The Victorian City

by Judith Flanders

  ‘constantly sweeping along’: Cubitt: Morning Post, 19 October 1852; lighting: Standard, 27 October 1852; Greville, Diary, 16 November 1852, vol. 2, p. 346.

  ‘barriers came down at eight’: general organization: ‘Police Regulations. Funeral of the late Field Marshal, Arthur Duke of Wellington, K. G., November 18, 1852’ (London, Metropolitan Police Office, 1852, BL shelfmark 1309 l.14, f.117); Beale, Recollections, p. 26.

  ‘for him it carried’: from this paragraph, unless otherwise noted, the details come from The Wellington News; description of catafalque: ‘Official Programme’ with additions from printed images; the foreign correspondent: in the Independence Belge, reprinted in the Illustrated London News, 27 November 1852, p. 467.

  ‘rest of the route’: falling man: Belton, Random Recollections, p. 147; Chelsea Pensioners: ‘The Order of Proceeding in the Public Funeral of the Late Field-Marshal Arthur Duke of Wellington ... ’ ([n.p.] 1852, BL shelfmark 813.cc44).

  ‘the minute guns’: testing the catafalque: Illustrated London News, 13 November 1852, p. 399.

  ‘Haynau was assaulted’: footnote on assault: The Times, 5 September 1850, p. 4; Garibaldi and the Barclay’s brewers: The Times, 2 June 1932, p. 15.

  ‘bones for evermore’: ‘Ode on the Duke of Wellington’, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London, Longman, 1969), pp. 1007–17.

  13. NIGHT ENTERTAINMENT

  ‘ran these activities’: animal baiting in Westminster: Richardson, Recollections, vol. 1, pp. 6, 9. The flyleaf of the copy in the British Library is inscribed ‘Son of the great [illegible] actor’ and then ‘Eton school list’. The Eton School Lists show a John Richardson attending c.1805–8, describing him as the ‘son of the great Lottery contractor’. If they are the same person, this dates the baiting arenas to c.1810s. The biographical information of the book’s inscription and the Eton School List otherwise seem incompatible. The ‘great’ showman John Richardson had no known children; the keeper of the lottery office in the eighteenth century was at one point a man named Richardson. (If this Revd John Richardson is his son, he was also a cousin of Beau Brummel.) I am grateful to Penny Hatfield, Eton College Archivist, for her help; Notebook of Sir John Silvester, British Library, Egerton 3710, ff. 3–4, 9, 29.

  ‘of animal baiting’: Badcock and Rowlandson, Real Life in London, vol. 1, pp. 596–7; monkey fight: Egan, Life in London, p. 222.

  ‘surrounding the city’: The Times, 28 March 1822, p. 1; police court: ILN, 29 April 1865, p. 391, is one account among many; ratting: Mayhew, London Labour, vol. 3, p. 7; the report is used almost verbatim by A. Mayhew, Paved with Gold, pp. 149ff., which I have cited here; dogfights: Mayhew, London Labour, vol. 1, p. 15, Smith, Little World of London, p. 52.

  ‘in the morning’: Martin Chuzzlewit, p. 651; Crockford’s: Donald A. Low, The Regency Underworld (Stroud, Sutton, 1999), pp. 145–6, and Anita McConnell, ‘Crockford, William’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, January 2008 [http:­//www.oxforddnb.­com.ezproxy.london­library.co.uk/­view/article­/6713, accessed 16 May 2011].

  ‘matter-of-fact’: Hints to Men about Town, by ‘The Old Medical Student’ (Liverpool, George Davis, 1840), pp. 35, 42.

  ‘not the drinking’: The Servant Girl in London, pp. 14–17.

  ‘domestic furnishings’: model pub: Loudon, An Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture, pp. 686–7.

  ‘of public-houses’: ‘Misplaced Attachment of Mr John Dounce’, Sketches by Boz, pp. 284–6; suburban building and pubs: Mark Girouard, Victorian Pubs (London, Studio Vista, 1975), p. 38; A. Mayhew, Paved with Gold, p. 41.

  ‘so till midnight’: Select Committee: Parliamentary Papers, 1834, pp. 8, 121.

  ‘not by much’: ‘Gin-shops’, Sketches by Boz, pp. 217–18; temperance reformer in East End: cited in Brian Harrison, ‘Pubs’, in Dyos and Wolff, Victorian City, vol. 1, p. 170.

  ‘very little alcohol’: ‘Gin-shops’, Sketches by Boz, pp. 217–18.

  ‘of oblivion’: discomfort of gin palaces: John Fisher Murray, ‘Physiology of London Life’, London Journal, 16 October 1847, p. 103; Sala, Gaslight and Daylight, p. 72.

  ‘soon enrolled’: sporting pubs: Archer, The Pauper, the Thief, p. 64; Shakespeare club: Tomalin, Charles Dickens, p. 90.

  ‘to Harmonics’: Tinkers’ Arms: Greenwood, Wilds of London, pp. 25–6; costermongers’ dances: Mayhew, London Labour, vol. 1, p. 12; discussion groups: Adams, Memoirs of a Social Atom, vol. 2, p. 315 and London by Night, or, The Bachelor’s..., pp. 42–3.

  ‘another glee’: Sketches by Boz, pp. 78–9.

  ‘and spittoons’: Oliver Twist, p. 207; Bleak House, p. 196; ‘forty pairs of lungs’: Archer, The Pauper, the Thief, p. 101; Little Dorrit, p. 128; footnote: Girouard, Victorian Pubs, p. 43.

  ‘Sweet Betsy Ogle’: Pickwick Papers, p. 272; Nicholas Nickleby, p. 724; shoemaker: Brown, Sixty Years’ Gleanings, p. 233; Collier, An Old Man’s Diary, vol. 2, pp. 12–14.

  ‘drunk on the stairs’: Old Curiosity Shop, p. 159; Great Expectations, p. 273.

  ‘give your orders’: ‘some good singing’: Leigh’s New Picture (1839 edn), p. 348; waiters: Paul Prendergast, ‘The Waiter’, in Meadows, Heads of the People, vol. 2, p. 223.

  ‘girls and boys’: Evans’s: Hollingshead, My Lifetime, vol. 1, pp. 154–5, Masson, Memories, p. 149, Girouard, Victorian Pubs, p. 46, and Hayward, Days of Dickens, p. 112; footnote on Hogarth: Hollingshead, ibid.; Thackeray, The History of Pendennis (Leipzig, Bernh. Tauchnitz, 1849), vol. 2, p. 136; Sam Hall: Masson, Memories, p. 153; ‘equivocal’: Vizetelly, Glances Back, vol. 1, p. 171; virginibus puerisque: Masson, Memories, p. 153.

  ‘they include’: the toasts and songs come from the following, all anonymous: The Cockchafer. A Choice Selection of Flash, Frisky, and Funny Songs ... Adapted for Gentlemen Only ... (London, W. West [?1865]), The Cuckold’s Nest, of Choice, Flash, Smutty and Delicious Songs ... Adapted for Gentlemen Only (London, W. West [?1865]), The Flash Chaunter ... now singing at Offley’s, Cider Cellers [sic], Coal Hole, &c ... . (London, W. West [?1865]), The Nobby Songster, A Prime Selection as now Singing at Offleys Cider Cellar: Coal Hole &c ... (London, W. West [?1842]), The Rambler’s Flash Songster ... now singing at Offley’s, Cider Cellars, Coal Hole, &c ... . (London, W. West [?1865]). The publication dates are those suggested by the British Library catalogue. However, the publisher William West died in 1854, by which time he was eighty-four, and had been retired for some years. These British Library copies may be reprints, or the dates may be incorrect. Edward Cray, Patrick Spedding and Paul Watt, editors of the Bawdy Songbooks of the Romantic Period (London, Pickering and Chatto, 2011), have dated The Cockchafer to c.1836, The Cuckold’s Nest to c.1837, The Flash Chaunter to c.1834, The Nobby Songster to c.1842, and The Rambler’s Flash Songster to c.1838. I am grateful to them for their generosity in offering advice on these songbooks, and to Patrick Spedding and Edward Cray for allowing me to read their introductions and notes in manuscript; D. E. Latané identified John Rhodes for me, and Mary Millar Joe the Stunner. I am grateful to them both; footnote on Waterford: K. D. Reynolds, ‘Beresford, Henry de la Poer, third marquess of Waterford’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www­.oxforddnb.com.­ezproxy.london­library.co.uk­/view/article/­56726, accessed 17 May 2011].

  ‘leering opportunities’: Coal Hole address: Every Night Book; or, Life After Dark, ‘by the author of “The Cigar”’ (London, T. Richardson, 1828), p. 55; Thackeray: The Newcomes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family (London, Bradbury and Evans, 1854), p. 6; admission and programme: Vizetelly, Glances Back, vol. 1, p. 169; poses plastiques: London by Night: The Bachelor’s..., p. 121, and Greenwood, Wilds of London, p. 105.

  ‘natal day’: Barty-King, New Flame, p. 28.

  ‘even brilliant’: Wheaton, Journal of a Residence, p. 222.

  ‘Bromley, Kent’: Vittoria: Allen, History and Antiquities of London, vol. 2,
p. 187; 1814 celebrations: Pardon, Routledge’s Popular Guide, pp. 106–7, O’Dea, Social History of Lighting, p. 47; Bromley: ILN, 4 August 1865, p. 142.

  ‘cock of the walk’: Joseph Ballard, England in 1815, as seen by a Young Boston Merchant..., ed. J. G. Crocker (Cambridge, MA, Riverside, 1913), pp. 115–17.

  ‘the Citty’: William IV: Colton, Four Years in Great Britain, p. 77; Tayler, Diary of William Tayler, pp. 48, 71.

  ‘nothing further’: Prince of Wales’s birth: ILN, 12 November 1842, p. 423; Prince Albert’s birthday: ibid., 18 August 1847, p. 139; Prince of Wales’ eighteenth birthday: ibid., 12 November 1849, p. 464; footnote: Dickens to de Cerjat, 16 March 1862, Letters, vol. 10, pp. 64–5; the queen: ILN, 4 June 1870, p. 571.

  ‘of laurel, scrolls’: ILN, 28 May 1853, p. 415.

  ‘coloured lights’: this paragraph and the next: ILN, 14 May 1863, p. 263, 4 April 1863, p. 374.

  ‘TO HER MAJESTY’: Wyon, Journal, British Library Add MS 59,617; ILN, 31 May 1856, p. 579; bug-destroyers: Mayhew, London Labour, vol. 3, p. 37.

  ‘six in the evening’: ILN, 15 September 1855, p. 323.

  ‘dirt and discomfort’: ‘The Horrors of Peace’, The Times, 21 May 1856, p. 5.

  14. STREET VIOLENCE

  ‘be carried out’: ‘The Great Winglebury Duel’, Sketches by Boz, pp. 463–82; Putney Heath duel: ILN, 23 July 1842; Camden Town duel: ibid., 8 July 1843, p. 30, 22 July 1843, p. 55, 21 July 1847, p. 114.

  ‘harshly punished’: ILN, 10 July 1869, p. 27; 31 July 1869, p. 103, 6 November 1869, p. 451; victualler: ILN, 9 January 1869, p. 27.

  ‘are Satisfied’: footnote: the Riot Act is, formally, 1 Geo. I St.2. c.5.

  ‘require hospitalization’: there are few reports on these street brawls, which are mentioned in the newspapers only in passing, if at all. A good modern study is Rob Sindall, Street Violence in the Nineteenth Century: Media Panic or Real Danger? (Leicester, Leicester University Press, 1990); this account draws from Allen, History and Antiquities of London, vol. 5, p. 59.

  ‘semi-starving men’: Spitalfields gang: Allen, ibid., vol. 5, p. 90, weavers: ibid. vol. 4, pp. 111–12.

  ‘resorting to killing’: Allen, ibid., vol. 4, pp. 129–30, reports the incident, but the interpretation of it, as well as the role of police, is my own.

  ‘incipient trouble’: Allen, ibid., vol. 5, pp. 129–30.

  ‘the previous decade’: Naples’ diary: cited in Durey, Return of the Plague, pp. 172–3.

  ‘padroll with cutlashes’: assaults on medical personnel: Durey, ibid., pp. 162–3; Sala, Twice Round the Clock, p. 146; footnote with the biographical information on Sala’s mother: 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 28 February 2011].

  ‘after the event’: Beale, Recollections, pp. 9–10; the number of Chartists on Kennington Common is disputed. I have followed David Goodway, London Chartism, 1838–1840 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 76.

  ‘see a disturbance’: the Sabbatarian riots in this and the next paragraph: ILN, 30 June 1855, pp. 646–7, and then passim, to 27 July 1855; Wyon, Journal, British Library, Add MS 59,617.

  ‘executive occasionally follows’: The Times, 27 June 1855, p. 8, 2 July 1855, p. 8; Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, p. 71.

  ‘for Co. Stafford’: Notebooks of John Silvester, British Library, Add MSS 47,466 and Egerton MS 3710, passim.

  ‘Civil Service Gazette’: Dickens, Oliver Twist, pp. 79–80, 102–3; biographical information on Laing: Oliver Twist, p. 499n.; arrest of ecclesiastical agent: ILN, 28 July 1855, p. 99.

  ‘at the doors’: Select Committee on the Police, 1816, in Low, Regency Underworld, p. 67.

  ‘income of £10,000’: 1810s: Brown, Sixty Years Gleanings, pp. 248–9; Jane Welsh Carlyle to John Carlyle, 31 January 1850, Carlyle Letters, vol. 25, pp. 15–17; Thomas Carlyle to Jean Carlyle Aitken, 23 January 1851, ibid., vol. 26, p. 2204.

  ‘tools of their trades’: Dickens, Little Dorrit, p. 208; the sixteen-year-old: Mayhew, London Labour, vol. 1, p. 413; pickpocket: Mayhew, London Labour, vol. 1, p. 411; £100 a year: Leigh’s New Picture (1839 edn), p. 81; Notebook of John Silvester: British Library, Egerton MS 3710.

  ‘marine-store dealers’: ‘My lad’: Derby, Two Months Abroad, p. 12; pushing at doors: Bleak House, p. 499; river thefts: ‘Down with the Tide’, Household Words, 5 February 1853, Dickens’ Journalism, vol. 3, pp. 119–21.

  ‘countries on the earth’: Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, ed. George Woodcock (first published 1859; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985), p. 84; ‘those good old customs’: Dickens, American Notes (New York, Modern Library, 1996), p. 68.

  ‘physical danger: Vizetelly, Glances Back, vol. 1, pp. 9–10.

  ‘them with force’: the summary and quotations from the White Swan case in this paragraph and the next are from Rictor Norton, Mother Clap’s Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England, 1700–1830 (London, GMP Publishers, 1992), pp. 187–90; footnote on other locations of molly-houses: [Robert Holloway], The Phoenix of Sodom ... the Gambols Practised by the Ancient Letchers of ... The Vere St Coterie (London, J. Cook [1813]), p. 14.

  ‘food and drink’: the shocked MPs: The Times, 7 April 1815, p. 3; Paine’s publisher: V. A. C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770–1868 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 89n.

  ‘had last been used’: the forger: Vizetelly, Glances Back, vol. 1, p. 10; the fishmonger: The Times, 5 June 1830, p. 6.

  ‘of Retribution’: prison nicknames appear in both Chesterton, Revelations of Prison Life, p. 13, and Mayhew and Binny, The Criminal Prisons, p. 82. Where they differ, I have relied on Chesterton, who was a prison governor, rather than Mayhew and Binny, who were journalists; the wall and door: Archer, The Pauper, the Thief, p. 173; the architectural historian is John Summerson, The Microcosm of London: [reproductions of pictures] by T. Rowlandson and A. C. Pugin (London, Penguin, 1943), p. 12.

  ‘closer to events’: ‘gestorben’: Mayhew and Binny, The Criminal Prisons, p. 82, while Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961) suggests the Romany source. The OED is unhelpful: ‘origins unknown’.

  ‘with the demons’: executions at Newgate: Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, pp. 89–90; Dickens at Courvoisier’s execution: cited in Philip Collins, Dickens and Crime (3rd edn, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1994), pp. 224–5.

  ‘and their wives’: Cited in Gatrell, The Hanging Tree, pp. 62–4.

  ‘deaths by overcrowding’: time between conviction and execution: Martin J. Wiener, ‘Judges v. Jurors: Courtroom Tensions in Murder Trials and the Law of Criminal Responsibility in Nineteenth-century England’, Law and History Review, 17: 3 (1999), pp. 467–506.

  ‘rooftop vantage point’: Greenacre: Camden Pelham [pseud.], The New Chronicles of Crimes, or, The Newgate Calendar (London, Reeves & Turner, 1886), vol. 2, p. 446; Fagin in the condemned cell: Oliver Twist, p. 445; footnote on capital crimes: ‘unnatural offences’, incorporating both sodomy and bestiality, was regulated by the Buggery Act of 1533 until 1861, when it was replaced by the Offences against the Person Act of 1861. The Act did not include incest, which was dealt with by the ecclesiastical rather than the criminal courts until 1908. As late as 1908 there was some discussion about the undesirability of criminalizing such acts on the interesting grounds that doing so might give people ideas. My thanks to Dr Sharon Bickle for this helpful summary; Dickens’ Jewish relatives: Michael Allen, Charles Dickens and the Blacking Factory, p. 36; Dickens’ rooftop: Dickens to John Leech, 12 November 1849, Letters, vol. 5, p. 643.

  ‘come to be hung’: Oliver Twist, pp. 15, 52.

  ‘crown a head’: rates of executions, Philip Horne, Oliver Twist, pp. xv–xvi; analysis of reduction in numbers hanged: Collins, Dickens and Crime, p. 4; rarity increasing audiences: Thomas W. Laqueur, �
�Crowds, Carnival and the State in English Executions, 1604–1868’, in A. L. Beier, David Cannadine and James M. Rosenheim (eds), The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 308; Punch and Judy: cited in Gatrell, The Hanging Tree, p. 121; William Thackeray, ‘Going to See a Man Hanged’, Fraser’s Magazine, 22: 128 (August 1840), pp. 150–58; Henry Angelo, Reminiscences of Henry Angelo ... (London, Kegan, Paul & Co., 1904), vol. 2, p. 139.

  ‘Oh Susannah’: Dickens, letter to the editor, Daily News, 28 February 1846, p. 6.

  ‘working-class onlookers’: Thackeray, ‘Going to See a Man Hanged’; Flowery Land pirates: Shaw, London in the Sixties, p. 130.

  ‘promote to visitors’: Leigh’s New Picture (1819 edn), p. 252, (1839 edn), p. 209.

  ‘descended on the scene’: The details of the Clerkenwell bombing, and the execution of Michael Barrett in this paragraph and the next two: Patrick Quinlivan and Paul Rose, The Fenians in England, 1865–1872: A Sense of Insecurity (London, John Calder, 1982), K. R. M. Short, The Dynamite War: Irish-American Bombers in Victorian Britain (Dublin, Gill and Macmillan, 1979), Daily News, 14, 16 and 25 December 1867, 27 May 1868; Morning Post, 16 December 1867; special constables: Daily News, 25 December 1867; Era, 29 December 1867.

  ‘ancestral landmarks’: ‘On an Amateur Beat’, Dickens’ Journalism, vol. 4, p. 382.

  15. THE RED-LIT STREETS TO DEATH

  ‘their unknowability’: Martin Chuzzlewit, p. 517; ‘How utterly lost’: Horwitz, Brushwood Picked, pp. 21–2; A Tale of Two Cities, p. 44.

  ‘prostitution at all’: the modern historian in the footnote is Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 14; Mayhew, London Labour, vol. 4, p. 255. Although the author here is Hemyng, see p. 397, I will continue to refer to ‘Mayhew’ in these notes, for bibliographical clarity.

  ‘the rising population’: from 50,000 to 80,000: Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 76–8, although the suggestion as to how the 80,000 figure was achieved is my own.