What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew

by Daniel Pool

  The reform of 1826 introduced the quarter, which weighed 28 pounds—one quarter of a hundredweight. (Not to be confused with a quartern—“quartern” with an “n” on the end being a more general term referring to a quarter measurement of an ounce, a stone, a peck, or a pint. A quartern loaf was a sort of standard bread size equal to a four-pound loaf.) More significantly, the Imperial system standardized the measurement of volume for both liquid and dry goods. 8.655 cubic inches constituted a gill, of which four made a pint. As in the United States, there were two pints to a quart and four quarts to a gallon (except that the English gallon was somewhat larger than that of the United States) and then came pecks, bushels, and so on. (288 gallons = 144 pecks = 36 bushels = 4.5 quarters.)

  Notwithstanding the advent of the new system, many goods continued to be measured in their own peculiar units even after 1826. Cloth, for example, was often measured in ells, each 11/4 yards long. Port and madeira wines were measured in pipes (about 100 gallons a pipe) and other wines were measured in hogsheads, as was ale, the hogshead being the equivalent of 11/2 barrels or 54 gallons. The practice of measuring wine by butts and tuns seems to have faded by the century’s end.

  A minor note: the dram was a unit of weight equivalent to one-sixteenth of an ounce. When, however, Abel Magwitch confesses to the soldiers who catch him on the marshes in Great Expectations that he stole “some broken wittles—that’s what it was—and a dram of liquor, and a pie,” he is referring not to this minuscule portion but to the amount of liquor one can down in one swallow.

  ENGLAND

  England and Wales were divided into fifty-two counties, units of both governmental and residential significance to the average English person. Many of the counties had names ending in “—shire”; the counties were called shires until William the Conqueror changed the name of the old regional designation. Much of Jane Austen’s novels was set in the counties not far north and south of London. George Eliot’s novels are often set in the Midlands, the area of fox hunting and enclosures north of London. Dickens, of course, centered most of his books in London itself; often, however, their locale may wander, as in Pickwick, Great Expectations, and David Copperfield, southeast of London to the coastal region of Rochester and Chatham, where Dickens spent part of his childhood. A good portion of Vanity Fair is set in and around “Queen’s Crawley, Hants.,” the latter being an abbreviation for Hampshire county, not far southwest of London.

  England and Wales.

  In the far north, there was Yorkshire, where a good part of the second half of Jane Eyre takes place. Wuthering Heights, of course, is set in western Yorkshire in the area of the county known as the “west riding.” And lastly, there was the Wessex of the great Hardy novels, a region in the southwest of England whose name the novelist borrowed from the old Saxon kingdom that had once occupied the area, territory Hardy described as “bounded on the north by the Thames, on the south by the English Channel, on the east by a line running from Hayling Island to Windsor Forest, and on the west by the Cornish coast,” of which Dorset was the heart.

  The names of certain cities would also have conjured up vivid associations for the nineteenth-century Englishman. Industry, of course, was centered in the north. Thus, Birmingham (sometimes “Brummagem”) was the center of metal manufacturing; Manchester of the cotton industry; Newcastle, of course, supplied coal to the country; and Bath was a social center that developed to meet the needs of rich, gouty invalids who came there to take the waters. Liverpool, where Mr. Earnshaw finds and takes pity on the boy Heathcliff, “starving, and houseless, and as good as dumb, in the streets,” was the main port of connection in northern England with the Atlantic and the West Indies. Portsmouth, on the southern coast and important in Mansfield Park, was a major naval base.

  And then there was London. . . .

  LONDON

  London geography was determined by the Thames. The great river ran from west to east through the city after a dogleg north past Westminster—so, too, did the city itself, its two great thoroughfares being the Strand-Fleet Street and Oxford Street-Holborn-Cheapside.

  At its core was the old City of London—known as “the City” as the century wore on—an entity consisting of the roughly square mile making up the area that had once been inside the old walls of the medieval city of London, bounded by the Thames on the south, the Inns of Court and Temple Bar on the west, and the Tower in the east, with its seven gates (Newgate of prison fame being one), which had all been torn down save for “that leaden-headed old obstruction,” as Dickens calls it at the beginning of Bleak House, “appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed corporation, Temple Bar.”

  Sketch plan of London.

  Within the City lay the Royal Exchange (the ‘Change upon which Scrooge’s word in A Christmas Carol is said to be so good), which was a gathering place for merchants in different trades, and the Bank of England, the financial nucleus of the nation, together with the financial offices and activities that naturally clustered around them. In fact, the term “the City” was also used to denote the financial heart of England in the way that “Wall Street” is used to describe the financial heart of the United States. In Jane Austen’s day, it was still customary for some merchants to live in the City, but as railroads were thrust through it and commuting became more feasible, even poor clerks began commuting to work from fringe or suburban areas the way we are told that Bob Cratchit does from Camdentown. In the first eighty years of the nineteenth century, in fact, the resident population in the City dropped from 128,000 to 50,000, while greater London as a whole mushroomed from a million to more than 4.5 million people.

  The fancy area of London was the West End, which lay west of Temple Bar and London’s center, Charing Cross. (Bloomsbury, site of the Russell Square where the Sedleys live in Vanity Fair, became increasingly less fashionable after the 1820s.) At the historic core of the West End lay what had once been the royal city of Westminster, with its palaces of St. James and Whitehall, along with Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament. The Treasury building was here, along with Downing Street, the Foreign Office and the Horse Guards (army headquarters). These had now become part of the larger, expanded London, and adjacent to this nerve center of government and royalty the ultrafashionable West End residential area of Mayfair (and, later, Belgrave Square and the nonfashionable Chelsea farther south) grew up. Mayfair was the location of the posh men’s clubs on Pall Mall, the exclusive shops on Bond Street and the fancy houses on the ritziest residential street in the city, Park Lane, overlooking the great greensward of Hyde Park on Mayfair’s western border. All were within a short distance of the new royal residence, Buckingham Palace.

  Predictably, the rest of the city became less fashionable and to the east, in particular, degenerated into slums, the East End along the docks beyond the area of the Tower becoming synonymous by the end of the century with poverty and misery. There were other areas as desperately poor, however; the notorious St. Giles and Seven Dials that sheltered Fagin’s gang were located not far from Charing Cross. Across the Thames lay Southwark, sometimes referred to as “the Borough” but part of London, where Little Dorrit’s father was imprisoned in the Marshalsea. The pleasure grounds of the Vauxhall Gardens where Joe Sedley was too drunk to pop the question to Becky Sharp lay here, and on the area’s west bank was Lambeth Palace, the official residence of the archbishop of Canterbury. Greenwich, with its royal hospital for old sailors, lay downstream to the southeast, as did Woolwich, one of the army’s two main arsenals. West were Kensington, Fulham, and Hammersmith; Whitechapel and Bethnal Green were to the city’s east; and north were St. Pancras, Islington, Clerkenwell, and Hampstead, where the distracted Sikes wandered after murdering Nancy.

  As they swelled in population, many of these areas also became terminals for the great railroads coming in from all over England. The reader of Victorian fiction will recognize the names of some of the big stations a mile or so northwest of the city’s center that connecte
d London with the north, Marylebone (1899) being farthest west, and then, in increasing proximity, Euston Station (1838), St. Pancras (1867), and King’s Cross (1852). A bit north of Hyde Park was Paddington Station (1854), which connected London with the west. Victoria Station (1862), a few blocks southwest of Buckingham Palace, ran to the south and southwest, and across the Thames River near the bridge of the same name Waterloo Station (1848) also brought in southerly traffic.

  The Thames was some 800 to 1,500 feet wide as it flowed through the city. Originating far upstream from London, it flowed down past Henley and Windsor as clear water, and, although the Thames was a tidal river, it was seldom brackish in London unless tides were unusually high and the wind had been from the east for a long time. In 1800, one could travel from the “Middlesex” (county) or London side to the “Surrey” side (Southwark) via London Bridge, the ancient stone bridge just west of the Tower, via Blackfriars Bridge near the Temple, or by way of Westminster Bridge near the great Abbey. “It was Old London Bridge in those days,” says Pip in Great Expectations, “and at certain states of the tide there was a race and a fall of water there which gave it a bad reputation.” Pip masters the trick of negotiating its waters, but the bridge’s architecture made the current sufficiently dangerous to be a factor in its replacement later in the century. In 1819, Southwark Bridge, the “Iron Bridge,” as Dickens calls it in contrast to London Bridge, was built between London Bridge and Blackfriars, and in 1817 Waterloo Bridge was constructed between the Blackfriars and Westminster bridges. We are occasionally reminded that in those days even foot passengers had to pay to cross the river. In a visit to the “Patriarchal Tent,” Dickens tells us, Little Dorrit “went by the Iron Bridge, though it cost her a penny.” (The wherries of the watermen and, later, the short-distance steamers might have taken her up or down the river for a fee as well.)

  From the standpoint of the riverfront, London Bridge really marked the entrance to the city; indeed, directions on the river were frequently given with reference to it as “above bridge” or “below bridge.” Large ships found London Bridge impassable so the great companies constructed several hundred acres’ worth of “the Docks,” as they were called (that of the East India Company alone covered 250 acres) to its south. “The Docks” were inshore from the Pool, the stretch of water south of the bridge where the colliers and other shipping massed, waiting for the signal to come in and unload their cargo.

  From there it was south some fifty miles—past Gravesend and the long, flat marshy stretches of Kent and Essex—to the river’s entrance at the Channel. “The river below,” wrote the author of a London guidebook in the 1870s, “and nearly all the way to the mouth, lies between flat marshes, over which the ships appear sailing across the grass, as in a Dutch picture.”

  Such was London.

  But what was it like to live in?

  —

  The fog in London was very real. Just why it was the color it was no one has ever been able to ascertain for sure, but at a certain time of the year—it was worst in November—a great yellowness reigned everywhere, and lamps were lit inside even during the day. In November, December, and January the yellow fog extended out some three or four miles from the heart of the city, causing “pain in the lungs” and “uneasy sensations” in the head. It has been blamed in part on the coal stoves. At eight o’clock in the morning on an average day over London, an observer reported the sky began to turn black with the smoke from thousands of coal fires, presumably for morning fires to warm dining rooms and bedrooms and to cook breakfast. Ladies going to the opera at night with white shawls returned with them gray. It has been suggested that the black umbrella put in its appearance because it did not show the effects of these London atmospherics. The fog was so thick, observed a foreigner at mid-century, that you could take a man by the hand and not be able to see his face, and people literally lost their way and drowned in the Thames. In a very bad week in 1873 more than 700 people above the normal average for the period died in the city, and cattle at an exhibition suffocated to death.

  There were problems underfoot as well as in the air. One hundred tons of horse manure dropped on the streets of London each day, and a report to Parliament said that “strangers coming from the country frequently describe the streets of London as smelling of dung like a stable-yard.” Originally, many streets were not paved; by mid-century, however, the dust from the pulverized stone with which London streets were paved coated furniture in good weather and turned to mud when it rained. An etiquette book advised gentlemen to walk on the outside of the pavement when accompanying a lady to ensure that they walked on the filthiest part of it, and every major street had a crossing sweeper like Jo in Bleak House, who for a penny swept the street before you made your way across it on rainy days so your boots did not become impossibly filthy. Nor was the Thames any better. London sewage, some 278,000 tons daily at mid-century, as well as pollutants from the factories along the river’s banks, was dumped untreated into the water, presumably helping to fuel the cholera epidemics that swept the city in the early part of the century. The smell was bad enough in the summer of 1858 to cause Parliament to end its session early.

  There was what we would surely call noise pollution, too—the incessant sound of wheels and horses’ hooves clacking over the pavement, the click of women’s pattens on the sidewalks in the rain, the bell of the muffin man, and the cries of the street peddlers selling such items as dolls, matches, books, knives, eels, pens, rat poison, key rings, eggs, and china, to say nothing of the German bands, the itinerant clarinet players, and the hurdy-gurdies.

  The children who added their din to that of the costermongers remind us that London was an overwhelmingly young city, as we are apt to realize when we read, say, Oliver Twist, a city of multitudinous street arabs, young costermongers, crossing sweepers like Jo, or the mud larks who scavenged the bed of the Thames—all playing in the streets or crying their wares, holding horses for gentlemen, fetching cabs for theatergoers on rainy nights, carrying packages or opening cab doors or doing cartwheels or handstands in the street in the hope of earning a ha’penny or penny. There was no compulsory school until 1880, and children under fourteen made up 30 to 40 percent of the population. A girl like Lizzie Hexam in Our Mutual Friend was thus free all day to help her father drag for lost items—or bodies—in the Thames.

  PRECEDENCE: OF BISHOPS, BARRISTERS, AND BARONETS

  A good deal of the social hierarchy in England was made explicit in the order of precedence, a more or less official ranking of honors, ranks, lineage, and occupational statuses in the kingdom. It was certainly a ranking of which no nineteenth-century hostess would have dreamed of being ignorant, for by mid-century it had become the custom in almost every household of any pretension for the guests at a dinner party to gather in the drawing room before the meal, the ladies then being escorted in to the dining room by the gentlemen one at a time in strict order of both their ranks, the personages of greatest rank or distinction going first. The good hostess at any dinner party ascertained everyone’s rank in advance and then quietly arranged the guests in order of precedence while the party mingled informally in the drawing room before the meal: “If the society is of a distinguished kind,” observed an etiquette book soberly, “she [the hostess] will do well to consult Debrett or Burke, before arranging her visitors.”

  Trollope, the infallible guide to social distinction and nuance, tells us both what a headache this could be and the social weapon it could become in the hands of the skillful. In The Last Chronicle of Barset he asks, “Amidst the intricacies of rank how is it possible for a woman to learn and remember everything? If Providence would only send Mrs. Dobbs Broughton a Peer for every dinner-party, the thing would go more easily; but what woman will tell me, off-hand, which should go out of the room first; a C.B., an Admiral of the Blue, the Dean of Barchester, or the Dean of Arches?” In Can You Forgive Her? one of the suitors for Mrs. Greenow’s hand is allowed to take her in to dinner, while the other,
grinding his teeth, must follow with another lady. “There was no doubt as to Mrs. Greenow’s correctness,” says Trollope. “As Captain Bellfield held, or had held, her Majesty’s commission, he was clearly entitled to take the mistress of the festival down to dinner.” And the loser’s companion points out to him briskly, “If you were a magistrate, Mr. Cheesacre, you would have rank; but I believe you are not.”

  Order of precedence among men.

  In the order of precedence the peerage (dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts, and barons) soared above virtually everyone else, including baronets and knights, who were creatures of relatively low distinction. A bishop, too, ranked very high, which is why the battles over the post (see Barchester Towers) could be so ferocious, while the high position accorded the lord chancellor and the archbishop of Canterbury suggests why those personages are alluded to in novels as beings of such consequence. As we shall see, official rank and actual social clout in the case of any particular individual might be two different things, but any effort to come to grips with the world embodied in the nineteenth-century novel must begin with precedence.

  THE TITLED

  There were two orders of titled folk in England. Dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts, and barons (who ranked in that order) were known as the peerage. Considerably below them on the social scale and not peers came the baronets and knights, easily recognizable because they were always addressed as “Sir.”

  Together with the bishops and the archbishops of the Church of England, the peers composed the House of Lords, and, indeed, a reference to a “lord” almost always meant a peer or one of his children. They were generally hugely wealthy and possessed of gigantic landed estates, but their only privilege of any significance was the right to be tried for a felony by the House of Lords rather than by a court. In addition, on extremely formal ceremonial occasions peers got to wear coronets. Search the Palliser novels and you will probably find a reference somewhere to “strawberry leaves.” These were the flora (in the form of precious stones, of course) that ornamented the ducal coronet; lower ranks in the peerage had their distinctive coronets as well.