Dickens's England: Life in Victorian Times

by Pritchard, R. E.

  ‘Any gentleman,’ said he, looking round, ‘may have a run at this ’ere hanimal for sixpence’; but though many dogs struggled to get at him, they almost all turned tail on finding themselves solus with Bruin. Those that did seize were speedily disposed of, and, the company being satisfied, the bear took his departure, and Billy announced the badger as the next performer.

  R.S. Surtees, Handley Cross (1854)

  SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING

  (I)

  On Saturday evening, the 24th of April, I went . . . to visit the low places’ resort of the working classes of Leeds. We started soon after nine o’clock, and visited about a score of beer and public houses and as many lodging houses. We found the former crowded with lads and girls – a motley assemblage of thieves and youth of both sexes from the factories.

  There were, on an average, about thirty in each house, and in each case ranged on the benches round the walls of the room, with a blazing fire, and well-lighted. I am confident that, of the 600 persons I saw in these places, not above one quarter, if so many, were turned of 25 years of age, and at least two-thirds were under age. In the beer-houses were several more children. In almost all there was a sprinkling of professed prostitutes. In some, perhaps a third of them, several men and boys were pointed out to me as professed thieves. . . .

  In some of these places we found a fiddle or some other instrument being played: these places were thronged as full as they could hold. In another dancing was going on in a good-sized room upstairs, where I found a dozen couples performing a country dance; the females were all factory girls and prostitutes; obscene attitudes and language accompany and form the chief zest to this amusement.

  Not one of these dancers, boys or girls, was above 20 or 21 years of age, and most of them 16 and 17. The prostitutes were easily distinguished from the factory girls by their tawdry finery and the bareness of their necks, although the costume and head-dress of the factory girls is not altogether dissimilar. In many of these places there was convenience upstairs for the cohabitation of the company below. . . .

  The lodging houses we visited were situated chiefly up narrow alleys running out of the Kirkgate, and are intermixed with working-class brothels. These alleys are wholly without sewerage; there is a gutter down the middle, but no underground channel whatever; they are in a filthy state.

  Report by C.J. Symons, Parliamentary Papers, Vol. XIV (1843)

  (II)

  Sunday, March 14th. Walked about the town [Wolverhampton], streets and outskirts, during church-time. Met men, singly and in groups, wandering about in their working caps or aprons, or with dirty shirtsleeves tucked up, and black smithy-smutted arms and grimed faces. Some appeared to have been up all night – probably at work to recover the time lost by their idleness in the early part of the week; perhaps drinking. Lots of children seen in groups at the end of courts, alleys and narrow streets – playing, or sitting upon the edge of the common dirt-heap of the place, like a row of sparrows and very much of that colour, all chirruping away . . .

  Boys fighting; bad language and bloody noses. Women, in their working dresses, standing about at doors or ends of passages, with folded arms. Little boys sitting in holes in the ground, playing at mining with a small pick-axe. Girls playing about in various ways; all dirty, except one group of about half-a-dozen girls, near Little’s Lane, of the age of from 9 to 15, who are washed and dressed, and are playing with continual screams and squeaks of delight, or jumping from the mounds of dirt, dung, and rubbish-heaps which are collected there, and cover a considerable space. . . .

  Adults seated smoking, or with folded arms, on the threshold of the door, or inside their houses, evidently not intending to wash and shave. Many of them sitting or standing in the house, with an air of lazy vacancy – they did not know what to do with their leisure or with themselves. One group of five adults very decently dressed; they were leaning over the rails of a pig-sty, all looking down upon the pigs, as if in deep and silent meditation – with the pigs’ snouts just visible, all pointing up to the meditative faces, expecting something to come of it. No working men walking with their wives, either to or from church or chapel, or for the sake of the walk – no brothers and sisters. Until the issuing-forth of the children from the Sunday schools, with all those adults who had attended some place of worship, nothing seen but squalid disorder, indifference and utter waste, in self-disgust, of the very day of which, in every sense, they should make the most. With all this, no merriment – no laughter – no smiles. All dullness and vacuity. No sign of joyous animal spirits, except with the girls on the dirt-heap.

  R.J. Horne, Parliamentary Papers, Vol. XV (1843)

  FROM ‘JULLIEN’S GRAND POLKA’

  Oh! sure the world is all run mad,

  The lean, the fat, the gay, the sad, –

  All swear such pleasure they never had,

  Till they did learn the Polka.

  CHORUS

  First cock up your right leg so,

  Balance on your left great toe,

  Stamp your heels and off you go,

  To the original Polka. Oh!

  There’s Mrs Tibbs the tailor’s wife,

  With Mother Briggs is sore at strife,

  As if the first and last of life,

  Was but to learn the Polka.

  Quadrilles and Waltzes all give way,

  For Jullien’s Polkas bear the sway,

  The chimney sweeps on the first of May,

  Do in London dance the Polka. . . .

  A Frenchman he has arrived from France

  To teach the English how to dance,

  And fill his pocket – ‘what a chance’ –

  By gammoning the Polka. . . . [‘soft-selling’]

  But now my song is near its close,

  A secret, now, I will disclose,

  Don’t tell, for it’s beneath the rose,

  A humbug is the Polka.

  Then heigh for humbug France or Spain,

  Who brings back our old steps again,

  Which John Bull will applaud amain,

  Just as he does the Polka.

  Anon., music-hall song, mid-century

  VAUXHALL PLEASURE GARDENS

  The truth is, that of all the delights of the Gardens; of the hundred thousand extra lamps, which were always lighted; the fiddlers in cocked hats, who played ravishing melodies under the gilded cockle-shell in the midst of the gardens; the singers, both of comic and sentimental ballads, who charmed the ears there; the country dances, formed by bouncing cockneys and cockneyesses, and executed amidst jumping, thumping and laughter; the signal that announced that Madame Saqui was about to mount skyward on a slack-rope ascending to the stars; the hermit that always sat in the illuminated hermitage; the dark walks, so favourable to the interviews of young lovers; the pots of stout handed about by the people in the shabby old liveries; and the twinkling boxes, in which the happy feasters made-believe to eat slices of almost invisible ham; of all these things . . . Captain William Dobbin did not take the slightest notice.

  He carried about Amelia’s white cashmere shawl, and having attended under the gilt cockle-shell, while Mrs Salmon performed the Battle of Borodino (a savage cantata against the Corsican upstart, who had lately met with his Russian reverses), Mr Dobbin tried to hum it as he walked away.

  William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1848)

  CREMORNE PLEASURE GARDENS

  Cremorne on a Derby night baffles description; progress round the dancing platform was almost impossible. The ‘Hermit’s Cave’ and the ‘Fairy Bower’ were filled to repletion, and to pass the private boxes was to run the gauntlet of a quartern loaf or a dish of cutlets at one’s head. Fun fast and furious reigned supreme, during which the smaller fry of shop-boys and hired dancers pirouetted within the ring with their various partners. But as time advanced, and the wine circulated, the advent of detachments of roysterers bespoke a not-distant row. A Derby night without a row was, in those days, an impossibility, and the night t
hat our contingent started from the Raleigh was no exception to the rule. No man in his senses had brought a watch, and if his coat was torn and his hat smashed, what matter? . . .

  The expected dénouement was not long in coming, and in a second, and without apparent warning, sticks were crashing down on top hats, tumblers flying in every direction, and fists coming in contact with anything or anybody whose proximity seemed to suggest it.

  The fiddlers had meanwhile made a hasty retreat, the gas was put out, and with the exception here and there of an illumination (a dip steeped in oil) the free fight continued till a bevy of police appeared upon the scene.

  Sauve qui peut was then the word, and helter-skelter, old and young, Jew and Gentile, soiled doves and hereditary legislators dashed like the proverbial herd of swine towards the gates. Often did this stampede continue for a while, till straggling cabs, on the way to their stables, picked up the stragglers, and landed them in less disturbed districts. But the night was by no means over, not certainly the Derby night for roisterers like Lord Hastings.

  ‘We’ll have a rasher of bacon, Bobby,’ he explained, as they descended in Piccadilly Circus. ‘Why, it’s barely five o’clock.’

  One of the Old Brigade (D. Shaw), London in the Sixties (1908)

  DERBY DAY

  Races at Epsom: it is the Derby day, a day of jollification; Parliament does not sit; for three days all the talk has been about horses and their trainers. . . .

  Epsom course is a large green plain, slightly undulating; on one side are reared three public stands and several other smaller ones. In front, tents, hundreds of shops, temporary stables under canvas, and an incredible confusion of carriages, of horses, of horsemen, of private omnibuses; there are perhaps 200,000 human heads here. Nothing beautiful or even elegant . . .

  It is a carnival, in fact; they have come to amuse themselves in a noisy fashion. Everywhere are gypsies, comic singers and dancers disguised as negroes, shooting galleries . . . musicians of all sorts; and the most astonishing row of cabs, barouches, droskies, four-in-hands, with pies, cold meats, melons, fruits, wines, especially champagne. They unpack; they proceed to eat and drink; that restores the creature and excites him; coarse joy and open laughter are the result of a full stomach. In presence of this ready-made feast the aspect of the poor is pitiable to behold . . . Nearly all of them resemble wretched, hungry, beaten, mangy dogs, waiting for a bone, without hope of finding much on it. They arrived on foot during the night, and count upon dining off the crumbs from the great feast. . . .

  However, a bell rings and the race is about to begin. The three or four hundred policemen clear the course; the stands are filled . . . The jockeys in red, in blue, in yellow, in mauve, form a small group apart, like a swarm of butterflies which has alighted. . . . Thirty-four run; after three false starts they are off; fifteen or twenty keep together, the others are in small groups . . . There is one imposing moment, when the horses are not more than two hundred paces off; in a second the speed becomes suddenly perceptible, and the cluster of riders and horses rushes onward, this time like a tempest. A horse of which little is known has won, and very narrowly; the betting against him was 40 to 1 . . .

  We descend; there is hustling and crushing in the staircases, at the refreshment counters; but most of the carriages are provisioned for the day, and the people feast in the open air in small knots. Good humour and unreserved merriment . . . towards evening the carnival is in full swing. Twenty-four gentlemen triumphantly range on their omnibus seventy-five bottles which they have emptied. Groups pelt each other with chicken-bones, lobster-shells, pieces of turf. . . . There are humorous incidents: three men and a lady are standing erect in their carriage; the horses move on, they all tumble, the lady with her legs in the air; peals of laughter follow. . . . Gentlemen approach a carriage containing ladies and young girls, and stand shamefully [i.e., to urinate] against the wheels; the mother tries to drive them away with her parasol. One of our party who remained till midnight saw many horrors which I cannot describe; the animal nature had full vent.

  Hippolyte Taine (trans. W.F. Rae), Notes on England (1872)

  BARTHOLOMEW FAIR

  [Held in Smithfield every August, for hundreds of years, until it was closed down in 1855.]

  . . . What a shock

  For eyes and ears! What anarchy and din,

  Barbarian and infernal – a phantasma,

  Monstrous in colour, motion, shape, sight, sound!

  Below, the open space, through every nook

  Of the wide area, twinkles, is alive

  With heads; the midway region, and above,

  Is thronged with staring pictures and huge scrolls,

  Dumb proclamations of the Prodigies;

  With chattering monkeys, dangling from their poles,

  And children whirling in their roundabouts;

  With those that stretch the neck and strain the eyes,

  And crack the voice in rivalship, the crowd

  Inviting; with buffoons against buffoons

  Grimacing, writhing, screaming – him who grinds

  The hurdy-gurdy, at the fiddle weaves,

  Rattles the saltbox, thumps the kettledrum,

  And him who at the trumpet puffs his cheeks,

  The silver-collared Negro with his timbrel,

  Equestrians, tumblers, women, girls and boys,

  Blue-breeched, pink-vested, with high-towering plumes.

  All moveables of wonder, from all parts,

  Are here – Albinos, painted Indians, dwarfs,

  The Horse of knowledge and the learned Pig,

  The Stone-eater, the man that swallows fire,

  Giants, Ventriloquists, the Invisible Girl,

  The Bust that speaks and moves its goggling eyes,

  The Waxwork, Clockwork, all the marvellous craft

  Of modern Merlins, wild Beasts, Puppet-shows,

  All out-o’-the-way, far-fetched, perverted things,

  All freaks of nature, all Promethean thoughts

  Of man, his dullness, madness, and their feats

  All jumbled up together, to compose

  A Parliament of Monsters. Tents and Booths

  Meanwhile, as if the whole were one vast mill,

  Are vomiting, receiving on all sides,

  Men, Women, three-years’ children, babes in arms.

  Oh, blank confusion! true epitome

  Of what the mighty City is herself . . .

  William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850)

  THEATRE AUDIENCES, AND A STAR

  The most striking thing to a foreigner in English theatres is the unheard-of coarseness and brutality of the audiences. The consequence of this is that the higher and more civilised classes go only to the Italian Opera, and very rarely visit their national theatre. . . . English freedom here degenerates into the rudest licence, and it is not uncommon in the midst of the most affecting part of a tragedy, or the most charming ‘cadenza’ of a singer, to hear some coarse expression shouted from the galleries in a stentor voice. . . . It is also no rarity for someone to throw the fragments of his ‘gouté’, which do not always consist of orange-peels alone, without the smallest ceremony on the heads of people in the pit, or to shail them with singular dexterity into the boxes; while others hang their coats and waistcoats over the gallery, and sit in shirt-sleeves . . .

  Another cause for the absence of respectable families is the resort of hundreds of those unhappy women with whom London swarms. . . . Between the acts they fill the large and handsome ‘foyers’ and exhibit their boundless effrontery in the most revolting manner. . . . They beg in the most shameless manner, and a pretty, elegantly dressed girl does not disdain to take a shilling or a sixpence, which she instantly spends in a glass of rum, like the meanest beggar. And these are the scenes, I repeat, which are exhibited in the national theatre of England, where the highest dramatic talent of the country should be developed; where immortal artists like Garrick, Mrs Siddons, Miss O’Neil, have captured the public
by their genius, and where such actors as Kean, Kemble and Young still adorn the stage. . . .

  [3 December 1826]

  The play concluded with a melodrama, in which a large Newfoundland dog really acted admirably; he defended a banner for a long time, pursued the enemy, and afterwards came on the stage wounded, lame, and bleeding, and died in the most masterly manner, with a last wag of the tail that was really full of genius. You would have sworn that the good beast knew at least as well as any of his human companions what he was about.

  Prince von Pückler-Muskau (trans. S. Austin), Tour by a German Prince (1832)

  POPULAR DRAMA

  There is a range of imagination in most of us, which no amount of steam-engines will satisfy; and which The-great-exhibition-of-the-works-of-industry-of-all-nations itself will probably leave unappeased. . . . Joe Whelks, of the New Cut, Lambeth, is not much of a reader, has no great store of books, no very commodious room to read in, no very decided inclination to read, and no power at all of presenting vividly before his mind’s eye what he reads about. But, put Joe in the gallery of the Victoria Theatre; show him doors and windows in the scene that will open and shut, and that people can get in and out of; tell him a story with these aids, and by the aid of live men and women dressed up, confiding to him their innermost secret, in voices audible half a mile off; and Joe will unravel a story through all its entanglements, and sit there as long after midnight as you have anything left to show him. . . .