wery good ’un to look at...but it’s an astonishin’ ’un to wear; and afore the brim went, it was a wery handsome tile. Hows’ever it’s lighter without it, that’s one thing, and every hole lets in some air, that’s another – wentilation gossamer I calls it.’ It’s almost all there – the Ws and Vs switching places, the irregular past tenses of verbs, the dropped Gs. Later, when Dickens created Jo in Bleak House, ‘in course’ instead of ‘of course’ appears; the addition of the ‘g’ ending on words like ‘sovereign’ joins the missing ‘g’ of Sam’s ‘astonishin’’ and the final ‘k’ on ‘nothink’. The Hs are added to words that begin with a vowel and are missing from words that begin with ‘h’, while the ‘i’ sound replaces ‘oi’ in words like ‘spoil’ – ‘spile’.

  Many have since claimed that Dickens invented the W/V slippage, but Real Life in London, published in 1821, when Dickens was just nine, claimed that Billingsgate fishmongers said, ‘vat slippy valking...all the vay to Vapping Vall.’ This had disappeared by the 1850s: Alfred Bennett, writing of his childhood in that decade, claimed not to have heard it, but he agreed that Dickens’ irregular past and present tenses – ‘come’ for ‘came’; ‘seed’ for ‘saw’ – were a constant, as were double negatives – ‘we ain’t got no’, ‘without no’. By the end of Dickens’ life the voices that one might today think he had imagined out of the ether had found their way on to the very real streets, as the bus conductors shouted out the destinations – ‘Benk’, ‘Charin’ Krauss’, ‘Pic’dilly’. People headed for Emma Smith [Hammersmith], Glawster Rowd [to rhyme with ‘loud’], I [Hay] Street, Nottin Ill Gite, Bizewater, Peddingten, Biker Street, Oldersgit Street, Ol’git, and Menshun Ouse.

  The cockney voice was the most characteristic of the London accents, but it was not the only one. Other classes had their own idiosyncratic patterns. Dickens was particularly fond of lower-middle-class genteelisms. A lodging-house keeper in Bloomsbury shows her ‘front parlior’ to potential lodgers: ‘the back parlior being what I cling to and never part with…Unless your mind is prepared for the stairs, it will lead to inevitable disapintmink.’ Moving up the social scale, an ‘affected Metropolitan Miss’ created as many syllables as she could: she ‘loves the ble-ue ske-i’ and delights in being ‘key-ind’ to the poor. So snarled Mayhew in the 1850s, while noting similar pretensions among the upper classes: ‘Your London exquisite, for instance, talks of taking – aw, his afternoon’s wide – aw – in Wotton Wo – aw – aw – or of going to the Opewa – aw – or else of wunning down – aw – to the Waces – aw – aw.’ (The stuttering vanished in perhaps the 1920s, although it has been suggested the R/W substitution still survives more among the upper than the working classes.) Not only did pronunciation vary between classes, but through the years changes occurred within each social group. Thomas Trollope, the son of a barrister and the grandson of a baronet, remembered that when he was a child in the 1810s older people pronounced Rome, ‘Room’, James, ‘Jeames’ and gold, ‘goold’, while ‘oblige’ was given the French pronunciation, ‘obleege’, a beef steak was a ‘beef-steek’, and the ‘a’ in words such as danger and stranger was pronounced as the ‘a’ in ‘man’. Seventy years later, these pronuncitations had all vanished.

  Even more than pronunciation, slang separated the various socio-economic groups, making each one as distinct on the street as their clothes did. ‘The fast [cash-strapped] young gentleman positively must speak to his governor [father], and get the old brick [decent chap] to fork out [give] some more tin [cash], for positively he can hardly afford himself a weed [cigar] of an evening – besides he wants a more nobby crib [better lodgings], as the one he hangs out in now…really isn’t the Stilton [done thing].’ (The last phrase sounds remarkably like P. G. Wodehouse, born two decades after this was written.) Costermongers specialized in backslang, although it was 1860 before that word began to be used to describe their private language. Long before it had a name, however, Mayhew supplied examples: a penny was a yenep, twopence owt-yenep, threepence erth-yenep and so on (except eight, which was ‘teaich’). Backslang also gave ‘on’ for no, ‘say’ for yes, as well as ‘cool the esclop’, ‘cool the namesclop’ and ‘cool ta the dillo nemo’ – look at the police/policeman, the old woman. Other elements from various sources were mixed in: ‘Vom-us! I’m going to do the tightener [have my dinner].’ ‘Vom-us’ is from the (to us) familiar ‘vamoose’, which is in turn from the Spanish ‘vamos’, ‘let’s go’, while ‘tightener’ is not foreign, just colourful – when you eat well your clothes get tight.

  Most of this has long vanished. What has survived is rhyming slang. Some attributed this new slang to thieves, others to ballad sellers and cheapjacks, the travelling hawkers who used it in their sales patter. By the late 1850s, it was prevalent enough that mainstream middle-class publications gave their readers tasters, although they didn’t yet have a name for it, but had to laboriously explain the method. It was, said Mayhew, ‘arranged on the principle of using words that are similar in sound to the ordinary expressions for the same idea…the…cant words are mere nonsensical terms, rhyming with the vernacular ones’. He offered as an example a ‘shallow cove’ from St Giles who says, ‘S’pose now…I wanted to ask a codger to come and have a glass of rum with me, and smoke a pipe of baccer over a game of cards with some blokes at home – I should say, Splodger, will you have a Jack-surpass of finger-and-thumb, and blow your yard of tripe of nosey-me-knacker, while we have a touch of the boards with some other heaps of coke at my drum?’ Other examples were Jimmy Skinner, dinner; Battle of the Nile, tile (a top hat); elephant’s trunk, drunk; Epsom races, braces; over the stile, sent for trial. Although not using rhyming slang himself, Dickens unexpectedly gets a look-in when in a novel of 1858 a character says, ‘leave the kid alone, or I’ll put out my Chalk Farm (arm) and give you a rap with my Oliver Twist (fist).’

  Mayhew realized that a great deal of the coster and more general working-class slang came from foreign languages. According to him, ‘carser’, for ‘house’, came from ‘the organ boys’, that is, from Italian (casa), while ‘ogle’ originated from ‘oogelijn’ or ‘little eye’, brought to London, he suggested, by ‘the Hollanders on board the Billingsgate eel-boats’ (it does derive from Dutch, but dates back two centuries earlier). ‘Fogle’, a handkerchief, he supposed came from from vogel, German for bird. (Foglia, Italian for pocket, seems more likely, as a fogle-hunter was a pickpocket: Oliver Twist was a ‘young fogle-hunter’ before he was rescued.) Dickens may have picked up some of these newly acculturated words. In Oliver Twist the undertaker Mr Sowerberry utters ‘Gadso!’ as an oath, although Dickens probably did not realize that it derived from cazzo, or ‘prick’ in Italian. Far more working-class slang came from Romany, although it was rarely recognized as the source. The most basic word, bona, good, Mayhew says comes from ‘the old dancing dog men’. He believed that what he called ‘thieves’ slang was ‘made up, in a great degree, of the mediaeval Latin’, and he translated, ‘Can you roker Romany’ as ‘Can you speak cant’, without elaborating on the word Romany at all, or translating ‘roker’ as Romany for ‘speak’.

  More commonly heard on the street were the everyday expressions that boys shouted at each other or at passers-by, the catchphrases of a lively street life. Some – such as the phrase ‘I believe you, my bo-o-o-y!’, derived from a popular play – were the currency of professional entertainers, but no one knew where most of these sayings came from before the arrival of music hall, when snatches of a song or a comic’s routine spread widely. But nonetheless, i
n the 1830s, ‘One’s ears were incessantly assailed with such cries as “What a shocking bad hat!” “There he goes with his eye out!” “How are you off for soap?” “Flare up! and join the union,” “Does your mother know you’re out?” or “It’s all very fine, Mr. Fergusson, but you don’t lodge here.”’ When the army Volunteer Corps was formed in 1859, mostly drawn from the ranks of the middle classes, their lack of professionalism provoked the sneer that all the Volunteers had ever managed to shoot were their own dogs; for years street boys shouted, ‘Who shot the dog?’ at any man in uniform. By the 1860s, there were more generic challenges to young men who were either excessively (in the boys’ opinions) well dressed or merely out with a young woman: ‘Who’s your hatter?’ or even ‘How’s your poor feet?’

  Some expressions indicated disbelief – ‘All my eye and Betty Martin’ – while ‘Do you see any green in my eye, as you pull down the lid?’ meant, do you take me for a fool. The longest-surviving, and one of Dickens’ favourites, was ‘Hookey Walker!’, sometimes shortened to ‘Walker!’ and often drawled out – ‘Waa—alker!’ This was the equivalent of the twentieth century’s ‘Pull the other one, it’s got bells on.’ In A Christmas Carol, when the newly reformed Scrooge leans out his window and tells a street boy to go and buy the biggest turkey at the poultryman’s shop, the boy replies, ‘Walk-ER!’, Scrooge responds, ‘No, no…I am in earnest.’ In David Copperfield, little Miss Mowcher, also to express disbelief, says, ‘Do you know what my great-grandfather’s name was?…It was Walker, my pet…and he came from a long line of Walkers, that I inherit all the Hookey estates from.’

  Even when they weren’t shouting out these phrases, people found ways of indicating contempt. In Pickwick Papers, when the legal clerk for the shyster lawyer thinks Mr Pickwick is trying to pump him for information, he ‘smiled once more upon the company, and, applying his left thumb to the tip of his nose, worked a visionary coffee-mill with his right hand, thereby performing a very graceful piece of pantomime (then much in vogue, but now, unhappily, almost obsolete) which was familiarly denominated “taking a grinder”’. A few years later, in The Old Curiosity Shop, another lower-middle-class notary’s clerk gestures at a street boy ‘with that peculiar form of recognition which is called “taking a sight”’, that is, he put his thumb up to his nose and wiggled his fingers in what was later called cocking a snook.

  Gestures and catcalls might seem like entertainment enough for passers-by and residents alike, but the streets were also the place for a whole raft of professional entertainers: Punch and Judy men, animal acts, peep-shows and tumblers were only the start. The most numerous were the street musicians. In Mayhew’s view there were two types, ‘the skilful and the blind’, that is, those with abilities and those who were begging. Bands were classed either as ‘English’ or ‘German’. The English players might be English and played in groups of up to twenty-five, usually made up of men who couldn’t read music and therefore couldn’t get jobs in theatres. The German bands were not necessarily German, or even foreign; ‘German’ indicated they were either brass bands or groups playing highlights from the operatic repertory. Then there were the instrumentalists: fiddlers, harpers, clarionet [sic] players and pipers, often accompanied by a dancing-girl.

  The main street instrument, however, was the organ, and the nineteenth-century passion for classification categorized these in the mid-century. Hand organists were usually ‘French’, which sometimes just meant foreign; if the performers were any good they had regular rounds and pitches, but most weren’t, and didn’t. Monkey organists were generally Swiss or Tyrolese boys, on the top of whose organs perched a monkey or marmoset dressed in a red jacket and cap; if possible the animal played the organ and the boy danced, but sometimes it was the other way round. Those who couldn’t afford a monkey had white mice, or a doll on a plank that ‘danced’ as they jerked a string tied to their knees.

  Handbarrow organists were jeered at as ‘some lazy Irishman’ or ‘sickly Savoyard’ because they wheeled their instruments in a barrow. Because they couldn’t grind and walk at the same time, they waited for a group of children or a crowd to collect and then made such a din that in effect they were paid to go away. The handcart organists were more enterprising, travelling in twos, threes or fours, with a complicated organ plus ‘bells, drums, triangles, gongs, and cymbals’. Set out in front was ‘a stage about five or six feet in width, four in height, and perhaps eighteen inches or two feet in depth’, on which danced automaton figures, just over a foot tall, ‘gorgeously arrayed in crimson, purple, emerald-green, blue, and orange draperies, and loaded with gold and tinsel, and sparkling stones and spangles’. They performed little stories: Daniel in the lion’s den, a Grand Turk threatening a slave, Nebuchadnezzar eating painted grass ‘with a huge gold crown on his head, which he bobs…every other bar’. At the front were figures of Napoleon, Tipu Sultan and his sons, and the Queen and Prince Albert.80 Napoleon, Tipu and Victoria ‘dance a three-handed reel, to the admiration of Prince Albert and a group of lords and ladies…who nod their heads approvingly’ until ‘the fiend in the corner rushes forth from his lair with a portentous howl. Away, neck or nothing, flies Napoleon, and Tippoo [sic] scampers after him, followed by the terrified attendants; but lo! at the precise nick of time, Queen Victoria draws a long sword from beneath her stays, while up jumps the devouring beast [from Daniel in the lion’s den]…and like a true British lion…flies at the throat of the fiend,’ just as the collection is made.

  George Scharf sketched dozens of London’s street musicians – a sailor, a man with a baby, and a blind violinist among them – as well as a kerb-side letter-writer.

  Ranking lower on the scale of attraction and approbation were the horse-and-cart organists, whose vast machines needed a cart drawn by two horses, crammed with ‘every known mechanical contrivance for the production of ear-stunning noises’. The most numerous of all organs on the street were the ordinary piano grinders, which at least had the benefit of not being too loud. Many of their practitioners were Italians living in Leather Lane: they carried the instrument on their backs, holding a staff as they walked that later doubled as a support to the instrument when they played. Flageolet organists and pianists were ‘the élite of the profession’, usually to be found in the West End ‘and on summer evenings…in the neighbourhood of some of the Inns of Court’. Hurdy-gurdy players came in two classes: ‘little hopping, skipping, jumping, reeling, Savoyard or Swiss urchins, who dance and sing and grind and play…and men with sallow complexions, large dark eyes, and silver earrings, who stand erect and tranquil’. These men also played at ‘extempore “hop[s]” at the door of a suburban public house on a summer night’, or at some other form of working-class entertainment. Most bands settled around pubs and other entertainment venues, and were known to the locals: Dickens wrote that ‘Stabbers’s Band’ performed every Monday morning outside a Camden pub. Women players existed but were few and far between. Arthur Munby saw a female cornet player in Westminster, but that was extremely unusual.

  There were also singers, as individuals or in groups. Many singers performed because they had no skills, no tools of a trade, no choices. In the 1830s, Dickens saw near the Old Vic theatre a woman carrying a baby, ‘round whose meagre form the remnant of her own scanty shawl is carefully wrapped’, who warbled a popular ballad ‘in the hope of wringing a few pence from the compassionate passer-by’ – but failing. Munby watched the dancing and singing of five ‘Ethiopian Serenaders’ in Scotland Yard one day, the women with their ‘hair decked with network and rolls of scarlet cloth: they wore pink calico jackets, petticoats of spangled blue, ending a little below the knee: and red stockings and red boots’. When he spoke to them, he realized they were English, blacked-up. They may have been inspired by Joseph Johnson, a black sailor in the early part of the century, who had been wounded during the French wars. He built a model of the Nelson, which he wore on his head and, by dipping and swaying, made it ‘sail’ as he sang. He was well kno
wn, walking as far afield as Staines, Romford and St Albans on his rounds. In the 1840s, another singer wore a similar ship on his head while carrying a baby on his back: one observer noted that he had seen him perform thus over a full decade, ‘the Child being always the same’. Other wounded sailors, usually dressed in a uniform, sang sea shanties and theatre songs of heroic tars. (Alfred Bennett added that as far as he could remember he had never seen a soldier in such circumstances.)

  Most householders professed to be driven mad by the constant jumble of music cranked out on the streets. It is unsurprising therefore to find the magistrates courts filled with cases where residents attempted to have the musicians banned, with the musicians in turn applying to the courts for loss of earnings. An early cartoon by Robert Seymour, the original illustrator of The Pickwick Papers, showed a street musician refusing to be moved on for less than 6d: ‘d’ye think I does n’t know the walley o’peace and quietness?’ The cartoonist John Leech, before his death, commented, ‘Rather…than continue to be tormented in this way, I would prefer to go to the grave where there is no noise.’ And even Dickens, otherwise so passionately absorbed in street theatre, dismissed these ‘brazen performers on brazen instruments’.