The Victorian City Read online

  ‘order, very like’: ‘their bread’: Hollingshead, Ragged London, p. 118; Westminster: Anthony S. Wohl, The Eternal Slum: Housing and Social Policy in Victorian London (New Brunswick, NJ, Transaction, 2002), p. 30; Church Lane: Roy Porter, London: A Social History (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1994), p. 268; 1838–56 figures: White, London in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 32–4; ‘Life and Death in St Giles’s’, in Household Words, 18, 13 November 1858, pp. 524–8; Bleak House, pp. 319–20; footnote: an earlier mention of ‘gonoph’ that Dickens may have seen occurs in W. A. Miles, Poverty, Mendicity and Crime, Report, 1839, p. 168: ‘Cocum gonnofs flash by night the cooters in the boozing kens, and send their lushy shicksters out to bring the ruin in’, cited in Jonathon Green, Green’s Dictionary of Slang (London, Chambers, 2010); New Oxford Street: Dickens, ‘On Duty with Inspector Field’, in Dickens’ Journalism, vol. 2, p. 363; Bleak House, p. 275.

  ‘to all parties’: Our Mutual Friend, p. 143.

  ‘smell of a graveyard’: Sir Peter Laurie: Simon Joyce, Capital Offenses: Geographies of Class and Crime in Victorian London (Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2003), p. 102; Dickens, Oliver Twist, pp. 416–17; Henry Mayhew, ‘Home is Home, be it never so Homely’, in [Lord Shrewsbury], Meliora: or, Better Times to Come (1852), pp. 276–7.

  ‘the sixteenth century’: extent of St Giles: Lynn Hollen Lees, Exiles of Erin: Irish Migrants in Victorian London (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1979), p. 84.

  ‘drunkards and thieves’: ‘Seven Dials’, Sketches by Boz, pp. 94–5; Flora Tristan, Flora Tristan’s London Journal: A Survey of London Life in the 1830s, trans. Dennis Palmer and Giselle Pincetl (London, George Prior, 1980), p. 135.

  ‘to journalists’: Jennings’ Buildings: ‘Jennings’ Buildings and the Royal Borough: The Construction of the Underclass in Mid-Victorian England’, in David Feldman and Gareth Stedman-Jones (eds), Metropolis: London Histories and Representations since 1800 (London, Routledge, 1989), pp. 11–39.

  ‘enough to work’: Bemerton Street: George Godwin, Another Blow for Life (London, Wm H. Allen, 1864), pp. 36–7; Nichol Street: ibid., pp. 12–13; Covent Garden porter: ibid., p. 22.

  ‘obviously to mind’: Oliver Twist, p. 69; cleaning the privy: James Greenwood, Wilds of London, p. 75; letter to The Times: The Times, 5 July 1849, p. 5, follow-up, 9 July, p. 3; footnote: the contemporary historian is James Winter, London’s Teeming Streets, pp. 130–31.

  ‘about to begin’: ILN, 13 and 27 February 1847, pp. 103, 144.

  ‘there’s nowhere else’: House of Commons Select Committee, Royal Commission on Metropolis Railway Termini, 1846, cited in Kellett, Impact of the Railways on Victorian Cities, p. 36; Farringdon Street alley: Greenwood, Wilds of London, p. 72.

  ‘to walk down’: clearance for Royal Courts of Justice: ILN, 18 August 1866, p. 155, and 15 December 1866, p. 575–7.

  ‘very worst conditions’: this paragraph and the next: starvation, private charity and Poor Law statistics: Hollingshead, Ragged London, pp. 3–4, and Mayhew and Binny, The Criminal Prisons, p. 44.

  ‘one for life’: Ragged School: Garwood, Million Peopled City, p. 61; dormitory: Dickens, ‘A Sleep to Startle Us’, in Household Words, 15 March 1852, in Dickens’ Journalism, vol. 3, pp. 54–6; ‘a large crowd’: Mayhew and Binny, The Criminal Prisons, p. 31.

  ‘casual hiring stands’: Mayhew and Binny, The Criminal Prisons, p. 44; Greenwood: ‘A Night in a Workhouse’, reprinted in pamphlet form from the Pall Mall Gazette (first published 1866; London, F. Bowering [n.d.]), passim. Greenwood based his pamphlet on trips he and another man made to the workhouse, but Greenwood’s is the narrative voice.

  ‘and were fed’: Some of the shocked response to Greenwood’s depiction appeared the next day: Frederick Greenwood, ‘Casual Wards’, Pall Mall Gazette, 16 January 1866, p. 1. I am grateful to Matthew Rubery for this reference, and to Patrick Leary and Clare Clarke for other information.

  ‘around us every day’: influence on Our Mutual Friend: Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 35; inquests: ILN, 19 December 1846, pp. 390–91, among many; incidence of rickets: Stephen Halliday, The Great Filth: The War Against Disease in Victorian England (Stroud, Sutton, 2007), p. 43; Ragged School deaths: ‘A Sleep to Startle Us’, in Dickens’ Journalism, vol. 3, p. 56; Bleak House, p. 705.

  8. THE WATERS OF DEATH

  ‘on the river’: Carter, Memoirs of a Working Man, pp. 125, 128.

  ‘Muswell Hill’: I am grateful to Ravi Mirchandani and Frank Wynne, who helped me come up with this well of place names.

  ‘inlet at Blackfriars’: I owe much of my description of the underground rivers in this and the next two paragraphs to N. J. Barton, The Lost Rivers of London (London, Phoenix House, 1962), pp. 26–7, 30ff., 37ff., and to Halliday, Great Stink, pp. 26–7.

  ‘Westminster Abbey’: the Serpentine: Edward John Tilt, The Serpentine ‘as it is’ and ‘as it ought to be’ ... (London, John Churchill, 1848), pp. 4–8.

  ‘new phenomenon’: outline of creation of fogs: Dale H. Porter, The Thames Embankment: Environment, Technology, and Society in Victorian England (Akron, OH, University of Akron Press, 1998), p. 57, and Peter Brimblecombe, The Big Smoke: A History of Air Pollution in London Since Medieval Times (London, Methuen, 1987), pp. 109ff.

  ‘as usual’: Benjamin Robert Haydon, Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon ... from his Autobiography and Journals ..., ed. Tom Taylor, 3 vols (New York, Harper and Bros, 1853), vol. 1, p. 52; Byron, Don Juan, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (first published 1823–4, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1958), Canto 10, v. 82; Wheaton, Journal of a Residence, p. 117.

  ‘London particular’: A Christmas Carol, pp. 47, 52; Bleak House, pp. 75–6.

  ‘of the sun’: St Paul’s: Wheaton, Journal of a Residence, pp. 40–1; Bleak House, p. 49.

  ‘any circumstances’: bottle-green: Hogg, London as it is, pp. 186–7; yellow: Thomas Miller, Picturesque Sketches of London, Past and Present (London, National Illustrated Library, [?1851]), p. 243; Our Mutual Friend, p. 417; Hawthorne, English Note-Books, vol. 2, p. 381; Italian friend: Dickens to Angela Burdett-Coutts, 13 December 1858, Letters, vol. 8, p. 718.

  ‘Cayenne pepper’: sulky gas: Miller, Picturesque Sketches, p. 243; effect on candles: Bleak House, p. 76; haggard light: Bleak House, p. 50; Edwin Drood, p. 136.

  ‘be run over’: ‘Implacable November’: Bleak House, p. 49; ‘You step gingerly’: Miller, Picturesque Sketches, pp. 244–7.

  ‘lasted four minutes’: Allen, History and Antiquities of London, vol. 5, pp. 60–61, vol. 4, p. 102.

  ‘was raw sewage’: Porter, London, p. 56, except for the 150 sewers: Anne Hardy, ‘Parish Pump to Private Pipes: London’s Water Supply in the Nineteenth Century’, in W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter, Living and Dying in London, Medical History, Supplement No. 11 (London, Wellcome Institute, 1991), p. 82.

  ‘sold as fertilizer’: Bill of Sewers: Halliday, Great Filth, p. 27; night-men’s operations: Mayhew, London Labour, vol. 2, pp. 450–51, 446.

  ‘nearly six inches’: West End: Michael Durey, The Return of the Plague: British Society and the Cholera, 1831–2 (Dublin, Gill and Macmillan, 1979), p. 56; St Giles: Halliday, Great Filth, pp. 133–4.

  ‘zincing establishment’: Hékékyan Bey, Journal, British Library Add MS 37,448; 10,000 cows: Hogg, London as it is, pp. 224–5; 1850 figures: [Richard H. Horne], ‘The Cow with the Iron Tail’, Household Words, 33, 9 November 1850, p. 147; St James’s cowsheds: Beames, Rookeries, pp. 166–7.

  ‘local hackney stands’: Millbank: Mayhew and Binny, The Criminal Prisons, p. 235; parks and Westminster Abbey: Wey, A Frenchman Sees London, p. 166; grazing rights: Schlesinger, Saunterings, p. 181; Old Bailey: A. Mayhew, Paved with Gold, p. 26; Carlyle: the references in his letters abound: among others, Carlyle to George Remington, 12 November 1852, Carlyle Letters, vol. 27, pp. 356–7; Nicholas Nickleby, pp. 227–8; David Copperfield, p. 324.

  ‘w
orth the expenditure’: Mayhew, ‘Home is Home’, pp. 278–80.

  ‘at all to take it’: Halliday, Great Filth, pp. 132–3, 202, 203, except for the farmers taking the soil for free: Mayhew, London Labour, vol. 2, p. 446.

  ‘per cent was reached’: 270,000 houses: John Liddle, On the Moral and Physical Evils Resulting from the Neglect of Sanitary Measures ... (London, Health of Towns Association Depot, 1847), pp. 16–18; Fulham and water supply by neighbourhood: Anne Hardy, ‘Parish Pump to Private Pipes’, pp. 79–82.

  ‘so little water’: Savile Row: Dickens, ‘Arcadian London’, All the Year Round, 29 September 1860, in Dickens’ Journalism, vol. 4, p. 188; thieving shopkeeper: [Henry Morley], ‘Death’s Doors’, Household Words, 9, 10 June 1854, pp. 398–402.

  ‘the waste back out’: East London Water Co., and frequency of standpipes: Gavin, Sanitary Ramblings, p. 88, 92.

  ‘get some water’: communal casks: Godwin, London Shadows, p. 62; Rose Street: ibid., p. 42; footnote on contemporary water consumption: by data360.org; water for fires: Morley, ‘Death’s Doors’.

  ‘cup of coffee’: baths for the prosperous: Leigh’s New Picture of London (1839 edn), p. 350, and Pardon, Routledge’s Popular Guide to London, p. 45; Jermyn Street Baths: Henry Mayhew, The Shops and Companies of London, and the Grades and Manufactories of Great Britain (London, The Second Printing and Publishing Co., 1865), p. 62.

  ‘hour of the night’: Great Expectations, p. 366.

  ‘of the Epidemic’: bathhouses: White, London in the Nineteenth Century, p. 457; Goulston Square Bath and free entry during epidemics: Beames, Rookeries, pp. 56–7; footnote: Halliday, Great Filth, p. 49.

  ‘of old age’: life expectancy: Andrew Sanders, Charles Dickens, Resurrectionist (London, Macmillan, 1982), p. 4; 1869 deaths: ILN, 30 January 1869, p. 128.

  ‘the killing ennui’: ILN, 13 February 1858, p. 159.

  ‘relation to it’: Sir John Simon: Halliday, Great Filth, p. 119.

  ‘health was established’: this and the next paragraph: Edwin Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, ed. M. W. Flinn (first published 1842; Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1965), passim, Anthony Brundage, England’s ‘Prussian Minister’: Edwin Chadwick and the Politics of Government Growth, 1832–1854 (University Park, PA, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988), passim, and Halliday, Great Filth, passim.

  ‘250 Acts’: Parliament: ILN, 21 October 1848, p. 247; Christchurch rector: Halliday, Great Filth, p. 28; governmental multiplicity: Francis Sheppard, London: A History (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 280.

  ‘typhus and typhoid’: epidemic figures: Charles Creighton, A History of Epidemics in Britain, vol. 2, From the Extinction of the Plague to the Present Time (first published 1891–4; London, Frank Cass, 1965), pp. 793–4; Tayler, Diary, pp. 19, 22; Prince Albert in footnote: Stanley Weintraub, ‘Albert [Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha]’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Sept 2010 [http:­//www.oxforddnb­.com.ezproxy.­londonlibrary.co.­uk/view/­article/274, accessed 7 May 2011].

  ‘cannot smell’: City sewers: Health of Towns Association, The Sanitary Condition, passim.

  ‘people died there’: Spitalfields Workhouse: Lovett, Life and Struggles, pp. 70–71; Minories death: Health of Towns Association, The Sanitary Condition, p. 12.

  ‘were worst affected’: the information in this paragraph: Creighton, A History of Epidemics, vol. 2, pp. 793–4, apart from the list of parishes, Durey, Return of the Plague, p. 28; footnote on mortality rate: Durey, Return of the Plague, p. 125; cholera south of the river: White, London in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 50–51.

  ‘his handkerchief’: Coldbath Field: George Laval Chesterton, Revelations of Prison Life (3rd edn, London, Hurst and Blackett, 1857), p. 116; the hulks: Mayhew and Binny, The Criminal Prisons, pp. 199–200.

  ‘sound of voices’: the description is of Golden Square, Soho: Hollingshead, My Lifetime, vol. 1, pp. 190–91.

  ‘first-floor windows’: ‘a solemn consideration’: ‘Night Walks’, in Dickens’ Journalism, vol. 4, p. 154; Oliver Twist, p. 43, and the information on Chatham: ibid., p. 493n.; Nicholas Nickleby, p. 898; Drury Lane graveyards: Geo. Alfd Walker, Gatherings from Graveyards, Particularly those of London ... (London, Longman, 1839), p. 162.

  ‘bones for fertilizer’: St Ann’s: Walker, The First of a Series ... Metropolitan Grave-Yards, pp. 14–16; sale of bones: ibid., pp. 16–17.

  ‘dead citizens’: St Clement Danes: Walker, Gatherings, pp. 158–9; ‘rot and mildew’: ‘City of London Churches’, in All the Year Round, 5 May 1860, in Dickens’ Journalism, vol. 4, p. 115.

  ‘or even weeks’: Bunhill Fields: Geo. Alfd Walker: The Second of a Series ... Metropolitan Grave-Yards (London, Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1847), p. 9; St Martin’s and Mr Foster: Walker, The First of a Series ... Metropolitan Grave-Yards, pp. 26–8.

  ‘a reeking fluid’: Portugal Street ground: Walker, The Second of a Series ... Metropolitan Grave-Yards, p. 6; A Christmas Carol, p. 124.

  ‘for the privilege’: protesting undertaker: Walker, The First of a Series ... Metropolitan Grave-Yards, p. 19; Enon chapel: Walker, Gatherings, pp. 154–5 and The Second of a Series ... Metropolitan Grave-Yards, pp. 15–16, and David L. Pike, Subterranean Cities: The World Beneath Paris and London, 1800–1945 (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2005), p. 221; advertisement for dancing: ‘Lord’ George Sanger, Seventy Years a Showman: My Life and Adventures ... (London, C. Arthur Pearson [1908]), p. 79; viewings: ILN, 27 November 1847, p. 343.

  ‘using the grounds’: ILN, 1 March 1845, p. 131.

  ‘were the dead’: ‘Address’: [Percival Leigh], ‘Address from an Undertaker to the Trade’, Household Words, 13, 22 June 1850, pp. 301–4; poem: [John Delaware Lewis], ‘City Graves’, Household Words, 38, 14 December 1850, p. 277; Nemo’s burial spot: Bleak House, pp. 202, 276. The location is debated. Tambling, Going Astray, p. 139, says it is in the churchyard of St Mary-le-Strand, while the editors of Dickens’ Letters suggest St Martin-in-the-Fields. I am with Tambling in this matter; Our Mutual Friend, pp. 386–7.

  ‘water-borne coffins’: Hugh Meller, London Cemeteries: An Illustrated Guide and Gazetteer (2nd edn, Godstone, Surrey, Gregg, 1985) lists all the new cemeteries, and their most famous residents. Mary Hogarth’s burial site and footnote: Tambling, Going Astray, p. 292.

  ‘fine, and river’: [Richard H. Horne], ‘Father Thames’, Household Words, 45, 1 February 1851, pp. 446–7; Little Dorrit, p. 68.

  ‘it won’t do’: ‘head-and-stomach’: Dickens to W. W. F. de Cerjat, 7 July 1858, Letters, vol. 8, p. 599; ‘smell rushes up’: ILN: 19 June 1858, p. 603, and 26 June, p. 631; Dickens: to de Cerjat, 7 July 1858, ibid.

  ‘of sheer stench’: Disraeli: The Times, 3 July 1858, p. 9; ‘compelled to legislate’: ibid., 18 June 1858, p. 9.

  ‘makes us clean’: Hollingshead, Underground London, pp. 58, 68, which is a collection of pieces from All the Year Round; Anon., The Wild Boys of London, or, Children of the Night. A Story of the Present Day (London, no publisher, [1866?]), p. 8.

  ‘doing properly’: Duke of Buccleuch’s house: ILN: 6 September 1862, p. 265, 30 May 1868, p. 535, 28 May 1870, p. 554. The embanking of the Thames in this and the next paragraph: Porter, The Thames Embankment, passim.

  ‘stage of transition’: military campaign: ILN, 30 July 1864, p. 114; Hudson, Munby, pp. 175, 191, 203, 221; Dickens to W. W. F. de Cerjat, 1 February 1861, Letters, vol. 9, p. 383.

  ‘form and colour’: Hudson, Munby, p. 265; the historian: Porter, The Thames Embankment, p. 34.

  1867: THE REGENT’S PARK SKATING DISASTER

  ‘off a cold’: Pickwick Papers, pp. 396ff.

  ‘end of the water’: numbers and Humane Society: ILN: 14 December 1844, pp. 375–6.

  ‘tunnel as usual’: Express Train: ILN, 17 February 1855, p. 151; skating in the tunnel: ibid., 3 March 1855, p. 197.

  �
��of a serious nature’: the paragraphs that follow have been compiled from newspaper reports. The eyewitness evidence is from the inquest transcripts, reprinted in The Times over the next two weeks of January, with further information from the Daily News, 16 and 17 January 1867, and the Morning Post, 16 January 1867. One of the most complete reports appears in the Standard, 22 January 1867. The number of icemen on duty is taken from these reports; however, according to Wendy Neal, With Disastrous Consequences: London Disasters 1830–1917 (Enfield Lock, Hisarlik Press, 1992), p. 111, there were nineteen.

  ‘to us, are dead’: The diary of Shirley Brooks is in the British Library; I am grateful to Patrick Leary for this transcript, and for pointing me to the skating disaster in the first instance.

  9. STREET PERFORMANCE

  ‘occupy his day’: Pantheon description: Allen, History and Antiquities of London, vol. 5, pp. 281–3; footnote on the Pantheon: Alison Adburgham, Shops and Shopping, 1800–1914: Where, and in What Manner the Well-dressed Englishwoman Bought her Clothes (London, Allen and Unwin, 1981), p. 22; Thackeray, ‘De Juventute’, ‘Roundabout Papers from the Cornhill Magazine’, in The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray (London, Smith Elder & Co., 1887), vol. 22, p. 73.

  ‘confectioners and milliners’: fashionable hours: Badcock and Rowlandson, Real Life in London, vol. 1, p. 104; carriages: Wey, A Frenchman Sees London, p. 72; ‘sparkling jewellery’: Nicholas Nickleby, pp. 488–9; Sala, Twice Round the Clock, pp. 132–3, 157.

  ‘clients also vanished’: Dickens to Catherine Dickens, 7 September 1853, Letters, vol. 7, p. 138; shop assistants and milkmaids: Dickens, ‘Arcadian London’, in All the Year Round, 29 September 1860, in Dickens’ Journalism, vol. 4, p. 183, 185; prostitutes: Hudson, Munby, p. 69.

  ‘they had been given’: Dickens, ‘Arcadian London’, Dickens’ Journalism, vol. 4, p. 189.

  ‘Rag Fair market’: marine stores and rag-and-bottle shops: Mayhew, London Labour, vol. 2, p. 108, Bleak House, pp. 98–9, David Copperfield, p. 177; Susan Shatto, The Companion to Bleak House (London, Unwin Hyman, 1988), pp. 59–64, on reselling.