by A. N. Wilson
I don’t much care if I never see a mountain in my life. I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intended local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead Nature. The lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street; the innumerable trades, tradesmen, and customers, coaches, waggons, playhouses; all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden; the very women of the Town; the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles; life awake, if you are awake, at all hours of the night; the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street; the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon houses and pavements, the print-shops, the old book-stalls, parsons cheapening books, coffee-houses, steams of soups coming from kitchens, the pantomimes— London itself a pantomime and a masquerade—all these things work themselves into my mind, and feed me without a power of satiating me.
If such pleasures were on offer to anyone who walked the streets with Lamb’s attentive eyes and ears, the life in the houses of the rich and great was incomparable. Spencer House, overlooking Green Park and now open to the public, is the last great aristocratic house in London to survive. Holland House in the park of the name was destroyed by a bomb in the Second World War. It is hard to think of funnier, or more enviable, social gatherings than those attended by the young Thomas Babington Macaulay and old Samuel Rogers, the banker poet, at Holland House: “We breakfasted on very good coffee, and very good tea, and very good eggs, butter kept in the midst of ice, and hot rolls.” The talk was often, by the 1830s, of figures from the Hollands’ past. Amid all the wit and laughter, the puns and verbal games, the portraits by Lawrence looked down on a group of people who were becoming obsolete. Byron, Sir Walter Scott, and Charles James Fox were remembered, but a different world was dawning. And by the time Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, it had definitely begun.
9
VICTORIAN LONDON
In Dombey and Son there is an unforgettable description of the devastation brought to Camden Town by the coming of the railways:
The first shock of a great earthquake had, just at that period, rent the whole neighbourhood to its centre. Traces of its course were visible on every side. Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that were undermined and shaking propped by great beams of wood. . . .
Everywhere were bridges that led nowhere; thoroughfares that were wholly impassable; Babel towers of chimneys, wanting half their height; temporary wooden houses and enclosures, in the most unlikely situations; carcases of ragged tenements, and fragments of unfinished walls and arches, and piles of scaffolding and wilderness of bricks, and giant forms of cranes, and tripods straddling above nothing.
It does not take much imagination or detective work, as you walk round London in the twenty-first century, to see how much of it was built during the reign of Queen Victoria— from its Gothic Houses of Parliament by Charles Barry (and exotically furnished and decorated by Augustus Welby Pugin) spreading outwards through miles of stock-brick suburbs to north, south, east, and west. At the beginning of the period, the railways were gouged out of Georgian streets and squares, and outlying suburbs and villages. Then came underground railways and an elaborate sewage system. Then more and more speculative building, more and more nondescript. Victorian London was a permanent building site. Its population soared: roughly a million in 1801; 4.5 million by 1881. In the 1840s alone, the period of the Irish famine, which killed over 1 million, 17 percent of London’s population were migrants. Three hundred thirty thousand new people came to London in that decade.
Dickens, again in Dombey and Son, hauntingly speaks of these thousands, making their way on foot down muddy roads and who, footsore and weary, [gazed] fearfully at the huge town before them, as if foreboding that their misery there would be but as a drop of water in the sea, or as a grain of sea-sand on the shore . . . Swallowed up in one phase or other of its immensity, towards which they seemed impelled by a desperate fascination, they never returned. Food for the hospitals, the churchyards, the prisons, the river, fever, madness, vice and death—they passed on to the monster, roaring in the distance, and were lost.
The Railway Age made, and unmade, London. By the 1850s, an elaborate network of railroads connected Birmingham, the Midlands, East Anglia, Scotland, and Wales to the metropolis in a manner never dreamed of in the eighteenth century. The destruction described by Dickens affected the poor, chiefly. The railway companies could not afford to buy the properties of the rich to carve up, and a Parliamentary Royal Commission forbade the building of a railway terminus within the central area bordered by Marylebone Road, City Road, Finsbury Square, and Bishopsgate Street.
About half the navvies who built the railways were Irish. They were badly paid, and their working and living conditions were harsh: it was usual to separate families, forcing the children of navvies into dormitories while their fathers lived in lodgings with other men. The Irishmen who built the great turnstile at the bottom of Haverstock Hill, known as the Roundhouse (now a theater) staged a violent rebellion in 1846.
The riot took place in the half mile of old Hampstead Road known as Chalk Farm Road, in the hot August of 1846, at the height of the famine in Ireland. On Monday, the ninth, Railway Constable Number 145 saw a large group of Irish navvies trying to get into the building site where the English bricklayers were at work. It is impossible at this distance to know how the quarrel broke out or exactly what it was about, since when the navvies were brought before the Marylebone magistrate they were not allowed to offer any evidence or any extenuating pleas in their defense. The Irish, who had been working near the station at Primrose Hill, advanced to attack the English bricklayers. Presumably these men, whose relatives at home were starving, believed that the English had stolen their day’s work? There were cries of “Kill the——— Protestant!” on the one hand, and “Murder!” by a landlady in Chalk Farm Road as she looked down on the street battle, which raged for over an hour between hundreds of laborers, hitting one another with shovels and picks. The police were beaten off and entirely failed to contain the violence. It was only when it was fizzling out that twenty Irishmen were arrested and taken to Albany Street Station. They fought so hard that it took seven constables to contain just one man.
To the authorities it was a frightening incident, not least because it demonstrated that if necessary a discontented proletariat could rise up and there would be little a police force could do against them. The Metropolitan Police had been established by Sir Robert Peel in 1829, and in this, the first major test of their strength, they had failed.
When the Chartist movement gathered momentum in 1848, the government was taking no chances. Waterloo Station was cordoned off by troops to allow the royal family to be spirited out of the capital by train and sent to their house on the Isle of Wight. Lord Fitzroy Somerset mobilized 7122 military, including cavalry; 1231 military pensioners; 4000 police; and no fewer than 85,000 special constables. The demonstration, planned for April 10, 1848, was for every man in the country to be allowed a parliamentary vote. The Whig aristocracy knew how to defend their own: they had formed a powerful alliance with the moneyed interests of the City and with the huge band of propertied Londoners, owners of small businesses, shops, and houses. The Chartists had hoped that over 100,000 would assemble on Kennington Common to march on Parliament and present their petition. As it was, about twenty thousand turned up and the occasion was a damp squib. But the government had shown its strength— with the British Museum, the Bank of England, and Somerset House all sandbagged and heavily guarded with armed men.
The contrast between Paris and London—or between London and many of the major European capitals—in this “year of revolutions” is very marked. Wretched as the plight was of the London poor, London remained an aspirant city, where those in the gutter aspired to rise. There was surprisingly little enthusiasm among the working classes in London for Chartism or any of the subsequent radi
cal movements.
“I cares nothing for politics neither; but I’m a chartist,” a street scavenger told Henry Mayhew, the journalist whose accounts of what one could almost call the ecology of London street life give us an invaluable insight into the existence of those who made a living simply out of living in London during the 1840s. In his pages we meet the blind sellers of tailor’s needles, the screevers (beggars who wrote bogus letters describing their distress, which they forced into the hands of passersby) the vendors of pies, cough drops, buns, ice creams, rat poison, hare skins, live birds. From Mayhew we learn that there was hardly any old rubbish thrown out by one person that could not be sold on to another person. We meet not merely the secondhand-clothes vendors but sellers of grease, dripping, rags, and bottles.
Mayhew notes, too, the anti-Semitism of Londoners against the eighteen thousand or so Jews, mostly very poor, who live in the capital: During the eighteenth century, they were considered—with that exaggeration of belief dear to any ignorant community—as an entire people of misers, usurers, extortioners, receivers of stolen goods, cheats, brothel-keepers, sheriff ’s officers, clippers and sweaters of the coin of the realm, gaming-house keepers; in fine, the charges, or rather the accusations, of carrying on every disreputable trade, and none else, were “bundled at their doors.” That there was too much foundation for many of these accusations, and still is, no reasonable Jew can now deny; that the wholesale prejudice against them was absurd, is equally indisputable.
Dickens’s creation of Fagin falls in with this anti-Jewish stereotyping; and the modern reader is perhaps shocked by the open and unapologetic anti-Semitism of, for example, Charles Lamb, or William Makepeace Thackeray. In Mayhew, we feel it as part of the inevitable pathos and unpleasantness that result from human beings living cheek by jowl in overcrowded and often uncongenial conditions.
The overcrowding led to appalling living conditions, dreadful traffic congestion, and widespread disease. The early Victorian doctors, among them Thomas Wakley (also an MP and a coroner, who founded The Lancet) and John Snow (pioneer of, among other things, the use of chloroform to lessen the pains of childbirth; Queen Victoria was a patient) were in the forefront of social improvement. The governing authorities hated Wakley for making public the extent of disease. For example, though the number of deaths recorded between October and December 1847 greatly exceeded the norm, the bills of mortality—death certificates—did not mention a single case of cholera, which was the real reason for the upsurge. The cholera epidemics killed tens of thousands. In 1849, fourteen thousand Londoners died of cholera, ten thousand in 1854—yet the private water companies were still supplying Thames water for drinking to their customers. In 1866, six thousand Londoners died of the disease.
By then, Edwin Chadwick, author of the Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population (1842), had been campaigning for a quarter of a century for decent underground sewers. It was the collaboration of Snow and Chadwick that led to the creation of the London sewers, one of the engineering triumphs of the Victorians. The cast-iron pipes, sunk deep beneath the London streets, ensured that even during the heaviest bombardments of the Second World War, Londoners could count on clean drinking water. There are over four hundred miles of pipes in the main London drainage system, and some twenty-five hundred miles of subsidiary piping. The pumping system necessary to purify the sewage was not perfected until the twentieth century, but the basic infrastructure of the London sewers, which saved thousands of human lives and improved the daily existence of the living so immeasurably, was the achievement first of the social pioneers Chadwick and Snow and, of equal importance, of the engineering skills of Joseph Bazalgette.
As well as building many miles of sewers out of London stock brick, Bazalgette also constructed the vast granite Albert, Victoria, and Chelsea embankments. The visitor to the London of today must sometimes regret that it is so difficult to get to the very bank of the river which runs through its heart. This regret would not have been foremost during Bazalgette’s lifetime. Disraeli described the Thames as “a Stygian pool reeking with ineffable and unbearable horror.” He did not, for once, exaggerate. The Houses of Parliament, built so picturesquely on the water’s edge, sometimes had to close altogether because the stench was intolerable.
If the sewers were born of necessity, so was the other Victorian engineering miracle in London, the underground railway. The center of town was too crowded, too expensive, and too congested with horse traffic to allow the building of railways overground. Yet more and more who worked in London needed to live in its outlying suburbs, which were expanding all the time during the Victorian period. The obvious solution was to build railways underground.
The first underground railway, the steam-operated Metropolitan, was opened in March 1863. It ran four miles, from Paddington to Farringdon Street. Charles Pearson, a member of the Common Council of the City of London, was the man who came up with the brilliant idea. The extraordinary fact about him is that he began recommending it as early as the 1830s, when he saw the problems that would be created by the population growth of London. The first trains (which Londoners referred to as the Underground even before the opening in March 1863), were gaslit.
After a few disasters—subsidence, the bursting of the Fleet river near Farringdon Station during the building process, and very expensive compensation claims from those who claimed their buildings were being undermined by the railway—the “tube” was developed, based on a tunneling shield first pioneered by Marc Brunel in 1818. Isambard Brunel used such a shield for his tunnel beneath the Thames of 1843 and the first tube railway (as opposed to the “cut and cover” method by which the 1863 Metropolitan line was built) between Tower Hill and Bermondsey opened in 1870. It was cable operated. James Greathead, seeing the potential of the tube, constructed the world’s first underground electric tube railway, the City and South London, in 1890.
In the construction of the sewers and the Underground, you might say that the Victorians showed themselves at their best: here is that trademark Victorian combination of publicspiritedness—a desire to improve the lot of the human race— with cleverness and engineering skill, and with the willpower to see through a brilliant notion.
Yet the Victorians’ independence of mind was also manifested in their dread of government, of busybodydom, of state interference. The voluntarism by which London affairs were or were not conducted had unfortunate consequences, with some of which London is still living.
The Corporation of London, an unelected and sometimes (in those days) corrupt body, was responsible only for the Square Mile and for those other parts of the capital leased or owned by City companies or by the Corporation itself. Joshua Toulmin Smith, author of The Metropolis and Its Municipal Administration (1852) argued passionately that the City of London should not be forced into line under the Public Health Act. His advocacy greatly delayed Chadwick’s sanitary reforms and cost many lives through cholera.
London never, for the first nine decades of the nineteenth century, had an elected body responsible for ensuring that its transport, its schools, its hospitals, its housing, its sanitation were adequate to the needs of the inhabitants. Between the ancient cities of London (the Square Mile) and Westminster, there was a chaos of boroughs and former villages. Planning, as such, was nonexistent. The architectural vandalism that resulted creates dismay in a reader of the twenty-first century.
Victorian speculative builders destroyed more Wren churches than did the Luftwaffe. The Builder proudly announced, “The church has to give way to commerce, vested interests in narrow streets are bought out and wide thoroughfares flanked by new structures take their place.” That was in 1881.
St. Bartholomew-by-the-Exchange was demolished in 1840–41 to make way for the new Royal Exchange. St. Benet Gracechurch Street was demolished in 1867–68; the Illustrated London News rejoiced at the disappearance of its “ugly spire.” St. Benet Fink went in the 1840s, and in 1894 were cleared out the final ruins and rem
ains of St. Clare Minoresses without Aldgate (the other convent buildings had been destroyed by fire in 1797). St. Dionis Backchurch, where Dr. Burney had been the organist in 1749–51, was demolished in 1878. St. George Botolph Lane was pulled down as late as 1941; St. James in the Wall, 1872; St. Martin Outwich (a medieval church, which had escaped the Great Fire but had been rebuilt in 1765) was pulled down in 1874; St. Mary Somerset (one of Wren’s finest) was demolished by Special Act of Parliament in 1872; St. Matthew Friday Street, a charming small church by Wren, went in 1881; St. Michael Bassishaw in 1899; St. Michael Wood Street in 1894; St. Olave Old Jewry, a Wren church of great historic interest with roots in the twelfth century, was destroyed in 1888.
It is difficult to exaggerate the Victorian hatred of the past, particularly of the eighteenth century. Think of Dickens’s descriptions of Mr. Dombey’s house in the elegant Portman Square: it is seen as ugly, just as Tennyson thought of the superb terraces of elegant Wimpole Street as “the long unlovely street” in In Memoriam. “If the Regency prized smooth stucco,” wrote Donald J. Olsen in The Growth of Victorian London, the Victorians produced the roughest stone surfaces possible; if the Georgians preferred unobstructive grey bricks, the Victorians produced the brightest red bricks they could manage; if the Georgians sought restrained uniform, monochrome façades, the Victorians revelled in glazed, polychrome tiles; if the Georgians admired flat cornices topping their buildings, the Victorians sought jagged skylines; if the Georgians desired uniformity, the Victorians demanded variety.
The architectural monuments which they have left to us tell us much about the Victorian multiple personality, now building a Gothic railway station such as St. Pancras, now blocks of flats or shops in a “Queen Anne” manner.