The Secret World of the Victorian Lodging House

by Joseph O'Neill

  Another of Mayhew’s 1850 informants told him that ‘fights and fierce fights are frequent in them and I have often been afraid murder would have been done’. Many other social investigators remarked on the prevalence of violence, which was as pervasive as the reek of the privies in most lodging houses. All lived in fear as irrational, drink-fuelled assaults were common. Peddlers were often robbed of their stock or takings and disagreements about food were frequent. This is one respect in which things had improved considerably by the advent of the twentieth century. Jack London’s 1902 account The People of the Abyss testifies to this and he notes that the ever-present fear of violence was a thing of the past, as lodgers passed their time playing draughts and cards.

  Where there was violence there was sure to be drink also. Drink was consumed in the majority of houses at all times of day and night, even when rules forbade it. This seems to have been the case even in model houses, as is recounted in Patrick Macgill’s recollections of a tramping navvy.

  Yet there is considerable evidence that those who still clung to respectability confined themselves to those houses which admitted only the sober and relatively clean. In some of these blacking brushes were supplied without charge and pen, paper and ink and soap were available, while for a small charge it was possible to hire a razor. Even among houses that catered especially for ‘travellers’ some were beyond reproach. Such was Farm House in the Mint, with 40 rooms, over 200 beds, 3 kitchens and a reading room, in which lodgers paid a penny to read the newspaper. Here, as in all well-ordered houses, it was common not to admit lodgers after midnight. One experienced lodger even told Mayhew of men there kneeling to say their prayers and enthused that ‘it’s wholesome and sweet enough there, and large separate beds’.

  There is evidence that during the second half of the nineteenth century there was a steady improvement even in many seamen’s lodging houses and in once infamous areas. Writing in 1881 Richard Rowe provides an account of the Highway in Ratcliff, an area known for its many seamen’s lodging houses and which was once notorious but said to have improved in recent times. He visited a lodging house on the Whitechapel Road, near the docks, which was a converted sugar works with 300 beds. It was freshly limewashed and every lodger was required to wash before going to bed. The kitchen – in addition to the requisite blazing fire, kept going day and night – housed lockers for the lodgers’ goods and had plenty of tables and forms. It was well ventilated and the bedding was sufficient. This was only one of the respectable houses in the Flower and Dean Street area.

  Some of the inmates of these better houses lived there for years, paying on a weekly or half-weekly basis, whereas the chance caller was required to pay nightly. The former paid 2s a week and the latter 4d a night. All these registered houses posted details of the number of beds allowed in each room.

  Yet, despite overwhelming evidence that the quality of lodging houses was not uniformly deplorable and that even in the worst areas they improved as the century wore on, the attitude of the political elite remained as intemperate as the lives of those who inhabited the worst houses. Those who did most to bring lodging houses to the notice of the public were invariably vehement in their condemnation of what they regarded as subversive institutions which served to undermine every conceivable facet of national well-being.

  Mayhew, writing to the Morning Chronicle in 1850, set the tone for subsequent diatribes. He was convinced that ‘vagrancy is largely due to and indeed chiefly maintained by low lodging houses’. But this was as nothing as compared to their major effects: ‘Prisons, tread-mills, penal settlements, gallows – all are in vain – and ragged schools and city missions are of no avail as preventives of crime, so long as these wretched dens of infamy, brutality and vice continue their daily and nightly work of demoralisation.’ In case anyone was still unclear about their impact, Mayhew added his view that ‘at present they are not the preparatory schools but the finishing academies for every kind of profligacy and crime’.

  Public fascination with the slums or rookeries and the lodging houses which seemed to epitomise many of their evils came to a head in the 1880s and culminated in the media frenzy surrounding the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888. Books and articles poured from the presses with lurid titles such as How the Poor Live and Horrible London. The Pall Mall Gazette regaled its readers with extracts from The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, Andrew Mearns’ sensationalist account of East End life in which he informed readers that ‘incest is common and no form of vice or sensuality causes surprise or attracts attention. The low parts of London are the sink into which the filth and abomination from all parts of the country seem to flow.’

  Nor was it solely sensationalist journalists who expressed revulsion: serious social investigators and reformers abhorred lodging houses. Lord Ashley described them in 1848 as ‘haunts of pollution’, both physical and moral. A few years later in 1851, Mayhew called them ‘wretched dens of infamy, brutality and vice’. In the opinion of Alsager Hay Hill they were ‘seed beds of mendacity and vagabondage’. It is significant that in 1844 they became the first working class dwellings to be subjected to parliamentary controls.

  As we saw earlier, it was as the seed-bed of infectious diseases that the slums became the object of middle class fears. But cholera was only one of the tramp-borne diseases that spread panic. Typhus, known as the ‘Irish fever’, was commonly associated with the Famine Irish, who, it was claimed, turned lodging houses into breeding grounds of disease. This is one of the reasons why casuals were separated from the workhouse regulars and also why they were not allowed to attend religious services in the workhouse.

  From about 1850, when the fear of typhus was dissipating, the fear of smallpox carried by tramps took its place. ‘For almost every town,’ Chadwick said, ‘the common lodging-houses are pointed out as the foci of contagious diseases throughout the district.’ Scientific evidence suggests that mingling the clothes of inmates – as occurred when they were fumigated – and the sharing of bath water were likely to facilitate the spread of the disease. About half the outbreaks during the epidemic of 1893 originated with tramps.

  This theme was echoed again and again into the twentieth century, as lodging houses – often bracketed with dog kennels and bone yards – were identified as a threat to public health and a source of smallpox. The consensus about the public health dangers was strongest when epidemics raged, particularly in 1848–9, 1866 and 1871–2. As early as 1848 the Leicester Domestic Mission became the first of numerous concerned groups to press for the closure of all lodging houses.

  There were also frequent official reports linking tramps with syphilis, a disease most frequently fatal when neglected and allowed to reach its tertiary stage. The build-up of deposits of bone inside the sufferer’s skull produces pressure on the brain, resulting in convulsions and paralysis. Occasionally the cartilage of the larynx falls in and the sufferer dies of asphyxiation.

  Insanitary conditions were not only injurious to health: they undermined respectability, a key concept in the Victorian psyche, no less important to the poor than other classes. Working class women waged an unequal battle against dirt, striving to keep their children clean and maintain a home that was tidy and sanitary. Cleanliness was a key facet of the respectability for which working people strived and was deemed a reliable indicator of decency and moral propriety. There was a sense in which working people believed that cleanliness was literally next to godliness.

  The lodging house made cleanliness almost impossible. A water butt often constituted the entirety of its washing facilities. With neither soap nor a towel, the lodger could do no more than give himself a swill in dirty water and then dry himself on his clothes. One informant in 1842 told the sanitary inspector, ‘I have known the bedding to be left unchanged for three months … They are infested with vermin – I never met with an exception.’ The inevitable result was that inadequate facilities and low standards ‘led to lodgers losing all care about cleanliness’.

  By the mi
d-nineteenth century it was a truism that the lodging houses were one of the pillars on which criminality rested. The Police Commissioner, Captain Hay, described them in his 1853 report as ‘infamous brothels, harbours of criminals’. When, in 1862, the Manchester press again investigated the city’s lodging houses they found that their moral character had not changed since Reach had ventured into Angel Meadow twenty years before. The same ragbag of fallen humanity lived there: prostitutes, their bullies, vagrants, cadgers, tramps, thieves and the low Irish huddled together in moral and physical squalor.

  It was universally accepted too that children who lived in lodging houses were inevitably drawn into criminality and vice. Stories of the corruption wrought by the lodging house on the innocent country bumpkin, wide-eyed and bemused on her first encounter with the great metropolis, were legion. Such young women, it was generally believed, were inevitably sucked into prostitution if their first encounter with the city was the lodging house.

  In their capacity to corrupt, even the better lodging houses were not beyond reproach. In his letters to the Morning Chronicle in 1850, Mayhew tells of a character he encountered in one of the most respectable lodging houses. His story was typical of a whole class of rogues who were not born into criminality but jumped into it because they wanted to ‘see life’. He admitted that his family were good and kind, yet he ran away from home and joined a criminal gang, all of whom were transported to Australia. He became a pickpocket and then graduated to forging banknotes and later to using loaded dice to con people at race meetings. He committed highway robbery before his exploits as a forger resulted in a sentence of fourteen years’ penal servitude. Yet, after seven he escaped and returned to England, where he lived in lodging houses which he described as the ‘grand encouragement and concealment of crime’.

  Their effect, according to Mary Higgs, was to ‘exert suction for evil on the young girl and the young boy. They form plague spots.’ The reason for this was quite simply because they ‘concentrate those who prey on society.’ As the nineteenth century drew to an end, the focus of social commentators was changing. Rather than deliberate on the physical conditions of the lodging houses, which were generally improving, it was the moral condition of the residents that attracted most attention.

  Some writers also saw in the lodging house a threat to the established political order. Many observers remarked that its clients were invariably anti-establishment, vitriolic in their condemnation of the aristocracy and hostile to the monarchy. Howard Goldsmid saw in the unemployed, who in 1885 bemoaned their fate in lodging house kitchens up and down the land, the harbingers of revolution. In reality the political attitudes of the lodging house were cynical and disenchanted, tending towards the same disengagement from politics which is common among large sections of the British population today. Far from being convinced that they could replace the political system with a better one, they were defeatist and resigned in the extreme, too preoccupied with keeping body and soul together to concern themselves with wider issues.

  Dick Turpin, Jack Sheppard and other legendary desperados were young criminals’ heroes. They swapped tales of their legendary audacity around lodging house fires and in prison cells and sang about them in the pubs, beerhouses and penny gaffs they frequented. From the mid-century hawkers sold written accounts of their exploits. Yet there is no evidence that there was a camaraderie of the outcast or any sense of shared political interests. If any general social principle united lodgers it was an implicit belief in social Darwinism, the conviction that life consists of endless struggle and that only the ruthless survive.

  Few nineteenth century commentators wrote of the depredations of the lodging house without mentioning the Irish and thereby appealing to the anti-Irish and particularly the anti-Catholic bigotry endemic to all sections of English society. From the early nineteenth century, and particularly during the great influx of Famine Irish after 1848, squalid accommodation was invariably associated with the Irish, whose lodging houses in the big cities were usually depicted as appalling. It is also true that many lodging houses were in the hands of Irish owners, perhaps as many as one in five, concentrated in areas with a larger Irish population. Their ownership tended to be greater in the west of the country, rather than the east, but the Irish-owner was to be found all over Britain, including rural areas where Irish agricultural labourers had worked in the years before the Famine.

  Ramsey, a small Fenland market town with a population of only 2,461 in 1851, provides a good example. The largest lodging house in the area was owned by John Hall from County Longford, who accommodated thirty-seven lodgers, all but five of whom were Irish. The situation was similar in St Ives, Bourne, St Neot’s, Gainsborough, Shrewsbury and throughout Shropshire. Newport, on the main route from Ireland to London and the Midlands, had eleven Irish lodging houses in 1851. In all instances Irish owners attracted their countrymen as lodgers. It was not without justification that the indigenous population regarded the Irish as extremely clannish.

  A succinct summary of the range of woes associated with the common lodging house appears in the Pictorial Handbook of London in the mid-nineteenth century: ‘The common lodging house is a disgrace to a Christian country, and a constant source of physical and moral evil. They are hotbeds of vice and crime, a disgrace to humanity.’ Lodging houses were not merely seen as places where the degraded incorrigibles wallow in their depravity, but as traps waiting for those who are unfortunate enough to become entangled in their pernicious influence: ‘it is to such sinks of iniquity and contamination that the newcomer takes abode on first arriving in [the city], or when quitting the parental roof, and there has every good principle undermined by evil associates until he becomes a pest to society.’ Writing in 1909 Mary Higgs agreed, though there is no doubt that by then facilities had improved beyond all recognition. She maintained that ‘conditions are allowed in common lodging houses that are a shame and a disgrace to civilization’.

  This undiluted antipathy is partly due to the fact the common lodging house was something of great symbolic importance in Victorian society representing the antithesis of that revered institution, the family. Today we are constantly lectured that ‘families come in all shapes and sizes’, which in effect means that virtually any combination of individuals may designate itself a family. The Victorians believed otherwise. As the 1871 census stated, ‘The natural family is founded by marriage, and consists, in its complete state, of husband, wife and children.’ But the family was more than an objective norm: it was, as one historian put it, ‘a state of mind’ and an ideal to which all other arrangements were compared and invariably found wanting.

  To Victorians it was self-evident that children who lacked parents were in peril – moral, financial and social. The family was the basis of a sound society, the means by which children were socialised and made useful citizens. The family was the ideal context within which women cherished their offspring, safe in the knowledge that their husband was there to provide economic security. Parental love, filial piety, self-sacrifice, religious faith, moral formation, loyalty and mutual support were all nurtured and encouraged within the family unit. Families were conducive to both the welfare of their members and society in general.

  Given that no one seriously disputed this, why did so many Victorians of marriageable age live outside the warm embrace of the family?

  Chapter Four

  Fighting with a Dog: Precarious Employment

  In Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory the priest protagonist seeks shelter in an abandoned farm estate, absconded by its owners with only their dying dog left behind. Exhausted, starving and almost broken by the relentless pursuit of those sworn to murder him, he is desperate for something to eat. The dog has the only food available, scraps of meat on a bone, lying between its paws. Tormented by hunger, he forsakes all dignity and fights the dog for the meat.

  There were many in Victorian Britain who knew how the priest felt. It was their daily lot. For most of the ninetee
nth century the average wage of an unskilled labourer was below subsistence level. Unlike current defnitions of poverty, which classify those without a car or a personal computer as poor, these people did not earn enough to buy the food, clothes and shelter necessary to remain healthy. Many were dependent on lodging houses.

  The problem for millions of Victorians was that they were locked into unequal competition with droves of others desperate for work. This was not only in a few areas of employment: all unskilled labourers were in this invidious position. Dockers were the most obvious example: there were at least thirty per cent more men trying to make a living on the docks than were employed at the peak of demand. In every port, from London to Glasgow and Liverpool to Hull, there were dock-side lodging houses whose residents depended on employment that was never better than precarious.

  Dockers, however, were only one of the numerous groups condemned to a daily struggle to feed themselves. Large swathes of the working population found themselves in a similar situation: market workers, builders, barbers, chimney sweeps, scavengers, firewood choppers, hawkers and cabmen, sandwich men and envelope addressers. Below even these were people engaging in occupations of last resort, who existed in a permanent state of destitution, a meal away from starvation: the bone-grubbers, the rag-collectors, the crossing-sweepers and the messengers. Yet the dock worker was perhaps the most extreme example of employment that was insecure. They were taken on daily, if required, and invariably found that those competing with them for a day’s work increased in number with every economic downturn.

  The collapse of the East End shipbuilding in 1867 made the area synonymous with poverty. London was a city of small masters overwhelmingly involved in the finishing trades for consumer goods. Like work in the docks and the building trade, these sectors were affected by seasonal fluctuations in the demand for labour. It was common, for instance, for as many as one in three builders and the same fraction of dockers to find themselves laid off with the onset of winter. Many factory jobs also involved periods of idleness. In Lancashire’s cotton industry periodic slumps meant that both spinners and weavers were often on ‘short time’ or laid off for weeks at a time. Such breaks in employment were the norm for most workers during the nineteenth century, which explains the great demand for jobs that offered steady employment, if only on mediocre pay, such as in breweries and on the railways.