The Victorian City

by Judith Flanders

  The decor, it seemed to Dickens, was, if possible, ‘even gayer than the exterior’. ‘A bar of French-polished mahogany, elegantly carved, extends the whole width of the place; and...Beyond the bar is a lofty and spacious saloon...with a gallery running round it, equally well furnished.’ This luxury contrasted sharply with the gin palace’s customers: two washerwomen; two old men who had ‘finished their third quartern’ – their third quarter of a pint – of gin and are ‘crying drunk’; and some ‘fat comfortable-looking elderly women’ drinking rum shrub (rum with lemon and sugar). ‘A throng of men, women, and children...have been constantly going in and out, [but late in the day this] dwindles down to two or three occasional stragglers – cold, wretched-looking creatures, in the last stage of emaciation and disease.’ Dickens is both realistic and sympathetic here, ending by commenting that if temperance societies could provide against hunger and want, the gin palaces would vanish; since they could not, who could blame the drinkers for gravitating to the warmest, most attractive place available? (It is also worth considering that people who rarely had enough to eat would easily become drunk on very little alcohol.)

  By the late 1840s, these drinking saloons were glamorous yet had no seating at all: ‘every exertion is used to make the place as uncomfortable to the consumers as possible, so that they shall only stop in to drink, and pay; step out, and return to drink and pay again’. In the 1850s, Sala described one busy gin palace, with about fifty customers at two in the afternoon. Drinkers were invited to state their business by being separated into distinct sections, the ‘Jug and Bottle Entrance’, the ‘Wholesale Bar’ and the ‘Retail Bar’, while barrels lined the walls emblazoned with enticing slogans and brand names encouraging them with visions of delight: ‘Choice Compounds’, ‘Cream of the Valley’, or ‘The Dew off Ben Nevis’. An advertisement for the ‘Celebrated Balmoral Mixture, patronised by his Royal Highness Prince Albert’ was accompanied by ‘the illustrious personage, clad in full Highland costume...represented taking a glass of the “Mixture” with great apparent gusto’. And all to serve gin at a penny a glass, to people who were deciding between food and another tumbler of oblivion.

  From the eighteenth century, pubs had been the natural home of all types of clubs and special-interest groups, and as gin palaces became more elaborate, these were increasingly encouraged. Mr Pickwick’s journeys start at, and the novel is predicated on, the Pickwick Club, which holds its meetings in a pub. Its club room was the epitome of many an upstairs club room, containing little more than a long wooden table and Windsor chairs, with prints on the walls. Pubs found numerous ways of attracting regulars: in the 1860s, several along Fleet Street were known as sporting taverns, stocking sporting newspapers, posting up telegrams announcing race results and otherwise ensuring they were the meeting places for like-minded people. The actor Charles Macready and John Forster were members of a Shakespeare club in the 1830s that met at the Piazza Coffee House in Covent Garden to read and discuss literature; Dickens soon enrolled.

  Pubs and clubs were also venues for people at times of distress, as well as at times of jollity. In Shoreditch in the 1860s, a pub sold black-bordered ‘tickets’ for 3d, to help the family of the recently deceased ‘Jemmy Baldwin [who] had died sudden, leaving nothing to bury him ... a few friends would meet that night at the Tinkers’ Arms, Spicer Street, for the benefit of the widow and orphans’. On happier occasions, many of these pubs also held ‘twopenny hops’, or costermongers’ dances, where anything up to a hundred men and women congregated to drink and dance to the music of a fiddle, ‘sometimes with the addition of a harp and cornopean’ (a cornet: a brass instrument that sounded like a trumpet). By the 1850s, many pubs had widened the scope of their club meetings, holding weekly discussion groups that were open to casual visitors, with a variety of subjects and different customer profiles being known and understood. The Cogers, in Bride Lane, Fleet Street, was a political forum; the Green Dragon, also in Fleet Street, held discussions on Tuesdays for ‘Literary Loungers’; on Mondays and Thursdays for other ‘popular subjects’. At the Blue Posts, in Shoe Lane, the Ruminators met on Wednesdays, with more miscellaneous discussions on Tuesdays and Fridays, while Mondays and Saturdays were given over to Harmonics.

  Harmonic meetings, also known as free-and-easies, covered the social spectrum: men meeting for the purpose of drinking and singing, sometimes as a club or a group of friends, sometimes a group of strangers. When a free-and-easy was held in a pub, there were usually some professional performers, but all present were expected to contribute. In Sketches by Boz, Dickens described a late-night harmonic meeting, where as many as a hundred men sit at tables, listening to three ‘professional gentlemen’ sing a glee (a part-song for three or more voices), after which they drink and smoke, and listen once more to ‘our friend, Mr Smuggins’, who ‘after a considerable quantity of coughing’ sings a comic song, ‘received with unbounded applause’, followed by a recitation, before the group joins in another glee.

  If the harmonic meeting was open to the public, the landlord of a pub frequently acted as the chairman, as is the case in Oliver Twist at the Three Cripples, the rogues’ pub in Saffron Hill, where the landlord seemed ‘to give himself up to joviality’, but ‘had an eye for everything that was done, and an ear for everything that was said’. Bleak House, too, includes a harmonic meeting at the Sol’s Arms, with the professional Little Swills, the comic vocalist. But it was group singing that was the raison d’être of these evenings: ‘it is only when one of the amateurs presently consents to oblige amidst a great rattling of glasses and thumping of pint pots, that the chorus develops its full perfections...with the united strength of some forty pairs of lungs.’ So ubiquitous was the free-and-easy that in Little Dorrit even in the Marshalsea the prisoners hold a regular club night in their ‘Snuggery’, complete with ‘presidential tribute...beery atmosphere, sawdust, pipelights, [and] spittoons’.127

  Sometimes the meetings were more select, involving a group of friends or colleagues, as in The Pickwick Papers, when the legal clerks gather at the Magpie and Stump pub in Clare market: ‘There’s Samkin and Green’s managing-clerk, and Smithers and Price’s chancery, and Pimkin and Thomas’s out o’ doors128 – sings a capital song, he does.’ Sometimes harmonic meetings were held to celebrate specific events. In Nicholas Nickleby, when the strolling players, the Crummles family, plan to go abroad, a supper is given in their honour at a local pub, ‘at which Mr Snittle Timberry would preside, while the honours of the vice chair would be sustained by the African Swallower’. A shoemaker attended a similar dinner that his employer held for his workers: the master ‘occupied the chair himself, and requested that I would act as vice’, as after the meal, ‘we indulged in mirth and song’. In the early 1830s, John Barrow, the editor of the Mirror of Parliament, was trying to find work for his nephew, a young man named Charles Dickens, and asked the journalist John Payne Collier whether he might recommend him to the owners of the Morning Chronicle.129 Berrow ‘also informing me that [Dickens] was cheerful company and a good singer of a comic song’, Collier ‘agreed to meet Dickens at dinner’; Dickens was so young ‘that he had no vestige of beard or whiskers’ and had needed a ‘good deal of pressing’ before he sang ‘The Dandy’s Dog’s-meat Man’, as well as a song he had written himself, ‘Sweet Betsy Ogle’.130

  More common were regular club nights, whose exclusivity was an indicator of their desirability. In The Old Curiosity Shop, Dick Swiveller belongs to ‘a select convivial circle called the Glorious Apollers’ [sic], of which he had ‘the honour to be Perpetual Grand’. This was a lower-middleclass version of Pip’s club in Great Expectations, the Finches of the Grove: ‘the object of which institution I have never divined, if it were not that the members should dine expensively once a fortnight, to quarrel among themselves as much as possible after dinner, and to cause six waiters to get drunk on the stairs’.

  These young men met regularly in Covent Garden, in the heart of the song-and-supper-club n
eighbourhood. From the earliest part of the century, ‘Supper Rooms’ were places men went to in the evening after dinner, and among the most famous were Evans’s, Offley’s, the Garrick, the Coal Hole and the Cider (sometimes Cyder) Cellars, all in Covent Garden or near the Strand. Singing was automatically part of the evening. An 1839 guidebook, in its listing of supper clubs, observes, in its entirety: ‘At most of these houses some good singing is to be heard, they being attended by professional men’: the quality of the song was more important than the food or the ambience, neither of which was mentioned. These clubs served breakfast fare, alcohol and cigars. In the intervals between the songs, the waiters rushed round, crying, ‘Gentlemen, give your orders; give your orders, gentlemen; whiskey, brandy, gin, and rum – rum, gin, brandy, whiskey,’ and taking orders for food: ‘Fried-’am-an’-eggs for you, sir? Sassages, did that gentleman say? Sassages is all gone, sir...Tripe, sir? Yessir.’ Then, when they heard ‘Order, order! Silence, waiters. Gentlemen, if you please, I’ll sing a song,’ they vanished until it was finished, when it would be, ‘Now, then, Waiter, bring that gentleman’s kidneys. Chop and shallots for the man oppo-site. Look alive there – be brisk! Kidneys for you, sir? Copy of the song just sung, gentlemen – copy of the song; celebrated song, sir – thanky, sir. Song, gentlemen, song; orders, gentlemen, orders – gentlemen, give your orders!’

  Evans’s was one of the longest surviving and most famous of the supper rooms. Originally established in an old house overlooking Covent Garden piazza, it was a hotel until W. C. Evans became the landlord in the 1820s and turned it into a supper room.131 In 1844, Evans retired, and Paddy Green later built a much more elegant galleried room, with gas lighting and a stage at the far end. Evans’s had been known for singing ‘erotic and bacchanalian’ songs, but under Green it was said to have become much more respectable. The Cider Cellars, on Maiden Lane, was the supper room that Thackeray fictionalized as the Fielding’s Head in Pendennis with a landlord who took the chair and sang ‘profusely’. In the 1840s, one performer was known in particular for a song entitled ‘Sam Hall’, about a condemned man awaiting execution, with the refrain ‘damn your eyes’. Late at night, the Cellar’s tone changed, when ‘the songs became decidedly equivocal in character’ and not for ‘virginibus puerisque’ – for girls and boys.

  The Coal Hole, a supper and singing club, opened first as a working-class pub in 1817, and this drawing probably dates from those early days. The men on the left, however, appear to have a punch bowl on the table, and they may well be a social group gathered to sing.

  Even with that warning, the memoirists and novel writers apparently toned down their descriptions, if books like The Nobby Songster, The Flash Chaunter and The Flash Songster are to be believed. These claim to contain songs ‘now singing’ at Offley’s, the Cider Cellar and the Coal Hole (see below), and most of the songs are headed, ‘to be sung to the tune of —’, which suggests group singing, or at the very least joining in the choruses. One volume gives a list of toasts ‘as given at the Cider Cellar’, which includes:

  ‘Here’s to the maid, who will take that in her hand which she longs for in her heart.’

  ‘A clear house, good lodging, and in a hairy situation.’

  ‘The bird in the hand and then in the bush.’

  ‘A fine maid, a good plaice, and a large pair of cods.’ [a ‘good place’ in the nineteenth century was a good job; cods were testicles, hence the fish pun]

  ‘May we always be able to insert a long article in the Ladies Magazine.’

  ‘The Sea (c—) for ever; and he who would be afraid to dive into it, may he be jammed and d—d for ever.’

  ‘Here’s what every woman’s got, what every man has not got, what we all get out of, and what we all like to get into.’

  Even today, these do not fall into the ‘respectable’ category, and many of the songs were even smuttier. Others are outright obscene:

  THE SWELL COVES [fashionable gent’s] ALPHABET

  A. stands for actresses who’ll work as well as play.

  B. for bilking bulleys [cheating the pimps], and old bawds [madams of brothels] of their pay,

  C. for c—t, and crim. con.132 deny it, ye who can.

  D. for ladies dil—s when they cannot get a man. So do not think me foolish, or think a flat [dupe] you see, I ’ve learnt the swell coves alphabet, just hear my A.B.C.

  E. stands for Emmerson of bawds she is the queen

  F. for fancy [sporting] fellows – did you ever see one green [inexperienced]

  G, you know, is Goodereds in famous Piccadilly 133

  H is mother H’s where I’ve covered many a filly. 134

  Chorus &c.

  I. next for Ives of St. Giles’s petts the first

  J. for Joe the Stunner, whose Banks may never burst135

  K. stands for Kinchins, and kifer hung with hair,136

  L. for lush [alcohol] and lechery, as well as Leicester Square.

  Chorus &c.

  M. stands for maidenhead, I often have drove through,

  N, stands, for Nicholson, of ‘Town’ chaps few so true,137

  O. you know is opera, where swells must keep a box,

  P. stands for patent pills, Phoenix Alley and the P— [pox],

  Chorus &c.

  Q. is Q—m and Queen’s-Bench, queer places to be in,

  R. Rhodes rogering hole, where you’ll always go again,138

  S. is sponging houses, Shire-lane, saloons, and s—ing.

  T. you know is thimble-rigs, and Tattersalls [horse-auction rooms]

  low-cunning.

  Chorus &c.

  U is an uprighter or hunt with hasty dressing,

  V. is the venereal that follows as a blessing,

  W. stands for Waterford, of spreeing he’s the king,139

  X. is a cross [double-cross] so you must square it while I sing.

  Chorus &c.

  Y. you know are yokels, but if now there’s any here, as

  Z. is my last letter, why he must be a Zany.

  My song now is ended, I hope you’ll have not cause,

  To say I am not wide awake, or grudge me your applause.

  So do not think me foolish, or think a flat you see,

  I know the swell coves alphabet, and say the A B C.

  By comparison, some songs had only mildly bawdy elements: ‘The Bill Sticker’ describes how the bill-sticker of the title, ‘Holloway’s ointment and Paris pills, the last a great reformer, / I plaster’d to Miss Kembles tail the first night she play’d Normer’.140 Or, to the tune of ‘God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen’, lyrics concerning

  some queer old gentlemen

  That nothing can dismay;

  Who crawl about the city,

  Almost every day;

  And look for game – I mean young girls,

  To lead them all astray,

  And rob them of comfort and joy.

  Several were far less respectful about authority figures than we might assume today. The Cockchafer presented ‘A Celebrated Parody on The King, God Bless Him’, while a song about the burning of the Houses of Parliament told the story of Bill, a hackney coachman, who fell down the House of Commons privy: ‘they said, Bill, are you dead, no I’m only inturd.’

  The songbooks claim that all these songs were sung in many supper clubs, of which the Coal Hole had the worst reputation, while still being a place where a respectable man could be seen. The Coal Hole began life as the Wolf Club in 1817, a working-class pub down ‘a dingy-looking alley’ at the bottom of Southampton Street, near where it met the Strand, before moving to the Strand proper, where Simpson’s restaurant is now. It was only when it began its harmonic meetings that it became fashionable. Thackeray depicted it as the Cave of Harmony in The Newcomes, where it is run ‘by the celebrated Hoskins’, a place where men go late at night when they want ‘welsh-rabbits and a good old glee’. However, by the time The Newcomes appeared in the 1850s, it had changed radically. In 1841, at the Garrick pub, in Bow Street, Rent
on Nicholson had set up what came to be known as ‘Judge and Jury’ evenings, appointing himself ‘the Lord Chief Baron’ and presiding over mock trials, with audience members acting as the jury. Favourite subjects were current crim. con. cases, or trials for alienation of affection, adultery and divorce. Since the entertainment, like all of these supper rooms, was confined to men, there was also a certain amount of cross-dressing as the parts were acted out. The 1s fee bought entry, ‘a glass of grog and a bad cigar’. ‘Men about town, city clerks ... betting men, and provincials ambitious of initiation into the shady side of London life’ made up the audience. Three years later, Nicholson moved these Judge and Jury evenings to the Coal Hole, where they, and he, flourished until 1846, when they returned to the Garrick. The Coal Hole settled down to being a regular supper room, but kept up its risqué reputation, with poses plastiques: semidraped women in tableaux recycling episodes from history and literature, while providing soft-core leering opportunities.

  These evenings were all for men, and even the cheapest of them involved some cost. One amusement that was available to both men and women, city-wide and without charge, was to be found throughout the streets: illuminations. Long before Paris, London was known as the city of lights. In 1805, when Frederick Winsor began his experiment of lighting the streets by gas at Carlton House, he began not with the functional but with the decorative, erecting thirty-two gas burners, including a four-branched one shaped like the Prince of Wales feathers. Over the gateway he set up a transparency, a painting on a semi-opaque fabric, lit from behind to display the initials ‘G R’ and a crown, with, on the other side, an illuminated address beginning ‘Rejoice, rejoice, ’tis George’s natal day’.