The Victorian City Read online

  In the late 1820s and early 1830s, riots became less random outbreaks of unfocused rage and more, as with the weavers, a desire to express a political and social point. Their being linked with these earlier outbreaks, however, permitted the perception that all political gatherings of the working classes were potential riots. Even so, the formation of Robert Peel’s Metropolitan Police force in 1829 improved matters: no longer were armed soldiers brought out at the first intimation of danger. In November 1830, a political rally was held in Blackfriars Road. After the speeches, the crowd raised a flag with ‘Reform’ painted on it. To the cry of ‘Now for the West End!’ a thousand men, shouting ‘Reform’, ‘Down with the police’, ‘No Peel’ and ‘No Wellington’, crossed Blackfriars Bridge and surged down Fleet Street and the Strand, heading for Parliament. As they reached Downing Street, the New Police caught up with the action, forming a line at the end of King Street, to prevent the men reaching the Houses of Parliament. The novelty lay in the fact that this force, armed only with truncheons, could disperse crowds without resorting to killing.

  Four months later, public expressions of anger were refocused. As cholera ravaged the city, the government nominated 21 March 1831 as a national Day of Fasting and Humiliation, when prayers would be offered and a twenty-four-hour fast observed as a sign of submission to divine will, in the hope that this would lift the epidemic. The Political Union of the Working Classes, representing the economic group that was bearing the brunt of the epidemic, issued a counter-proclamation, announcing ‘their intention to distinguish that day by the distribution of bread and meat amongst the lower orders’: as they so sharply pointed out, fasting was something they did all too routinely. By 11 a.m., nearly 15,000 workers, ‘many of whom appeared to be in the greatest possible distress’, had gathered in Finsbury Square, and three hours later the number had grown to 25,000. The plan had been to ‘perambulate in procession into different parts of the metropolis’, but the very fact of the gathering was considered dangerous, and the police were out in force, determined to clear the square and prevent the march, even though there had been few signs of incipient trouble.

  This political response to the epidemic was unusual. Far more common were outbursts, even violent ones, aimed at medical personnel, for the epidemic had produced a strong link in the public mind between doctors and what were known as resurrection men. Over the previous decades, medical schools had expanded, while the supply of cadavers for study remained finite. Only the corpses of executed criminals were legally available for dissection, leaving most medical schools unable to teach anatomy or surgery. Resurrection men had therefore prospered by digging up freshly buried bodies to sell to the schools. In the first decade of the century, Joseph Naples, an ex-gravedigger and a member of a south London gang of resurrectionists, most unusually kept a diary, which showed how profitable the trade was. On 14 January 1812, he wrote: ‘went to St Luke’s [church graveyard and disinterred] 2 adults...1 large and 1 small, took them to barthow [St Bartholomew’s Hospital]. Came home and went to St Thomas’ [Hospital], afterwards went to the other end of town for orders.’ The gang then met ‘at the Hartichoak’ pub, to divide their takings: £8 4s 7½d to each gang member, or about four months’ income for a street seller. In 1831, two men who were tried for the murder of an Italian street boy admitted that they had sold more than 500 bodies to the London hospitals in the previous decade.

  The 1832 Anatomy Act was passed in order to shut down this thriving business. Now medical schools were entitled to claim for dissection any bodies that were to be buried at the parish expense – in effect, the bodies of paupers, or the working poor whose families could not afford a funeral. By this Act, many thought, anatomization had been transformed from being a punishment for capital crime into being a punishment for poverty. When the first wave of cholera arrived simultaneously with the change in the law, some believed that this new disease was a pretext to lure the unwary poor to hospital, where they would be killed as a precursor to being anatomized. In June 1832, a hospital porter was attacked in Oxford Street as he carried a man dying of cholera to hospital; police were needed to disperse the crowd. On the same day, a woman was assaulted when bringing a patient to the Lime Street cholera hospital, the infuriated mob baying ‘Burker!’ at her.144 Later a surgeon making a house call in Vauxhall was attacked; when the parish surgeon arrived after the patient’s death, he found that the body had been hidden, for fear it would be taken for anatomization. Those gathered outside whispered that he and his colleagues ‘merely wanted to get the poor into their clutches to burke them’, and once more the police were called. Sala remembered as a child watching a similar incident from his nursery window in North Audley Street. One of the Earl of Clarendon’s servants had died of cholera and ‘a great crowd’ had gathered before the earl’s door, all ‘violent and clamorous...My nurse says that they will have to send for the “padroll” with “cutlashes”.’145

  These small, irregular outbreaks were dealt with as isolated episodes, just as earlier street violence had been, but political protest continued to alarm the authorities. In April 1848, the Chartist Convention organized a mass meeting on Kennington Common, where the workers were to congregate before marching on Parliament to present a petition of nearly 2 million signatures from supporters of political reform. Even children were aware of the middle-class fear of popular disorder. Sophia Beale, aged about seven, recorded two days before the meeting: ‘There is to be a great meeting of Chartists the day after tomorrow on Kenington Common. every one is very excited and peple are being made into speshal cunstabels...not papa because he is a docter and...if any one is shot he will have to bind them up. Papa is going to take me to see the cannons tomorrow so good bye.’ The next day, ‘We went to the Common this morning but there was nothing to see. Papa talked to a polliceman and he said there were some big guns in some of the back yards and garden so we came home to tea and ever body thinks they will fight tomorrow out there on the Common.’ In the event, while 100,000 ‘speshal cunstabels’ were sworn in to prevent the protestors crossing the river, the 150,000 or so who gathered held a peaceful meeting on the Common, with the leadership taking the petition separately after the event.

  It is noticeable in retrospect that, by the late 1840s and 1850s, what were termed ‘riots’ were generally nothing of the kind and were more likely merely large crowds with something on their minds. The earlier violence had to a great extent vanished. The Hyde Park riots over the ultra-Sabbatarian legislation were a prime example, only seven years after the Great Chartist meeting. In 1855, Lord Robert Grosvenor and others attempted to push a bill through the House of Commons to ban the Sunday selling of refreshments in places of amusement. This was widely seen as one law for the rich (whose servants worked on Sundays and whose clubs were open on Sundays) and another for the poor (whose single day of leisure was to be curbed). A demonstration was organized in Hyde Park. On the first Sunday the protestors stood along Rotten Row, waiting for the carriages of the fashionable and greeting them with ‘loud hissing and groaning, accompanied by deafening cries of “Go to church!” “Why do you allow your servants to work on Sunday?” “Shame on you!” “Down with the Sabbatarians!”’ One woman stood up in her carriage, holding her prayer book aloft to indicate her church-going, but its sole effect was to make the protestors shout, ‘Walk, walk, and let your horses rest, and your coachman go to church!’ Several people were forced out of their carriages and had to walk home, but there was nothing worse. As with Sophia Beale and her father on Kennington Common, many perfectly respectable middle-class people found the mass protest a matter of almost touristic interest. Leonard Wyon noted in his journal that ‘a disturbance was expected...[so] May [his wife] and I walked to Hyde Park in the evening, but everything seemed quite quiet.’ The Wyons were an intensely respectable pair – they were sober, industrious, went to church twice every Sunday and then discussed the sermons afterwards. Furthermore, May was prone to panic attacks. Nonetheless they visited Hyde Park s
pecifically to see a ‘disturbance’.

  Even The Times, that establishment paper, was with the workers, calling the proposed law ‘unequal and onesided’ and claiming that it ‘interfered with the comforts and recreations of the working classes’ while leaving the wealthy to do as they liked. The single episode of violence came the following week, when crowds once more assembled to hoot and jeer. Immediately they did so, ‘the police rushed out from their ambuscades, and made unsparing use of their truncheons on every persons within their reach’. Even when the protestors scattered, the police continued to chase them, driving them into the Serpentine and indiscriminately sweeping up many unrelated passers-by out for their Sunday walks. This description of a police-sanctioned assault was unusual only in that it was a newspaper report, not fiction. Dickens had for some time expressed his ambivalence about unruly mobs and authority’s response. In the late 1830s, in Nicholas Nickleby, he portrayed a meeting in the City, where ‘the sterner spirits’ barracked the speaker, stamping on the floor and shouting. A policeman ‘immediately began to drag forth...all the quiet people...at the same time dealing out various smart and tingling blows with their truncheons, after the manner of that ingenious actor, Mr Punch: whose brilliant example, both in the fashion of his weapons and their use, this branch of the executive occasionally follows’.

  This was only a decade after the old system of parish watchmen – which Dickens had grown up with – had been replaced by the police. Dickens soon became their ardent supporter, but his own background on the fringes of the lower middle classes meant that he always had a corner, sometimes quite a large corner, of distrust for petty authority. This was not unreasonable. The pre-1829 system had been notably corrupt. The notebook owned by the (also notably corrupt) magistrate Sir John Silvester contained a list of receivers of stolen goods. Several entries say a receiver ‘is or lately was’ an officer, while a ‘well known Fence’ is listed as having lived for fifteen years as the tenant of a ‘Sheriffs Officer’. A second list suggests that receivers were a fact of life across the city and across social classes, including as it does goldsmiths, weavers, the widow of a Newgate turnkey and the ‘watchman [at] the corner of Cow Lane’. A separate page, which may (or may not) be a continuation of that list, includes a law stationer, two attorneys, a lieutenant in the East India Company, his servant, a lottery-office keeper, ‘Smith [who] belongs to Chancery [court or bar]’, a baronet, and ‘Sir Brook Boothby memb. for Co. Stafford’.

  In 1837–9, Dickens immortalized his distrust of officialdom in Oliver Twist, with his depiction of Fang, the magistrate, who was easily recognized by contemporaries as a portrait of Allan Stewart Laing, a Hatton Garden police magistrate notorious both for the savagery of his sentencing and for his intemperate outbursts. In the novel Fang has one street beggar arrested ‘for playing the flute’, just as Laing once had a muffin man arrested for ringing his bell. In 1838, a doctor accidentally bumped into Laing in the street and the magistrate assaulted him before having him arrested. Arresting doctors was a very different matter from arresting muffin men, so Laing’s services were dispensed with. Two decades on, Fang had another real-life double, when in the Sabbatarian riots an ecclesiastical agent was caught up in the arrests. When he came up before the magistrate he was refused a hearing, as was his character witness, a barrister and the editor of the Civil Service Gazette.

  For there was a curious attitude to petty crime. It was generally believed in middle-class society that crime was a constant, bubbling under, always waiting to erupt; at the same time, the pettiness of petty crime was visible to all, as was the fact that most thefts were undertaken purely for survival. A Select Committee on the Police heard testimony in 1816 that there were ‘above two hundred regular flash-houses in the metropolis’ – places where stolen goods were received and where the residents divided ‘the plunder of the day’, before ‘sally[ing] forth from these houses to rob in the streets’. Yet the detail of the same report suggests nothing of the sort. One of these master criminals was a coster-woman who sold goods from a basket on the street, paying children a penny or two for stolen handkerchiefs, which she then pawned to buy stock for her basket. Another was a woman near Wigmore Street who ‘buys chiefly Brushes, Pails, Coal-skuttles [sic], &c., which little Boys sneak from Gentlemen’s Houses, down the areas and at the doors’.

  Similarly, dog theft was spoken of as a highly lucrative criminal industry. In the late 1810s, one memoirist said that men ‘leading poodles fantastically trimmed’ haunted the Queen’s Head pub in Chiswell Street (as Beech Street this is now the fluorescent-lit tunnel beside the Barbican Centre). The pub was said to be the nexus of a nationwide dog-theft underworld, where dogs that had been stolen in the countryside were brought to be sold, while dogs stolen in London were shipped from there to the country, so that no stolen dog was ever again seen near its home. This may have been the case, but if Jane Carlyle’s experiences were anything to go by, things had changed radically in the intervening decades. Jane and Thomas Carlyle lived in Chelsea, by the river, and Jane’s dog Nero was stolen twice in 1851: ‘mercifully it was near home that he was twitched up...and the lads who are all in my pay for odd jobs – rushed out to look for him and stopt the man who had him till I came up and put my thumb firmly inside his collar...he said [he] had found the dog...and...I would surely “give him a trifle for his trouble”!! and I was cowardly enough to give him twopence to rid Nero and myself of his dangerous proximity.’ Even after this, her husband believed that ‘There is a large Fraternity...who live by stealing Dogs, chiefly women’s, and selling them back at a ransom. I have heard some big sum, £10,000 I think, mentioned as their annual income from this fine act.’ A lot of dogs, surely, would have to be ‘twitched up’ at 2d per dog to reach an income of £10,000.

  Low-level crime remained a reality for much of the first half of the century, with the same causes, and the same perpetrators – the hungry poor, often children.146 Nightly in Covent Garden, as Little Dorritt crossed the piazza, she saw ‘the miserable children in rags ... [who] like young rats, slunk and hid, fed on offal [refuse, or market waste], huddled together for warmth, and were hunted about’. These youngsters were little different from the sixteen-year-old prostitute interviewed by Mayhew, who had been on her own from the age of ten and had stolen ‘cats’ and ‘kittens’ – the pint and half-pint pots that were left on house-railings for the pubs – to survive. In another interview a pickpocket told Mayhew how well he had done in a crowd at a double execution: he took, he said, a purse with 2s in it, and two handkerchiefs; at a fire he had stolen handkerchiefs worth 2s 3d and three pairs of gloves, worth 4d. Fires and executions were known to be particularly good spots for thieving, although this apparently noteworthy haul of, at most, a few shillings’ worth of goods in a prime location puts into perspective the type of journalism that assured its readers that petty thieves were making over £100 a year, the wages of a well-employed clerk. John Silvester’s notebooks instead make clear how little was earned from thieving, at least early in the century: Mr Baker, of One Tun Court, off the Strand, ‘Keeps a Drag [a wheel-less cart] & lets it out to Thieves to convey Stolen Property’; Mr Garratt of Moor Street, Soho Square, rented out housebreaking tools; while Mr Zachariah Philips in White Hart Yard, Drury Lane, ‘Lends out Pistols ... by the Night at so much for their use’. There were criminals who earned so little they could not afford their own tools of their trades.

  The police were not, however, misled by media sensationalism, concentrating doggedly on routine policing. One tourist heard a policeman say to a boy in the street: ‘My lad, you have been here five minutes, looking at those goods, it is time you were off.’ As Dickens went out on the beat with them, he saw how they spent much of their time ‘push[ing] at doors; to try fastenings; to be suspicious of bundles’ – the daily minutiae of low-level pilfering. River crime, which sounded so exciting, was equally trifling. The Thames River Police had ninety-eight men patrolling from Battersea to Barking Creek as ‘a police of p
revention’, against tier-rangers, who crept onto boats at night and ‘groped for the skippers’ inexpressibles’ [trousers], taking their ‘watch, money, braces, boots and all’; lumpers, or unskilled labourers, who unloaded the ships and smuggled ashore small items, usually tobacco, for the crews; dredgermen, employed to unload barges, who threw stolen items overboard, dredging them up later while pretending to search for dropped bits of coal. These were the major thefts; the minor ones were of stolen ‘copper nails, sheathing, hardwood, &c.’, carried away by workmen to sell to marine-store dealers.

  Punishment for these crimes was visible in the street too. The centre of London itself, the point that marked the separation of the City and the West End, was Temple Bar. By the nineteenth century this was the one surviving gate marking the old City boundaries, the other seven – Aldgate, Aldersgate, Bishopsgate, Cripplegate, Ludgate, Moorgate and Newgate – having been demolished long before. It had also been the final destination for the heads of traitors, impaled on spikes and left to rot in full sight of the populace as a warning. Those who had been found guilty of involvement in the Jacobite uprising of 1745 were the last to be impaled, remnants of their heads surviving for decades, well within living memory at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Dickens, in A Tale of Two Cities, called the display one of ‘an insensate brutality and ferocity’. These were, he wrote bitterly, ‘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’.

  While heads were no longer displayed for public amusement and edification, other forms of state-endorsed violence survived the arrival of the new century and were visible on the streets. One was the public pillorying of criminals. The pillory was an upright pole raised on a platform, having a cross-piece with holes in it for the victim’s arms and head. ‘The board moved on a pivot, and...the poor terrified delinquent...was required to perambulate round and round.’ Today the perception of the pillory is that it was punishment by public humiliation. In fact, it was a punishment of both mental degradation and acute physical danger.