The Victorian City

by Judith Flanders

  104. Peel lived in Whitehall Gardens, which was on the river before the Embankment pushed out the shoreline (see p. 225ff.), behind the Banqueting House and more or less where the Ministry of Defence is now.

  105. The arch now faces Apsley House, at Hyde Park Corner, but the statue was almost unanimously disliked from the outset, and by 1883, when the arch was moved to its current location, the statue was removed to Aldershot. The sculpture now on top of the arch is twentieth century, Adrian Jones’ The Angel of Peace Descending on the Chariot of War.

  106. From the sixteenth century, the Lord Mayor’s Show had taken place on 29 October; with the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in 1751, when eleven days were ‘lost’, it moved to 9 November. In 1959, the date became moveable, and the show is now held on the second Saturday in November. The only year the show has not been held was in 1852, when the Duke of Wellington’s funeral prevented the event (see pp. 335–46). The Lord Mayor today has a mainly ceremonial role as mayor only of the Square Mile, and is not to be confused with the mayor of London.

  107. The sorry saga of the marriage of Caroline and the Prince Regent, later George IV, is too long to rehearse here: it is enough to say that before their wedding in 1794, the Prince had already secretly morganatically married Maria Fitzherbert. The royal couple separated within a year, after the birth of their daughter, Charlotte. The Regent made three formal attempts to find evidence of his wife’s adultery, to enable a divorce; when their daughter died, her mother was not notified but left to find out by chance. On the Regent’s accession to the throne in 1820, Caroline, who was physically barred from his coronation, became a rallying point for opponents of the unpopular new king.

  108. Greville (1794–1865) was a minor political figure and a diarist of genius. When his expurgated diaries were published after his death, in 1874, even in this form they offended the queen, who recorded that she was ‘horrified and indignant at this dreadful and really scandalous book. Mr Greville’s indiscretion, indelicacy, ingratitude, betrayal of confidence and shameful disloyalty towards his Sovereign make it very important that the book should be severely censored and discredited.’ It was those very qualities, of course, that made Greville great.

  109. The queen did inherit the cash, using it to build Balmoral and buy extra land around Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.

  110. Robert Pate had actually managed to strike the queen with his stick: this was the one incident in which the queen was injured.

  111. Wedding favours were posies of flowers surrounded by leaves and ribbons for women; for men, silvered leaves and acorns, with more ribbons. They were worn pinned on the breast, usually by members of a wedding party and their households, although for royal weddings no family connection was required.

  112. The Bricklayers’ Arms, otherwise a station used by labourers as they travelled to Kent for the hop-picking, was more infrequently the place where grandees arrived by train from Dover, being convenient for Westminster Bridge, and then only a short ride up to Parliament or Buckingham Palace.

  113. He lived up to this last slogan. At the station, as the crowd pressed forward, he reached over the barricades and shook hands indiscriminately, thanking members of the public for coming and calling workmen ‘my brothers’, before picking up and petting a child who offered him flowers. It is clear from the reports that this type of contact with people was unusual, possibly previously unknown.

  114. A few City parishes continue this tradition, but on different days, and sometimes only once every few years.

  115. Slang for food, particularly picnic food.

  116. Cardinal Wiseman (1802–65) was made the first cardinal-archbishop of Westminster when Pius IX re-established the Catholic hierarchy in England, an action that provoked the hostility described above.

  117. I suspect when sung on the streets another portion of his anatomy was substituted here. I have no evidence, but see the songs on pp. 360–2.

  118. Crape was a silk that had been treated so that it had a wrinkled surface that absorbed rather than reflected the light, producing a dull, matte finish that was considered appropriate for mourning.

  119. They remained there for the full year of mourning, and if, noted one bemused foreigner, the house was let during that year, ‘the tenants take on’ the hatchment together with the lease. The hatchment for the Duke of Wellington remained outside Apsley House more than a decade after his death.

  120. This clause caused problems on his death, when public opinion demanded that he be buried in Westminster Abbey. A compromise was reached: he was buried in the Abbey, but in a private ceremony.

  121. One particularly unfortunate display of the Northern Lights kept twelve engines and seventy-four men dashing about an entire night, attempting to locate the fire that kept being sighted over the horizon – a sobering indication of how street lights have altered our ideas of night.

  122. In 1901, a journalist born in 1864 noted that the firemen still roared ‘Hi! yi! hi! yi!’ as they raced along. ‘The suggestion so often made that the firemen should abandon their wild cries and substitute a gong is bitterly opposed’ by the men: ‘They have always yelled “Hi! yi!” and they will always do so.’

  123. Conditions can be imagined when comparing it to the last great state occasion in the cathedral, the marriage of the Prince of Wales and Diana Spencer: a mere 3,500 were seated then.

  124. The absence of Austria was in response to an ugly little episode. An Austrian general named Haynau had fought against Napoleon, but had later been involved in the atrocities against the revolutionaries of 1848 in Italy, stories of his vicious behaviour being widespread. In Belgium he had narrowly escaped attack in the street. In London in 1850 he was assaulted by some draymen working at the Barclays and Perkins brewery in Southwark, who shouted ‘Down with the Austrian butcher!’ threw mud and ‘dirt’ at him, threatened him with a beating and ultimately chased him down the Borough High Street until he hid in the George Inn. Austria was still smarting from this diplomatic humiliation two years later and refused to send a representative to the duke’s funeral. On the other side, when Garibaldi visited London in 1864, he asked to be taken to see the brewery, so he could personally thank the draymen. The matter was a little delicate, as the men had committed criminal assault, although none had ever been identified. Finally it was suggested that if Garibaldi went to the brewery at a certain time, some men would be in the forecourt grooming the horses, and Garibaldi might wish to acknowledge, in particular, the man on the far right, which he did. Today a plaque marks the spot where Haynau was assaulted.

  125. There are two small notebooks and they are a mystery. They contain a note dated 1952 (when they were acquired by the British Museum) stating that they previously belonged to the 1952 owner’s father-in-law, who in turn had been Silvester’s great-great-nephew; but while the notebooks may well have been in Silvester’s possession, there is no knowing who compiled the information they contain, for what purpose, or how reliable it is.

  126. Theatres had historically run long programmes, beginning with a five-act drama at 5 p.m., followed by an interlude of some sort, then an afterpiece – a farce or a comedy in one act. After the third act of the main play, entrance was reduced to half-price, and many people who worked long hours or had small incomes regularly attended only after the discounted prices came into effect.

  127. Spittoons, although usually unmentioned, were an important part of club furnishings. One pub in 1847 had four spittoons in the bar-parlour – and twenty-nine in its club room, which held only twenty-one chairs.

  128. ‘Out o’ doors’ clerks are known as outside clerks today; they transport documents from legal chambers to court registry offices, serve papers and so on.

  129. John Payne Collier’s reputation today is primarily as a literary forger. However, at the time John Dickens approached him, he was an admired journalist, particularly for The Times and the Morning Chronicle, as well as the Observer’s theatre critic.

  130. Collier al
so wrote that Barrow had told him that the boy had ‘assisted Warren...in the conduct of his extensive business’, and ‘referred...jocosely’ to the rhyming advertisements, suggesting Dickens had written them. Biographers have wondered whether Barrow knew of Dickens’ childhood disgrace, why he would hint at it. But Collier’s diary was published the year after Forster’s biography of Dickens revealed to the world the events of Dickens’ childhood, and it seems more likely that Collier retrospectively ‘remembered’ something that Barrow, forty years earlier, had never told him, to embellish his diary now that the young Dickens was famous.

  131. A memoirist records that the original building appears in Hogarth’s Morning engraving in his Four Times of the Day series. Reading from right to left, Tom’s Coffee-House, the entrance to St Paul’s church, and then Evans’s were depicted. But, he added, Hogarth had not reversed his original drawing to allow for the fact that the engraving would flip the image, so it appears backwards.

  132. Crim. con. was an abbreviation for a legal term, ‘criminal conversation’. As a wife was legally a man’s property, if she committed adultery, her husband could sue her lover for damages, not for the adultery, but for reducing her ‘value’ by entering into ‘criminal conversation’ with her.

  133. Goodered’s Flash Saloon was a ‘hotbed of vice’, according to a guidebook.

  134. Mother H. was a well-known madam; see p. 412.

  135. I have not identified Ives of St Giles – a prostitute perhaps? Joe the Stunner was ‘stunning Joe Banks’ (fl. 1830–50), a well-known London publican and fence, whose pub was in St Giles.

  136. ‘Kinchen’ were child thieves, more commonly boys, while ‘kifer’ was a woman as represented by her sex organs – ‘plenty of kifer in that house’; so the sentence praises both young girls and those who had reached puberty.

  137. For more on ‘Baron’ Nicholson, see p. 363.

  138. This is John Rhodes, the owner of the Coal Hole (his brother William managed the Cider Cellars). It is interesting that the place is referred to in such sexual terms; for more on the overlap of entertainment halls and prostitution, see pp. 405–6.

  139. This is the 3rd Marquess of Waterford, whom the Dictionary of National Biography describes as ‘reprobate and landowner’, itemizing some of his exploits: ‘it amused him to challenge passers-by to fight him, to break windows, to upset (literally) applecarts. He painted the Melton Mowbray toll bar red; he fought a duel; he painted the heels of a parson’s horse with aniseed and hunted him with bloodhounds.

  140. This is Adelaide Kemble, the now less-remembered opera-singer sister of the actress Fanny Kemble, both daughters of Charles Kemble.

  141. Dickens three years later echoed this lack of enthusiasm, calling him a ‘poor dull idle fellow’.

  142. Limelight was more commonly used in theatres for special effects. It was created by burning off the calcium in lime, which gave a red flame; when oxygen was mixed in, the gases together gave off an incandescent light.

  143. Now only an idiom, the Riot Act of 1715 was a legal formula used to break up ‘tumults and riotous assemblies’. A strict procedure had to be followed: the Act had to be read aloud to those whom the officials wished to disperse, using a set form of words. The crowd then had one hour to leave the area, and no force was permitted until that hour had elapsed.

  144. ‘Burker’ had become a term of abuse for any resurrectionist, although Burke and his partner Hare, were murderers rather than resurrectionists. Between November 1827 and 31 October 1828 William Burke and William Hare murdered sixteen or seventeen people in Edinburgh before selling their bodies to Dr Robert Knox’s anatomy school.

  145. Sala very possibly did see this; it sounds as if he did. However, the ‘nurse’ and his ‘nursery’ appear to be adult inventions to make his background more middle-class: his mother was a singer and dancer and only just eked out a living.

  146. As late as the 1850s the age of criminal responsibility was seven, compared to sixteen in France at the same time. Now ten in England and Wales, it remains among the lowest in Europe, where it ranges from fourteen to sixteen.

  147. The White Swan is generally referred to as a brothel, that is, a place where a proprietor or hired supervisor controls resident prostitutes, collecting fees and paying the sex-workers either a percentage or a salary. But from the description that comes down to us it sounds as though it might have been an accommodation house, a place where rooms were rented for short periods of time to anyone who appeared: professional sex-workers or couples simply wanting a private space. For more on heterosexual accommodation houses, see pp. 411–2. Whatever type of house it was, a contemporary author claimed there were many similar houses in the Strand, in Blackman Street, in the Borough, near the Obelisk, at the intersection of Kennington Lane and Kennington Road, in the Inns of Court, and in Bishopsgate Street, in the City.

  148. Dickens’ depiction of Fagin in the condemned cell on the night before his execution was artistic licence. By 1837, the year Oliver Twist began serialization, the only crimes punishable by death were high treason, murder, attempted murder, arson on inhabited premises, wrecking (causing a shipwreck), piracy, rape and ‘unnatural offences’, while Fagin was a receiver of stolen goods, for which the punishment was transportation. Isaac (Ikey) Solomon, on whom it has long been thought Dickens may have in part based Fagin, was found guilty of receiving at the Old Bailey in 1830, and transported to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). However, recently a more interesting possibility has emerged: Dickens may well have used someone even closer to home as his model for the Jewish fence. His maternal aunt had married into a Jewish family (it was her stepson who gave the young Charles work at the blacking factory), and in 1825 her husband’s cousin-by-marriage, Henry Worms, was convicted of receiving stolen goods and transported, like Fagin and like Solomon, to Van Diemen’s Land.

  149. I can discover no reason for Angelo to refer to four men. Five were executed on 1 May 1820: Arthur Thistlewood, John Thomas Brunt, James Ings, William Davidson and Richard Tidd.

  150. If he recalled the price accurately, the cost of a rooftop spot had increased by 400 per cent from Dickens’ rental in 1849. This may indicate how rarity drove prices up, although it may also be the memoirist’s faulty recollection, or a desire to appear a big spender.

  151. The nineteenth-century view was that women in certain notoriously poorly-paid trades automatically became prostitutes, although modern historians have questioned this. Milliners, for example, routinely worked fourteen-hour days, and sixteen in the season. In view of the difficulties of life that we have seen – finding time to collect water and so on – it is worth questioning how much time, if not energy, they had for extra-curricular prostitution as well.

  152. Mary Magdalene was, of course, the follower of Christ to whom he appeared after his resurrection (John 20:1–18); she is frequently linked with the sinner in Luke 7:37, and thus represents a repentant prostitute. Asylums for ‘fallen women’ were therefore often called Magdalen homes.

  153. According to the Dictionary of National Biography, Hanger was considered ‘among the dregs of society’ by his contemporaries.

  154. The female age of consent had been twelve since the sixteenth century; in the nineteenth century, intercourse with a girl under the age of ten was a felony, with a girl aged between ten and twelve a misdemeanour. The age of consent was raised to thirteen in 1875, and to sixteen in 1885. Historically there has never been a male age of consent for heterosexual sex.

  155. In Greek mythology, Cyprus was devoted to the worship of Aphrodite, and so a Cyprian was a prostitute. If one wants to carp, ‘gay Cyprian’ is the equivalent of saying a prostituted prostitute.

  156. It is worth remembering, too, that at the beginning of this period, as well as being the main red-light district at night, the Haymarket was, in the daytime, just that: a market where hay was sold: ‘The whole right hand side of the street going downwards, from the Piccadilly end to the Opera House, used to be lined with loads of
hay’, with the pavement ‘crowded by salesmen and their customers’.

  157. I suspect that ‘bare to the waist’ here means without the handkerchief that would normally have been worn at the neck of a low-cut dress, thus with the breasts partially exposed, which Walter’s ‘half naked’ in the next sentence appears to back up. (See also note on p. 184.) Although this passage is corroborated by Walter, I have found Flora Tristan unreliable on the subject of prostitution more generally. She replicates whole passages from Ryan’s Prostitution in London, which cannot be taken at face value (see p. 395), and she doubles Colquhoun’s estimate of the number of prostitutes in London, purely because, she writes, the population had doubled.

  158. Walter seems overly optimistic about their income. If a woman paid 15s a week for her rooms, and once a year bought a dress for £5, plus other items of clothing for another £5, food (7s a week), fuel (3s), candles or other lighting (3s) and laundry (1s), at a minimum her outgoings would be nearly £3, probably closer to £4 to cover only the basic necessities of life and her trade. This would require eight clients a week paying the maximum to cover the basics, leaving no room for anything to go wrong, no seasonal fall in trade, as in August, and with no money going towards dependants. That some women in the West End or prosperous locations could indeed make a living this way and set money aside for the future can be seen in the stories of women like the coffee-house proprietor Munby knew (see p. 400); but it was just as obviously not possible for everyone.

  159. Walter claimed in the 1850s that the overseer of a house in James Street, which had eight good rooms and two small, less desirable ones, took £20 a day. Eliminating the two small rooms, if we assume that the eight rooms charged 5s per customer, then to make £20 a day, each room would have to process ten customers a day, a hot-sheet hotel indeed. Even if the actual income were only half this, the house’s turnover would be over £2,500 a year for a forty-six-week year.