The Victorian City

by Judith Flanders

  An hour or so after the workmen set out in the morning, it was the turn of the office workers. Every morning it was the same, a thick black line, stretching from the suburbs into the heart of the City; every evening the black line reversed, dispersing back to its myriad points of origin, as hundreds of thousands of men tramped steadily to and from work, the ‘clerk population of Somers and Camden towns, Islington, and Pentonville…pouring into the city, or directing their steps towards Chancery-lane and the Inns of Court. Middle-aged men…plod steadily along…knowing by sight almost everybody they meet or overtake, for they have seen them every morning (Sunday excepted) during the last twenty years, but speaking to no one.’ Thus wrote the young journalist Charles Dickens.

  These middle-aged clerks were sober in white neckcloths and black coats, although their neckcloths were often yellow with age, while the black dye of their coats had turned rusty brown. The secret ambition of the clerk Reginald Wilfer in Our Mutual Friend was to be able to afford an entirely new suit of clothes all at once. There were also younger, unmarried clerks, ‘dashing young parties who purchase the pea-green, the orange, and the rose-pink gloves; the crimson braces, the kaleidoscopic shirt-studs, the shirts embroidered with dahlias, deaths’ heads, racehorses, sun-flowers, and ballet-girls…the shiniest of hats, the knobbiest of sticks’. In Bleak House, when Mr Guppy proposes to Esther, he puts on a new suit, ‘a shining hat, lilac-kid gloves, a neckerchief of a variety of colours, a large hot-house flower in his button-hole, and a thick gold ring on his little finger’.

  Of whatever type, ‘each separate street, pours out its tide of young men into the City. From the east and the west, the north and the south, on it comes…clerks of all ages, clerks of all sizes, clerks from all quarters, walking slowly, walking fast, trotting, running, hurrying’. This implies variety, but in reality these commuters moved in an extraordinarily regimented way. In an age when traffic was not constrained by any regulations – with no rules about which side of the street to drive on; no one-way streets – walking was, by contrast, ‘reduced to a system’, with everyone walking on the right. One worker living south of the river bought the Morning Star every day at a tavern near his house, and ‘So orderly was the traffic throughout that route that I could, by keeping to the right, read my paper the whole way’ as he walked the three miles to the City.

  The scale made it a sight, but walking was the most common form of locomotion throughout the nineteenth century. By mid-century it was estimated that 200,000 people walked daily to the City; by 1866 that figure had increased to nearly three-quarters of a million. These were numbers worth catering to. By seven, or even six o’clock, depending on the trade, many shops had taken down their shutters. Bakers were among the first to open, supplying servants and children sent to fetch breakfast bread and rolls, as well as the passing lines of walkers, serving them with breakfast on the hoof, just as earlier the labourers had bought theirs from the coffee stalls. The poet Robert Southey early in the century asked a pastry-cook-shop owner why all their windows were kept open, even in the rain. ‘She told me, that were she to close it, her receipts would be lessened [by] forty or fifty shillings a day’ as commuters reached in to buy a loaf or a bun as they passed – 40s equating to 480 penny loaves, or around 500 customers buying a daily walking breakfast from that one shop alone.

  It was not only the working classes and the clerks who travelled on foot, however. In our time of public and private mass transport, the walkability of London has almost been forgotten. But in the nineteenth century, Londoners walked, without much differentiation between economic groups. In 1833, the children of a middle-class musician living in Kensington walked home from a concert in the City. Two decades later, Leonard Wyon, a prosperous civil servant, and his wife shopped in Regent Street, then walked home to Little Venice. In 1856, the wealthy Maria Cust returned from her honeymoon, walking with her husband from Paddington to Eaton Square. And according to Dickens (in a letter he may have coloured somewhat for comic effect), a child who got lost at the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park was found by the police in Hammersmith, ‘going round and round the Turnpikes – which he still supposed to be a part of the Exhibition’. All except the first journey are, to the modern eye, surprisingly short, less than three miles. Even the longest, to Kensington from St Paul’s, is only four and a half miles.

  Put in this context, the amount of walking done by the characters in Dickens’ novels is not as unusual as it appears today. In Bleak House, Peepy, a small child living in Thavies Inn, near Gray’s Inn Road, is ‘lost for an hour and a half, and brought home from Newgate market’, a mile away, having most likely walked through the slum of Saffron Hill. The more prosperous characters in the novel also walk across London, the women alone at night sometimes taking hackneys, but not always even then. The Jarndyce cousins go to the theatre by fly (rented coach) when they are staying in lodgings in Oxford Street, but in the daytime they walk to Holborn, to Westminster Hall and, on ‘a sombre day’, with ‘drops of chilly rain’, to Chancery Lane. Mr Tulkinghorn walks from the Dedlocks’ house, probably in Mayfair (this is the one place in the novel not given a specific location), to his own chambers in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and even Lady Dedlock follows him there and back on foot. Even at 4 a.m., Esther and Mr Bucket walk from Cursitor Street to Drury Lane, which probably takes them less than a quarter of an hour, but much of their route is through Clare market and Drury Lane slums. The lower-middle-class or working-class characters walk even further afield. Prince Turveydrop, a dancing master, walks from Soho to Kensington; Mr George from Mount Pleasant, in Clerkenwell, over Waterloo Bridge, then to the Westminster Bridge Road; he returns, again on foot, to Leicester Square. What is today even more unexpected is the number of middle-class women walking alone in Dickens’ novels. In Our Mutual Friend, Bella Wilfer walks from Holloway to Cavendish Square without comment; people look at her only when she reaches the City, where few women were to be seen on the streets. In Little Dorrit, Amy Dorrit, at this point in the novel wealthy, walks from the Marshalsea prison, south of the river, to Brook Street in the West End. None of these walks is commented on as unusual – there is no mention that the women concerned tried and failed to find a coach, or that a carriage was not available. Walking was the norm.

  Many of those walking long distances then worked twelve-, fourteenor sixteen-hour days, at the end of which they then walked home again. The great journalist of working-class London, Henry Mayhew, noted in passing what he considered ‘the ordinary hours’ of employment: from six to six.15 At Murdstone and Grinby’s wine warehouse, the eight-year-old David Copperfield works until 8 p.m., walking to and from his lodgings in Camden Town. Many people worked much longer hours. Shifts for drivers of hackney cabs were always long: the shorter shifts lasted eleven or twelve hours, the long shifts from fourteen to sixteen hours, sometimes more. (The horses could work nothing like these hours: two or three horses were needed for a twelve-hour shift.) Even worse were the hours of many omnibus employees: frequently drivers and conductors (known as ‘cads’, probably from ‘cadet’, that is, the junior partner of the team) worked twenty hours at a stretch, beginning at 4 a.m. and ending at midnight, with an hour and a half off during that time. The industry average, however, was fifteen hours: 7 a.m. to midnight, with seven minutes for dinner, and ten minutes between journeys at the termini.

  Shop assistants worked equally long hours. One linen draper told his fellows at the Metropolitan Drapers’ Association that he had started to close his shop at 7 p.m. instead of 10 – thus working an eleven-hour day – and had found it saved money: ‘so cheerful and assiduous’ were the staff made by these short hours that he could manage with fewer employees. Henry Vizetelly, later a publisher, worked his apprenticeship as a wood-engraver, walking ten miles daily from Brixton to Judd Street in Bloomsbury and back, leaving his lodgings at about six and arriving home again around ten. And, he pointed out in his memoirs, he was lucky: City hours were longer. The description of the Cheeryble brothers
’ City firm in Nicholas Nickleby accords with his recollection. Their manager opens up the office six days a week at 9 a.m. and locks up again after the last employee goes home at 10.30 p.m., ‘except on Foreign Post nights’, when the letters abroad go late, to catch the last post; then the office closes at 12.20 a.m.16 The Cheeryble employees thus work an eighty-five-hour week. Yet their business is presented to the reader as the epitome of benevolence and good employment practices.

  2.

  ON THE ROAD

  When Nancy decides to betray Fagin and Bill Sikes, so that Oliver Twist can be rescued to live a better – a middle-class – life, she rushes from Bill Sikes’s room in Bethnal Green, in the east of London. It is a quarter to ten at night, yet as ‘She tore along the narrow pavement’ she found herself ‘elbowing the passengers from side to side; and darting almost under the horses’ heads, cross[ing] crowded streets, where clusters of persons were eagerly watching their opportunity to do the like’. It is only when she reaches the West End that the streets become less crowded, and even then there are plenty of people about who turn to watch this frantic woman running along.

  That the London streets were always busy, always teeming with humanity, is a regular feature of travellers’ accounts of the city. In 1852, Max Schlesinger, a German journalist who spent much of his life in London, said ‘there is not a single hour in the four and twenty’ when the main streets were empty. When Charlotte and Anne Brontë had planned their first visit to London ‘in the quiet of Haworth Parsonage’, they had expected to walk from their lodgings at the Chapter Coffee House in Paternoster Row, near St Paul’s, to their publisher in Cornhill, a few hundred yards away. But once in London, ‘they became so dismayed by the crowded streets, and the impeded crossings, that they stood still repeatedly, in complete despair’, the journey taking them the best part of an hour. Locals were as overwhelmed as strangers. Henry Mayhew, born and bred in London, compared the sound of the city to the ‘awful magnificence of the great Torrent of Niagara…if the roar of the precipitated waters bewilders and affrights the mind, assuredly the riot and tumult of the traffic of London at once stun and terrify’. It was that continuous sound that struck most people – the ‘uninterrupted and crashing roar’.

  This roar made it difficult, sometimes impossible, to hear, often indoors as well as out of doors. An American clergyman in the early 1820s attended a service at St Clement Danes, sitting near the pulpit, but even so found the sermon inaudible because ‘The church…is most unfortunately situated for hearing, being placed in the middle of the Strand.’ Suburban householders suffered too. In 1834, Jane Carlyle, wife of the historian Thomas Carlyle, wrote from her new home, in a side street in Chelsea: ‘I…have an everlasting sound in my ears, of men, women, children, omnibuses, carriages, glass coaches, street coaches, waggons, carts, dog-carts, steeple bells, door bells.’ The noise was, if anything, worse in a coach. When the characters in Dickens’ novels want to have an important conversation, they ‘stop…the driver…that we might the better hear each other’.

  Dickens commented on the noise directly from time to time, but more often it runs under the surface of his novels. Again and again when his characters walk through the city, they stop and turn onto side streets to talk. In particular, this noise is notable when they are near Holborn. In this heart of legal London, and the heart of Dickens-land, they frequently veer off into one of the Inns of Court as a refuge from the sound. The Inns of Court – Lincoln’s Inn, Gray’s Inn, and Inner and Middle Temple – were where barristers trained, lived and practised.17 Traditionally, each Inn comprised a cluster of buildings, with a dining hall, a chapel or church, a library and chambers, laid out around private gardens, and each represented a legal society, as did the Inns of Chancery – Furnival’s Inn, Lyon’s Inn, Clement’s, Thavies’, Barnard’s, Staple’s, Symond’s, Clifford’s and New Inn – for solicitors. (Only the Inns of Court survive as functioning entities today, although a small section of Staple’s Inn still stands.) The importance of the Inns had declined as training and accreditation was taken over by the Law Society from 1825, and so many of their chambers were let out in lodgings. These buildings were densely populated by Dickens’ fictional characters, as well as by Dickens himself, who lived for nearly four years in Furnival’s Inn. (The massive late-Victorian Prudential Building stands on the site in Holborn today.)

  On Holborn, one of the largest east–west routes, the Inns were oases of quiet. After leaving Ellis and Blackmore, Dickens began work as a shorthand parliamentary reporter. For this he took a room in Doctors’ Commons, off St Paul’s Churchyard, where ‘Before we had taken many paces down the street…the noise of the city seemed to melt, as if by magic, into a softened distance.’18 This magicking away of the clamour was a repeated refrain in his works. In the early 1840s, in Martin Chuzzlewit, Tom Pinch passes ‘from the roar and rattle of the streets into the quiet court-yards of the Temple’. In the 1860s, in Our Mutual Friend, Mr Boffin is accosted by Mr Rokesmith outside the Temple: ‘Would you object to turn aside into this place – I think it is called Clifford’s Inn – where we can hear one another better than in the roaring street?’ And in Dickens’ final work, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, left unfinished at his death in 1870, Staple’s Inn ‘is one of those nooks, the turning into which out of the clashing street, imparts to the relieved pedestrian the sensation of having put cotton in his ears, and velvet soles on his boots’.

  The roar of the city was not a single noise, but was made up of a multiplicity of noises. In 1807, Robert Southey published a series of letters in the voice of a visiting Spanish nobleman, who on his arrival in the capital wonders that a watchman, calling loudly, goes past his house every half-hour the whole night long: ‘A strange custom this, to pay men for telling them what the weather is every hour during the night, till they get so accustomed to the noise, that they sleep on and cannot hear what is said.’19 But a single voice was not going to make much difference to the tumult of London, with its street sellers, sweeps and dustmen, its street musicians, its ‘hundred churches…chim[ing] the hour…in a hundred different tones’. And each area created its own industrial sounds as well. At the docks, ‘the clicking of the capstan-palls, the chains of the cranes, loosed of their weight, rattle as they fly up again; the ropes splash in the water; some captain shouts his orders through his hands; a goat bleats from a ship…and empty casks roll along the stones with a hollow drum-like sound’. Behind everything lay ‘the rumbling of the wagons and carts in the street…and the panting and throbbing of the passing river steamers…together with the shrill scream of the railway whistle’. For it was, above all, transport that created noise, ‘the steady flow’ that ‘rises and falls, swells and sinks, but never ceases day nor night’.

  This was no exaggeration. In 1816, a French visitor, Louis Simond, wrote that between six and eight in the evenings the volume of the carriages shook the pavements and even the houses, worsening after ten, when ‘a sort of uniform grinding and shaking, like…a great mill with fifty pair of stones’ began, continuing until after midnight, when it finally faded before beginning again with the dawn.20 The main ingredient in the din was traffic, and the reason was basic mechanics. One factor was the horses’ hooves and the iron wheels on granite paving stones; another was ‘the boxes of the wheels striking the arms of the axeltrees’ of the carts and carriages. The chief problem was that for much of the century the majority of streets were either paved poorly or not at all.

  Retrospectively, we assume that one of two surfaces were used: cobblestones, a word rarely used at the time, or macadam. But there was in fact a plethora of choices: asphalt, granite setts (the contemporary term for cobblestones), flint and gravel, wood, even cast iron were all tried out. The aim was to produce a surface that horses did not slip on, that was not too hard on their legs at a trot, that was easily cleaned and that did not turn into a swamp in the rain – yet each set of circumstances required a different solution.

  Macadam began to be laid in the 18
20s, and the first macadamized road in London was in St James’s Square, one of the most exclusive locations of the aristocratic West End. The surface then spread to St George’s parish, around Hanover Square, equally exclusive, before Piccadilly too was macadamized. Officially, macadam was a mix of tiny (less than two-inch) granite stones, spread over a prepared surface and then rammed home by ‘huge iron or stone cylinders painfully hauled by ten or a dozen big navvies’ or labourers (a name originally given to the men, the ‘navigators’, who dug the canals), after which ‘Stone blocks or sets were driven home by files of men wielding great wooden rammers which they lifted and let fall in unison.’21

  When the surface was properly laid, the roads were good. The problems came when corners were cut. Some contractors used bigger stones, which failed to cohere into the necessary smooth surface. Some created an initially smooth surface by placing sand and gravel on top of the stones, which quickly deteriorated under traffic and poor weather. Others failed to ram or roll the foundations adequately, leaving the traffic to press the stones sideways, creating ruts and forcing the horses to work harder to pull their loads on the unstable surfaces. And even on well-laid macadam, quantities of surface dirt formed when the streets were warmed by the sun and the friction of traffic: ‘the mud becomes sticky, the carriage wheels draw the stones out, and the road becomes broken up.’ When it rained, the ‘macadamized streets, mixed into a sickening decoction, formed vast quagmires’ of a glutinous mud known as ‘licky’. (Less often, but no less importantly, the licky streets provided ammunition for ‘the mob to revenge themselves on the police’ in times of unrest.)