Another occupation for the children of London was to provide light entertainment for the citizens. Many small boys, for example, used to keep pace with the trams “not merely by using their legs briskly, but by throwing themselves every now and then on their hands and progressing a few steps (so to speak) with their feet in the air.” The favourite locale for this energetic activity was Baker Street, where the children cartwheeled “to attract attention and obtain the preference if a job were in prospect; done, too, in hopes of a halfpenny being given the urchin for his agility.” This display in the streets is an aspect of theatrical London, too, but the spectacle had its consequences. Mayhew examined the hands of one “urchin” and noticed that “the fleshy parts of the palm were as hard as soling-leather, as hard, indeed, as the soles of the child’s feet, for he was bare-footed.” So the city hardened its street children in every sense. The unhappy process is complemented by the description of their “stolid and inexpressive” countenances.
When the children worked “on their own hook” there were certain items which they could not sell. No child could master the sale of patent medicines because they did not have the experience to gull the public, nor were they skilful at selling “last dying speeches.” More curious, however, is the evident fact that these street juveniles did not sell such childish items as marbles or spinning tops. The reason here may be more profound. Who would wish to purchase items of childhood innocence and play from those who had always been denied such things?
Street children had their penny gaffs, commonly known as “low” theatres, where amateur dramatic representations were performed for an audience which also came from the street. They became a byword for filth and indecency. There were other forms of drama for more affluent London children, however, principal among them the toy theatre. It was sold with characters “penny plain and two pence coloured” which were cut out, pasted on to cardboard, glued to wires or sticks, and then pushed upon a wooden or cardboard stage. Play-acting was essentially a London pastime crucially combining the tradition of the caricature or satirical print, to be seen in the windows of every print-seller, with that of the London drama or pantomime.
The earliest of these childhood spectacles was manufactured in 1811, and they soon became immensely popular. When George Cruikshank was dilatory in their publication “the boys used to go into his shop and abuse him like anything for his frequent delays in publishing continuations of his plays.” The toy theatre was part of the history of London spectacle, in other words, emerging from the gothic and the phantasmagoric. It imitated the humour and heterogeneity of the London stage, also, with burlesques and buffooneries: The Sorrows of Werther became The Sorrows of Water, or Love, Liquor and Lunacy.
It was a city of melodrama in many respects, where the young loved to act and to recite. One of the daily reading lessons at London schools was taken from the drama, and there was a perfect “itch for acting” among the young boys and girls. In Vanity Fair (1847–8) Thackeray depicts two London boys as having a pronounced “taste for painting theatrical characters.” Another Londoner, writing of the early 1830s, stated that “nearly every boy had a toy theatre.”
There is a picture, composed in 1898, of “Punch By Night” which depicts a group of tiny children looking up in wonder at a Punch and Judy booth illuminated by oil-light. Some are barefoot, and some in rags, but as they stand on the rough stones their eager attentive faces are bathed in light; yet it may be that the illumination is emerging from them on this dark London night. A similar sense of the numinous emerges in descriptions of children at play in the streets of the city. Theodore Fontane, the German author, wrote of spring in the rookeries of St. Giles when “The children have taken their one, pitiful toy, a home-made shuttlecock, into the street with them and while, wherever we look, everything is teeming with hundred of these pale children grown old before their time with their bright, dark eyes, their shuttlecocks fly up and down in the air, gleaming like a swarm of pigeons on whose white wings the sunlight falls.” There is a sense of wonder, and mystery, vouchsafed in the wave of happiness and laughter emerging from the foul and squalid tenements of the poor. It is not a question of innocence contrasted with experience, because these children were not innocent, but somehow a triumph of the human imagination over the city. Even in the midst of filth, they have the need and the right to be joyful.
That sense, that human aspiration, is also present in the many descriptions of children dancing in the street. In A.T. Camden Pratt’s Unknown London there is an account of Holywell Street in the late nineteenth century with “the curious sight of the children in lines across the roadway at either end of the row, dancing to the music of a barrel organ that never seems to go away … It is noticeable that they all dance the same simple step; but the grace of some of these unkempt girls is remarkable.” It is as if it were some ritual dance, the dance of the city, to a music that never seems to fade. Evelyn Sharp, in The London Child, records how “sometimes, they danced in unison, sometimes as a kind of chorus to a little première danseuse in whirling pinafore and bare feet; and always they betrayed their kinship with the motley crowd that dances in wild abandonment to the jingle of the street organ.” Once more the street organ betrays its persistent presence, as if it were the music of the stones, but the simple ritualised step of the children has made way for wildness and “abandonment”; they are giving themselves up to forgetfulness and oblivion because in the savage dance they can ignore the conditions of their ordinary existence. Implicitly they are defying the city. If we can dance like this, what harm can you do us?
A poem of 1894 depicts “a City child, half-girl, half elf … babbling to herself” while playing hopscotch on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral. London “roars in vain” to catch “her inattentive ear” and she does not bestow one glance upon the great church rising above her. Here the dignity and self-sufficiency of the “City child” are being celebrated, quite removed from all the demonstrations of power and business around her. She would appear to have been created out of the very conditions of the streets, and yet there is something within her which is able to ignore them. It is a mystery vouchsafed to the late nineteenth-century poet Laurence Binyon, who depicts two children in an alley once more dancing to the sound of a barrel organ—“face to face” they gaze at each other, “their eyes shining, grave with a perfect pleasure.” Their mutual enjoyment and understanding rise above the sordid material world that surrounds them. In George Gissing’s novel Thyrza (1887), Gilbert Grail turns into Lambeth Walk and as “he did so, a street organ began to play in front of a public house close by. Grail drew near; there were children forming a dance, and he stood to watch them. Do you know that music of obscure ways, to which children dance … a pathos of which you did not dream will touch you, and therein the secret of hidden London will be revealed.” It is the great secret of those who once existed in the dark heart of the city. It is defiance, and forgetfulness, compounded. It is the London dance.
Lambeth is now, like much of London, quieter than once it was. There seem to be no children on the streets, but a small green named Pedler’s Park in Salamanca Street has been classified as a “children’s play area”; where once all London was a “play area” now zones have been segregated for that purpose. Lambeth Walk, once the centre of Old Lambeth, is now pedestrianised with three-storey council houses of dark brick along it. It leads to a shopping mall, albeit a dilapidated one, down which staggers a drunken man cursing to himself; shops are boarded up, and some are derelict. But above the mall itself have been painted murals of children. One shows Lambeth Ragged School, in Newport Street, and is dated 1851. Another is of children, with their legs bare, exuberantly dancing after a watering cart; the image is taken from a photograph by William Whiffin, dated c. 1910, which showed some small boys playing in the spray. And then suddenly, on 1 July 1999, four young girls bring out a skipping rope and begin to play in the middle of Lambeth Walk.
Continuities
George Scharf ’s
drawing of “The Original Oyster Shop” in Tyler Street; the shop itself has gone but all the buildings on the same site have followed its contours.
CHAPTER 69
Have You Got the Time?
The nature of time in London is mysterious. It seems not to be running continuously in one direction, but to fall backwards and to retire; it does not so much resemble a stream or river as a lava flow from some unknown source of fire. Sometimes it moves steadily forward, before springing or leaping out; sometimes it slows down and, on occasions, it drifts and begins to stop altogether. There are some places in London where you would be forgiven for thinking that time has come to an end.
In medieval documents ancient London customs were declared to be “from time out of mind, about which contrary human memory does not exist”; or an object might be classified as standing “where it now stands for a longer time than any of the jurors can themselves recall.” These were ritualised, or standardised, phrases suggesting that the earliest measure of time was human memory itself. In an anonymous medieval poem on the life of St. Erkenwald there are verses which concern the masons rebuilding St. Paul’s Cathedral in the fourteenth century; they discover a great tomb within the ancient foundations of the church, in which rests the unblemished corpse of a pagan judge who speaks thus: “How long I have lain here is from a time forgotten. It is too much for any man to give it a length,” although even in that distant period London was “the metropolis and the master town it evermore has been.” The corpse is baptised, its soul saved, and at the close “all the bells of London rang loudly together.”
Beyond the time measured by human memory there exists, therefore, sacred time invoked by the sound of these bells. The visions of Our Lady in the church of St. Bartholomew, or the miracles surrounding the shrine of Our Lady of Willesden, suggest that London was also the harbour of eternity. The bells provided that sonority where sacred and secular time met. Yet for many centuries a form of communal memory was also commonplace—“In the great hard frost … in the late dreadful storme … ever since the sicknesse yeare … two or three dayes after the great high wind”—when the events of London mark out an imprecise but useful chronology. Public gatherings also measured London time, in “sermon time” or “at Exchange time when the merchants meet at the Royal Exchange.” There was a human scale, also, in the measurement of light and shadow in the city as an index of time: “about candlelighting in the evening” or “when it was duskish.”
The spirit of the city lives, too, in the emblems which adorn it. There were four “wall dials” in the Inner Temple, one of which bore the inscription “Begone About Your Business,” which is a true London apothegm. On the sundial in Pump Court are etched the words, “Shadows we are and like Shadows Depart,” and in Lincoln’s Inn two emblems of sacred time were installed. On the southern gable of the Old Buildings was the motto Ex Hoc Momento Pendet Aeternitas, or “On This Moment Hangs Eternity,” and, beside it, Qua Redit Nescitis Horam or “We Do Not Know the Hour of his Return.” These emblems are the written equivalent of the church bells, resounding through the streets of the city. In the Middle Temple another sundial reasserts the actual nature of London with complementary mottoes. Time and Tide Tarry For No Man and Vestigia Nulla Retrorsum or “No Moment Is Backward.” So even the sun, and the light, are mastered by the urgent rhythm of city activity.
In this context the dominance of clock time in the city can be understood. Wren’s London churches have clocks designed within them; no doubt the dials are a substitute for the bells which once rang out, but there is also a suggestion that time itself has somehow become a deity to be venerated. When in the early eighteenth century Bennett’s Clock Shop, at 65 Cheapside, set up images of Gog and Magog above its frontage the shop’s owner was expressing a general truth; these tutelary deities of London were used to strike the hour, confirming the identity of time and the city. For a city based upon work and labour, upon power and commerce, time becomes an aspect of mercantilism.
That is why the city became famous for its clocks, from that upon St. Paul’s to that of “Big Ben” on St. Stephen’s tower at Westminster, and renowned for its clock-makers. Artificers such as Charles Gretton and Joseph Antram of Fleet Street, John Joseph Merlin of Hanover Place and Christopher Pinchbeck of St. John’s Lane, were often visited by foreign travellers and were themselves notable London figures; Pinchbeck opened a clock-making and clock-work gallery to display his skills, while Merlin had his own Mechanical Museum. The measurement of time, and the ingenuity of its artificial instruments, fascinated Londoners; in a city always moving and always making, the attention to the process of measuring was also an attention to its own energy and greatness. That is why London also became the world centre of watch-making. By the end of the eighteenth century, for example, there were more than seven thousand workmen in Clerkenwell assembling watches at a rate of 120,000 a year, 60 per cent of which were exported. It is almost as if London was manufacturing time itself, and then distributing it to the rest of the world. The nature of its manufacture, with different artisans in different districts making one small part of the assembly, means that Clerkenwell itself could be seen as a clockwork mechanism with its face to the sky.
The position of Greenwich upon the meridian is well known but on this famous site was also erected the time signal ball, a wood or leather sphere five feet in diameter, which was raised and dropped by a galvanic motor clock; this device was considered to be “the most wonderful clock in the world” regulating “the time of all the clocks and watches in London.” In particular “a very small outlay … will secure true Greenwich time to every City establishment.” So time and trade ran together. Another great clock was established at the post office of St. Martin’s le Grand in the 1870s; it was known as the “chronopher” and by means of a “time current” running along the electric telegraph it controlled the time of “sixteen of the most important cities in the kingdom.” London set up and dominated the time of the entire country. With the central position of Greenwich, it might even be said to have controlled the time of the world. There was also the phenomenon of “railway time,” so that the locomotives speeding out of London set the time for the provincial stations through which they passed.
In twenty-first-century London too, time rushes forward and is everywhere apparent; it hangs upon neon boards, and is illuminated on the front of office buildings. Clocks are everywhere, and most citizens have the image of time strapped to their wrists. It might even be suggested that the general and characteristic obsession of London is with time itself. That is why all of its commercial operations are designed to be conducted and monitored in the shortest possible time, just as information is only important when it is of instantaneous access. The faster an action or a dealing can be reported, the more significance it acquires. The affluent Londoners of the fourteenth century who first displayed the counterpoise clock in their households were at the beginning of a process in which London would capture and market time. The city oppresses its inhabitants, and the evidence of that oppression can be found in the time it imposes; there is a time for eating, a time for working, a time for travelling to work, a time for sleeping. It represents the great triumph of materialism and commerce within the city.
The consequences emerge in the activity and imagery of London over a long period. One eighteenth-century observer remarked that in London they “talk little, I suppose, that they may not lose time.” Similarly there is no bargaining, and the custom of having fixed prices “is not the product solely of competition and confidence, but also of the necessity of saving time.” It has often been noted how quickly Londoners walk. If there is a cause for this anxious speed it may lie in the deeply inherited instinct that time is also money.
There is an old London inscription: “As every thread of Gold is valuable/So is every minute of Time.” Time must not be “wasted.” Chateaubriand noticed that Londoners were impervious to art and general culture precisely because of this obsession; “they chase away th
e thought of Raphael as liable to make them lose time and nothing more.” Significantly he associates this with the need to work; they are “for ever on the brink of the abyss of starvation if for a moment they forget work.” Time and work are indeed intimately mingled within the consciousness of London; they cannot be separated, not even for a moment, and out of this conflation emerges frantic and continuous activity. Like automata, the citizens become the components of the monstrous clock that is London. Then time indeed becomes a prison. A riddle in a London chapbook asked the question, What am I?
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