The Victorian City

by Judith Flanders

  2. I will use City with a capital ‘C’ to mean that area of London that is more or less confined geographically within the old medieval walls governed by the Corporation of the City of London, which now represents the financial district of London; ‘the city’, in lower case, refers to London more generally.

  3. For an explanation of pre-decimal currency, see p. xiii.

  4. Hind was an obsolete word for a servant by the time Dickens was writing, but ‘labouring hind’ was a phrase regularly used in poetry and translations, and would have been recognized as such.

  5. Income and class, inextricably linked, are difficult to compare directly with modern income and social status. However, as a rule of thumb, between £100 and £150 was considered the entry-level income for the lower middle classes for most of the nineteenth century, and £500 was at the upper end of the middle-class scale. Although professional men who earned more (sometimes as much as £1,000) were still considered middle class, they emulated the lifestyles of the upper classes. In turn, the lower echelons of the upper classes, the gentry, often got by on £500 or even less.

  6. A list of Dickens’ major works, with the dates of serial and one-volume first publications, appears on page 425.

  7. It is for this reason that I have cheated slightly, using ‘Victorian’ in my title, even though Dickens’ dates, and the period I cover, begin earlier, and finish earlier, than the period when Victoria reigned (1837–1901.)

  8. Temple Bar, which narrowed one of London’s busiest roads to a mere twenty feet, was dismantled in 1878 after nearly a century as a traffic menace, and was purchased by a brewer to create the entrance to the grounds of his house near Enfield. In 2004, the house having long since become a conference centre, Temple Bar was returned to the City and inserted into the new development at Paternoster Square, beside St Paul’s.

  9. Dickens prided himself on keeping up a regular pace of four and a half miles per hour. Over a mere five miles, this was a ‘breather’; friends learnt to be wary of his ‘busters’, which lasted up to thirty miles.

  10. It is worth remembering that the great illustrator of Dickens’ work named himself ‘Phiz’, which was slang for face, from ‘physiognomy’; the two men together captured the faces that passed them daily, giving the anonymous crowds characters.

  11. It was for this reason that street clocks were common. The lack of timepieces generally was the source of the running joke, renewed by Dickens in Bleak House, where ‘we met the cook round the corner coming out of a public-house, wiping her mouth. She mentioned, as she passed us, that she had been to see what o’clock it was.’

  12. Thomas Wright (1839–1909) was the son of a blacksmith who became a tramping worker (see pp. 164–5), before finding employment as a manual labourer in an engineering firm. He studied on his own, and in 1872 became one of the first national school-board visitors, a huge step up in status, if not in pay. He wrote widely on the world of the working man into which he had been born.

  13. G. A. Sala (1828–95) was ostensibly the child of a dancing master who died soon after his birth, although it is likely that his real father was an army officer. Sala was raised by his mother, a singer and teacher, and first became an artist providing illustrations for pennydreadfuls. It was in 1851, with the essay ‘A Key to the Street’, published in Dickens’ journal Household Words, that he came to prominence as one of ‘Dickens’ Young Men’, before later becoming a well-known foreign correspondent.

  14. James Greenwood (early 1830s–1927) was a successful children’s author before he turned to investigative journalism in the 1860s. He was one of, if not the, first to dress to blend in with those on whom he was reporting, most famously for a stay in a workhouse’s casual ward, for which he became known as the ‘Amateur Casual’ (see pp. 198–9).

  15. Henry Mayhew (1812–87) was a journalist and social reformer. As well as being one of the founders of the comic magazine Punch, he compiled a monumental study of street workers, London Labour and the London Poor (1851, with additions until the early 1860s), based on hundreds of interviews initially conducted for a series of essays he wrote for the Morning Chronicle between 1849 and 1850. Scholars have since discussed methodological flaws in this work, but no study of nineteenth-century working-class street life could manage without it.

  16. By mid-century, every night was a foreign post night, but in 1839, when Nicholas Nickleby was appearing, the post office sent out post to different countries on set days to coincide with ships’ sailing dates: France daily, Belgium four times a week, Holland and northern Europe twice a week, but southern Europe and Malta only once a fortnight. Post to the United States went once a month, to the Caribbean twice a month. So ‘Foreign Post nights’ varied from office to office, depending on where they did business abroad.

  17. Dickens’ employers in 1827, Ellis and Blackmore, were located in Holborn Court (now South Square), Gray’s Inn, later also the address of Tommy Traddles, David Copperfield’s struggling attorney friend. The square having been heavily damaged in the Blitz, today almost all the buildings are reconstructions. The single original building is, happily, number 1, once the offices of Ellis and Blackmore.

  18. Doctors’ Commons, between Knightrider Street and Upper Thames Street (a plaque on Faraday Building on the north side of Queen Victoria Street now marks the site) was not an Inn of Court but the location of various arcane areas of law, including the ecclesiastical courts of appeal, the offices that provided marriage licences and the places where wills were probated. The lawyers here were also in charge of divorce, which until 1857 required an Act of Parliament to dissolve each marriage individually. After 1857, when divorce became part of common law, Doctors’ Commons ceased to function, and in 1867 the secluded courtyard was demolished.

  19. Despite being replaced by the Metropolitan Police in 1829, a few of the old watch hung on in unexpected places: the Temple, private land owned and run by the Inns of Court, had a watchman calling the hours until 1864.

  20. Louis Simond (1767–1831), a shop owner, had emigrated to the USA before the French Revolution, where he married an Englishwoman, before visiting England in 1809 and remaining for nearly two years. One contemporary historian has described his journal as ‘cranky and hostile’.

  21. Nineteenth-century macadam bears only an ancestral relationship to twentieth-century ‘tar-macadam’, or tarmac, which incorporates tar and creosote to bind together the surface.

  22. Alfred Rosling Bennett (1850–1928) worked on the first Indian government telegraph, and then in electrical engineering, establishing the first experimental overhead telephone line. He was noted for his great personal charm, which is amply borne out in his delightful memoir of his childhood.

  23. At one time the spot, on a traffic island in the centre of Oxford Street, where it nears the Edgware Road, was indicated by three brass markers, but at some point in the recent past they seem to have disappeared.

  24. ‘Pockets’ were not what we mean by pockets, which were surprisingly late to develop. In the eighteenth century, pockets in clothes were still mostly decorative, and working men had a pocket only in their aprons. Women’s pockets tied on with strings around their waists, like market sellers’ or waiters’ money pouches today. In the nineteenth century, pockets were made in coats and waistcoats more generally, but tie-on pockets remained commonplace.

  25. In 1866, a political group was refused permission to hold a rally in Hyde Park, and the infuriated crowd tore down the park railings. The newspapers tsk-tsk-ed about the ‘mob’, but, added the Illustrated London News cheerfully, ‘One useful result’ of the civic unrest was that Park Lane had been involuntarily widened.

  26. This is a private joke of Dickens, who does not name the building, but for those who recognized it, he silently contrasted the Society’s zeal for exporting religious education abroad while ignoring the illiterate crossing-sweeper on its doorstep.

  27. I use the word ‘him’ because most sweepers were male, although the wives of regular s
weepers frequently stood in for their husbands when they ran errands, or were ill. In the 1860s, the diarist Arthur Munby noted a fourteen-year-old girl working as a sweeper in Charing Cross, dodging deftly between the horses and the wheels. He evidently spoke to her, as he noted that she wanted to be an orange-woman when she grew up; the very fact that he noted this, however, suggests the rarity of girl sweepers.

  28. Dustmen strictly removed only ‘dust’, the remains from coal fires. However, the word was frequently used more elastically, and many called the men whose job it was to remove human waste ‘dustmen’.

  29. The pumping was very hard work, said Alfred Bennett. His childhood home was directly across the road from a pump, and to this proximity he and the neighbouring children ‘owed our first introduction to swear words’. Note in the drawing above that the man pumping has taken off his hat and coat, which hang on the railings. He seems to have replaced his colleague, who sits on the kerb, mopping his forehead.

  30. Frederick Winsor (1763–1830) was born Friedrich Winzer in Brunswick. He was an entrepreneur rather than an engineer or inventor, bringing to the home of the Industrial Revolution discoveries that were not much regarded in France. Like many entrepreneurs, his promotional skills were better than his managerial ones, and more pragmatic men soon forced him out of the company he formed.

  31. ‘Walter’ is a conundrum. He is the pseudonymous author of the eleven-volume My Secret Life (published 1888–94), a supposedly autobiographical account of his, shall we say, ebullient erotic life. The book is pornography, and those sections have, no doubt, all the verisimilitude of that genre, but there follow three possibilities: (1) that Walter was indeed a man with an exhausting private life, and the autobiographical elements he includes are true, or nearly so; (2) that Walter imagined his private life, but that he did indeed live the life of the middle-class professional man he claimed to be; or (3) the entire book is a work of fiction. If (1) or (2) are the case, then My Secret Life is useful for the light Walter throws on many aspects of the London sex trade (for more on this subject, see pp. 393–424), and equally so for his passing descriptions of daily life; if (3), the former becomes less reliable, but there is still no reason to believe that the author did not describe daily life as he knew it. If we take Walter’s biographical hints at face value, he was born in the 1820s and died after 1894. I have based my reading of his book on this chronology. Walter does, unusually for an unknown person, have an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which offers suggestions as to who the real Walter may have been.

  32. Because the gradient was nearly 1 in 77, until 1844 the trains to and from Euston were pulled up or winched down by a cable to and from the engine house in Camden.

  33. Arthur Munby (1828–1910) was a civil servant in the ecclesiastical commission, but he is know today for the diaries he kept between 1859 and 1898, in which he recounted in detail his long relationship with (and ultimately marriage to) Hannah Cullwick, a servant, as well as wonderfully detailed descriptions of a fast-changing London.

  34. An 1893 book claims that Shillibeer’s buses each contained ‘a library’ of books to entertain the passengers. I would like to believe that this were the case, but the many reports on the darkness of the early buses make it seem implausible.

  35. Some tube stations today – the Angel, Royal Oak and Swiss Cottage – are still named for pubs, just as London buses continue to move between fare stages.

  36. These watermen were not the same as those who earned a living on the river. The waterman on a cabstand was so-called for the water he used to wash down the cabs, rather than for the more obvious watering of the horses, although this was also one of his duties: the watermen kept order generally, ensuring there was no ill-usage of the horses, feeding, watering and attempting to keep them warm. He also helped passengers and their baggage in and out of the cabs. For this he was paid 1d by each driver as he joined the rank, and another ½d from the driver when he was hired by a fare. (He also stood hopefully by, expecting to be tipped another 1d by the passenger.)

  37. Hansom (1803–82) spent a lifetime producing innovative work that he could somehow never make pay: he and his architectural partner built the Town Hall in Birmingham, but went bankrupt by underestimating costs; he founded The Builder magazine, but was forced to give it up, again through underestimation of costs; and although he patented his enormously successful safety cab, he never received the many thousands of pounds the rights were ostensibly sold for.

  38. The original version had the driver on a perch on the right of the cab, as can be seen in an illustration in Chapter 2 of Pickwick Papers.

  39. According to The Traveller’s Oracle of 1828, those households that did not keep a footman would be wise to fit their carriages with a set of spikes at the rear: ‘Do not permit Strangers to place themselves behind your Carriage at any time, or under any pretence whatever,’ as they will either rob you or steal bits off the carriage, including the ‘Check Braces, and Footmen’s Holders’ (the lead-strings by which passengers notified the driver they wanted to stop, and the leather straps that the footmen on the steps at the rear held on to) ‘in half the time that your Coachman can put them on’. Therefore, ‘unless you think that two or three outside passengers are ornamental or convenient, or you like to have your Carriage continually surrounded by Crowds of Children, incessantly screaming, “Cut! Cut behind!”’, the ‘Spikes are indispensable’. This may have been no exaggeration: the illustration on p. 384 shows children clambering unmolested across the top of a coach.

  40. The word ‘shay’, often heard on the street and sometimes used in literature, was a back-formation from chaise, created under the impression that ‘chaise’ was plural: one shay, two chaise. A chaise was an all-purpose word to describe many types of carriage: it could have two or four wheels, was generally open (although it might have the folding hood known as a calash), and often simply meant a light carriage or cart used for pleasure rather than work.

  41. The dancer Marie Taglioni (1804–84) was in the 1830s at the height of her fame, having starred in Paris in Meyerbeer’s ground-breaking opera, Robert le Diable, leading the famed ‘dance of the nuns’, and dancing ballet’s first Sylphide in her father’s La Sylphide in 1832. In London she dazzled audiences, with Princess Victoria an ardent fan.

  42. Two picaresque novels of London life fought it out in 1821: Pierce Egan’s Life in London, or, the Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, esq., and his elegant friend, Corinthian Tom, accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian, in their rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis, with illustrations by George and Robert Cruikshank, and Jonathan Badcock’s Real Life in London, or, The Rambles and Adventures of Bob Tallyho, Esq., and His Cousin, the Hon. Tom Dashall, Through the Metropolis; Exhibiting a Living Picture of Fashionable Characters, Manners, and Amusements in High and Low Life, with illustrations by Thomas Rowlandson. Egan’s won, but both stories of young rich men out on the razzle are useful guides, if not to authentic London life, at least to how most readers wanted to see the city.

  43. The passenger, Friedrich von Raumer (1781–1873), was a professor of both history and political science, at the universities of Breslau and then Berlin. He travelled widely in Europe between 1816 and 1855.

  44. The old Palace of Westminster, consisting of the medieval buildings where Parliament sat, together with the Royal Courts of Justice, burnt down in 1834. (For more on the fire, see p. 331.) The only surviving buildings were Westminster Hall, the Cloisters of St Stephen’s, St Mary Undercroft Chapel and the Jewel Tower. The new Palace of Westminster, today’s Parliament buildings, was designed by Charles Barry with Augustus Pugin, after Barry won the competition for the design. Building began in 1840, and in 1847 the new House of Lords was used for the first time, although further building work continued for decades.

  45. The remaining Victorian stations built after the 1848 fiat were: King’s Cross (1852), the Brunel station at Paddington (1854), Victoria (1860), Broad Street (1865), Cannon Str
eet (1866) and St Pancras (1868), Holborn Viaduct (1874, becoming Thameslink in 1990), St Paul’s (1886, becoming Blackfriars in 1937) and, just at the close of the century, Marylebone (1899).

  46. Costermongers, or costers, sold fruit, vegetables and fish from carts on the streets. For more on street sellers, see pp. 140–62.

  47. One small indication of their importance is seen in the number of pubs that have ‘horse’ in their name. In one 1851 list, there were twenty-one pubs named for Queen Victoria, but twenty-five named the Black Horse, twenty-seven named the Horse and Groom, fifty-four named the White Horse, plus additional ones with names like the Horseshoe, or the King on Horseback. There were also fifteen Watermen’s Arms.

  48. One report of these ice suppliers came at the height of London’s worst cholera epidemic, although the water-borne nature of transmission was not yet recognized.

  49. Men rarely if ever wore short sleeves, no matter how dirty their work. Some indoor jobs allowed for rolled-up shirtsleeves (in Our Mutual Friend the potboy of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters has ‘his shirt-sleeves arranged in a tight roll on each bare shoulder’), or men sometimes held their sleeves up with a band. Copying clerks and those in inky trades, as well as those doing outdoor work, where men wore jackets, all wore calico oversleeves, almost always just called ‘sleeves’. (Plate 17 shows a pair.) In Bleak House, Mr Snagsby, the well-to-do law-stationer, wore a grey shop-coat with black sleeves over it. Sleeves were tied on at the upper arm, with strings until the arrival of ‘gutta-percha’, or elastic. Most were black, although bakers and muffin men, among certain other trades, wore white sleeves as a badge of their ‘clean’ calling.

  50. Warren’s Blacking was the original company, based at 30 Strand, but Warren’s brother set up in competition, advertising as ‘Warren’s Blacking, 30 Hungerford Stairs, Strand’. This latter was the company that employed the young Charles.