London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City

by Gray, Drew D.

  For many of the readers of Mearns' article (which could be purchased for a penny) his revelations must have shocked them to their core. As we have seen Victorian Britain was at its apogee as the century entered its final decades. Middle-class Londoners could be excused their complacency and smugness, even if Britain was experiencing its own `great depression' between 1873 to 1896.11 It must have come as a nasty shock to discover that incest was `common' in the overcrowded tenements where the poor lived. Even if this claim was probably made with a nod to journalistic license, Mearns' intention was to emphasize the consequences that such poor conditions brought with it: `Immorality' he wrote, `is but the natural outcome of conditions like these' " In the same year that The Bitter Cry of Outcast London appeared, Octavia Hill, the foremost matron of London charity, published a new edition of her Homes of the London Poor which drew on her own extensive experience of visiting the poorer classes. Octavia Hill had started her involvement with London's poorest in her early teens, when she had assisted her mother at the Ladies Guild in Russell Place, Holborn. The Guild operated a co-operative crafts workshop involving local children and Octavia soon became familiar with their homes and lives and was horrified at the conditions in which they existed.13 Inspired in part by her association with John Ruskin but also by her strong belief in the principles of `self-help' (as propounded by Samuel Smiles), Hill attempted to address the issue of social housing. Ruskin invested in her scheme to build affordable housing for the working classes, and Octavia's career as a social reformer was up and running. The essential element of Hill's philosophy was personal contact with the recipients of her charity. By visiting her tenants, with her growing band of female helpers, to personally collect the rents, Octavia could observe the way they were living and could get to know their problems. As Gillian Darnley notes, `in effect they were model social workers'.14

  Let us return to Hill's own writings on the housing issue. She wrote that she wanted to `free a few poor people from the tyranny and influence of a low class of landlord and landladies; from the corrupting effect of continual forced communication with degraded fellow-lodgers; from the heavy incubus of accumulated dirt: so the poor might have scope to spring, and with it such energy as might help them to help themselves.'5 In reporting her contact with one male tenant Hill reveals the importance of reforming as well as re-housing the working classes. On discovering that the tenant would not send his children to school and was allowing an unacceptable level of overcrowding by taking in three additional children, Octavia threatened him with eviction. He requested an interview and expressed the view that since he was not behind with his rent she should let him be. `The room was his; he took it, and if he paid rent he could do as he liked in it, he argued. Hill countered `Very well, and the house is mine; I take it, and I must do what I think right in it' She agreed the extra mouths could stay but insisted that the children were taught to be `good, and careful, and industrious', warning him that `If you prefer liberty, and dirt, and mess, take them but if you choose to agree to live under as good a rule as I can make it, you can stay. You have your choice"' The man agreed - the children were sent to school. In the long tradition of charitable giving in England, Hill's approach was paternalistic but it was underpinned by the principles of self-reliance and responsibility.

  The Bitter Cry of Outcast London and the writings of Octavia Hill were not new commentaries on London's problems. They sat within an ongoing discourse regarding the living conditions, morals and health of the working classes. As we shall see, attempts at solving the problems of poor and inadequate housing and sanitation had been ongoing since the late 1850s. Neither were social investigators, newspapermen or charity workers novel inventions of the 1880s. However, the horrific events of the summer and autumn of 1888 gave renewed impetus to the drive for change, coming as they did hot on the heels of a royal commission a few years earlier.

  In 1884, in response to a newspaper campaign orchestrated by the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, William Stead, and the personal intervention of the Prince of Wales, the Liberal administration established a royal commission to examine the housing conditions of the working classes in London." This was not the first, nor was it to be the last occasion on which the honourable members of the Houses of Parliament peered into the homes of the poor of the capital. The problem of poor quality, insanitary and overcrowded lodgings had exercised politicians, social reformers and religious missionaries throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. The Conservative leader, the Marquis of Salisbury, was an active supporter of the commission as was the Prince himself who had visited the poorest areas of London and had himself contributed by speaking in the debate."

  The commission's brief was to explore two related questions: first, given that conditions had improved in the previous 30 years, why was there still a problem of chronic overcrowding; and second, to discover why legislation to remedy housing problems was not being enacted. In 1868 a bill sponsored by William Torrens had allowed for the demolition of unfit housing and the re-housing of those made homeless as a result. However, the House of Lords forced amendments to Torrens' bill so that when it became law the requirement to re-house had been omitted and, as a result, Torrens' Act became merely a tool for destruction.19 Richard Cross' later act (of 1875) had also failed to appreciate the costs involved in implementing his legislation. It had been hoped that clearing away slum housing would bring a concomitant rise in rateable values as areas improved; once it was clear that this was unlikely and that the burden of such clearance schemes would fall on the ratepayer the Metropolitan Board of Works (MBW) and the City of London both backtracked from implementing reforms.20

  With these previous reforms in mind the commission heard evidence from various parts of the metropolis (including Whitechapel) and more generally from elsewhere in Britain. The findings were sobering. The commission discovered that the inhabitants of Whitechapel cellars who were evicted by sanitary inspectors merely moved to another cellar to continue their troglodyte existence while `their condemned habitation' was immediately filled by new tenants.21 The commission was informed of the high relative costs of rented accommodation in London with tenants having to part with anything from a fifth to a half of their incomes in rent. The average weekly rent in Spitalfields was 4s 6d to 6s per week, and that for an unfurnished room. The East End was overcrowded and workers were unable to move to the less congested suburbs because of their need to stay close to their places of work. Casual dock workers had to be able to react to news of work at 6 a.m., others had to start work even earlier (at 3 or 4 a.m.), or when a merchant's vessel came into the Port of London.22 Costermongers (those selling a range of usually cheap goods from street stalls or barrows) needed to live close to their pitches and supplies.

  Centrally located working-class communities also provided better forms of support and cheaper goods than those available outside. Affordable transport schemes were gradually being introduced to encourage families to move away from the centre but these did not come into widespread use until the last decade of the nineteenth century.23 Other concerns affected some residents of the East End. Jewish immigrants would have found it hard to move out of the centre for all the above reasons but had additional anchors holding them in Whitechapel. As Jerry White has observed, `For a Jewish family, needing to live within walking distance of a synagogue, a kosher butcher and the ritual baths, there was no alternative to living in the "ghetto" and thus no alternative to overcrowding'.24 The housing crisis could not be solved by `displacement' as James Yelling has noted, instead it required a more holistic approach to the problems of the late nineteenth-century city and these problems were increasing.25

  In the period between 1851 and 1881 population density in the capital had grown from 7.72 persons per house to 7.85. Now while this in itself was not a dramatic rise it is much more interesting to note that in Bethnal Green and St George's in the East the rises had been steeper (from 6.78 to 7.65 in the former and from 7.87 to 8.16 in the latter).26 Arguab
ly the situation was worse than this. Census takers were reliant on the honesty `of those who stood most to gain by underestimating the numbers of occupants' of buildings.27 Thus, tenants, fearing eviction under sanitary guidelines, and landlords, worried about being prosecuted or stung with increased rates, gave false information and counts were carried out during the day when many householders were out. We need, therefore, to think of reports of overcrowding in London as an understatement of the reality.

  As slum clearance took place and evictions ensued, the occupants were often caught unprepared - perhaps unwilling - to face the reality of their situation. The commission was told that even when the very poor were given notice `they never seem to appreciate the fact that their homes are about to be destroyed until the workmen come to pull the roof from over their heads' 21 In some ways it was the poorest inhabitants that found it easiest to relocate. When the notorious lodging houses of Flower and Dean Street (one of the first targets of Richard Cross' act29) were demolished to make way for more respectable artisan model dwellings in the late 1880s, their occupants decamped to Dorset (known locally as `Dorset') Street and White's Row, across Commercial Road. In turn they ousted the weaker elements who had lived there previously, and the cycle of evictions and upheaval continued.30

  There are other ways to view the attempts to clean up the East End in the late 1800s. Slum areas were viewed as breeding grounds for crime and immorality as well as diseases such as cholera. Removing the `nests of disease and crime'31 by pulling down swathes of decrepit homes would help open up the dark courts of the East End to the view of the police, sanitary inspectors and reformers, and undermine the criminal networks that infested them. As The Times put it: `as we cut nicks through our woods and roads through our forests, so it should be our policy to divide these thick jungles of crime and misery'.32 The same philosophy underpinned the efforts of Baron Haussmann as he drove 135 km of new boulevards and thoroughfares through the streets of Napoleon III's Paris, with similar consequences for poorer Parisians.

  ENTERING THE ABYSS: HOUSING CONDITIONS IN THE EAST END

  So ran a popular musical number that reflected both the reality of housing in the district and the coping methods of the inhabitants. In Hanbury Street, the site of Annie Chapman's murder, overcrowding was rife. At number 85 there were nine occupied rooms each of which were home, on average, to seven people. The rector of Spitalfields told the 1884 royal commission that `in several of these rooms there are adult sons and daughters sleeping together on the floor. In no room in that house is there more than one bedstead' 34 The single toilet was filthy and residents preferred to use their own chamber pots but these would often remain in the room for long periods before being emptied. This was not the worst of houses; indeed Hanbury Street was `in the better part' of the parish and its occupants were `all respectable people'.35 The Bitter Cry of Outcast London had warned its readers of the consequences of such overcrowding: `That people condemned to exist under such conditions take to drink and fall into sin is surely a matter for little surprise, he wrote.36 He also warned his readers that `the family of an honest working man [was] compelled to take refuge in a thieves' kitchen ... the houses where they live their rooms are frequently side by side, and continual contact with the very worst of those who have come out of our gaols is a matter of necessity' So, the housing crisis of the 1880s, in the eyes of Mearns and others, forced the poor to live side by side with other `deviant' types.37

  This underlying fear, that the `respectable' members of the working class could be infected by the so-called `residuum, was a very real one for late Victorian society. Thus, some of the slum clearance schemes of the previous 30 years had been intended to remove notorious rookeries and dens of criminality and vice such as the Old Nichol at the northern end of Brick Lane and other streets around Spitalfields Market .3' The royal commission tended to confirm Mearns' analysis and Lord Salisbury accepted the need for further housing reforms declaring that `the more our prosperity increases the more there is the danger that unless remedial measures are taken, the evils of overcrowding will also increase"'

  The state of the poor was a worry for many middle-class Victorians who must have viewed the conditions they lived in with rising astonishment. After all, their own lives, in comfortable homes where intimacy was bounded by restrictive social rules that governed the behaviour of adults and children alike, were a long way from those of the working classes. The settled, secure and spacious villas and town houses of the middle classes contrasted sharply with the cramped and Spartan dwellings of the poor. The children of the middle class enjoyed a classical education at school or from governors while the children of the streets attended board schools only sporadically. Many working-class families moved house frequently, `like fish in a river' as Charles Booth observed.40 People moved when times were hard and rent difficult to find, often at night to avoid the landlord or his collectors. The musical hall song `My old man, made popular by Marie Lloyd, describes the migratory nature of some working-class lives.

  The wealthier classes misunderstood this behaviour as `shiftless' and `transitory': they worried about the numbers of children running wild in the streets and avoiding the education that was considered to be so essential for the future of nation and Empire (as Octavia Hill had noted, to instill good behaviour and `industriousness'). It was hard to attend to school without a stable home environment and many children's education must have suffered as a result. Indeed it is hard to read anything written from a middle-class perspective about the lives of the poor in this period without hearing the shock and horror they contained. The notion of a society divided along very different class lines is evident in numerous letters, pamphlets and sermons. Despite the legions of `slummers' and missionaries, the lack of understanding of working-class culture is staggering: this truly was another country, a different race or even species - the well-trodden discourse of `darkest England' reveals as much about middle-class Victorian attitudes as it does about working-class lives.

  The readership of The Times may well have been shocked to read the report of one London Board school inspector, T. Marchant Williams, in February and March 1884. In the central districts of London including the notoriously overcrowded area of St Giles, Williams calculated that some 24 per cent of families lived in one room only; a further 43 per cent had two rooms while just 33 per cent enjoyed the relative luxury of three rooms.42 As Anna Davin has shown, Williams' findings echoed those of Charles Booth in East London in 1891 and 1901.43 Living in one or two or even three rooms meant little privacy for anyone. A family of eight might occupy two beds, or three if a truckle bed could be stowed away during the day under one of the others and if the budget stretched that far. In some homes multiple beds were unheard of; in others the very poor slept on rags or old clothes on the floor. Rooms had to serve as bedrooms, living rooms and workrooms and if any attempt was going to be made to keep them clean (and despite the concerns of the well-to-do middle classes most working-class wives tried to keep up standards of respectability) then houses had to be vacated during the day. There might be several explanations for the crowded street scenes captured by late century photographers but the need to find space to work was certainly one. When modern readers worry about allowing their children out to play we might reflect that our ancestors had little choice.

  Anna Davin cautions us against assuming that the overcrowded conditions within which many London families existed in the 1880s necessarily degraded those that experienced them. Stories of families sleeping two, three or four to a bed; of sisters and brothers sharing limited space; of children running amok in the streets - all these can provoke visions of neglect, incest and hardship. However, this is to accept too readily the fears and warnings of contemporary social investigators, COS visitors and Board school investigators: all of whom reflected middle-class concerns about the poor and their offspring. Both Davin and Jerry White (in his study of the Rothschild Buildings)," drawing upon a range of first-hand accounts, describe a world of co
mmunity support, of neighbours happy to share what meagre food and goods they had with those less fortunate than themselves - hopeful that when it came to their own time of need others would reciprocate. Davin shows us, as Helen Bosanquet discovered, that the backbone of this self-supporting society was its matriarchs: the women of the East End battled poverty, sickness, dirt and their husbands to keep body and soul (and, crucially, family) together.

  The evidence suggests that where contemporary middle-class observers saw danger the working class saw companionship, warmth and shared troubles in their overcrowded homes. We might assume that no one could enjoy sharing a bed with siblings or other relatives but clearly this is erroneous: many missed the warmth and security it brought, as this example shows: `We slept two, three in a bed like nothing. We never had a hot water bottle or extra blankets - we didn't need it. You all warmed another' one resident of the Rothschild remembered.45 Arthur Harding, who grew up in the notoriously criminal Nichol estate at one end of Brick Lane, also recalled his early life with fondness rather than horror.46 `Community' is a word laden with meaning and imbued with a sense of a longlost past. In our `broken' twenty-first century society the need to cling to notions of a `golden age' surfaces frequently, regardless of whether such a `golden age' ever existed.47

  Jerry White's wonderful micro-history of an East End tenement in the late Victorian and Edwardian period shows that, even though many had little themselves, they were often prepared to share it with their neighbours.4R This sharing of resources included food and drink, shelter and companionship, and extended beyond family ties and could even result in the suspension of feuds and disputes when times or circumstances were particularly hard.49 Children were looked after when parents fell sick and could not provide; families clubbed together to find rent for those behind with theirs (and on at least one occasion they prevented an eviction from the Rothschild model dwellings); refugees fleeing persecution in the Russian empire were accommodated until they could find their own digs or were able to move on to America or elsewhere.