The Victorian City

by Judith Flanders

  51. In the ever-growing city, brickmaking should be understood for the huge industry it was. Like the ‘horse’ names for pubs, there were fifteen Bricklayers’ Arms in London in the early 1850s.

  52. This usage is not recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary, but the shoemaker used it as if the term were common enough; certainly his meaning is not in doubt.

  53. A search was instituted for the child’s family, but without success. Henry was raised by the workhouse surgeon, with contributions made from ‘private individuals’ towards his education. In 1852, he appeared again before magistrates to get permission to join the surgeon, who had emigrated to Melbourne.

  54. Contrast that to the British Museum at the time, which permitted visitors to see the exhibitions only if they had a letter of introduction signed by a trustee.

  55. The Fleet was shut down preparatory to a planned rebuilding, but Holloway prison was built instead, the beginning of the movement of prisons to the suburbs. In 1846, the Fleet was demolished and the site left derelict for over twenty years, before the land was sold to the London, Chatham and Dover Railway.

  56. The list of those without homes in Dickens’ fiction includes: Oliver Twist’s mother, who ends in the workhouse, as well as the children who work for Fagin; Nicholas and Smike after they run away from Dotheboys Hall in Nicholas Nickleby; Nell and her grandfather in The Old Curiosity Shop; the prostitutes Martha and Little Em’ly in David Copperfield, and David himself on his way to find Betsey Trotwood; Jo the crossing-sweeper, a nameless woman passed by Esther and Inspector Bucket, and even Lady Dedlock on her final flight, in Bleak House; both Stephen Blackwood and his wife, and Tom Gradgrind in Hard Times; nameless homeless people ‘coiled up in nooks’ in Little Dorrit;Magwitch in his youth in Great Expectations; Betty Higden, and the ‘half-dozen’ who die of starvation in the street that Mr Podsnap dismisses as ‘not British’ in Our Mutual Friend.

  57. ‘Naked’ in the nineteenth century generally meant wearing only underclothes, but it also had a less formal secondary use: to describe people in the street as ‘naked’ appears to have meant that they were not wearing outdoor clothes – no hats, and the men might have had no jackets. It seems likely that here ‘naked’ means that in mixed company the men were in shirtsleeves and the women possibly were not wearing their neck handkerchiefs, leaving their décolletage uncovered bare over low-cut dresses.

  58. Mr Tulkinghorn’s address was also a private joke: Dickens’ friend Forster lived at 58 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and it is either his house, or the one next door (designed by Inigo Jones), that Dickens describes.

  59. The OED’s earliest usage of ‘gonoph’, to mean pickpocket, from the Yiddish ‘thief ’, is attributed to Dickens in this novel. But in the previous decade The New Swell’s Night Guide to the Bowers of Venus tells of ‘having put the green culls fly to the fakements of the mots and the gonnifs’ (that is, ‘having made the innocent dupes aware of the trickery of the whores and thieves’). This book is a guide to brothels (see pp. 404–6), and I am not suggesting that this is where Dickens learnt the word, just noting that it was already current.

  60. The French social critic and activist Flora Tristan (1803–44) made two stays in London, one in the 1820s, one the following decade, which together formed the basis for her London Journal. I use her reports with some caution: her material was chosen to heighten her political and socio-economic points; in some places it is demonstrably taken from other writers whose reliability I question. (See p. 408.)

  61. In a middle-class home, the back kitchen was the scullery, most commonly where the pump was to be found; a front kitchen was where the range was, and the cooking was done. In the next sentence, the front one-pair is the front room on the first floor, that is, up one pair of stairs.

  62. Jennings’ Buildings was across the road from St Mary Abbotts, near where what used to be Barkers department store stood for a century, and is now the haut-bourgeois Whole Foods market.

  63. One contemporary historian has suggested that the publication of this letter was arranged – and possibly part written, or at least elaborated – by Charles Cochrane, a sanitary-health agitator. Perhaps, but it is no less heartrending.

  64. Dorcas societies were named for the woman who ‘was full of good works and almsdeeds’ in Acts 9: 36; they were organizations of church ladies who met to make clothes for the poor.

  65. This term, when applied to fog, was apparently invented by Dickens in this novel. Previously it had referred to a type of Madeira.

  66. Joseph Hékékyan, or Hékékyan Bey, as he was known (1807–75), an Armenian, was the son of a translator for the Khedive of Egypt, who paid for his education, first at Stonyhurst, then as an engineer. He returned to Egypt in 1830 and became president of the Board of Health, before becoming a pioneering archaeologist, most notably at Memphis.

  67. In the UK in 2008, the average person used thirty-three gallons daily.

  68. One of the baths built after this Act was passed, the Old Castle Street bathhouse, in Whitechapel, is today the Women’s Library of London Metropolitan University.

  69. Simon (1816–1904) was the descendant of French immigrants and gave his last name the French pronunciation.

  70. Chadwick (1800-90) was one of the instigators of the idea that workhouses be made less ‘eligible’ than poverty (see p. 169): he was a dedicated social reformer, but one with a fairly robust distaste for the masses.

  71. Typhus and typhoid were recognized as distinct diseases only in 1869. Typhus, or gaol fever, is transmitted by lice or fleas, and was therefore linked to poverty; typhoid is water-borne, transmitted by ingesting food or drink contaminated with faeces. It was the latter that was said to have killed Prince Albert in 1861, although stomach cancer is today suggested as the cause: there were no other reported cases of typhoid in the area, and he had suffered for four years from an undiagnosed stomach ailment.

  72. In the nineteenth century, the terms English or summer cholera referred to symptoms that today are grouped together as gastroenteritis – fever accompanying gastric illness.

  73. The nearly 50 per cent mortality rate was terrifying, but so too was the speed with which cholera killed. It was reported that one-third of deaths occurred less than a day after the symptoms first appeared, two-thirds within forty-eight hours.

  74. This site had been burying Dissenters since c.1665. Today it is famous as the last resting place of William Blake, Bunyan, William Defoe, Isaac Watts and George Fox, although one wonders how much of their remains in reality survived Victorian burial methods.

  75. She was followed there by many others of the Dickenses’ acquaintance: Thomas Hood, Leigh Hunt, Thackeray, John Leech, Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins and George Cruikshank.

  76. The Temple gardens were much more than simply a nice square of green: they covered three acres in the middle of the busiest part of London.

  77. The building later became the National Institute to Improve the Manufactures of the United Kingdom, then a wine shop, and today it is a Marks and Spencer, for many years known as their ‘Pantheon’ store.

  78. Johann Rudolf Glauber was a seventeenth-century alchemist; Esculapius (now more commonly Asclepius) the Greek god of medicine. I am not aware of the former being as common a motif as the latter as this passage implies.

  79. It is for this reason that soldiers are ‘gazetted’: that is, their promotion is announced in the Gazette.

  80. Tipu Sultan (1750–99), ruler of Mysore, was a demon figure in nineteenth-century Britain. He had won a series of battles against the British, before being killed at the battle of Seringapatam. His attitude to the British can be seen in ‘Tipu’s Tiger’, a half-life-sized clockwork tiger, which he commissioned. When wound up, the tiger savages a prostrate redcoat, to the accompaniment of growls from the tiger and squeaky wails from this prey. The piece was looted by the British after his defeat and is now in the V&A. It is too fragile to be played, but can be seen in action on vimeo.com/8973957.

 
; 81. Although the parks continued to be closed for the occasional civic event throughout the nineteenth century – Green Park was closed for the day of the Duke of Wellington’s funeral, for example, so the gentry could watch in comfort – the last long-term closure was under Queen Anne (reigned 1702–14), when the public was barred from much of St James’s Park.

  82. Little more than the ground-plan of Nash’s great project survives. Every building Nash designed in Regent Street has long gone; the Quadrant lasted only decades, being demolished in 1848: it was ‘both inconvenient and injurious to the inhabitants’, as ‘doubtful characters’ lurked in its shelter; in the park itself, only the Holme, the house designed by Decimus Burton, even vaguely resembles its original construction, although substantial alterations and additions were made in the twentieth century; the other houses were razed or completely rebuilt. The terraces surrounding the park are in the style of Nash, in that they are white stucco, but few are actually to his designs. All Soul’s Church, Langham Place, still valiantly hangs on. Up close it is dwarfed by the BBC’s loomingly vast new Broadcasting House, but from Oxford Circus it appears to be gently encircled, echoing Nash’s curves.

  83. The statue still remains in situ although now, dwarfed by Trafalgar Square and marooned on a traffic island, it has become so insignificant as to be virtually invisible. And it is worth noting here that the pretty story that Charing Cross was named for Edward I’s chère reine Eleanor of Castile is just that, a pretty story. More prosaically, the medieval village of Charing derived its name from the Anglo-Saxon cerr, a turning, referring to the sweep of the Thames. The ‘cross’ outside Charing Cross station does stand on the spot where one of twelve markers indicated the resting places of Eleanor of Castile’s coffin on its way to Westminster Abbey, but the original was demolished by the Puritans in 1647; today’s cross is Victorian.

  84. The office block behind South Africa House is still named Golden Cross House, although one doubts whether its occupants know why.

  85. It is for this reason that the numbering of St Martin’s Lane still today does not begin at ‘1’: numbers 1 to 28 St Martin’s Lane had stood in the section of the lane that was sacrificed to create the open area of Trafalgar Square.

  86. This was not London’s only geographico-legal anomaly. Ely Place, in Clerkenwell, and the surrounding land belonged to the Bishop of Ely, and the land was technically governed by Cambridgeshire. Other Alsatias were in Whitefriars, between Salisbury Square and Hanging Sword Alley in the City, once owned by the Carmelites and therefore a religious sanctuary, but by the nineteenth century merely a place where thieves felt secure, as they did in the Alsatia in the Mint, in Southwark.

  87. It still survives, under the care of the National Trust, behind the closed Aldwych tube station (although at least one historian has suggested that it is eighteenth century rather than Roman).

  88. A later architectural historian claimed that the domes are the problem, set out, he puts it, like pots on a mantelpiece.

  89. And so it proved. Barry planned statues of William IV and George IV on the north side of the square, for the east and west corners, but the money was never forthcoming. George IV paid for his own, and the commission was eventually carried out. The north-western corner remains empty today, or, rather, a rotating series of contemporary pieces have been installed since 1998, most a useful means of uniting all passers-by in contempt. Much the same was felt at the time for the sculptures on the south side of the square: the statue of Sir Charles Napier, conqueror of Sindh in 1842 and later Commander-in-Chief of the army in India, was installed in 1856, and described by the Art Union journal as ‘perhaps the worst piece of sculpture in England’; Sir Henry Havelock, who recaptured Cawnpore after the Indian Mutiny in 1857, joined him in 1858. But good or bad makes no difference: in the vast wastes of Trafalgar Square they are all barely noticeable.

  90. A dog cart was not drawn by dogs, but was a small open cart with a double bench running the length of the cart, with, underneath, space that was originally used in the country to transport hunting dogs. The carts therefore had a somewhat raffish, sporting air, hence these clerks hiring one. Because the carts were easy to drive, however, in the countryside upper- and middle-class women also frequently drove themselves in them.

  91. The number of passengers does not appear to be an exaggeration. In 1878, the Princess Alice foundered and sank on a similar excursion, killing 650, with nearly 200 more being rescued.

  92. Roundabouts were powered either by the roundabout owners, or, when they could find them, by small boys: ‘having no half-pennies of their own, [they] were always ready to push round their luckier companions for the reward of a ride later on’.

  93. It has recently been suggested that it is a mistake of our day to assume that oysters were once food for the poor, and that Sam Weller is suggesting that the desperation indicates the poor man is eating above his station. But I think that the differentiation is between poor and destitute. Mayhew’s oyster seller is clear: her customers include men who look like ‘poor parsons down upon their luck’ or ‘The poor girls that walk the streets’ but her ‘heartiest customers…are working people, on a Saturday night…The very poor never buy of me…A penny buys a loaf, you see, or a ha’porth of bread and a ha’porth of cheese…My customers are mostly working people and tradespeople’: poor by middle-class standards, but not poverty-stricken.

  94. Sellers’ mysterious cries were a running joke among the middle classes. A visiting American claimed that one woman regularly called ‘Stur-ur-ur!’ outside his window, to sell her watercresses. Other cries were just baffling: a seller near Portland Place called ‘cats’-meat’, but in fact he was selling cabbage plants, while a man calling ‘chickweed’ had watercresses for sale. The tourist thought that the cry didn’t matter, as the sellers had regular beats and were recognized by the cry, not the content, but some of these calls do seem counter-productive.

  95. Nineteenth-century muffins were, of course, not American cake-like muffins. The modern ‘English muffin’ (an American anomaly too) is the descendant of what was being sold here. Made from a yeast batter, they were cooked on a griddle rather than baked, then cut in half, and served hot, spread with butter.

  96. The Corn Laws were passed in 1815, as Britain moved to a peacetime economy after a quarter of a century of war. The import of grain (corn in this context generally meaning wheat, but legally all grain) from abroad was prohibited unless the home price rose above a certain – astronomical – level, to protect the home markets. Even though the laws brought immense hardship, repeal did not come until 1849, such was the hostility of the great landowners to competition from abroad.

  97. The origin of the word ‘hokey-pokey’ is uncertain, but it is probably connected to the novelty of ice cream – milk (or turnip) is, ‘hocus-pocus’, magically turned into a delicious treat.

  98. Working-class cookshops were also places where street sellers had their food cooked in bulk, as with the baked-potato sellers on pp. 283–4.

  99. If Dickens is to be believed, men kept almost everything they owned in their hats. It is almost quicker to itemize those characters who did not use their hat as a handy man-bag. Those who did include: Mr Pickwick, who keeps his glove and handkerchief there when he goes skating; in Oliver Twist a hat is home to Mr Bumble’s handkerchief; the Dodger brings hot rolls and ham for breakfast in his; his pickpocket colleague Toby Crackit puts a shawl in ‘my castor’ [‘castor’ = beaver]; in Nicholas Nickleby, Newman Noggs, flustered, tries to fit a parcel ‘some two feet square’ into his, as well as keeping at different times a letter there, ‘some halfpence’ and a handkerchief, while the moneylender Arthur Gride keeps large wedding favours (see p. 315) in his; in The Old Curiosity Shop, Kit’s handkerchief is in his hat; in Martin Chuzzlewit, Montague Tigg keeps old letters, ‘crumpled documents and small pieces of what may be called the bark of broken cigars’ in his, while the stagecoachman uses his to store his parcels for delivery; in Little Dorrit, Pancks, the mo
neylender’s clerk, keeps his notebook and mathematical calculations there; and finally, in David Copperfield, David puts a bouquet for Dora ‘in my hat, to keep it fresh’ – possibly the only fully middle-class person in Dickens’ novels to use this caching spot. Much later in the century Sherlock Holmes notices a bulge in Watson’s hat, which indicates he has stashed his stethoscope there, but there are few other mentions in fiction. I suspect it was a standard location for a man’s handkerchief, and for all the other items Dickens merely thought it was funny.

  100. Boxes appear to have been a recognized coffee-room feature. In an essay Dickens refers to the arrangements at a Ragged School, where ‘each class was partitioned off by screens adjusted like the boxes in a coffee-room’.

  101. If a waiter served a third of the average 600 customers each day, even deducting half his earnings for his place and for the laundry and supplies, he would earn about 8s a day, which was a good enough wage. One book published in 1840 claimed that waitresses paid as much as 20s a day for their places, although it also claimed that a 2d tip was average, double the sum quoted in every other source. The waitress would thus need to serve 125 customers before her fee was covered (and much more likely 250). This seems feasible, but I think it’s likely that her tips, too, were usually 1d, and given that the average working day in a coffee house was fifteen hours, it would therefore have been possible for her to earn her fee plus another 7–8s a day.

  102. For those with an interest in pre-decimal sums, or food prices, this translates as: four servings of veal-and-ham at 9d each (3s), four servings of potatoes at 1d each (running total now 3s 4d), one cabbage at 2d (total 3s 6d), three servings of marrow at 3d each (total 4s 6d), six servings of bread at 1d each (5s), three servings of cheese at 1d each (5s 3d), four half-pints of half and half (porter and ale mixed) at 3d each (6s 3d), four glasses of rum at 6d each (8s 3d), tip for three diners at 1d each (or 8s 6d for lunch for three).

  103. By 1875, the Albion had taken over the cigar divan and become Simpson’s Divan Tavern, at 103 the Strand, where it remains as a restaurant today, although the building is more recent, and its street number is now 100.