Dickens's England: Life in Victorian Times

by Pritchard, R. E.

  It is nine o’clock precisely, and while the half-price [audience] is pouring into the Victoria Theatre, the whole-price . . . is pouring out with equal and continuous persistence, and are deluging the New Cut. Whither, you may ask, are they bound? They are in quest of their Beer. . . . The great pressure is outwards, and the great gulf stream of this human ocean flows towards a gigantic ‘public’ opposite the Victoria, and which continually drives a roaring trade.

  I wish that I had a more savoury locality to take you to than the New Cut. . . . it is simply Low. It is sordid, squalid and, the truth must out, disreputable. . . . Everything is second-hand, except the leviathan gin-shops, which are ghastly in their newness and richness of decoration. The broad pavement presents a mixture of Vanity Fair and Rag Fair. It is the paradise of the lowest of costermongers, and often the saturnalia of the most emerited thieves. Women appear there in their most unlovely aspect: brazen, slovenly, dishevelled, brawling, muddled with beer or fractious with gin. The howling of beaten children and kicked dogs, the yells of ballad-singers . . . the fumes of the vilest tobacco, of decaying vegetables, of escaping (and frequently surreptitiously tapped) gas, of deceased cats, of ancient fish, of cagmag [old, decaying] meat, of dubious mutton pies, and of unwashed, soddened, unkempt, reckless humanity; all these make the night hideous and the heart sick.

  Ten o’clock p.m. – An Oratorio at Exeter Hall

  Prithee pull up the collar of thy coat, stiffen thy neckcloth as much as possible, take that wicked cigar from thy mouth, cast down thy eyes, and assume a decorum if thou have it not. We are going to Exeter Hall. . . .

  There would seem to be in an oratorio something essentially germane to the English mind and character. The sounding recitative and swelling hymns, the rolling choruses and triumphant bursts of exultant music, have a strange affinity with the solemn, earnest, energetic English people, slow to move to anger or to love, but, when moved, passionately enthusiastic in their love, bloody and terrible in their great wrath. . . .

  To the seriously-inclined middle classes the oratorio supplies the place of the opera. And it behoves you to consider what a vast power in the state those serious middle-class men and women are. It is all very well for us, . . . travelled and somewhat cynical as we may be, to pretend that the ‘serious’ world is an amalgam of bigotry, hypocrisy and selfishness, and to ignore the solemn religious journals that denounce hot dinner on Sundays, or a walk after it, or the perusal of a secular book on the sacred day, as intolerable sins. Yet how many thousands – how many millions – of sober, sincere, conscientious citizens are there, who are honestly persuaded of the sinfulness of many things which we consider harmless recreations! . . . Who look upon dancing as an irreligious and Babylonish pastime! Whose only light reading consists of tracts, missionary chronicles, and memoirs of sainted cheesemongers and the beautiful daughters of dairymen! . . .

  But the serious world, and that section who are worldly, meet on neutral ground at an Exeter Hall oratorio. The religionists see no sin in listening to sacred music; the mundane come to listen with delight to the immortal strains of Handel, of Haydn, and of Mendelssohn. ‘When shall their glory fade?’ asked Tennyson, singing of the Six Hundred at Balaclava. When shall the glory of our great oratorio writers decay? Never – I hope.

  Eleven o’clock p.m. – Late Suppers

  The children of the aristocracy and some sections of the middle classes are gone to bed – save those who have been so good that their fond parents have taken them to the play, which entertainment they are now enjoying, with delightful prospects superadded of ‘sitting up’ to supper, perchance of oysters, afterwards. But the children of the poor do not dream of bed. They are toddling in and out of chandlers’ shops in quest of ounces of ham and fragments of Dutch cheese for father’s supper; they are carrying the basket of linen – mother takes in washing – to the residences of clients; they are eliminating the most savoury-looking bits of plaice or flounders from the oleaginous pile in the fried-fish shop; they are fetching the beer and the ‘clean pipe’ from the public house; nay – not infrequently, alas! assisted by a lean baby in arms – they are fetching father himself home from the too-seductive establishment of the licensed victualler. Eleven o’clock at night is the great supper-time of the working classes . . . At eleven o’clock close the majority of the coffee, chop-houses and reading-rooms. There are some that will remain open all night, but they are not of the most reputable description. At eleven the cheap grocer, the cheesemonger and the linen-draper in low-priced neighbourhoods begin to think of putting up the shutters; and, by half-past eleven, the only symposia of merchandise open will be the taverns and cigar-shops, the supper-rooms and shellfish warehouses, the night coffee-houses and the chemists – which last shops, indeed, never seem to be quite open or quite closed, at all, and may be said to sleep with one eye open.

  Midnight – Eating in the Haymarket

  Midnight: the play is over, and the audience pour from the Haymarket Theatre. The aristocratic opera season is concluded by this time of the year, and the lovers of the drama have it all their own way. Crowds of jovial young clerks and spruce law students cluster beneath the portico, yet convulsed by the humours of Mr Buckstone. Happy families of rosy children, radiant in lay-down collars, white skirts and pink sashes, trot from the entrance to the dress-circle under the wing of benevolent papa and stout good-humoured mamma, with a white burnous and a tremendous fan . . .

  Supper is now the great cry, and the abundant eating and drinking resources of the Haymarket are forthwith called into requisition. Bless us all! There must be something very dusty and exhaustive in the British drama to make the Haymarket audience so clamorous for supper . . . Are you rich – there is Dubourg’s, the Hôtel de Paris, and the upstairs department of the Café de l’Europe. There is no lack of cunning cooks there, I warrant, to send you up pheasants and partridge en papillotte; filets with mushrooms or truffles, culinary gewgaws that shall cost five shillings the dish. . . . If your funds and your credit be very low, why, you can enter one of the taverns – if you can reach the bar for the crowd of Bacchanalians that are gathered before it, and sup on the quarter of a pork pie, a sausage roll, and a Banbury cake, washed down by a glass of pale ale; nay, if you be yet lower in pocket, and your available wealth be limited to the possession of the modest and retiring penny, you may, at the doors of most of the taverns, meet with an ancient dame of unpretending appearance, bearing a flat basket lined with a fair white cloth. She for your penny will administer to you a brace of bones, covered with a soft white integument, which she will inform you are ‘trotters’. There is not much meat on them, but they are very toothsome and succulent. It is no business of yours to inquire whether these be sheep’s trotters or pigs’ trotters, or the trotters of corpulent rats or overgrown mice. They are trotters. . . .

  I will abide by the Haymarket oyster-shop, rude, simple and primitive as it is, with its peaceful concourse of customers taking perpendicular refreshment at the counter, plying the unpretending pepper-castor and the vinegar-cruet with the perforated cork, calling cheerfully for crusty bread and pats of butter; and, tossing off foaming pints of brownest stout (pale ale – save in bottles, and of the friskiest description – is, with oysters, a mistake), contentedly wiping their hands on the jack-towel on its roller afterwards.

  One a.m. o’clock – A Fire

  ‘Fire! Fire!’ . . . There goes the ‘County Fire Office’. There it goes, dashing, rattling, blazing along – only the very strongest adjective, used participle-wise, can give a notion of its bewildering speed – there it goes, with its strong, handsome horses, champing, fuming, setting the pavement on fire with their space-devouring hoofs, and seeming to participate in the fire-hunting mania. They need no whip, only the voices of the firemen, clustering on the engine like bees, the loose rattle of the reins on their backs, and the cheers of the accompanying crowd. The very engine, burnished and glistening, flashing and blushing in its scarlet and gold in the gaslight, seems imbued
with feeling, and scintillating with excitement . . .

  The fire is in the very thickest part of St Giles’s [south of Bloomsbury, east of Charing Cross Road] . . . the most infamous district in London. . . . From a hundred foul lanes and alleys have debouched, onto the spick-and-span new promenade, unheard-of human horrors. Gibbering forms of men and women in filthy rags, with fiery heads of shock hair, the roots beginning an inch from the eyebrows, with the eyes themselves bleared and gummy, with gashes filled with yellow fangs for teeth, with rough holes punched in the nasal cartilage for nostrils, with sprawling hands and splay feet, tessellated with dirt . . . One can bear the men; ferocious and repulsive as they are, a penny and a threat will send them cowering and cursing to their noisome holes again. One cannot bear the women without a shudder, and a feeling of infinite sorrow and humiliation. They are so horrible to look upon . . . With sternness and determination one can bear these sights; but, heavens and earth! the little children! who swarm, pullulate – who seem to be evoked from the gutter . . . I declare that there are babies among these miserable ones, babies with the preternaturally wise faces of grown up men; babies who, I doubt little, can lie, and steal, and beg, and who, in a year or so, will be able to fight and swear, and be sent to jail for six months’ hard labour . . . ‘whipped and discharged’, the merry prologue to Portland and the hulks, the humorous apprenticeship to the penal settlements and the gallows. . . .

  Notwithstanding all which, there is a terrific fire in the very midst of St Giles’s tonight; and that conflagration may do more in its generation towards the abolition of the district than all the astute contractors and speculative builders. The fire is at an oilman’s shop, who likewise manufactures and deals in pickles, and from the nature of the combustible commodities in which he trades, you may anticipate a rare blaze. . . .

  The houses on either side must go too; so think the firemen. Fears are entertained for the safety of the houses over the way, already scorched and blistering, and the adjoining tenements within a circle of a hundred yards are sure to be more or less injured by waters, for the street is wretchedly narrow, and the houses lean-to frightfully. One extremity of the thoroughfare has been shored up for years by beams, now rotting. The oil and pickle man is heavily insured, so is the contractor for army clothing over the way, so is the wholesale boot and shoe manufacturer next door. . . . But the miserable inhabitants of the crumbling tenements that cling like barnacles to the skirts of the great shops and factories, are they insured? See them swarming from their hovels half naked, frenzied with terror and amazement, bearing their trembling children in their arms, or lugging their lamentable shreds and scraps of household goods and chattels into the open. Are they insured? The fire will send them to the workhouse, or, maybe, to the workhouse dead-wall . . .

  Two o’clock a.m. – The Turnstile of Waterloo Bridge

  And now, for the first time since this clock was set in motion, something like a deep sleep falleth over London. Not that the city is all hushed; it never is. There are night revellers abroad, night prowlers afoot. There is homeless wretchedness knowing not where to hide its head; there is furtive crime stalking about, and seeking whom it may devour. Yet all has a solemn, ghastly, unearthly aspect; the gas-lamps flicker like corpse-candles; and the distant scream of a profligate, in conflict with the police, courses up and down the streets in weird and shuddering echoes.

  The Strand is so still that you may count the footsteps as they sound; and the pale moon looks down pityingly on the vast, feverish, semi-slumbering mass. Here we stand at length by Upper Wellington Street; a minute’s walk to the right will bring us to the ‘Bridge of Sighs’.

  Which never sleeps! Morning, and noon, and night, the sharp, clicking turnstile revolves; the ever-wakeful tollman is there, with his preternaturally keen apron. I call this man Charon, and the river which his standing ferry bridges over might well be the Styx. Impassible, immobile, indifferent, the gate-keeper’s creed is summed up in one word – ‘A halfpenny!’ Love, hope, happiness, misery, despair and death – what are they to him? ‘A halfpenny for the bridge’ is all he asks! But ‘a halfpenny for the bridge’ he must have.

  ‘Please, sir, will you give me a halfpenny for the bridge?’ A phantom in crinoline lays her hand on my arm. I start, and she hastens through the turnstile

  Anywhere, anywhere,

  Out of the world

  perhaps. But I may not linger . . .

  Three o’clock a.m. – Bow Street Police Station

  In a commodious gas-lit box, surrounded by books and papers, and with a mighty folio of loose leaves open before him – a book of Fate, in truth – sits a Rhadamanthine man [strict judge in the underworld], buttoned up in a greatcoat often; for be it blazing July or frigid December, it is always cold at three o’clock in the morning. . . . Rhadamanthine man in greatcoat being but the Inspector of police on night duty, sitting here at his grim task for some fifty or sixty shillings a week. . . .

  He has had a busy time since nine last evening. One by one the ‘charges’ were brought in, and hour after hour, and set before him in that little iron-railed dock. Some were felonious charges: scowling, beetle-browed, underhung charged, who had been there many times before, and were likely to come there many times again. A multiplicity of Irish charges, too: beggars, brawlers, pavement-obstructers – all terribly voluble and abusive of tongue; many with squalid babies in their arms. One or two such charges are lying now, contentedly drunken heaps of rags, in the women’s cells. Plenty of juvenile charges, mere children, God help them! swept in and swept out; sometimes shot into cells – their boxes of fusees, or jagged broom-stumps, taken from them. A wife-beating charge; ruffianly carver, who has been beating his wife with the leg of a pianoforte . . . There was a swell-mob charge, too, a dandy de première force, who swaggered, and twisted his eye-glass, and sucked his diamond ring while in the dock, and declared he knew nothing of the gentleman’s watch, he was ‘shaw’. . . . As the night grew older, the drunk and disorderly and drunk and incapable charges began to drop in; but one by one they have been disposed of in a calm, business-like manner, and the ‘charges’ are either released or, if sufficient cause were apparent for their detention, are sleeping off their liquor, or chewing the cud of sweet and bitter fancies, in the adjacent cells.

  George Augustus Sala, Twice Round the Clock; or the Hours of the Day and Night in London (1859)

  A CITY MUCH LIKE LONDON

  Hell is a city much like London –

  A populous and a smoky city;

  There all sorts of people are undone,

  And there is little or no fun done;

  Small justice shown, and still less pity. . . .

  All are damned – they breathe an air

  Thick, infected, joy-dispelling:

  Each pursues what seems most fair,

  Mining like moles, through mind, and there

  Scoop palace-caverns vast, where Care

  In thronèd state is ever dwelling.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley, Peter Bell, the Third (1819)

  SEVEN

  Arts and Pleasures

  I’d take her to see the Aquarium,

  I’d take her to see the Zoo,

  I’d take her to see the Waxwork Show,

  The Crystal Palace too.

  Oh! yes, if she’d only be true to me

  ‘Twould fill me with delight,

  And I’d bring her to see the Music Halls

  Every Saturday night.

  Anon., music-hall song (late Victorian)

  Early in the century, traditional rural sports and entertainments were overtaken by a new, urban, industrial culture, in the movement to towns, mills and factories. For a while it seemed that workers’ spare time and leisure were overwhelmed by an avalanche of work, but as working conditions improved, an entertainment and leisure business developed.

  The wealthy, of course, never had such problems. For them, from March each year (the end of fox-hunting) there was the London ‘Season’: recepti
ons and levées at Court, balls at great houses and Almack’s Assembly Rooms (marriage markets, where unacceptable nouveaux riches might be filtered out); the Royal Academy Private View, the Eton and Harrow cricket match, Ascot and Epsom racing, Henley Regatta; then Cowes for the yachting; and then off in August for the shooting season.

  More cultured entertainments were provided at concerts in London, Manchester and Edinburgh – Chopin, Mendelssohn and Liszt performed. The Great Exhibition in 1851 attracted 6 million visitors, producing £180,000 profit, which was invested in museums. Exhibits included British engineering – Nasmyth’s steam-hammer, Brunel’s hydraulic press – American sewing-machines and Colt revolvers; also, a garden bench made of coal, a vase made of mutton fat, nude metal sculptures, and elaborate, heavy furniture and furnishings for the Veneerings.

  The period marked the expansion of novel-reading, perhaps using Mudie’s lending-library list. This is no place for a sketch of the Victorian novel: simply listing the important novelists’ names – the Brontës, Dickens, Disraeli, Eliot, Gaskell, Kingsley, Meredith, Thackeray, Trollope – one marvels at the riches available.

  Theatres of different kinds provided more popular entertainment. Until 1834, only the Haymarket, Covent Garden and Drury Lane could perform ‘legit.’ full-length plays. More ‘popular’ theatres such as the Adelphi, the Lyceum and the Coburg (now The Old Vic) provided melodramas, farces, harlequinades, burlesques and burlettas (one-acters with songs); the middle classes generally avoided such theatres because of the rowdy audiences and ubiquitous prostitutes. Lower still were the ‘penny gaffs’, vulgar halls for the younger, poorer working class. Most successful, especially for the lower classes, were the music halls, that developed from concert rooms attached to public houses (one might note here how porter and gin were great, if destructive, solaces; laudanum – opium – was used surprisingly widely, by all classes).