The Victorian City Read online

  For, a mere dozen years after Waterloo Bridge opened, it had become a byword for suicides. A political essay as early as 1829 used the bridge as an obvious synonym for suicide without feeling the need for any explanation: ‘The man who loves his country with a sincere affection, unwilling to witness the decline of her prosperity and glory, already hesitates only between pistols and prussic acid, Waterloo-bridge and a running noose.’ In a short story in the late 1830s, Dickens had a drunkard end his life on the bridge. By then, however, it was generally women abandoned by their lovers who were said to kill themselves there: the bridge was known as ‘the English “Bridge of Sighs”...“Lover’s Leap”, the “Arch of Suicide”...a favourite spot for love assignations; and a still more favourite spot for the worn and the weary, who long to cast off the load of existence...To many a poor girl the assignation over one arch...is but a prelude to a fatal leap from another.’

  Thomas Hood added a link to prostitution in his poem, ‘The Bridge of Sighs’ (1844), basing his story on a real incident, when Mary Furley, an impoverished seamstress faced with the workhouse, threw herself into the Regent’s Canal, taking one of her two small children with her. Hood’s poem altered the location to Waterloo and removed all the identifying details. Much later, Dickens described the death of a woman in the Regent’s Canal that was probably much closer to reality. Walking at dusk through Regent’s Park ‘one day in the hard winter of 1861’, he saw a cab driver speaking to the park keeper with ‘great agitation’, before rushing off, followed by the novelist. ‘When I came to the right-hand Canal Bridge, near the cross-path to Chalk Farm, the Hansom was stationary, the horse was smoking hot’, and, lying ‘on the towing-path with her face turned up towards us, [was] a woman, dead a day or two, and under thirty, as I guessed, poorly dressed in black. The feet were lightly crossed at the ankles, and the dark hair, all pushed back from the face, as though that had been the last action of her desperate hands, streamed over the ground.’

  That was journalism. In fiction it was the river rather than the canal that called to Dickens in his depictions of desperate prostitutes. In Oliver Twist, Nancy gestures to the Thames: ‘How many times do you read of such as me who spring into the tide...It may be years hence, or it may be only months, but I shall come to that at last.’ (Although compared to the end Dickens gave her, bludgeoned to death by Sikes, drowning might have been more merciful.) In David Copperfield, Martha, who had grown up in the small town of Great Yarmouth, flees to London to hide her shame after she ‘falls’. David comes across her at Blackfriars Bridge and follows her along the river, past Waterloo Bridge, past Westminster Abbey, to Millbank – that is, along the streets frequented by prostitutes, through the slum around Westminster, and then back to the river, where she cries: ‘I know I belong to it. I know that it’s the natural company of such as I am!’ These prostitutes flit across London’s bridges like the ghosts they would soon become. In Little Dorrit, begun five years later, in 1855, Little Dorrit and Maggie, her simple-minded companion, walk across London Bridge at night, where they meet a prostitute walking east, in the direction of Granby Street and Waterloo Road. Maggie asks her, ‘What are you doing with yourself?’ and the answer is stark: ‘Killing myself.’ This may be metaphorical, a conventional view of the natural destination of one who leads her life, or it may be literal. We don’t know, as she vanishes into the morning mist.

  Hood’s poem, ‘The Bridge of Sighs’, fixed Waterloo Bridge in the public mind as the place where women, especially prostitutes, committed suicide. This illustration by Gustave Doré reinforced the location, with its view of St Paul’s looming in the background.

  Other locations for suicide were equally symbolic. A particular magnet for the desperate was the Monument to the Great Fire of London, a stone column 202 feet high topped by an urn in the shape of flames, standing 202 feet from the spot where the fire that devastated the City in 1666 first broke out. In low-rise, nineteenth-century London, the Monument was far more visible than it is today and was one of the most important sights of the City; many visitors climbed its 300-plus stairs for the view of London spreading beneath them. Yet negative connotations were ever-present. In Barnaby Rudge, set in the 1780s, a young man is sent off for a day in London with 6d to spend on ‘diversions’, and his father recommends passing the entire day at the top of the Monument: ‘There’s no temptation there, sir – no drink – no young women – no bad characters.’ By the time Dickens wrote this, in 1841, the main temptation that people associated with the Monument was jumping over the edge, and this father, who is not a loving one, may be telling his son that he might kill himself for all he cared.

  Even so, few chose it for this purpose. In 1788, a baker jumped off, followed in 1810 by a diamond merchant and, shortly afterwards, another baker. In 1839, a fifteen-year-old boy, thought to have lost his job, leapt from the platform, as did a baker’s daughter. As a result, a guard was stationed at the top, but he failed to prevent Jane Cooper, a servant, throwing herself over. After her death a cage was placed around the platform, to prevent any others from following suit. Six people had plunged to their deaths here in forty-four years, four of whom were men, but it was still said that suicide by women crossed in love was ‘a tradition of the Monument’.

  But it was the river, always the river, to which Dickens returned. In 1860, his journalistic narrator stood at the riverside at Wapping, ‘looking down at some dark locks in some dirty water’, said to be the local ‘Bridge of Sighs’. He comments to an ‘apparition’ that materializes beside him, ‘A common place for suicide,’ and the chilling answer is: ‘Sue...And Poll. Likewise Emily. And Nancy. And Jane...Ketches off their bonnets or shorls, takes a run, and headers down here, they doos. Always a headerin’ down here, they is. Like one o’clock.’ The journalist conscientiously asks, ‘And at about that hour of the morning, I suppose?’ The apparition rejects this: ‘They an’t partickler. Two ’ull do for them. Three. All times o’ night.’ The poor, the hungry, the desperate: none was particular, just looking for an end.

  At the beginning of the century, in 1801, the essayist Charles Lamb refused an invitation to the Lake District, unable to bear leaving behind ‘all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden, the very women of the Town, the Watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles, – life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night, the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street, the crowds, the very dirt & mud, the Sun shining upon houses and pavements, the print shops, the old book stalls...coffee houses, steams of soup from kitchens, the pantomimes, London itself a pantomime and a masquerade, – all these things work themselves into my mind and feed me...I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much Life.’ Yet many others saw not life but death in what Arthur Clennam in Little Dorrit described as London’s ‘streets, streets, streets’. In Henry Wallis’s The Death of Chatterton (1859), one of the most famous paintings of the nineteenth century, the main area of the picture is given to the image of the young poet who has committed suicide. Behind him, through the window, can be seen the dome of St Paul’s, the symbol of the indifferent, anonymous city that has crushed him, and continues on, uncaring. This is what Dickens meant when he wrote, ‘with how little notice, good, bad, or indifferent, a man may live and die in London...his existence...[is] a matter of interest to no one save himself; he cannot be said to be forgotten when he dies, for no one remembered him when he was alive.’

  Yet in the same year that Dickens stood by that Wapping bridge, looking down into the water where so many women had met their end, he also created a fictional barrister who had chambers in Gray’s Inn Square, precisely where the young Dickens himself had begun his writing life. The barrister, a dried-up man of fifty-five, fretted: ‘What is a man to do? London is so small!...Then, the monotony of all the streets, streets, streets – and of all the roads, roads, roads – and the dust, dust, dust!’ He gives his watch to a man who has chambers near by, asking him to look after it while he is out of town. And that is the la
st anyone sees of him until, after ‘his letter-box became choked’, the porter enters his rooms to find that he had hanged himself. Leaving London and leaving life were one and the same.

  This was the refrain of Dickens’ novels and journalism for thirty years. It was only with his very last work that there is any indication of a different view, perhaps a hint of how worn-out this dynamo of a man had become. In his twenties, Dickens had found happiness – as well as his career, and fame, and fortune – in the streets. By the mid-1860s, when Dickens was in his fifties, in Our Mutual Friend the ‘great black river’ is now seen to be ‘stretching away to the great ocean, Death’; in the penultimate chapter of Edwin Drood, left on his desk unfinished at his demise in 1870, it comes even closer. Mr Tartar takes pretty Rosa Bud for a day out on the Thames: ‘The tide bore them on in the gayest and most sparkling manner, until they stopped to dine in some everlastingly green garden.’ Then, ‘all too soon’, they must head back, and once more ‘the great black city cast its shadow on the waters, and its dark bridges spanned them as death spans life’. The river had been at the heart of London and the heart of Dickens’ work. As early as Oliver Twist his writing had been compared to ‘The surface of the stream [that] seems bright, and cheerfully bubbling as it rushes on – but in its windings you come ever and anon upon some place of death’. In his final novel, only the river represents life, while London – that never-equalled city, the city that was the motivating force behind one of the greatest novelists of all time – is shadowy and dark with death.

  It is not possible, however, to leave Dickens there. He himself would not have done so voluntarily. Instead, let us leave him with Arthur Clennam and Little Dorrit, when they marry in the old church beside the Marshalsea, the scene of the Dickens family’s terrible humiliation. After the ceremony the couple stand together on the church steps, looking down at the busy street below them. Then: ‘They went quietly down in to the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward, and the vain, fretted, and chafed, and made their usual uproar.’

  DICKENS’ PUBLICATIONS

  Publication date

  Sketches by Boz

  Newspaper sketches: November 1837–June 1839; in book form, 1836–7; in 1 vol., 1839

  Pickwick Papers

  Serial: April 1836–November 1837; book, 1837

  Oliver Twist

  Serial: February 1837–April 1839; book, 1838

  Nicholas Nickleby

  Serial: April 1838–October 1839; book, 1839

  Old Curiosity Shop

  Serial: April 1840–November 1841; book, 1841

  Barnaby Rudge

  Serial: February 1841–November 1841; book, 1841

  American Notes

  Book: 1842

  A Christmas Carol

  Book: December 1843

  Martin Chuzzlewit

  Serial: January 1843–July 1844; book, 1844

  The Chimes

  Book: December 1844

  The Cricket on the Hearth

  Book: December 1845

  Dombey and Son

  Serial: October 1846–April 1848; book, 1848

  The Battle of Life

  Book: December 1846

  The Haunted Man

  Book: December

  David Copperfield

  Serial: May 1849–November 1850; book, 1850

  Bleak House

  Serial: March 1852–September 1853; book, 1853

  Hard Times

  Serial: April–August 1854; book, 1854

  Little Dorrit

  Serial: December 1855–June 1857; book, 1857

  A Tale of Two Cities

  Serial: April 1859–November 1859; book, 1859

  Great Expectations

  Serial: December 1860–August 1861; book, 1861

  Our Mutual Friend

  Serial: May 1864–November 1865; book, 1865

  Edwin Drood

  Serial: April 1870–September 1870

  [left incomplete]

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  ‘merely life’: Dickens, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, ed. Mark Wormald (first published 1836–7; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1999), p. 752; early citations of use of the term ‘Dickensian’: Glasgow Herald, 20 December 1859, Hampshire Advertiser, 31 December 1870, Liverpool Mercury, 23 November 1888.

  ‘on Dickens himself’: ‘packed, like game’: Dickens, ‘Dullborough Town’, in All the Year Round, 30 June 1860, The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’ Journalism, vol. 4, The Uncommercial Traveller and Other Papers, ed. Michael Slater and John Drew (London, J. M. Dent, 2000), p. 140; John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, 3 vols (London, Chapman and Hall, 1872–4), vol. 1, p. 16; rent: Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (London, Vintage, 1999), p. 61.

  ‘and kitchen ranges’: Dickens, David Copperfield, ed. Jeremy Tambling (first published 1849–50; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1996), p. 170.

  ‘labouring hind’: David Copperfield, p. 150; the chronology for Dickens’ time in the blacking factory is uncertain. Dickens’ friend and biographer John Forster says Dickens started work there around December 1823, while other writers believe that it was more likely to be January or February 1824. The date he left is equally uncertain, with one scholar, Michael Allen, Charles Dickens and the Blacking Factory (St Leonards, Oxford-Stockley Publications, 2011), pp. 92–4, suggesting it was as much as a year later. Most biographers think six months is more likely. It was certainly early 1825 before the boy returned to school. In his single known comment on the episode, Dickens himself claimed not to be able to remember; ‘labouring hind’: my thanks to Leslie Katz, Suzanne Daly, Susan Dean, Charles Hatten and Karla Waters for their help in tracking down the use of this phrase in the nineteenth century.

  ‘far he had come’: Forster, Life, vol. 1, pp. 47–8.

  ‘shortened it to Boz’: ‘I walked down’, Forster, Life, vol. 1, p. 76.

  ‘find himself famous’: sales figures for Pickwick are variously cited, ranging from 400–500 copies at the start, to 40,000–50,000 or even 60,000 by the end; I have followed the middle course of Michael Slater, Charles Dickens (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2009), p. 215. For the chronology of Dickens’ childhood and adolescence in the previous paragraphs, I have followed Michael Allen, Charles Dickens’ Childhood (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1988), passim, and Duane DeVries, Dickens’s Apprentice Years: The Making of a Novelist (Hassocks, Sussex, Harvester Press, 1976), passim.

  ‘Vauxhall-bridge-road’: ‘Gone Astray’, in Household Words, 13 August 1853, The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’ Journalism, vol. 3: ‘Gone Astray’ and Other Papers, ed. Michael Slater (London, J. M. Dent, 1998), pp. 155–65; Sala, cited in Forster, Life, vol. 3, p. 476; footnote on Dickens’ walking pace: George Dolby, Charles Dickens as I Knew Him: The Story of the Reading Tours in Great Britain and America, 1866–1870 (London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1885), p. 255.

  ‘his final years’: all but one of these descriptions of Dickens were compiled by Frederic G. Kitton, Charles Dickens by Pen and Pencil, and A Supplement (London, Frank T. Sabin, 1890); Sala’s contribution appears on p. 93; the ‘whipper-snapper’ and the ‘pretty-boy’ are Thomas Trollope, p. 53; the light step and jaunty air, Arthur Locker, p. 173; the ‘man of sanguine complexion’ is from Derek Hudson, ed., Munby, Man of Two Worlds: The Life and Diaries of Arthur J. Munby, 1828–1910 (London, John Murray, 1972), p. 191.

  ‘in the daylight’: Forster, Life, vol. 2, p. 256; Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop, ed. Angus Easson (first published 1840–41; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985), p. 43.

  ‘accuracy of a cabman’: ‘Whenever we have an hour’: this was the original opening for ‘The Prisoner’s Van’, as printed in the newspaper Bell’s Life, 29 November 1835, but it was replaced when it was collected into Sketches by Boz. Cited in John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson, Dickens at Work (London, Methuen, 1957), p. 44; the solicitor’s clerk: Kitton, Charles Dickens, by Pen
and Pencil, pp. 130–31; ‘accuracy of a cabman’: Fraser’s Magazine, 21 (April 1840), p. 400.

  ‘may interest others’: ‘lounging one evening’: Dickens, ‘The Parlour Orator’, Sketches by Boz, ed. Dennis Walder (first published 1836–9; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1995), p. 272; ‘Suggest to him’: Dickens to W. H. Wills, 27 September 1851, The Letters of Charles Dickens: The Pilgrim Edition, ed. Madeline House, Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford, Clarendon, 1965– ), vol. 6, p. 497; ‘The Uncommercial Traveller: His General Line of Business’, All the Year Round, 28 January 1860, Dickens’ Journalism, vol. 4, p. 28.

  ‘on the London streets’: the charity children appear in Illustrated London News (hereafter cited as ILN), 28 May 1842, pp. 44–5; Our Mutual Friend, originals in Mayhew, noted in Harland S. Nelson, ‘Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend and Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 20: 3 (December 1965), pp. 207–22; Harvey Peter Sucksmith, ‘Dickens and Mayhew: A Further Note’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 24: 3 (December 1969), pp. 345–9, and Richard J. Dunn, ‘Dickens and Mayhew Once More’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 25: 3 (December 1970), pp. 348–53; the woman in white: Dickens, ‘Where We Stopped Growing’, Household Words, 1 January 1853, Dickens’ Journalism, vol. 3, p. 111.