The Victorian City

by Judith Flanders

  A step above these were the pawnshops. In rich districts, pawnshops looked like ordinary jewellers, and only the notice at the door, announcing that money was advanced on goods and advertising a ‘fireproof safe’ in which to keep them, indicated their real function. Inside, instead of an open counter, as Martin Chuzzlewit discovered, many pawnshops were fitted with ‘a series of little closets, or private boxes’, so that each customer could remain hidden from his or her neighbour. Items pawned in the West End might include decorative household objects such as drawings, vases, statuettes, or personal items like jewellery and cashmere shawls; in St Giles, by contrast, the pawned items were more likely to be petticoats, shirts and workmen’s tools. Here the same items were pawned every week, ‘not because the man is a drunkard or an idler’, wrote Dickens sympathetically in Household Words, ‘but because he is a poor jobbing carpenter, without a penny of monied capital: who, when he has a small job in hand, and has done the sawing part of it and wants [to purchase] the nails and glue to finish it, pawns the saw to provide them, until he is paid and can redeem it’. By 1850, there were more than 400 official pawnbrokers in London (and probably thousands more of the unofficial sort: see below).

  On pawning a watch valued at, say, £2, its owner was given £2 and a pawn ticket. The watch could be redeemed any time over the next year by paying back the £2, plus interest, which usually ran to 15 or 20 per cent a year. If it were not redeemed within fifteen months, the pawnbroker was allowed to sell it. But there were many tricks of the trade. Unscrupulous pawnbrokers made customers take two tickets each for half the value of an item, since the interest was calculated from a base rate, and this way the value for an inexpensive item could be doubled. Some sewed a farthing into the lining of a coat: when customers making a purchase felt it, they chose that coat over others of better quality, imagining that someone had secreted a high-value coin there for safety and then forgotten about it. Other pawnbrokers were sympathetic to their clientele and accommodated their needs, whether it was routinely accepting carpenters’ tools at a pawnshop by the dockyards, or in the West End allowing their regular customers, prostitutes, to take their jewellery out of hock for a night ‘for a consideration’.

  Many marine stores, Krook’s included, hung a small black-faced doll in the window, to indicate they were dolly shops, that is, unlicensed pawnbrokers that offered money on goods considered too contemptible to be accepted by a regular pawnbroker. Dolly shops, said Dickens, took on the air of their neighbourhood by the accumulation of goods that were pawned. Around Drury Lane, the stock leant towards ‘faded articles of dramatic finery, such as three or four pairs of soiled buff boots...worn by a “fourth robber”, or “fifth mob”’, while around the Marshalsea the clothes were of better quality than usual, having been pawned by formerly well-heeled debtors as money grew scarcer; near the docks, the main items were sailors’ clothes. Below the dolly shops in the hierarchy came leaving shops, for items that even the dolly shops wouldn’t take: a single knife or fork, or a baking dish to be redeemed on Saturday, payday, for the Sunday meal. This is the type of shop run by Pleasant Riderhood in Our Mutual Friend. She has other income – she lets rooms, and her father earns his own living – which makes the contents of her fictional shop slightly superior to a real one in a Southwark slum in 1858, kept by a paralysed ex-sewerman and his wife. Pleasant’s window contains a couple of handkerchiefs, a coat, some ‘valueless’ watches, tobacco, pipes, sweets and a bottle of walnut ketchup. The sewerman’s shop contained, as its entire stock, ‘a handful of sugar candy, a few brandy-balls, four sugar-plums contained in pickle-bottles, three herrings and a half, five dip candles and a half...a quart of parched peas, in a broken plate’.

  Just as Regent Street was the place for luxury goods, other streets had reputations as the places to go for specific items, even if on a less elegant scale. Cranbourne Alley, running between Leicester Square and St Martin’s Lane, had nothing but bonnet shops, ‘at the doors of which stood women, slatternly in appearance, but desperate and accomplished touters’, according to one point of view. (Other writers said the women were not slatternly at all but ‘of decent appearance’.) ‘Man, woman, or child, it was all the same to them; if they had made up their minds that you were to buy a bonnet, buy one you were obliged to...Piteous stories were told of feeble-minded old gentlemen emerging from the “courts”, half-fainting, laden with bonnet-boxes, and minus their cash, watches, and jewellery’. These touters were known as ‘She-Barkers’, as though they worked in fairs, and such was their fame that even children knew of their practices. Young Sophia Beale thought that the omnibus cads calling their route were like ‘the milliners in Cranbourne alley who run at people passing and hold up bonnets and shout “buy, buy, only 5 shillings”’.

  Even without a barker, or without the great plate-glass windows that the most expensive, modern stores could afford, smaller shops in the less fashionable districts had their own means of advertising their wares to the streets’ passers-by. Many kept their street signs from the eighteenth century much longer than did the glossy Regent Street emporiums. In the 1820s, such signs were an everyday sight: ‘The Pawnbroker decorates his door with three gold balls – the Barber...hangs out a long pole – the Gold-beater, an arm with a hammer in the act of striking – the Chemist, a head of Glauber, or Esculapius78 – the Tobacconist, a roll of tobacco, and of late it has become customary for these venders [sic] of...snuff, to station a wooden figure of a Highlander, in the act of taking a pinch.’ In Little Dorrit, the Chiverys’ tobacco shop by the Marshalsea prison has its little Highlander. At Captain Cuttle’s, in Dombey and Son, a wooden midshipman is affixed outside to indicate he is a ship’s-instrument maker, and in Martin Chuzzlewit, written in the early 1840s, while not mentioned by Dickens, an illustration shows a pie shop with a massive pie sign.

  As these fictional references suggest, sometimes the signs were painted boards, as the old ones had been and as pub signs are today; sometimes they were in the shape of the object they represented; and sometimes there were also wooden models, increasing in size as the century progressed. Pubs went in for elaborate renditions of their names: the Elephant and Castle Tavern used a vast model elephant bearing a howdah; the Swan Tavern in the same south London location ‘had a large and well-proportioned bird’ over its board. Smaller businesses also thought size mattered. One bootmaker’s model boot was ‘large enough for the Colossus of Rhodes’, while in the same row of shops a gigantic dustpan indicated a tin-man’s shop, a vast cigar a cigar divan (see p. 295) and a huge stick of sealing wax a stationer. Some traders stuck with elaborate painted images. Fishmongers went in for seascapes, while small grocers favoured pictures of tea parties ‘of staid British matrons, assembled round the singing kettle’, or ‘a party of Bedouins in the Desert’ sitting around a Staffordshire-ware tea service. The ‘humbler sorts of coffee-shops and eating houses’ favoured a picture of a loaf of bread, some butter, a piece of cheese and some bacon on a blue-and-white plate, beside a cup of coffee. If they were teetotal, there would be nothing further; otherwise they would include a glass of ale or a tankard of porter, ‘with a foaming top like a cauliflower...and perhaps a red herring, eloquent of a relish. Sometimes there are a couple of mice delineated in the act of nibbling the cheese.’

  Aside from shop signs, painted exhortations to buy had begun to appear in the early 1830s. ‘Warren’s Blacking, 30, Strand’ (the main firm, not Dickens’ employers) was painted up ‘in letters from six to eighteen inches long, on the brick walls along the public roads’: coach passengers saw the reminders from miles away, over and over again. In one fictional treatment nearly two decades later, these painted signs on the road to London were ‘great white invitations to “TRY WARREN’S”, or, “DAY AND MARTIN’S BLACKING ”, loom[ing] through the darkness of the dead walls’. Sometimes Warren’s even painted ‘WARREN’S IS THE BEST’ on the pavements.

  These signs were insignificant in quantity when compared to the ever-present ‘bills’:
sheets posted, or stuck up, on almost every flat surface, whether static or ambulant. Many Regency engravings show every temporary hoarding covered in bills, and through the century technology altered only their size and colours, ‘a fresh supply of artistical gems’ being posted anew every day. These included playbills, which were the most common, the contents lists from weekly magazines, or images of items with addresses where they could be purchased, whether pens, spectacles, dresses or men’s suits. The bill-sticker was a regular sight, in ‘fustian jackets with immense pockets’, his tins of paste attached by a strap, with great bags holding the bills and long extendable sticks with a crossbar at the end, which made it possible for him to post the bills at any height.

  Dickens wrote about these men in 1851, although unusually his report doesn’t sound particularly authentic. The ‘King of the Bill-Stickers’ told him his father had also been a bill-sticker eighty years before, which in terms of life expectancy sounds unlikely in itself, while his statement that he himself earned 30s a week, ‘including paste’, defies belief. In Bleak House, the legal clerk Mr Guppy presents his salary of 40s a week as pushing him into the middle classes, and Mayhew’s street sellers averaged 10s a week. The ‘King’ also tells Dickens he was ‘the first that ever stuck a bill under a bridge!’, although Max Schlesinger in the same year wrote that the bridges, running with damp, never had bills posted on them, but were instead painted: ‘there is not an arch in a London bridge but has its advertisements painted on it.’ He adds that, in 1851, every one of them was for the steamer companies. The question, however, must remain open. In 1858, the painter Augustus Egg in his triptych Past and Present showed the Adelphi arches papered with playbills as well as excursion advertisements.

  These bills were all advertising well-established companies. Smaller businesses relied on another eighteenth-century survival, the handbill. These were given to customers in shops, and wrapped around purchases, but most often they were handed out in the street. By Temple Bar, wrote Southey, posing as a visiting Spaniard in 1807, ‘I had a paper thrust into my hand [and] Before I reached home I had a dozen.’ Just over a decade later, the fictional Life in London claimed handbills were so common ‘that a man scarcely opens a coal-shed, or a potatoe-stall’ without distributing handbills to all and sundry, ‘frequently with great success’. Such handbills might advertise exhibitions, patent medicines, whisky, linen drapers’ or giraffes at the zoo. Many handbills printed their advertising jingles in verse. In The Old Curiosity Shop, Mr Slum writes the text for handbills, with ‘pathetic effusions’ for goods purchased by ‘private houses and tradespeople’, parodies for pubs and lawyers’ clerks, while he couched advertisements directed at girls’ schools in moral educational verses. By the 1850s, bills were handed out by ‘seedy personages’ who could not earn a living in any other way.

  Early in the century the hander-out was as much a part of the advertisement, and the street entertainment, as the handbill. Often such men wielded poles with banners, or some other noticeable ornament, as they took up their position in the street. In the early 1830s, by Regent Street, a man stood dressed in a red coat with epaulettes, ‘having on his head a cocked hat, surmounted by the panache of a field-marshal. At his back and before him were suspended, so as to balance each other, a couple of boards, with printed placards...“Gentlemen should instruct their servants to use Brown’s blacking!”’ The awkward phrasing of this description makes it clear that the idea of a sandwich-board was new. Dickens was the first to create an edible metaphor, referring two years later to ‘an animated sandwich, composed of a boy between two boards’, and soon these ‘Peripatetic placards’ became ‘a piece of human flesh between two slices of pasteboard’. When the Illustrated London News began publishing in 1842, it hired 200 sandwich-board men to promenade the streets, also publishing an engraving of this event that suggests they marched in one single long line, to make a bigger impression.

  In the 1830s, odd costumes designed to attract attention became a feature of street life. Two men between them wore ‘one huge garment of green moreen’, with long, flowing, green sleeves, and just one hole for the face, ‘surmounted by a dunce’s cap’. For some inexplicable reason this two-for-one was advertising ‘a new cure for the itch’. By the 1850s, strange clothing or pasteboard signs were no longer enough, being replaced by large papier-mâché representations of the product in question. One man wore a giant scarlet boot on his head; underneath it he ‘was wrapped in a garment entirely composed of cardboard soles’, while also somehow managing to carry a flag with a bootmaker’s name and address. Even something as simple as a tradesman’s moving premises received elaborate treatment. On Holborn, twelve men walked up and down carrying a huge table on which was painted ‘MR. FALCON REMOVED’ and the address of the new shop. As its sole purpose was to notify Mr Falcon’s regular customers, the procession covered only a dozen yards of pavement, ‘continually, silently, without ever stopping for rest...for many days and even weeks’.

  Other forms of advertisements seem more natural today. By the 1830s, omnibuses were already carrying advertisements. By 1837, some bore portraits of Boz himself, as the author of The Pickwick Papers. (It is nice to think that perhaps the Bardell omnibus, whose name Dickens possibly borrowed for Mr Pickwick’s landlady, carried advertisements for the very novel in which Mrs Bardell appeared.) From these, it was a short step to entire carts being dedicated to advertising, which were on the roads at about the same time, presenting complex scenarios to promote the excellence of various products. One cart carried a huge tub of water while behind it walked men bearing an enormous wellington boot suspended from a pole, repeatedly submerging it in the tub to prove its waterproof qualities. Carts might be seen with ‘huge skeleton houses covered with handbills’ or be disguised as imitation steamboats. One cart bore a giant hat, ‘a hybrid between an Egyptian obelisk...and an English country-gentleman’s gate’, which advertised washable wigs; another displayed arched gothic windows in which dresses endlessly revolved on clockwork stands. In the 1850s, when such things were at their peak, a cart advertising a panorama was made up of ‘three immense wooden pyramids’, complete with hieroglyphics (thoughtfully translated into English), together with portraits of Isis and Osiris. Max Schlesinger, who watched this spectacle trundling down the street, noted that it was followed by another cart got up to look like a mosque, complete with cupola, and driven by a fair boy whose face had been artistically adorned with soot, to promote ‘a most marvellous Arabian medicine, warranted to cure the bite of mad dogs and venomous reptiles generally’. Behind it, to promote Vauxhall Gardens, came ‘a dark green chariot of fantastic make, in shape like a half-opened shell, and tastefully ornamented with gilding and pictures’.

  Other advertisements required less capital and were of a more transient nature. Auctions of household goods were advertised by ‘a breadth of stair-carpet’ hanging out of a first-floor window, together with a printed notice on the door or gate. Barber’s shops regularly posted similar printed notices announcing that they were selling ‘on oath, the pure grease of a fine large bear’ as pomade for men’s hair, and from time to time, to promote the freshness of their grease, the sign declared, ‘We kill a bear this week,’ frequently accompanied by a live bear itself, muzzled and tied up in the little area by the shop’s basement. It was cynically assumed that the same bear was handed round from barber to barber, each one in turn displaying it while advertising its imminent demise, then sending it on to a colleague. The joke was so common that in Nicholas Nickleby, when a stagecoach is overturned and the passengers pass the time by telling stories, one concerns a German count who killed his own bear to grease ‘his whiskers with him afterwards’.

  Apart from greasing whiskers, shops, pubs and other public places offered wide-ranging street services. Shops were constant scenes of coming and going, and it was only in the backstreets that shabbiest little ones had bells on the doors; the more prosperous shops always had at least one member of staff present, more often se
veral, to provide goods and services. Tailors made running repairs to torn or damaged clothing, lending their customers something to wear while they sat and waited. In Pickwick Papers, Sam Weller buys from a stationer ‘a sheet of the best gilt-edged letter-paper and a hard-nibbed pen’, taking them to an inn, where he orders brandy ‘and the inkstand’. Coffee rooms and taverns also acted as postal drops, taking letters and passing them on; personal newspaper advertisements gave these addresses as a poste restante. In Great Expectations, pubs also supply services that to us seem even more unexpected. When Magwitch is captured by the police on the river, he and Pip are taken to a nearby pub, where Pip purchases a full set of clothes, so that Magwitch won’t have to go to gaol in his wet things.

  Every shop delivered, whether they were expensive establishments with their own emblazoned carriage, or small local ones that despatched the goods by an errand boy in a small top hat and a big suit with shiny buttons. Even The Pickwick Papers’ hard-up medical student Bob Sawyer, buying spirits in the unprosperous Borough for a little evening party, gets the alcohol delivered from the wine vaults, the glasses from the pub and oysters from the oyster shop: he carries nothing home himself. Refreshment rooms routinely stocked newspapers for their customers (see p. 301) and many also sent them out: in the late 1830s and early 1840s, a retired actor in Kentish Town had the Morning Advertiser delivered every day ‘with the early dinner-beer’.

  For those who couldn’t afford that, there was still plenty of opportunity to read the news on the street. In part, the news was a constant street noise, as the newsboys cried out the latest headlines. But newspaper offices also pinned up copies of each edition outside their offices, where extraordinary events drew huge crowds, whether it was the 1848 revolutions in Europe or the Derby winners. The London Gazette, which printed the official list of bankruptcies, as well as army promotions and retirements79 and other official notices, also produced ‘an Extraordinary Gazette’ during the Crimean War, giving the official casualty lists. These were sent on to all the newspapers for reprinting, but since the Gazette had them first, crowds stood outside daily, waiting for the first copies to be pinned to the Gazette office wall in St Martin’s Lane.