The Victorian City

by Judith Flanders

  Many boys, however, did not have an employer. They worked for themselves, standing outside offices, clubs and, especially, coaching inns or, later, railway stations and bus stops, selling a wide variety of items. Other children sold services. Much casual labour had to do with horses, in stables or on the streets. Boys hung about livery stables, where they helped the stable-hands for a few pennies, or for food. Dickens’ fiction teems with boys like Kit Nubbles in The Old Curiosity Shop who goes out to ‘see if I can find a horse to hold’ so he can ‘buy something nice’; another character in the same novel hands his pony and phaeton to a man ‘lingering hard by in expectation of the job’, while in Dombey and Son Mr Carker calls ‘a man at a neighbouring way to hold his horse’. All these men and boys expected to earn a penny for standing with a horse for up to half an hour. (Any longer than that and the horse needed to be taken to a stable.) One boy, in fiction, was a bit more entrepreneurial. In the 1821 comic novel Real Life in London, man leaves his horse with a boy while he visits his club. On his return he finds the boy hiring out his horse in penny rides to other street boys and this was, supposedly, his ‘fifteenth trip’ – which, to work as comedy, must at least have held the possibility of truth.

  More usual was the boy who was given some bread and butter for helping a shopboy to polish the brass on the door of a chemist’s shop; or those who stood by the restaurants and saloons in the Haymarket late at night, hoping for pennies for opening cab doors ‘and putting their ragged coat-tails against the muddy wheels to protect the dresses of those alighting’. A woman who sold sheep’s trotters had a crippled son who cleaned knives for a family; although not paid, he was fed, which alone was enough to make a difference in mother and son’s weekly accounts. During a frost, when pipes froze, boys knocked on doors in residential districts, offering to wait in line at the standpipe for the householders; or they marched along the streets calling, ‘Water – water! any water wanted?’ and for 2d filled the householders’ buckets.

  Boys haunted railway stations, carrying bags or helping porters push carts. Some were cab runners, waiting near the cabstands at stations, then running behind any cab that left loaded with luggage. When the cab reached the passenger’s destination, the boy got the luggage down and (unless prevented by the passenger’s own servants) carried it into the house, for which he was then tipped. Attitudes to these porters varied widely. One journalist claimed that the runners shouted abuse if they weren’t permitted to take the luggage, preying in particular on women and servants; an American tourist, on the contrary, reported them waiting ‘very humbly’ for ‘Anything y’r honor pleases’.

  Running porters performed the same service for omnibus passengers, waiting at stops by the railway stations and following buses when passengers got on with luggage. A journalist in the 1850s watched as a group of six boys, ranging in age from about seventeen to twelve or thirteen, ran behind his bus from Paddington to the Bank, in the City. At each stop, when a passenger with luggage got out, one boy peeled off to carry the bag home for a tip. The final boy, aged about fourteen, had to fight off ‘a half-drunken porter of forty’ who was standing at the Bank omnibus stop, also waiting for passengers with luggage. These older men, frequently unemployable alcoholics, were one of the reasons the boys ran in packs. The boy who won this job earned a penny or two for carrying a bag half a mile, having already run five miles from the station, but as the boys took it in turn to serve the first passenger, some of their journeys were shorter. Altogether, the journalist was told, the boy averaged three trips a day, on a good day earning 1s 3d, on a bad one 8d or 9d. His lodgings cost him 6d a week, and his food consumed the rest: like the crossing-sweepers, he worked barefoot, unable to afford the wear and tear on his boots.

  A grown-up version of these boy porters, and slightly better paid, were the ticket porters of the City, one of whom, the stalwart and faithful Trotty Veck, was created by Dickens in a Christmas story, The Chimes. Ticket porters – recognizable by their ticket, their badge of office, which had to be worn, and by their white aprons – were licensed by the City to function as letter carriers and messengers: when in Bleak House Esther needs to send an urgent message to her guardian, she writes it at a coffee house, and sends it by ticket porter. They were also licensed to carry goods weighing up to three hundredweight (136 pounds) within a radius of three miles. Across the City there were wooden pitching places, upright blocks on which parcels could be balanced while porters got their breath back. Despite these loads, the porters were stereotypically considered lazy. ‘Trotty’ was an exception, as his name suggests, but in David Copperfield Dickens presented the general view, as David watches a ticket porter dawdling along with a letter. ‘He was taking his time about his errand, then; but when he saw me...he swung into a trot, and came up panting as if he had run himself into a state of exhaustion.’

  Trotty’s income is minuscule. Even when children lived with their parents, even for those earning well in their trade, and with a family all contributing to a group income, there was no give in the budget: one illness, or one week of bad weather, could destroy them all. If there was no money for rent, then the entire structure on which the family had built their life quickly disintegrated. Some, who were far worse off, were always in view as a warning, on the same streets, also selling. The really indigent were reduced to peddling matches.

  Matches were paradoxical, being both cheap and highly valued in an age of fires, candles and gas. By the end of the eighteenth century, brimstone, or sulphur-tipped, matches were in use. These could be made by the vendors in their rooms: the cheap deal wood was split with a knife, a pennyworth of brimstone was heated over a fire to make it liquid, and the match tips were dipped in it. (If no fire was available, then sham matches could be made by dipping the wood in powdered sulphur, which looked the same but did not ignite; by the time the buyer found out it was too late.) Brimstone matches were lit by holding them to a candle or fire. In the absence of an open flame, a tinderbox was needed: a small wooden box divided in two, with a flint, a steel, the matches and some old linen rags on one side. The flint and steel were struck over the rags, creating sparks, which caused the rags to catch fire. The match was lit and held to a candle, to light whatever else was wanted, while the damper, a loose block that nestled into the other side of the box, was used to tamp out the rags.

  Tinderboxes were overtaken in the 1810s by phosphorus bottles and matches dipped in chlorate of potash; when a light was needed, the match was dipped into the phosphorus and then rubbed against a cork until it ignited. By the 1830s, the congreve or ‘congry’ match appeared, which lit by friction when struck on any surface, making it easy to light, but causing many accidents by accidental friction. The names congreve and lucifer were used interchangeably, although the lucifer, also dipped in sulphur, was treated so that it ignited only when rubbed against sandpaper, leading to the matchboxes with sandpaper strips along the sides. Although lucifers smelt as foul as the brimstones, and were still dangerous, they were a great improvement on the old tinderbox method: ‘the box we could never find when we wanted it; the tinder that wouldn’t light; the flint and steel that wouldn’t...strike a light till we had exhausted our patience’. This farrago had ‘gone now; and, in its place, we have sinister-looking splints, made from chopped-up coffins; which, being rubbed on sand-paper, send forth a diabolical glare, and a suffocating smoke. But they do not fail, like the flint and steel, and light with magical rapidity.’

  The constant presence of open flames in the nineteenth century meant that matches were not always necessary. In 1843, there was a gas explosion in Rosamond Street, Clerkenwell, when a man lit his cigar with a paper spill, or twist of paper, which he had held to a gaslight outside a shop. He tossed the spill away and it blew down a sewer grating: ‘an instantaneous explosion of gas took place, resembling a discharge of artillery...about ten houses only have sustained injury, and these not to any great extent.’ With less drama, this use of spills was routine. A novel of the 1850s depicts s
treet children waiting in the Haymarket to run errands or fetch cabs for the men about town, and carrying paper ‘to accommodate gentlemen whose cigars had gone out...if any such...chanced to approach, instantly the “spills” were lighted at the convenient jets at the café door’.

  Congreves quickly became the standard match sold by street sellers, who offered two, sometimes even three, boxes for a penny, substantially undercutting the cigar shops, which sold penny boxes. The street sellers sometimes made a penny profit on a dozen or simply sold them at cost, which is why match sellers were classed not as street sellers, but as beggars.

  Match selling was a byword for poverty. Most pictures of match sellers show either very small children or the very elderly – always an indication that there was little, if any, profit in a trade – and they are almost always depicted barefoot. The link between age, physical debility and matches occurs again and again. One journalist in the 1840s outside a gin palace reported seeing ‘aged women selling ballads and matches, cripples, little beggar-boys and girls’ – that is, those who physically could not earn a living. The architect, magazine editor and housing reformer George Godwin counted the residents of a slum court near Whitechapel Church in 1854, where sixteen rooms were home to 300 people. It was unsurprising to read that in one room lived a family of five match sellers, while the room above was occupied by a family of four whose wares were lucifers and onions.

  In the first decades of the century, there was another, even more impoverished, group, ‘the lowest classes to gain a livelihood’. It is noticeable that for them, all interaction with the more prosperous classes, even by begging, was entirely absent. Mostly these people collected and resold waste that even the impoverished thought had no value. There were women who scavenged in Thames Street, known as the place where ‘Lisbon merchants’ sold imported citrus fruit, salvaging the squeezed lemon skins from the gutters and selling them to manufacturers who extracted the last vestiges of juice to make cheap lemon-drops. There were bone-pickers, who fought the dogs on the streets for discarded bones, which they sold to second-rate bone burners at 2s a bushel. Grubbers searched the cobblestones for bits of nails or other metal, which they sold to marine-stores dealers (see p. 239), while finders walked up to ten miles a day collecting the same sorts of metal, as well as rags and bottles. Grubbers earned on average between 2d and 3d a day, while finders, if the weather was wet, earned even less, as muddy rags had to be washed and dried before they could be sold. By mid-century, however, the modernization of manufacturing processes had made these ways of earning a living unviable.

  Selling matches was the last resort of the ill, the very old and the very young. This photograph from the 1880s shows a fairly successful-looking seller: although the child is barefoot, he wears a cap, a sign of respectability.

  These people were one accident or illness away from the fate of the man on whom an inquest was held in Walthamstow in that decade of economic depression, the Hungry Forties. The inquest jury heard that this man, ‘name unknown, aged 52’, had been out of work for weeks, but had managed to scrape a living selling congreves, until the police had threatened to arrest him as a beggar. Too frightened to go out selling in the streets again, he bartered his remaining stock of congreves for stale crusts and the dregs of tea, as well as a place to sleep on the floor in a room. Then he vanished for four days, until he was found crouched outside: he said he had moved out because he had nothing left to barter. His ‘landlord’ helped him in and gave him some gruel and ale, but he died the next day. Verdict: ‘That the deceased died from want of the common necessaries of life and exposure to the cold.’

  Many who were selling in the streets were doing so as a temporary measure to avoid precisely this fate. They were neither begging nor stealing, just tiding themselves and their families over a bad patch by making something from (almost) nothing. Early in the century one unemployed labourer and his son in Watford wove willow branches around pebbles to create children’s rattles; they made a sackful of them and then walked the nearly twenty miles to St Paul’s Churchyard to sell them at 6d each on that busy commercial thoroughfare. Groundsel and chickweed, to feed songbirds, were gathered freely from common land, and thus the sale of it was the preserve of the young or the very old: one old brush seller became a chickweed seller when rheumatism prevented his plying the more lucrative trade. He was known for having no cry and instead merely standing outside his regular houses, where the caged songbirds recognized him and began to cheep. Another man skimmed the weed off a pond in Battersea to sell to those who kept ducks in the slums, where residents raised fowl for sale. Simplers foraged in the woods on the edge of the city, gathering simples – medicinal herbs, mushrooms, dandelion greens and nettles – which they sold in markets, or collecting snails, leeches or vipers for simpling shops or herbalists. (Snails were recommended for consumptives, but vipers, says one writer in 1839, ‘of late years...are so little called for that not above one in a month is sold in Covent Garden Market’.) Boys cut grasses and reeds growing around the ponds on Hampstead Heath or in ditches near drains and sewers, selling it to costermongers as fodder for their donkeys.

  The equation of street selling with poverty was complete, with it being generally understood as ‘honest’ or ‘decent’ poverty, in which people worked hard to support themselves. Yet by the 1850s, Mayhew, interviewing hundreds of street sellers, found a consistent belief among them that things had been easier decades earlier. No longer did housewives wait at home to hear a cry of ‘Pretty pins, pretty women?’ but instead went to the drapers; likewise, the men carrying barrels on their backs, with measures and funnels, and calling ‘Fine writing-ink’, had also lost business to the shops. Steadily modernity was changing the nature of the streets. The new office buildings in the City, the increase in bus (and soon underground) transport, the increasing size of London: all were making street selling less practicable, and necessitating more shifts to produce a bare living.

  Street sellers were not alone in this. Most workers did not have a single job that sustained them, much less their family. Instead they patched together a series of jobs, either ones they held regularly, or seasonal work, to pay for basic sustenance and a room, or part of a room, to sleep in. A guidebook on London in 1852 contained a section entitled ‘Banking’; in addition to information on the Bank of England, private banks, joint-stock banks and so on, it listed loan societies run by pubs for the poor, tallymen (pedlars who sold on instalment), and even pawnbrokers, who regularly lent money on the same goods, pawned and redeemed week after week as a family struggled from payday to payday. According to the guidebook, these makeshifts of the working classes were an integral part of the financial system.

  Much of the battle to get work was visible on the streets. Many labourers, both skilled and unskilled, were hired by the day, or at best by the job. Skilled workers such as tailors and cobblers used pubs as trade clubs, a ‘house of call’, where ‘the masters applied when they wanted workmen’. But in the earlier half of the century in particular, the hiring of unskilled labour took place out in the street: ‘chairmen, paviers, bricklayers’-labourers, potato-gatherers, and basket-men’ stood daily ‘at their usual stands for hire’ around the city: in Whitechapel, in Cheapside, on Oxford Street and at Tottenham Court Road among others.

  The dockyards, some of the largest employers in London, used similar hiring practices. Skilled labourers such as coopers, rope-makers and carpenters held permanent jobs; until the 1850s, when the shipbuilding industries moved out of London, so did men working in iron foundries, sail yards and block-and-tackle shops. But two-thirds of the dockworkers were unskilled and were hired by the day. At 7.30 every morning a ragtag army a thousand or more strong stood waiting for a few hundred jobs, pushing and jostling for their favourite spots, where they thought the calling foreman looked most frequently. Once the foreman came out, ‘Then begins the scuffling and scrambling, and stretching forth of countless hands high in the air, to catch the eye of him whose nod can give them w
ork...some men jump up on the back of others, so as to lift themselves high above the rest and attract his notice. All are shouting.’ After the foreman had filled his quota, many hung around in the waiting yard, in case a ship arrived late on the tide: a hundred or so men competing to be one of the half-dozen who might possibly be needed, to earn 4d an hour.

  Even at the docks, weather affected the work – a prevailing easterly wind meant no incoming shipping; the seasons dictated the volume of ships arriving and leaving. Away from the docks, these factors affected many other kinds of labourers. Bricklayers, house painters, slaters, fishermen and watermen all suffered loss of earnings on rainy days, while pipe layers, sewer builders and some smaller building firms could not function when the ground was frozen. Luxury goods and services suffered badly when the social season ended and the rich shifted to their country houses. Even clerks, on the edge of the middle class, suffered then, as those who serviced the legal world had to survive the long summer vacation when the courts rose: ‘it is starvation to the Scribe; it means the workhouse for many.’ It was here that the true precariousness of life, and status, were made clear, where these men, hanging grimly on to the fringe of the lower middle classes, were forced to join the working classes, ‘earning a scanty livelihood...picking hops’ in Surrey and Kent. In Farringdon the Ragged School Dormitory for the indigent and homeless employed a night officer, whose job it was to sit on a dais every night from 9.30 p.m. to 6 a.m., to prevent assaults, thefts or other antisocial behaviour. The holder of this position in the early 1850s was a clerk by day, who put in another eight and a half hours through the night for the extra £1 it brought each week – and he had beaten 200 applicants to the post.