The Victorian City Page 3

  Whilst these impressions were real, they were also radically reworked by Dickens’ imagination to create new realities, well recognized by his fellow artists. Henry James described Dickens’ type of fiction, with its real places and real street names, as having the ‘solidity of specification’; Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke of Dickens’ ‘London tracts’. So real were these tracts that when the American historian Francis Parkman arrived in London, ‘I thought I had been there before. There, in flesh and blood, was the whole host of characters that figured’ in Dickens – the people, the traffic: everything, he marvelled.

  Details that Londoners didn’t even notice they were noticing were given a place in the sharp-eyed author’s books. Like foreigners, Dickens noted the native customs: he reproduced them faithfully for the locals, just as the visitors reported them to their audiences at home. In À Rebours (1884), by the French decadent novelist J.-K. Huysmans, the hero drifts into a daydream in an English bar in Paris, peopling the Parisian cellar with customers culled from his favourite Dickens novels. ‘He settled down comfortably in this London of the imagination…believing for a moment that the dismal hootings of the tugs behind the Tuileries were coming from boats on the Thames.’ As Walter Benjamin quoted half a century later, ‘Dickens did not stamp these places on his mind; he stamped his mind on these places.’ Dickens created London as much as London created Dickens.

  As the city changed, what was imagination and what reportage has blurred and become hard to distinguish. Jokes that Dickens’ readers understood, dry asides on the streets that he and they walked so regularly, for us lie deeply buried. This book is an attempt to bring these details to the surface once more, to look at the streets of London as Dickens and his fellow Londoners saw it, to examine its workings, to take a walk, in effect, through the city as it appeared in Dickens’ lifetime, from 1812 to 1870.

  Mr Micawber, the young David Copperfield’s feckless but faithful friend, offered his services on David’s first day in London: ‘Under the impression…that your peregrinations in this metropolis have not as yet been extensive, and that you might have some difficulty in penetrating the arcana of the Modern Babylon…in short…that you might lose yourself – I shall be happy to call this evening, and install you in the knowledge of the nearest way.’

  The arcana of the modern Babylon: like Mr Micawber, Dickens reveals to his readers the occult secrets of London, installing in us, his readers, the knowledge of the nearest, and best, way. The least we can do is follow him.

  PART ONE

  The City Wakes

  1810: The Berners Street Hoax

  Early one morning in November 1810, long before breakfast, a chimney sweep knocked at the basement door of a respectable house in Berners Street, just north of Oxford Street. He had been sent for, he said. Mystified, the residents said they had no need of a sweep and closed the door. That was the last moment of peace they had that day, for soon the house was besieged by sweeps, all claiming they had been summoned. They were swiftly followed by dozens of wagons bringing coal that the drivers said had been ordered, and by legions of fishmongers with the day’s catch, also apparently required by the house’s mistress, one Mrs Tottenham.

  Soon came ‘piano-fortes by dozens, and coal-waggons by scores – two thousand five hundred raspberry tarts from half a hundred pastry-cooks – a squad of surgeons – a battalion of physicians, and a legion of apothecaries – lovers to see sweethearts; ladies to find lovers – upholsterers to furnish houses, and architects to build them – gigs, dog-carts, and glass-coaches, enough to convey half the free-holders of Middlesex to Brentford’. Before this horde had retreated, on came an endless stream of tradespeople:

  Invitations and orders were sent in her name,

  (In truth, I must own, ’twas a scandalous shame)

  To milliners, wine-merchants, lawyers, musicians,

  Oculists, coal-merchants, barbers, opticians,

  Men of fashion, men cooks, surgeons, sweeps, undertakers,

  Confectioners, fishmongers, innkeepers, bakers,

  Men-midwives – the man who exhibits a bear,

  And, O worse than all! to his lordship the mayor.

  All were earnestly begged to be at her door

  Precisely at two, or a little before,

  The surgeons first, armed with catheters, arrive

  And impatiently ask is the patient alive.

  The man servant stares – now ten midwives appear,

  ‘Pray, sir, does the lady in labor [sic] live here?’

  ‘Here’s a shell,’ cries a man, ‘for the lady that’s dead,

  ‘My master’s behind with the coffin of lead.’

  Next a waggon, with furniture loaded approaches,

  Then a hearse all be-plumed and six mourning coaches,

  Six baskets of groceries – sugars, teas, figs;

  Ten drays full of beer – twenty boxes of wigs.

  Fifty hampers of wine, twenty dozen French rolls,

  Fifteen huge waggon loads of best Newcastle coals –

  But the best joke of all was to see the fine coach

  Of his worship the mayor, all bedizen’d, approach;

  As it pass’d up the street the mob shouted aloud,

  His lordship was pleased, and most affably bow’d,

  Supposing, poor man, he was cheered by the crowd…

  These were followed by rows of carriages bearing the city’s grandees, all invited to a party. Then came the chairman of the East India Company and the Governor of the Bank of England, both of whom had been promised information on supposed frauds on their companies; even royalty was summoned, in the person of the Duke of Gloucester, who arrived to hear the deathbed confession of an aged family retainer.

  The street now teemed with people, their anger at having their time and money wasted dissipating as tradesmen who had been turned away stayed to watch the next batch of hopefuls arrive, to shouts of laughter. But the Lord Mayor was not amused, driving off to the Marlborough Street Police Office to lay a complaint before the magistrates.

  … his lordship, it seems, is no friend to such jokes…

  In sooth ’twas a shame (not withstanding ’twas witty)

  To make such a fool of the lord of the city…

  Away drove his lordship, by thousands attended,

  The people dispersed, and thus the hoax ended…

  The magistrates ordered their officers out to disperse the crowds, but by then even more had arrived, this time great numbers of servants who had received letters offering them positions. It was long after dark before Mrs Tottenham was left in peace.

  Those in the know had, almost from the first, suspected that this was a trick perpetrated by Theodore Hook, a composer, farceur and man about town. Today his main claim to fame is that one of his plays was mocked by Byron in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, but at the time the author of Teleki was famous in his own right, for pranks and practical jokes as much as his writing. Rumour immediately attributed this hoax to Hook, claiming that he had sent out hundreds – some said thousands – of letters ordering goods and services, answering advertisements for lost or found items, and directing all to 54 Berners Street, before hiring rooms in the house across the road so he and his friends might watch the fun in comfort.

  Nancy Mathews – the wife of the actor Charles Mathews and a great friend of Hook – claimed after his death, that it was not he who had perpetrated this hoax at all: it had been, she said, ‘designed and executed by a young gentleman, now a high, and one of the most rigid Churchmen in the kingdom’. (The reality of an unnamed person is always slightly suspect, but it is worth noting that Hook’s brother, also conveniently deceased by this time, had been Dean of Worcester, and the dean’s son was a High Churchman with decidedly Tory leanings.) Mrs Mathews’ chief point was that this famous hoax was not the original. Hook, she said, had not been the perpetrator of the Berners Street Hoax, but had instead been responsible for an earlier hoax, which she said occurred in Bedford Street. For weeks,
she claimed, he had assiduously replied to classified advertisements in the newspapers: ‘everything lost had been found by Mr. — of Bedford Street. Every thing found had been lost by Mr. — of Bedford Street. Every servant wanting a place, was sure to find an excellent one in the family of Mr. — of Bedford Street. If money was to be borrowed, it would be lent on the most liberal terms, by Mr. — of Bedford Street. If money was to be lent, it would be borrowed, on most advantageous interest, by Mr. — of Bedford Street.’

  And sure enough,

  on the following day, punctual as a lover, came…honest men leading the animals they had found, expecting their reward…and disconsolate owners 20 The Victorian City of missing pets, hoping to regain the favourites they had lost. Men and maids…eager for ‘sitiwations’, – congregated in such numbers, that there was not a place left…by and bye came carts, with large teams…with many a cauldron of coal, labouring up the narrow slanting street, followed by pianoforte carriages – crates of china and glass…rolls of carpeting – potatoes and firewood…trays of turtle – bags of flour – packages of flannel and linen – packing cases and trunks of every dimension – chariots and horses – asses – dogs – brewers’ drays and butchers’ trays – confectionery and books – wheel-barrows, surgeons’ instruments and mangles – sides of bacon – boots and shoes – bows and arrows – guns and pistols, &c. &c.

  As with Berners Street later, when the hoax was discovered at first everyone was enraged, until a change of mood overcame the crowd, and each person hoaxed remained for the sheer amusement of seeing their successors being imposed upon in turn: ‘on each arrival a loud huzza from the assembled crowd proclaimed “a brother won!”’

  Whether the site was Bedford Street, or Berners Street, the hoax took place in public, to be enjoyed by the public, not by a discerning, selfselecting group, such as would buy a book, or a newspaper, or go to a play, but by the indiscriminate pedestrian, the random passer-by. The perpetrator of the hoax, whether Hook or the high and rigid churchman, saw the streets not as a place to pass through on the way from one building to another, but as a place worth being in. Two months later, an epilogue to a play staged at the Lyceum included a mention of a ‘Hoax’ that had ‘set London in a grin’ for the pleasure of giving ‘gazing mobs a treat’. The enjoyment was not for the perpetrators but for the participants: those in the street.

  The streets of London in the nineteenth century were, in many cases, the same ones we walk today. But not only did they look different, their purpose was different; they were used differently. It is that use, that idea of purpose, that needs to be recaptured.

  1.

  EARLY TO RISE

  It is 2.30 in the morning. It is still night, but it is also ‘tomorrow’. By this hour at Covent Garden market, in the centre of London, the streets are alive. Long lines of carts and vans and costermongers’ barrows are forming in the surrounding streets. Lights are being lit ‘in the upper windows of public houses – not the inhabitants retiring to rest, but of active proprietors preparing…for the new day…The roadway is already blocked up, and the by-streets are rapidly filling.’

  By dawn, the streets leading into London were regularly filled with carriages, with carts laden with goods, and with long lines of men and women (mostly women), plodding down Piccadilly, along Green Park, on their way to Covent Garden, carrying heavy baskets of fruit on their heads as they walked from the market gardens in Fulham several miles away. More approached Covent Garden from the south, from the market gardens that lined the south-west side of the river.

  Interspersed with these suppliers and produce sellers were many more who made their living around and in the markets. The coffee-stall keepers appeared carrying cans of coffee from yokes on their shoulders, the little smudge-pot charcoal fires already lit underneath, winking in the diminishing darkness. Then ‘a butcher’s light chaise-cart rattled past…with the men huddled in the bottom of the vehicle, behind the driver…dozing as they drove along’, followed by ‘some tall and stalwart brewer’s drayman…(for these men are among the first in the streets), in his dirty, drab, flushing jacket, red night-cap, and leathern leggings’.

  The lithographer George Scharf sketched street traders and market porters in 1841, showing the many different ways they transported their wares.

  These early risers had woken long before daybreak with the aide of various stratagems. Alarm clocks had not yet been invented (wind-up alarm clocks did not appear until 1876), and even clocks were beyond the reach of most workers.11 In the first three decades of the century, the watch patrolled the streets nightly, dressed in long, drab greatcoats and slouch hats, carrying rattles and calling out the half-hours. For a small fee, these men stopped at houses along their routes, to waken anyone who needed to be up at a specific time. Later this job of knocking up, as it became known, was taken on by the police – a useful way to earn a little extra cash, as well as an aid to good community relations. As the constables walked their beats, they tapped on the window with a long stick, or banged the knocker as they passed, waiting for an ‘All right!’ to be shouted from indoors in acknowledgement. The very poor, who could not afford the requisite penny or two a week, paid a halfpenny or so to an equally poor fellow worker who woke his friends on his way home from nightwork.

  Among the first people out on the street each morning were the coffee-stall keepers. Today, eating out is more expensive than cooking at home, but in the nineteenth century the situation was reversed. Most of the working class lived in rooms, not houses. They might have had access to a communal kitchen, but more often they cooked in their own fireplace: to boil a kettle before going to work, leaving the fire to burn when there was no one home, was costly, time-consuming and wasteful. Water was a rare and precious commodity in working-class housing, which did not begin to see piped water (usually just to the basement kitchens) until late in the century. The nearest running water might be a street pump, which functioned for just a few hours a week. Several factors – the lack of storage space, routine infestations of vermin and being able, because of the cost, to buy food only in tiny quantities – meant that storing any foodstuff, even tea, overnight was unusual. Workers therefore expected to purchase their breakfast on their way to work.

  After getting up in the dark and the cold, wrote Thomas Wright, an ex-labouring man,12 ‘the gleam from the hot-coffee stall comes like a guiding star…H ere you get warmth to your hands on the outside of the cup, and for the inner man from the liquid, which you get piping hot, for the proprietors of the stalls are aware that that quality is regarded by their morning customers before strength or sweetness.’ These stalls mostly appeared at the edges of the city and in the centre, with fewer in the suburbs: in Camberwell, in the late 1850s, one memoirist says that there were ‘street refreshment stalls at night in some localities, but I never saw one’. On the major routes, however, these stalls were everywhere, ranging from the simplest makeshifts to elaborate structures. Some consisted of a board laid over a pair of sawhorses, a can of coffee kept hot by a charcoal burner, and a few plates of bread and butter; if the owner could manage a blanket over a clothes horse to protect a bench from the wind, all the better. Others were more robust. The journalist George Augustus Sala described one Covent Garden stall as ‘something between a gipsy’s tent and a watchman’s box’.13 At Islington, a regular coffee stall by a pub was erected nightly: out of a hand-barrow came benches, a table and ‘a great bright tin boiler with a brass tap’, heated by a coke fire, and all enclosed in a cosy canvas tent. A lamp was lit, the table was covered with a cloth and laid with cups, saucers, a loaf and a cake, and in fifteen minutes a snug little booth was ready for customers.

  Who the customers were, and which the busy times, varied by location and cost. A cup of coffee and ‘two thin’ – two thin pieces of bread and butter – was a penny in the West End and City; around the docks, where the customers were entirely working class, it was half that. Street sellers of food, walking to the markets to get their supplies for th
e day from about 3 a.m., were early visitors; later the night-workers heading home crossed with the day-workers, and at working-class stalls there was generally ‘some thinly clad, delicate-looking factory boy or girl’ standing by hopefully. The ‘popular belief among working men’, said Wright, is that ‘a fellow is never any poorer’ for buying something hot for those even worse off than themselves.

  The journalist James Greenwood spent a night with a coffee-stall holder in Islington, watching the customers come and go.14 The stall was set up at 11.30, just as the tavern near by was closing. In the first hour there were only two paying customers, a night cabman and ‘an unfortnight’ (unfortunate – the standard polite term for a prostitute), plus a beggar. Then came a blind boy who sang in pubs and his father, four street-sweepers and three ‘tipsy gents’. From 1.30 to 2.30 a.m., a number of men dropped by to sober up; then the ‘very worst sort of customers’ appeared: those who had nowhere to sleep, and eked out halfpenny cups of coffee by the charcoal fire for as long as they could; others did not even have the halfpence, but were allowed by the soft-hearted stall-keeper to sit by the fire all the same. Between 2.30 and 3.30, three more unfortunates stopped by, and two labourers asking the way to the Uxbridge road: they had, they said, been three days searching for work, and were returning home, having had no luck. One of the unfortunates made the offer: ‘pitch into the bread and butter and coffee; I’ll pay,’ and, the stall-keeper reported, ‘I’m proud to say that they used her like honest chaps, eating a tidy lot, certainly, but not half, no, nor a quarter as much’ as they obviously wanted to, after which they thanked her politely and refused the 6d she tried to give them. They were followed by a cabman with a drunken passenger. By 3.30 the cattle-drovers began to arrive, filling the space with their dogs, ‘which makes it uncomfortable’, said the stall-keeper, but he knew that if he remonstrated they would upend his trestle-boards and destroy his livelihood: ‘I’m thankful I only have their company two mornings in the week.’ From then it was more prostitutes until around five, when the daily workers arrived. From this the stallholder earned around £30 a year for an eight- or nine-hour workday, six days a week, fifty-two weeks of the year: about average for a street seller.