The Victorian City

by Judith Flanders

  ‘been in 1800’: size of London, numbers of inhabitants and houses: Jeremy Tambling, Going Astray: Dickens and London (Harlow, Pearson Longman, 2009), p. 18, and Jerry White, London in the Nineteenth Century: ‘A Human Awful Wonder of God’ (London, Jonathan Cape, 2007), p. 77.

  ‘impression so nicely’: Walter Bagehot, ‘Charles Dickens’, in The Works and Life of Walter Bagehot, ed. Mrs Russell Barrington (London, Longmans, Green, and Co., 1915), vol. 3, pp. 84–5; ‘fanciful photograph’: Dickens to W. H. Wills, 24 September 1858, Letters, vol. 8, p. 669; footnote: I owe this idea to Tambling, Going Astray, pp. 21–2.

  ‘he marvelled’: Henry James, ‘The Art of Fiction’, 1884, cited in F. O. Matthiesson, The James Family (New York, Knopf, 1947), p. 360; ‘English Traits’, in Emerson, The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston, Fields, Osgood & Co., 1870), vol. 2, p. 278; Parkman, The Journals of Francis Parkman, ed. Mason Wade (London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1949), vol. 1, p. 221.

  ‘created Dickens’: J.-K. Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1959), p. 138; Walter Benjamin citing G. K. Chesterton, Dickens, in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA, Belknap, Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 438.

  ‘the nearest way’: David Copperfield, p. 153.

  1810: THE BERNERS STREET HOAX

  ‘aged family retainer’: ‘piano-fortes by dozens’: [Theodore Hook], Gilbert Gurney (London, Whittaker & Co., 1836), vol. 1, pp. 298–9.

  ‘left in peace’: verse: ‘The Hoax: An Epistle from Solomon Sappy, Esquire, in London, to his brother Simon at Liverpool’, Satirist, or, Monthly Meteor, 1 January 1811, pp. 59–61.

  ‘the fun in comfort’: the details of the episode are given by Hook’s biographer, Bill Newton Dunn, The Man Who Was John Bull: The Biography of Theodore Edward Hook, 1778–1841 (London, Allendale, 1996), p. 12, citing an article from the Morning Post, which he does not date and I have been unable to trace. However, the Examiner, 2 December 1810, p. 768, ‘Principal Occurrences in the Year 1810’, in the New Annual Register [January 1811?] and ‘Principal Occurrences in the Year 1810’, in the Edinburgh Annual Register [January 1811?], all seem to be reprints, with some additional information.

  ‘of Bedford Street’: this and the next two paragraphs: Mrs [Nancy] Mathews, Tea-Table Talk, Ennobled Actresses, and Other Miscellanies (London, Thomas Cautley Newby, 1857), pp. 158–62.

  ‘those in the street’: epilogue to Lost and Found: cited in Literary Panorama, February 1811, pp. 379–90; the European Magazine, and London Review, January 1811, p. 46, names the play and authors.

  1. EARLY TO RISE

  ‘are rapidly filling’: [William Moy Thomas], ‘Covent Garden Market’, Household Words, 175, 30 July 1853, pp. 505–11.

  ‘side of the river’: long lines of men and women: Charles Dickens, ‘The Streets – Morning’, Sketches by Boz, p. 70.

  ‘leathern leggings’: Augustus Mayhew, Paved with Gold, or, The Romance and Reality of the London Streets (London, Chapman and Hall, 1858), p. 75. This is a novel, but Augustus Mayhew acted as one of his brother Henry’s primary researchers on London Labour and the London Poor, and not only does he use here the material he gathered for background, but some of it shows up in the same words in both works. I have therefore, with caution, treated some descriptive passages in the novel as non-fiction.

  ‘from nightwork’: Dickens, Bleak House, ed. Norman Page (first published 1852–3; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985), p. 96.

  ‘ready for customers’: [Thomas Wright], The Great Unwashed, ‘by a Journeyman Engineer’, p. 185; footnote on Wright: Alastair J. Reid, ‘Wright, Thomas’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, October 2006 [http://www.­oxforddnb.com.­ezproxy.londonlibrary.­co.uk/view/article­/47426, accessed 7 January 2011]; Camberwell: Alfred Rosling Bennett, London and Londoners in the Eighteen-fifties and Sixties (London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1924), p. 54; Covent Garden: George Augustus Sala, Gaslight and Daylight, with Some London Scenes They Shine Upon (London, Chapman & Hall, 1859), p. 13; footnote: biographical information on G. A. Sala: P. D. Edwards, ‘Sala, George Augustus’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2005 [http://www.­oxforddnb.­com.ezproxy.­londonlibrary.co­.uk/view/article­/24526, accessed 17 June 2011]; Islington: James Greenwood, Unsentimental Journeys: or, Byways of the Modern Babylon (London, Ward, Lock, & Tyler, 1867), pp. 32–3.

  ‘worse off than themselves’: [Thomas Wright], Some Habits and Customs of the Working Classes, ‘by a Journeyman Engineer’ (London, Tinsley Brothers, 1867), p. 255.

  ‘for a street seller’: Greenwood, Unsentimental Journeys, pp. 34ff.

  ‘journalist Charles Dickens’: ‘The Streets – Morning’, Sketches by Boz, p. 73.

  ‘his little finger’: middle-aged clerks: Leman Rede, ‘The Lawyer’s Clerk’, in Kenny Meadows [illus.], Heads of the People: or, Portraits of the English, ‘with original essays by distinguished writers’ (London, Willoughby & Co., [1840]), vol. 1, pp. 28ff; younger clerks: George Augustus Sala, Twice Round the Clock: or, The Hours of the Day and Night in London (London, Houlston and Wright [1859]), p. 83; Bleak House, p. 173.

  ‘to the City’: Anon., The London Conductor (London, John Cassell, 1851), p. 1; ‘reduced to a system’: The London Guide, and Stranger’s Safeguard ... ‘by a Gentleman’ (London, Bumpus, 1818), p. 27; newspaper reader: W. E. Adams, Memoirs of a Social Atom (London, Hutchinson, 1903), vol. 2, p. 313.

  ‘one shop alone’: 1850 figures: Parliamentary Select Committee report, cited in John R. Kellett, The Impact of the Railways on Victorian Cities (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 45–6; 1866 figures: White, London in the Nineteenth Century, p. 42; Robert Southey, cited in David Barnett, London, Hub of the Industrial Revolution: A Revisionary History, 1775–1825 (London, Tauris, 1998), p. 1.

  ‘four and a half miles’: musician’s children: Rosamund Gotch Brunel (ed.), Mendelssohn and his Friends in Kensington: Letters ... 1833–36 (London, Oxford University Press, 1934), pp. 24–5; Leonard Wyon: Journal, BL Add MS 59,617, 21 January 1854; Maria Cust, cited in Heather Creaton (ed.), Victorian Diaries: The Daily Lives of Victorian Men and Women (London, Mitchell Beazley, 2001), p. 39; Dickens to the Hon. Mrs Richard Watson, 11 July 1851, Letters, vol. 6, p. 429.

  ‘was the norm’: Peepy: Bleak House, p. 109; the page references for the rest of the walks in this paragraph are respectively: pp. 224, 260, 921, 750, 375, 718, 867, 247, 356; Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, ed. Adrian Poole (first published 1864–5; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1997), pp. 446, 452; Dickens, Little Dorrit, ed. John Holloway (first published 1855–7; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985), p. 830.

  ‘at the termini’: Mayhew on working hours: Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (New York, Dover, 1968; facsimile of Griffin, Bohn edn, 1861–2), vol. 2, p. 174; the cab and bus employees: John Garwood, The Million Peopled City, or, One-half of the People of London Made Known to the Other Half (London, Wertheim and Macintosh, 1853), pp. 177–9, 220–24; the cab horses: William John Gordon, The Horse-World of London (London, Leisure Hour Library, 1893), p. 36.

  ‘employment practices’: the draper: ILN, 12 October 1844, p. 230; Henry Vizetelly, Glances Back through Seventy Years: Autobiographical and Other Reminiscences (London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1893), vol. 1, p. 116; Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, ed. Michael Slater (first published 1838–9; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1978), p. 539; footnote on Foreign Post nights: the days are taken in this instance from Leigh’s New Picture of London ... (London, Leigh and Co., 1839 edn), but other handbooks carry the same information.

  2. ON THE ROAD

  ‘running along’: Dickens, Oliver Twist, or, The Parish Boy’s Progress, ed. Philip Horne (first published 1837–8; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2002), p. 330.

  ‘crashing roar’: Max Schlesinger, Saunterings in and about London, trans. Otto Wenckstern (first published 1852; London, Nathaniel Cooke, 1853), p. 70; Mrs
Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (London, Smith, Elder & Co., 1870), pp. 270–71; Henry Mayhew and John Binny, The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of Prison Life (London, Charles Griffin [1862]), p. 53; ‘crashing roar’: Charles Manby Smith, The Little World of London (London, Arthur Hall, Virtue and Co., 1857), p. 395.

  ‘hear each other’: American clergyman: Nathaniel S. Wheaton, A Journal of a Residence during Several Months in London ... in the Years 1823 and 1824 (Hartford, CT, H. & F. J. Huntington, 1830), p. 41; Jane Carlyle to Eliza Stodart, 1 August 1834, The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle (hereafter referred to as Carlyle Letters), ed. Charles Richard Sanders, Kenneth J. Fielding, et al. (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1977), vol. 7, pp. 250–54. The complete letters are available online, at http://carlyleletters.dukejournals.org; Bleak House, p. 823.

  ‘in Holborn today’: footnote: the location of Ellis and Blackmore is slightly opaque, as Dickens, in Sketches by Boz, claimed that the solicitors’ offices were at 1 Raymond Buildings, ‘originally off Gray’s Inn Square’. However, Geoffrey Fletcher, The London Dickens Knew (London, Hutchinson, 1970), p. 48, states that Ellis and Blackmore was definitely at Holborn Court, now South Square, and the company moved to Raymond Buildings later; survival of Number 1: Andrew Goodman, The Walking Guide to Lawyers’ London (London, Blackstone, 2000), p. 205; Dickens, David Copperfield, p. 754.

  ‘on his boots’: Doctors’ Commons: David Copperfield, p. 327; Dickens, The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, ed. P. N. Furbank (first published 1843–4; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1986), p. 693; Our Mutual Friend, pp. 99–100; Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, ed. Arthur Cox (first published 1870; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1993), p. 133.

  ‘day nor night’: Robert Southey, Letters from England, ed. Jack Simmons (first published 1807; Gloucester, Alan Sutton, 1984), p. 46; footnote on the Temple watchman: Hudson, Munby, pp. 191–2; church bells: Mayhew and Binny, The Criminal Prisons, pp. 23, 32; dockyards: James Freeman Clarke, Eleven Weeks in Europe; and, What May be Seen in that Time (Boston, Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1852), p. 59.

  ‘poorly or not at all’: [Louis Simond], ‘A Day in London’, in The National Register, vol. 2, no. 4, 21 September 1816, p. 59; footnote on Louis Simond: the contemporary academic’s work from whom Simond’s biographical information also derives is Xavier Baron (ed.), London 1066–1914: Literary Sources and Documents, vol. 2: Regency and Early Victorian London, 1800–1870 (Robertsbridge, Helm Information, 1997), p. 143; reasons for street noise: Ralph Turvey, ‘Street Mud, Dust and Noise’, London Journal, 21: 2 (1996), pp. 131–48.

  ‘fall in unison’: this and the following two paragraphs come from Turvey, ‘Street Mud’, unless otherwise stated; ‘iron or stone cylinders’: Bennett, London and Londoners, p. 90; sticky streets: Parliamentary Papers, 1868, XII, Select Committee on Metropolitan Local Government Q1866–72; ‘quagmires’: [Alexander MacKenzie], The American in England (New York, Harper & Brothers, 1835), p. 103; adhesive qualities: cited in James Winter, London’s Teeming Streets, 1830–1914 (London, Routledge, 1993), p. 119; the mob and the roads: ILN, 7 July 1855, p. 7.

  ‘with the granite’: London Bridge navvies: Bennett, London and Londoners, p. 98; footnote on Alfred Rosling Bennett: Ronald M. Birse, ‘Bennett, Alfred Rosling’, rev. Brian Bowers, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.­oxforddnb.com.­ezproxy.londonlibrary.­co.uk/view/­article/37181, accessed 17 June 2011]; horses’ hooves: ILN, 7 January 1854, pp. 7, 10; Wilkie Collins, Basil (London, Richard Bentley, 1852), vol. 2, pp. 155, 194.

  ‘windows were open’: Journal of the Society of Arts, cited in Turvey, ‘Street Mud’, p. 139.

  ‘into the twentieth century’: Cheapside petition: ILN, 29 October 1842, p. 391; wood in the City: ILN, 28 January 1843, p. 59, but this story runs and runs: see also 4 and 18 February, 2 September, 7 October and 18 November 1843, 7 December 1844, p. 359; locations retaining use of wood: ILN, 20 June 1846, p. 398, lists the Old Bailey, and it was still wood paved when Mayhew was writing London Labour, in which he also notes ‘some churches and other public buildings’, but does not itemize them, vol. 2, p. 181; post-1870s wooden paving: Walter Besant, London in the Nineteenth Century (London, Adam & Charles Black, 1909), p. 344.

  ‘paved at all’: New Yorker: Fanny W. Hall, Rambles in Europe ... (New York, E. French, 1839), vol. 2, p. 143; the date of her trip is not stated, but appears from the context to be before 1837, possibly as early as the late 1820s; Leigh’s New Picture (1839 edn), p. 29, although this quote and some of the accompanying text in fact repeat almost verbatim C. F. Partington, National History and Views of London ... from Original Drawings ... (London, Allan Bell and Co., 1834), p. 4.

  ‘in every suburb’: Hector Gavin, Sanitary Ramblings: Being Sketches and Illustrations of Bethnal Green (London, John Churchill, 1848), pp. 14–17; western suburbs: ‘Walter’, My Secret Life (5 vols., first published 1888–94; Ware, Herts, Wordsworth, 1995), vol. 2, p. 241; Anthony Trollope, Castle Richmond (London, Chapman & Hall, 1860), vol. 3, p. 196.

  ‘throughout his life’: the memoirist: S. and E.-A. Whyte, Miscellanea Nova (Dublin, Edward-Athenry Whyte, 1800), p. 49; [Louis Simond], Journal of a Tour and Residence in Great Britain during the Years 1810 and 1811 ... (Edinburgh, Archibald Constable and Company, 1815), vol. 1, p. 18; Wheaton, Journal of a Residence, p. 191; 1835 guidebook: Partington, National History and Views of London, p. 4; macadamization and pavements: Winter, London’s Teeming Streets, 1830–1914, p. 37.

  ‘and certain progress’: traffic islands: Andrew Dickinson, My First Visit to Europe ... (New York, George P. Putnam, 1851), p. 119; Schlesinger, Saunterings, p. 16; the view from the bus: Henry Colman, European Life and Manners; or, Familiar Letters to Friends (Boston, Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1850), vol. 1, p. 163.

  ‘but still faster’: Fordyce: cited in Dana Arnold, Re-Presenting the Metropolis: Architecture, Urban Experience and Social Life in London, 1800–1940 (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2000), p. 38; Little Dorrit, p. 690.

  ‘Kennington Gate’: factor in traffic problems: T. C. Barker and Michael Robbins, A History of London Transport ..., vol. 1: The Nineteenth Century (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1975), p. 64; turnpike locations: Arthur Hayward, The Days of Dickens: A Glance at Some Aspects of Early Victorian Life in London (London, George Routledge and Sons, 1926), p. 84. This book appears to be in many places an unacknowledged compilation of contemporary accounts, occasionally conflating information from more than one account. I therefore cite Hayward only when I have been unable to identify an original.

  ‘one for tickets’: Old Brompton toll gate: S. C. Hall, Retrospect of a Long Life, 1815–83 (London, Bentley and Son, 1883), vol. 1, p. 68; Oxford Street gates: Thomas Adolphus Trollope, What I Remember (London, Richard Bentley, 1887), p. 31; footnote on pockets: Phillis Cunnington and Catherine Lucas, Occupational Costume in England, from the Eleventh Century to 1914 (London, Adam & Charles Black, 1967), p. 353.

  ‘returned the money’: keeping travellers waiting: Hall, Retrospect of a Long Life, vol. 1, pp. 68–9.

  ‘the rest themselves’: clockwork mechanism: MacKenzie, The American in England, vol. 1, p. 217; Dickens on its inventor: Dickens, ‘Down with the Tide’, in Dickens’ Journalism, vol. 3, p. 115; taking goods instead of money: ibid., p. 117.

  ‘of verisimilitude’: number of tickets: Revd R. H. Dalton Barham, The Life and Remains of Theodore Edward Hook (London, Richard Bentley, 1849), vol. 1, pp. 61–2; Oliver Twist, p. 365.

  ‘river were abolished’: 1830 toll removal: Barker and Robbins, A History of London Transport, vol. 1, p. 13; the 178 toll bars: Bennett: London and Londoners, p. 90; Vauxhall: Edmund Yates, Edmund Yates: His Recollections and Experiences (London, Richard Bentley and Son, 1885), p. 96; the campaign to lift the tolls: ILN, 23 March 1857, 6 June 1857, 15 August 1857, 8 and 29 May 1858; ‘Great Open-Air Demonstration’: ILN, 27 July 1857, p. 632; abolition of tolls: G. A. Sekon, Locomotion in Victorian London (London,
Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 40.

  ‘defied the night’: Southwark Bridge: ILN, 19 November 1864, p. 513; Little Dorrit, pp. 135, 260, 305; Waterloo Bridge: ‘Night Walks’, in All the Year Round, 21 July 1860, in Dickens’ Journalism, vol. 4, p. 151.

  ‘private matter’: straps on buses: Barker and Robbins: A History of London Transport, vol. 1, p. 32; Magazine Day: Smith, Little World of London, p. 47; police notice: ILN, 31 July 1852, p. 71.

  ‘given to the police’: Westminster Bridge: ILN, 10 March 1860, p. 235; traffic light: cited in William Kent, London for Dickens Lovers (London, Methuen, 1935), p. 48; 1871 treatise: Henry Carr, Metropolitan Street Traffic: Suggested Improvements (London, R. J. Mitchell and Sons, 1871), p. 3.

  ‘weighing machine’: weights of horses and carts, lack of turning space: Gordon, The Horse-World of London, pp. 54, 84, 127, 77; brewers’ dray horses: J. E. Bradfield, The Public Carriages of Great Britain: A Glance at their Rise, Progress, Struggles and Burthens (London, Piper, Stephenson & Spence, 1855), p. 69; six horses harnessed in line: David W. Bartlett, What I saw in London, or, Men and Things in the Great Metropolis (Auburn [CT?], Derby and Miller, 1852), p. 69; Nelson’s Column: ILN, 2 July 1842, p. 121; carters lending horses: Albert Smith (ed.), Gavarni in London: Sketches of Life and Character (London, David Bogue, 1849), p. 39.

  ‘twenty-five yards’: Half-way House: plans for destruction in ILN, 16 July 1842, p. 150; Middle Row: Percy Edwards, History of London Street Improvements, 1855–1897 (London, London County Council, 1898), facing p. 35, and map, Yates, Recollections, p. 35, Edward Callow, Old London Taverns: Historical, descriptive and Reminiscent ... (London, Downey & Co., 1899), p. 224, Walter Thornbury, Old and New London, 6 vols (London, Cassell, Petter, & Galpin [?1887–93]), vol. 1, pp. 51ff.