In 1812 Westminster Bridge was the first to be illuminated by the new fuel. The highly intellectual Hester Thrale declared, in 1817, towards the end of her life, that “such a glare is cast by the gas lights, I knew not where I was after sunset. Old Father Thames, adorned by four beautiful bridges, will hardly remember what a poor figure he made eighty years ago, I suppose, when gay folks went to Vauxhall in barges, an attendant barge carrying a capital band of music playing Handel’s ‘Water Music’-as it has never been played since.” So the river, quite changed by the gaslight, became the object of surprise or bewilderment-“I knew not where I was.” Even the music upon the water seemed changed.
There were many illustrations of street-lights in all their variety, modelled in baroque and classical styles, with additional representations of gasometers and elaborate retorts. The old epoch of the lamplighter was mocked in the process, but the less advantageous aspects of the new lighting were also depicted. A series of cartoons depicting A London Nuisance has one of a lamplighter on the top of his ladder spilling oil over an unfortunate pedestrian, in the old style, while another shows a gas explosion in a chemist’s shop. That prospect of combustion was one of the reasons why the domestic use of gas was not fully in place until the 1840s. Yet by 1823 there were four private companies vying for trade, much of which, along the two hundred miles of gas mains laid just beneath the surface of the streets, was once more devoted to the lighting of the principal shops.
The shops of the eighteenth century, with their narrow windows and panes of bulging glass, were lit inside by tallow candles or blinking oil-lamps. With the modern shops of the next century, the encroaching darkness of twilight was suddenly the “herald of such a light such as the sun never darts into the nooks and crannies of traffic; broad streams of gas flash like meteors into every corner of the wealth-crammed mart.” The new gaslighting would not only banish vice and crime from the streets, it would also materially increase the speed and volume of trade: truly London light. “But it is really at night that London must be seen!” wrote Flora Tristan in her London Journal of 1840. “London, magically lit by its millions of gas lights, is resplendent! Its broad streets disappearing into the distance; its shops, where floods of light reveal the myriad sparkling colours of all the masterpieces conceived by human industry.” A similar enthusiasm is evinced in an account of the Strand where “the shops were all brightness and wonder,” and of another thoroughfare where the shops “seem to be made entirely of glass.” You might be forgiven for thinking that the great new brightness was the brightness of burgeoning commerce.
Yet there were other attitudes towards the new light. For some it was harsh and unnatural, the lurid emanation of an artificial city. To other Londoners, however, the gas was most glorious for the shadows which it cast. It created a city of softness and mystery, with sudden pools of light fringed by blackness and silence. So in certain areas London’s ancient presence stifled its new light; the shadows, and the mystery, returned. This may perhaps account for the speed with which London became accustomed to higher levels of brightness. When they ceased to be dazzled by the illumination of gas, the old presences of London began to reassert themselves. The author of The Little World of London noticed down one lane that “the glass of the gas-lamp has been wantonly pelted away to the last fragment. The flame flickers in the night-breeze, and casts its fitful gleams upon every form of poverty and wretchedness and vice, here huddled together as in a common asylum.” Gas, instead of being the incandescent banisher of vice and crime, here compounds the misery of the dispossessed. In a poem of the 1890s by Arthur Symons, there is a description of
The dim wet pavement lit irregularly
With shimmering streaks of gaslight, faint and frayed
where once again it is the flickering, inconstant and insubstantial nature of the city light that is manifested. It is as if the city has swallowed up the light or, rather, fundamentally changed its nature. In the night paintings of late Victorian London, for example, the dark shapes of the city beneath the moon are only momentarily illuminated by lines of gas-lamps. Paradoxically that which had seemed most new, and revolutionary, in lighting soon became identified with all that was overburdened with age and history. Who has not, in imagination, seen the gas-lamps in the fog? It is the very permanence and longevity of London which transform even the most recent invention into an aspect of its ancient life. The yellow gas in the old square lamps was replaced by green incandescent gases, dancing like so many glow-worms in their glass bottles, but these in turn were replaced by a new force.
The first employment of electric light was upon the Embankment in 1878, followed by the illumination of Billingsgate and the Holborn Viaduct as well as two or three theatres. Since London was then the great centre of world power it is appropriate that the first power station in the world should be at 57 Holborn Viaduct; it was constructed by Thomas Edison in 1883 and less than ten years later, according to that commercial imperative which is by now so familiar, the first electric advertising signs were placed in Piccadilly Circus. The city exploited this new brightness from the beginning, and once more “the golden tint of the electric light” was apostrophised; when “the gold and silver lamps” emerge from the twilight, “The shops shine bright anew.” There seems to be no escape from the conjunction of light and trade. Like other forms of light before it, however, electricity was said to render the city unreal and unfamiliar. One Londoner suggested that the novel light lent “a corpse-like quality” to the skin while in the floodlit streets “the crowd looks almost dangerous and garish.” This particular light was also more “cruel and clinical” than its predecessors. Those who became accustomed to electricity, however, soon looked back upon gas with the same nostalgic contempt as those living in gaslight regarded the old days of the oil-lamp. Arthur Machen, in the early 1920s, recollected that gas-lit London was “all glorious and glittering” but that now “I should find it sombre and gloomy, an abode of shadows and dark places, ill-lit with flickering and unsteady yellow flames.” The electricity moved down Oxford Street and Kensington High Street, Knightsbridge and Notting Hill. It spread from Piccadilly by means of overhead cable to Regent’s Park and the Strand. By 1914 there were seventy power stations operating within the metropolis, turning it into a generator of energy and power.
The variety of lighting supplies at first had the effect of turning London into an unevenly lit city; each of its twenty-eight boroughs made their own arrangements with the suppliers of electricity, which means that a car travelling at speed in the 1920s might pass from one street bathed in a very high light intensity to one shrouded in comparative darkness. But this had always been the case, since the city of contrasts had relied upon contrasted light. As Arthur Symons wrote in London: A Book of Aspects, “In London we light casually, capriciously, everyone at his own will, and so there are blinding shafts at one step and a pit of darkness at the next.” The many accidents in the 1920s, however, created a demand for a level standard of illumination, which in turn led to a standardisation of lamp-posts with columns 25 feet high and 150 feet apart. It is one aspect of London life which even the most knowledgeable citizens scarcely notice, and yet the uniformity of lighting in the major streets is perhaps the most significant aspect of the modern city.
In the autumn of 1931 certain public buildings were illuminated by floodlighting for the first time; so great was the interest and excitement that the streets were filled with spectators. It is as if London is always revealing itself anew. Nine years after the floodlighting, however, the night city was plunged into profound darkness during the black-out, when in certain respects it reverted to medieval conditions. In the streets themselves, as reported in Philip Ziegler’s London at War, “It seemed … sinister to have so many people shuffling around in the blackness”; familiar roads became “impenetrable mysteries,” leaving Londoners frightened and confused. One recalled finding her destination but only after becoming “damp with perspiration and quite exhausted.” Storms were
welcomed since, in the instantaneous lightning flash, a well-known corner or crossing could be glimpsed. This sense of bewilderment and panic could have emerged in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries no less than during the Second World War, but this latter-day darkness served only to confirm how frightening and mysterious London might still become.
When the black-out was lifted in the autumn of 1944 the relief was palpable. “It is no longer inky black, but all softly lit up and shining, and all the little beams of light are reflected most charmingly in the wet streets.” Those “little beams” in later years gave way to neon, mercury and general fluorescence so that, at the beginning of a new century, the city lights up the sky for many miles around and has become a greater source of brightness than the moon and stars. For some this is a source of anger, as if the artificial city were somehow contaminating the cosmos itself. Yet there are still many streets which are only partly illuminated, and many small passages and byways which are scarcely lit at all. It is still possible to cross from a brightly lit thoroughfare into a dark street, just as it has been for the last three hundred years, and to feel afraid.
But does London have its own natural light? Henry James noted “the way the light comes down leaking and filtering from its cloud ceiling.” There is a sense of damp and misty brightness which other observers have recorded, as if everything were seen through tears. But James also noticed “the softness and richness of tone, which objects put on in such an atmosphere as soon as they begin to recede.” Buildings and streets dissolve into the distance, therefore, without the clarity of the light in Paris or New York. It has been said that nowhere “is there such a play of light and shade, such a struggle of sun and smoke, such aerial gradations and confusions.” Richard Jefferies, who in his apocalyptic novel After London (1885) depicted the city as a miasmic wasteland, had an eye for just such “aerial gradations”-from a yellow sunset to an “indefinite violet” in the south-west, from the dazzling light of summer to the redness of the winter sun when the streets and buildings are suffused with a “fiery glow.” The faint blue-green mist was known as the light “that London takes the day to be,” softening and blending the cityscape while in the parks there hovers “a lovely pearl-grey haze, soft and subdued.” Yet there is also a coldness in the light of the streets which may be glimpsed in the grey of winter and the blue mist of spring, the haze of summer and the “orange sunsets of autumn.” It is derived from the immensity which the light of London reflects so that, as Hippolyte Taine put it, it becomes the emanation of a “huge conglomeration of human creation” when “the shimmering of river waves, the scattering of the light imprisoned in vapour, the soft whitish or pink tints which cover these vastnesses, diffuse a sort of grace over the prodigious city.” That sense of immensity is glimpsed in Virginia Woolf’s account of London as “a swarm of lights with a pale yellow canopy drooping above it. There were the lights of the great theatres, the lights of the long streets, lights which indicated huge squares of domestic comfort, lights that hung high in the air. No darkness would ever settle upon these lamps, as no darkness has settled upon them for hundreds of years.” The lights of London blaze perpetually. From the air the lights shine for miles like a vast web of brightness. The city will never cool down. It will remain incandescent. Yet where there is light there is also shadow, and the darkness of night.
CHAPTER 49
Night in the City
There have been many accounts of the London night. Books entitled City Nights and Night Life have been entirely devoted to the subject. James Thomson called it the city of dreadful night (1874). It may be that the city is truly itself, and becomes truly alive, only at night. That is why it exercises a constant fascination. The effect begins at twilight, in that crepuscular hour with “the dusky multitude of chimney pots and the small black houses,” of “muddy ways and slatternly passages” when, in the words of Julian Wolfreys’s Writing London, “the sinister, the threatening, monstrous inhumanity of the limitless city” becomes apparent. These are all accounts from the nineteenth century, but night terrors of earlier centuries are no less substantial. From earliest times the streets of the city have never been safe at night. Curfew was rung at nine and, in theory, the alehouses were closed and citizens were meant to stay indoors. In the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, however, drama, verse, epistles and satires came to emphasise the nature of the city night with lines such as these quoted in Thomas Burke’s The Streets of London:
Frightening of cullies, and bombastine whores,
Wringing off knockers, and from posts and doors
Rubbing out milk maids’ and some other scores,
Scowring the watch, or roaring in the streets,
Lamp-blacking signs with divers other feats …
These were the pranks of the “roaring boys,” which were juvenile enough compared with the more violent excesses of the gangs, or the thieves, or the rapists, under cover of darkness. Thomas Shadwell, the late seventeenth-century dramatist, remarked how at approximately “two in the morning comes the bell-man, and in a dismal tone repeats worse rhymes than a cast poet of the nursery can make; after him come those rogues that wake people with their barbarous tunes, and upon their tooting instruments make a more hellish noise than they do at a Playhouse when they flourish for the entrance of witches.” From the evidence of the drama, and reports such as this, it seems clear that at night the city was almost as noisy as day, with the difference only that the sounds at night were more frantic and desperate, among yells and screams and shouts and whistles punctuating the early hours with their own uneasy refrain. If you were to listen intently you might hear “Who’s there?” or “Your purse!” or “Dog, are you dumb? Speak quickly!”
“My ears were so serenaded on every side,” wrote Ned Ward at the beginning of the eighteenth century, “with the grave musick of sundry passing bells, the rattling of coaches, and the melancholy ditties of Hot Bak’d wardens and Pippins … nothing could I see but light and nothing hear but noise.” The unnaturalness of the London night is emphasised here, filled as it is with light and sound rather than the silence and darkness celebrated in the poetry of the evening landscape. When Samuel Pepys accompanied Lady Paulina Montague through the nocturnal streets she was terrified “every step of the way.”
The reasons for her fear are outlined in John Gay’s poem, “Of Walking the Streets by Night,” which is part of his Trivia-trívium being the point where three streets meet, the word generally used to characterise public thoroughfares of every description. In the “busie Street” at night planks and ladders and low awnings offered continual obstacles to progress. “Now all the Pavement sounds with trampling feet” amid the neighing of horses and the lowing of bullocks; the coachmen hustled each other, and lashed each other with whips; there were fights in the streets also “till down they fall and grappling roll in Mud.” Gay noticed one notorious spot for night traffic jams, by St. Clement Danes in the Strand where the church itself acted as a massive impediment; the streets upon either side of it had no posts to distinguish road from pavement, so the result was a confusion of coaches, horses and pedestrians worse compounded by the fact that loaded wagons were brought from the Thames through the narrow side-streets which led on to the main thoroughfare. To be caught in the “mob” or “throng” was dangerous indeed. If the solitary walker was not pushed and jostled and cursed, his wig, or cambric handkerchief, or watch, or snuff-box were likely to be stolen; to the raucous sounds of the night, then, was added the cry of “Stop Thief!” The pedestrian risked being crushed by carriage wheels, or pushed aside by chair-men, but more dangerous were the open cellars from which goods were sold. There was thick mud in the streets and, from above,
empty Chamber-pots come pouring down From
Garret Windows; you have cause to bless
The gentle Stars, if you come off with Piss.
It was wise to pay no attention to the sound of blows being exchanged, or the cries for help.
Yet, at
night, even the houses of Londoners were not necessarily havens from the anxiety and unrest of the streets. About two o’clock in the morning on 21 March 1763 Boswell’s candle went out at his lodgings in Crown Street, Westminster. He went down to the kitchen in order to find a tinder-box, but he could see nothing of the kind there. “I was now filled with gloomy ideas of the terrors of the night.” So the darkness without spread fear within. “I was also apprehensive that my landlord, who always keeps a pair of loaded pistols by him, might fire at me as a thief.” The dangers of vandalism and theft were very great, then, if the owner of the house must keep pistols by his bed; it resembles the practice of Samuel Johnson, who always took a stout cudgel with him before he ventured upon the streets. So Boswell “went up to my room, sat quietly till I heard the watchman calling ‘Past three o’clock.’ I then called to him to knock at the door of the house where I lodged. He did so, and I opened it to him and got my candle relumined without danger.” Here is a vignette of London life which, despite its brevity, is arresting-the call of the watchman, the instruction from Boswell, and the hurried lighting of the candle.
The night of nineteenth-century London has a less intimate aspect. The Victorians were fascinated and appalled by it. It is the period when the genre of “night painting” emerged among the artists of London, while in the theatre there were melodramas such as London By Night (1845) and After Dark, a Tale of London Life (1868). The poetry of the age is filled with intimations and images of the dark city, from Dowson and Lionel Johnson to George Meredith and Tennyson. It is as if the inhabitants of nineteenth-century London were haunted by the night city so that, in the words of Rudyard Kipling recalling his early experience of London in lodgings, “Here, for the first time, it happened that the night got into my head.”
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