The Victorian City

by Judith Flanders

  Dickens might be thought to be indulging in novelistic fancy when in Martin Chuzzlewit the nurse Betsey Prig buys salad from a street seller in High Holborn, ‘on condition that the vendor could get it all into her pocket’, which is ‘accomplished…to the breathless interest’ of an entire hackney-coach stand full of people. Yet the journalist James Ritchie noted the same universal interest in the mundane: ‘Hail a cab in any part of London,’ he wrote, and ‘you will observe that several grown-up persons and a large number of boys will stop to see you get in the cab.’ When the Serpentine in Hyde Park was drained of its stagnant, sewage-infected water in 1869, ‘a small army’ could not have kept bystanders from gathering to watch as the park’s fish were scooped up and transferred temporarily to the Round Pond. Crowds also gathered outside houses where some disaster had occurred: murder, violence, death. In Dombey and Son, when Walter miraculously returns long after being given up for dead in a shipwreck, ‘groups of hungry gazers’ could be found outside his uncle’s house ‘at any time between sunrise and sunset’, staring at its closed shutters. This too echoed reality. In 1850, when riding along Constitution Hill, Sir Robert Peel was fatally injured after being thrown from his horse and then crushed by the falling animal. For the few days that he survived, a great mass of people ‘thronged’ the ‘little garden’ at Whitehall, and even as night fell, ‘respectful groups’ remained standing outside well after 10 p.m.104 Aside from miraculous returns from the dead and incidents involving famous statesmen, mundane events also drew huge gatherings. When in 1843 a family of ten was evicted from their room in Clerkenwell for non-payment of rent, ‘an immense mob was forthwith attracted’, numbering possibly a thousand people, to commiserate with the homeless and shout abuse at the landlord’s men.

  Street theatre might spring from the most unlikely events. When Sir Robert Peel was injured in a fall from his horse, crowds gathered daily outside his house until he died. Not only did these people find staring at a house interesting; journals like the middle-class Illustrated London News thought that its readers would enjoy an engraving of it too.

  Sometimes street events might be more extraordinary still, lasting days or even weeks. At the beginning of March 1842, the Morning Post reported a ‘Singular Delusion’: ‘for some weeks past…the lower classes of Irish residing in the metropolis’ had believed that London was about to be hit by an earthquake ‘which is to swallow up the capital’ on the 16th. The other papers eagerly picked up the story, recounting how many of London’s residents had left for the country, or gone to Ireland, or merely east of Stepney, ‘on the supposition that the earthquake is not to extend beyond that’. A week later, ‘popular credulity’ suggested that ‘St. Paul’s Cathedral has already sunk five feet’, prompting hundreds to turn out to see for themselves. The papers published over a hundred stories in the next four weeks, many running three or four of them a day. Some readers thought it a joke, some a Chartist plot (see pp. 375–6), but most took it as an opportunity to laugh at the credulity of the labouring Irish. Even so, by the 17th, the day after the earthquake had been scheduled to take place, it was clear that it was not only the poor who had been taken in. Certainly the slums were either unusually empty, or rang with ‘frantic cries [and] the incessant appeals to Heaven’. However, the wharf for the Gravesend steamer at London Bridge was also ‘thronged by crowds of decently-attired people’, while Brighton experienced an influx of expensive carriages, and hordes gathered on the well-heeled heights of Hampstead, Highgate and Primrose Hill. When nothing happened, people sheepishly returned to their everyday lives, but took away no lasting lesson. In October, reports circulated that a ghost ‘in snow-white apparel’ was to walk through the churchyard of Whitechapel Church, and the surrounding streets became impassable for the best part of a week.

  The middle classes enjoyed other types of one-off events in the streets, as when a crowd gathered in Hyde Park to watch the arrival of ‘a huge truck drawn by forty of [brewer] Mr Goding’s finest cream-coloured horses bedecked with green bays’, co-opted to pull M. C. Wyatt’s vast equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington, which was to be placed on top of Decimus Burton’s triumphal arch outside Apsley House.105 Even preparations for a public event drew multitudes. In 1863, two full days before the arrival of Princess Alexandra of Denmark for her wedding to the Prince of Wales, Arthur Munby went down to London Bridge to look at the decorations being erected: ‘an huge [sic] mass of people of all kind [sic] was struggling to and fro’. The next day, ‘The Strand was scarce passable’, with ‘Crowds all the way’ from Inner Temple along Newgate and Cheapside to London Bridge, ‘the crush increasing’ with every step, ‘till at the Monument I found I could get no further; being indeed borne backward by the mass of people coming the other way’. The attraction for these people was just the decorations and bunting, not even the arrival itself (see pp. 315–17).

  Events of state, especially declarations of war and peace, produced more formal street ceremonies and celebrations. In 1853, at the start of the Crimean War, the City’s mace bearer and the Lord Mayor’s gate porter processed from the Mansion House to the Royal Exchange in their black robes of office, drawing a crowd of 300: ‘The news spread in all directions, and a rush was made to the point of interest’, to hear, and to cheer, as the queen’s declaration of war with Russia was read aloud. Enthralled, spectators watched as the royal standard was raised and ‘the sword of state belonging to the Corporation was unsheathed’. Over the next two years, battles were ceremonially marked: cannon were fired from the Tower and St James’s Park throughout the day to celebrate the victory at Alma. In the City, the Lord Mayor carried the news first to the London Tavern, where ‘the leading members of the Corporation’ were to be found, and only then conveyed it to the Royal Exchange ‘for the purpose of more publicly proclaiming the news. The civic trumpeter having sounded several times’, he read the news of the victory to a crowd of 500.

  The coming of peace had long been a street event. In 1814, the Peace of Paris had been marked by a festival, with all the central London parks decorated and lit up to resemble pleasure gardens, with mock battles enacted on the Serpentine, hot-air balloons and theatre booths at the fairs. After a ‘Grand National Jubilee’ on 1 August, however, the fairground people in Hyde Park refused to strike their very prosperous pitches and finally had to be evicted by soldiers. When the Crimean War ended in 1856, there were more fireworks in Hyde Park, but this time a stand was erected with seats costing 1s 6d apiece, to make the crowds easier to control.

  Far more moving, and more involving for the populace, was the return of the soldiers from the Crimea. Just over two years after the first troops had embarked, four brigades of 3,200 men emerged from Nine Elms station in formation, still wearing their weather-beaten, battle-damaged uniforms, to a band playing ‘Hail the Conquering Hero Comes’, ‘amidst a tremendous burst of cheering’. They marched along below balconies and windows thick with spectators: ‘Every point on the route was positively thronged,’ with the crowds nearly a couple of hundred yards deep in places. At Whitehall and Old Palace Yard, every window in the Houses of Parliament was crammed with MPs, peers and their families. The bells of St Margaret’s, Westminster’s parish church, pealed and guns were fired in the park. From the windows of the houses that lined Parliament Street, flags hung and flowers rained down on men ravaged by battle injuries and disease.

  As they neared Buckingham Palace, the queen appeared at a window – the sole window not bursting with cheering men and women. The troops assembled in the forecourt as the queen and Prince Albert emerged, Albert accompanying the men as they marched up to Hyde Park, while the queen rode in her carriage to meet them. Up to 100,000 people had been waiting in the park for hours. The soldiers arrived at 12.30, after which Queen Victoria and Albert inspected the troops, before taking the salute. The troops then cheered the royal family, placing their bearskins on the tips of their bayonets and waving them high overhead. Once the royal party had left, the people lining the str
eets were expected merely to cheer the guards as they marched to their barracks. Instead, tens of thousands broke through the barriers to where the soldiers were mustered. At first the soldiers closed ranks, but this onslaught was not one of aggression, but an expression of gratitude. The crowds washed around the troops, hurrahing, waving their hats and handkerchiefs, reaching to clasp the shoulders of men who had seen thousands of their brother soldiers die, shaking their hands over and over, walking alongside them and cheering them all the way to their quarters.

  Less emotional, but more frequent, was the Lord Mayor’s Show, held every 9 November to celebrate the incoming Lord Mayor of the City of London.106 Throughout the City, shops either didn’t open at all or closed early, while ‘streamers are hung out from the houses…amiable street-boys at every corner’ waved flags, and all was ‘brass bands and confusion and endless cheers!’ The new Lord Mayor swore his oath before the aldermen of the City, then set off on a quasi-coronation procession, accompanied by the previous mayor, the aldermen and other City and guild officials, preceded by ‘the city heralds, trumpeters, men in brass armour’. By tradition, the route passed through the parish in which the mayor was himself an alderman, a mark of favour celebrated by exceptional street decorations. Officials then went upriver on the City barges to Westminster, where the Lord Mayor swore another oath of allegiance before the judges at the Court of Exchequer and then returned by barge once more, to Blackfriars Bridge. Once ashore, the procession ‘increases in splendour and magnificence’, as the wives of the mayor and officials joined them in the City’s state coaches, followed by ‘Princes, Ministers of State, the Judges of the land, and the Foreign Ambassadors’, all taking the road to the Mansion House, for the day’s highlight: the civic dinner.

  Prime ministers, Lord Mayors, even royalty were a regular sight in the streets, although the public response was not uniformly admiring. In his day the Prince Regent rarely showed himself to the unmediated populace, who had a nasty habit of shouting at him, ‘You d—d rascal, where’s your wife?’107 Under Victoria, public response was more muted, to the point where the presence of royalty excited little notice, much less enthusiasm. Leonard Wyon noted in his diary, ‘as we were in the Edgware Road in an omnibus we saw P. Albert P. of Wales and Col. Grey riding behind us,’ adding immediately afterwards, ‘dear Mary bought me a handsome walking stick.’

  Fluctuating attitudes to royalty could partly be gauged by the crowds in the streets. Victoria’s reign began with scant public interest. In 1837, after William IV’s death, the new queen was driven from Kensington Palace to St James’s, an event that prompted so feeble a public reaction that one observer commented, ‘I was surprised to hear so little shouting, and to see so few hats off as she went by.’ When she appeared at the palace window for the formal proclamation, ‘the people…did not…hurrah’ until they were urged on by a courtier. Six months later, on her way to the House of Commons, ‘not a hat [was] raised’ as the new queen passed, and at Ascot she was ‘tolerably well received; some shouting, not a great deal, and a few hats taken off’. The political diarist Charles Greville was clearly not impressed.108

  Her coronation got off to a bad start. The original date had been set for 20 June 1838, which was the first anniversary of the death of William IV. The opposition claimed that a cheeseparing government had done this deliberately, as a way of saving money by claiming it was a day of mourning. The date was therefore moved to 28 June, provoking the trade element to complain again: first, that they had not been given adequate time to produce souvenirs; then, that by the time the date had changed, they had already produced souvenirs, all of which carried the wrong date. Disraeli, a very new MP, was scarcely more enchanted even a week before the event. As MPs were obliged to wear formal court dress, he told his sister that he planned to save his money and stay away from the ceremony, sooner than attend ‘dressed like a flunky’. However, a few days later he wrote wistfully, ‘London is very gay,’ with the processional route ‘now nearly covered with galleries and raised seats’, which he thought would look superb once they were decorated with ‘carpets and colored hangings’. Diplomatic London, too, was seething with foreign dignitaries, ‘visible every night with their brilliant uniforms and sparkling stars’. Unsurprisingly, Disraeli attended the ceremony ‘after all’, using it as an opportunity to store up droll episodes: Lord Melbourne ‘looked very awkward and uncouth, with his coronet cocked over his nose’, and clutching the sword of state ‘like a butcher’, while ‘ribboned military officers and robed aldermen…were seen…wrestling like schoolboys…behind the Throne’. One elderly peer, Lord Rolle, having climbed the stairs to the throne to make his bow, caught his foot in his coronation robes and tumbled down them again. Wicked Disraeli solemnly told visitors that Lord Rolle’s roll ‘was a tenure by which he held his Barony’.

  While the crowd loved a parade, it was not yet committed to loving those who paraded. Two years later, Victoria’s fiancé was referred to in street songs as a ‘German sausage’ (lewd subtext intended). And while ‘a countless multitude’ stood in the driving rain to watch the royal bride pass by on her way to the wedding, they did so ‘without any cheering’. Later, popular attitudes fluctuated with events. When a royal child was born (and there were nine of them), salutes were fired in the parks, while a greater or lesser number of private individuals and commercial premises marked the occasion with decorations. In 1842, few buildings bothered to display illuminations for the birth of the Prince of Wales (for more on illuminations, see pp. 363–9), and in 1848, after the queen gave birth to yet another child, when ‘God Save the Queen’ was played at the theatres, a number of ‘ill-mannered’ people refused to take off their hats. The ‘sorry usage’ shown by more fervent royalists was recorded by one journal as indicating ‘loyal enthusiasm’. However, in the same magazine, when a miser named Neild died, leaving more than £250,000 to the queen, it was noted laconically that the will was most likely to be disputed ‘on the ground of insanity’.109

  It was the seven attempts to assassinate the queen that drew the strongest public displays of admiration, and then affection, until in time the monarch’s advanced age and longevity on the throne eventually prompted veneration. The first such attempt was in 1840; in 1842 two more followed within days of each other. After the first, which occurred while she was out driving, the queen quickly visited her mother, to reassure her, then returned to the park, where ‘she was received with the utmost enthusiasm by the immense crowd’; all the men on horseback ‘formed themselves into an escort and attended her back to the Palace, cheer[ing] vehemently’. This may be the first time Greville recorded seeing active cheering for Victoria, adding that the incident had ‘elicited whatever there was of dormant loyalty’. After the first of the two 1842 attempts, the following morning ‘numbers of respectable persons’ stood outside Buckingham Palace for hours until the queen and her party drove out for her regular airing in the park. The queen, despite the attack, still used her open barouche, which elicited ‘one long, loud, and continued shout of hurrahs, accompanied by the waving of handkerchiefs and hats’. The road from the palace to Hyde Park Corner was lined with people, and the park, too, was dense with spectators: when the queen arrived, ‘not a head was covered’, which was a big change in a few years. By the time of the fifth assassination attempt, in 1850, theatregoers had become accustomed to welcoming the queen after such an episode. The young Sophia Beale was at Covent Garden that evening to see Meyerbeer’s The Prophet:

  We were in a small box up at the top of the theatre opposite the royal box and all of a sudden every one stood up and cheered and made a great noise. Then we saw the Queen and Prince Albert come into the box, and they came to the front and bowed and looked very pleased. And then Madame Grisi rushed on the stage in evening dress from her box, she was not acting, and all the singers sang God save the Queen … Papa went out and asked the box keeper what had happened, and he said a man had thrown a stick at the Queen when she was driving in the Park, but
it did not hurt her.110 So after they had sung God save the Queen, the opera went on.

  Such imperturbability impressed everyone. Four years later, Dickens watched Louis Philippe, the king of France, driving out in Paris. He too had survived an assassination attempt, but, wrote Dickens contemptuously, ‘His [carriage] was surrounded by horseguards. It went at a great pace, and he sat very far back in a corner of it, I promise you. It was strange to an Englishman to see the Prefect of Police riding on horseback some hundreds of yards in advance…turning his head incessantly from side to side…scrutinizing everybody and everything, as if he suspected all the twigs in all the trees.’