A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain

by Michael Paterson

  He gave an example, in case it should be thought that he was exaggerating:

  I visited the back room on the ground floor of No 5. I found it occupied by one man, two women, and two children; and in it was the dead body of a poor girl who had died in childbirth a few days before. The body was stretched out on the bare floor, without shroud or coffin. There it lay in the midst of the living.1

  Though the doctor, and those who commissioned his report, may have been shocked by these conditions, there was nothing in the least unusual about them, for millions lived this way. The rooms he described would have had no furniture, the inhabitants sleeping on straw and rags, which might not necessarily be uncomfortable (the Russian tsar, Nicholas I, chose to sleep the same way!) but which was a breeding-ground for lice and other vermin. There would be no running water, as a consequence of which neither bodies nor clothing could be kept clean. There would be no means of removing sewage, with the result that the bodily waste of a building’s inmates would be left in corners and on staircases. Even to those who knew no other way of life these must have seemed difficult circumstances. It was some compensation that they would be off the premises for much of the twenty-four hours, at work or in the streets. In homes where no one possessed cooking skills, and where there were in any case few facilities, there would be no incentive even for the womenfolk to stay indoors.

  The homes of the poor often occupied the centre of cities, while the better off moved to the edges or to the burgeoning suburbs. In central London the great rookeries – as slum districts were then known – around Drury Lane, Seven Dials and Westminster Abbey were so complex, and so dangerous to outsiders, that even in daytime the police did not venture into them except in numbers. When large building projects, such as the creation of Victoria Street in Westminster or Holborn Viaduct, were undertaken, scores of homes were demolished – without any attempt at rehousing their occupants – and thousands left to crowd into tenements elsewhere. Proud attempts at civic improvement could exacerbate the problem.

  The Streets and the Workhouse

  It would be a mistake to imagine that the Victorians were complacent about conditions like these. For a host of reasons there was considerable anxiety regarding the rookeries. There were innumerable visits, numerous reports, frequent meetings of committees and commissions, and several schemes for alleviation of overcrowding. One motive was the danger from illness, for there were outbreaks of cholera in the forties and fifties – a disease previously not known in Britain, and therefore a symptom of a worsening situation. Another reason was fear, on the part of the property-owning classes, of social unrest. The thirties and forties were decades of serious depression and disturbance. In neighbouring countries there were outbreaks of revolution (France experienced these in 1830 and 1848). The broad mass of the poor was regarded as a potential threat to order, and it was in the interests of the state to see that they were not driven to extremism. More significantly, there was a realization that industrialization had created intolerable conditions and that these must be improved. One of the many attractive qualities of comfortably-off Victorians was their sincere concern for the unfortunate. There was a genuine desire, in an age that saw itself as enlightened and progressive, to better the lot of the destitute. Prominent among those concerned with the problem of housing the poor was Prince Albert, who designed a set of ‘model dwellings’ that were exhibited at the Great Exhibition (an example of this is preserved). Another was George Peabody, an American philanthropist who in 1862 donated a sum of money large enough to build eight entire housing estates during the following two decades. Though these may strike modern observers as having a barrack-like austerity, they were a very considerable step forward in urban planning, and the original buildings – estates can be seen near Covent Garden and Westminster Abbey, among other places – are still doing duty today. His efforts were, of course, welcomed by the Government (both official and public opinion favoured private enterprise as a means of solving social ills); the Queen offered him a knighthood, though he was unable to accept it without giving up his United States citizenship, something he was unwilling to do.

  For those who were destitute, and who lacked the means even to rent bed space on a floor, there were the streets. Today we are used to seeing people sleeping rough in the streets of cities, but there are comparatively few of them. In the nineteenth century there were thousands, just as – in an age when poverty was greater than we can comprehend – there were thousands, not dozens, of beggars. At dusk in London the benches on the Embankment began to fill with rough-sleepers, while Hyde Park, Green Park and St James’ Park housed swarms of them. Naturally it was easier to live in the open during summer, and each autumn numbers of homeless – most commonly the elderly – committed suicide to avoid the rigours of winter. Many others in any case died from exposure, their bodies found huddled in doorways by patrolling policemen.

  The alternative to living rough was to apply for admission to a workhouse, for despite widespread instances of crushing poverty, Victorian society made provision for the destitute. The system had been in place since the reign of James I, and was organized on a parish basis. Anyone who could prove themselves out of work, or otherwise in want, would be granted admission, and it is worth remembering that inmates were not confined indefinitely. One might be there for only a few days or weeks. It was possible – and commonplace – to sit out a severe winter in the workhouse, and this was done by men such as builders’ labourers whose outdoor work was seasonal. While some of those who lived there were no doubt habitual idlers, many others were unfortunates of all classes who had fallen on hard times. One observer described the range of humanity that could be encountered there as:

  people of every clime. As regards their past history, the inmates are as promiscuous an assemblage as it were possible to get together. Those who were born in splendid mansions are there reduced to the same level as those who first drew their breath in the most wretched hovel; it lays the axe at the root of all the conventional differences which exist in society.2

  Life in the workhouse was not as grim as readers of Oliver Twist might imagine, for the institution depicted by Dickens was a deliberate exaggeration. These establishments were, however, not intended to be comfortable. They divided their inhabitants between the sick and the healthy. Like many schemes for assisting the unfortunate, they were designed to get able-bodied inmates back on their feet as soon as possible, and this would be difficult if life inside was made too easy. Men and women were segregated – regardless of whether they were related – and lived in barrack-like wards. They were also required to perform some form of work – tending garden plots, picking oakum (unravelling old rope), assisting in the kitchen or infirmary – depending on their age and strength. The workhouse was often the destination of those too infirm to live on their own, and it has entered mythology as a heartless separator of aged married couples. While it is true that facilities were too limited, and rules too inflexible, to allow families to live together (children usually went with their mother, and saw their father only on Sunday afternoons at ‘visiting time’) it is important to remember that parishes also provided ‘outdoor relief’ which enabled recipients to stay at home. This practice was officially stopped in 1830, but carried on anyway. Recipients were given, at the beginning of the reign, between one and three shillings a week, and a loaf.

  Victorians, whatever their means or their social class, hated the workhouse. To have to call upon public charity either alive or dead (those who could not afford a funeral were buried at parish expense) was a spectre that haunted millions. The cult of self-help and respectability meant that this public admission of failure was, in a sense, worse than death. Henry Mayhew, during his researches into the poor, interviewed a woman whose husband was terminally ill. His one fixation, in the last days of his life, was that after he was gone he would suffer the humiliation of a ‘parish funeral’. Those who succeeded in swallowing their pride and entering the workhouse often found themselves ade
quately fed – paupers had meat dinners up to three times a week, which must have been considerably more than many of them were accustomed to – and were relatively comfortable. These institutions survived the Victorian era, and finally became extinct only after the Second World War when the welfare state was set up.

  Child Labour

  Those at the bottom of society began their working lives early. Children were likely to start earning as soon as they were able, and this usually meant about the age of five or six. There were always coppers to be made by running errands, or by holding horses while their owners went about some piece of business. In financially desperate families, tailoring work might be undertaken at home by the parents, and children, from the moment they could first hold a needle, would be set to work helping make up garments. More specialized jobs – selling matches or watercress, blacking shoes or sweeping a crossing – required not only equipment but access to a ‘pitch’, and there might be stiff competition for this. Crossing-sweepers, once they had a particular place of work, guarded it jealously and might remain there for the rest of their lives. Victorian memoirs often refer to men or women who have stood at the same kerbside for decades (there was, for instance, a black man who swept the crossing at the bottom of Ludgate Hill), becoming part of the urban landscape.

  By the age of thirteen, boys and girls would be launched in the adult world of work. If they were fortunate they might be apprenticed at that age to some trade. Their parents, or any other well-disposed relative or adult, would pay for them to spend a period of five years or so in learning a profession, after which they would be qualified to practise it. Apothecaries, butchers, carpenters and a host of others were organized in this way, as they had been since the Middle Ages. To become an apprentice was the first step on the road towards respectability and financial security, and it did not always require private means to make this move, for parish authorities often paid for pauper boys to be apprenticed as tailors or shoemakers. For girls there was effectively only one apprenticeship – that of milliner. This involved little more than learning the basic skills of sewing, and then working at making dresses or bonnets for as long as one’s health and eyesight lasted. It was both dull and tiring work, and it was not constant – demand for clothes fluctuated according to the time of year and changes of circumstance (a death in the Royal Family would mean the adoption of mourning black by Society). Whether in London or elsewhere, the demand for new dresses was dictated by the social season, which meant frantic periods of overwork to get costumes ready in time. The conscience of the Victorian middle and upper classes was often pricked by Punch and other periodicals that published drawings of exhausted milliners collapsed over their sewing as they worked through the night.

  The Road to Ruin

  For women there were many possibilities for earning a living in small and insecure ways. They could sell things – flowers, foodstuffs or other commodities – in the streets. They could ‘take in washing’ or look after other people’s children (‘baby-farming’). Many thousands of them pursued an older profession, and this had the ‘advantage’ that it could be a part-time activity. Milliners and servant girls often supplemented their incomes in this way.

  However deplorable this may be from a moral point of view, it is worth remembering that such an activity gave them a certain independence. Female servants, especially if they were young and pretty, had often been ‘ruined’ by male counterparts or by employers, and thus fallen off the ladder to respectability. With nothing left to lose – and possibly having been dismissed from their position – they worked on the streets, but by doing so they were able to earn much more than they could in their former occupation, and they could also choose their hours and dress as they liked (respectable ladies sometimes met their former maids in the street, and were scandalized by their expensive and fashionable dress, for it would have been obvious at a glance how it had been obtained). If they were successful they would consort, on more or less equal terms, with men of their employers’ class. The most fortunate of them might well be set up as ‘kept women’, and for a few years have their own household. As a result many of them found ‘ruination’ a positive, even desirable state, and moral campaigners lamented that many young women actually looked forward to it. Ironically – at least for the few short years before disease, imprisonment or the loss of beauty ended their careers – it made them freer and more self-respecting than they had been as part of the official world of work. The temptations of this way of life were described by Superintendent James Dunlap of the Metropolitan Police. In his evidence to the Select Committee on the Protection of Young Girls in 1881, he related how servants ‘get small wages; they come out on errands; they see these girls walking about the streets, their equal in social standing; they see them dressed in silks and satins; they say: “You can go and dress in silks and satins, while I am slaving”; they talk to the girls, and they are influenced.’

  Factory work claimed large numbers of young women, especially in the North and Midlands. This too was repetitive and exhausting, frequently involving long hours standing at machinery. It might also be highly dangerous, not only because unprotected machinery could be lethal, but because the constant breathing of fumes could kill by degrees those who worked in confined or unventilated spaces. Reports into working conditions refer incessantly to this:

  The duties of the powder-packer consist of filling casks with bleaching powder. To do that he has to enter the chamber, which for several days has been filled with chlorine gas. The heat is sometimes tremendous, especially as the poor wretch who has to endure it is swathed about the head in a way that would protect him from arctic cold. With the muzzle on, the effort of breathing appears to be most painful even in the open air. The chest heaves like that of a man struggling for breath in the violent stages of lung disease. The appearance of the face gives you an impression that he is being suffocated; the eyes seem distended as they stare through the goggles.

  Even with dry-cleaning, or ‘French cleaning’ as it was called, there was danger of:

  Giddiness, nausea, vomiting, and headaches, sometimes of tasting the spirit, and usually loss of appetite, intoxication with hysterical symptoms, sleepiness and, in the more severe cases, of loss of consciousness.3

  The girls and young women who worked at Bryant and May’s match factory in London’s East End were the subject of public interest when they went on strike in 1888 under the leadership of the socialist Annie Besant. She reported that:

  One girl was fined 1 shilling for letting the web twist round a machine in the endeavour to save her fingers from being cut, and was sharply told to take care of the machine, ‘never mind your fingers’. Another, who carried out the instructions and lost a finger thereby, was left unsupported while she was helpless.4

  While these conditions – created by unregulated industrialization – are shocking to us, we must remember that they were also shocking to contemporaries. The mere fact that they were recorded indicated that there was concern and that something was being done about them. To the Victorians’ credit there were constant enquiries, reports – and Factory Acts. The improvement of conditions was gradual, piecemeal and unfinished by the end of the reign, but it was nevertheless being pursued. It must also be remembered that nineteenth-century workers did not simply exist in pathetic misery. There were trade unions – the movement had been particularly active in the early part of the century – and a host of societies had been formed by these men and women, supported by modest regular subscriptions to pay the costs of sickness and other distress.

  We would also be mistaken in imagining young factory workers merely as sunk in exploitation and misery. A contemporary description shows them to have had, in spite of the awful hardship of their lives, a certain spirit and sense of fun:

  Factory girls are often the daughters of dock labourers or other irregularly employed workmen, frequently of drunkards. They have been brought up in stifling rooms, with scanty food, in the midst of births ands deaths, year
after year. They have been accustomed to ups and downs; one week they have been on the verge of starvation, another they have shared in a ‘blow-out’. They have learnt to hate monotony, to love drink, to use bad language as their mother tongue, and to be true to a friend in distress. They care nothing for appearances, and have no desire to mix with any but their equals.

  On the whole these girls, outside their homes, lead a healthy, active life. They do not over-exert themselves at the factory. They rise early and have plenty of open-air exercise, both on their way to and from the factory and in their evening walks. They are rough, boisterous, outspoken, warm-hearted, honest working girls. Their standard of morality is very low, so low that to many they may seem to have none at all.

  Their great enemy is drink; the love of it is the curse they have inherited, which, later on, when they are no longer factory girls, but dock labourers’ wives, will drag them down to the lowest level, and will be transmitted to the few of their children who survive. They are nearly all destined to be mothers, and they are almost all entirely ignorant of any domestic accomplishments.5