Dickens's England (28 page)

It was not a healthy place to live, its gas-lit streets filthy with horse-dung, the air thick with smoke and soot, the whole intermittently ravaged by tuberculosis, typhoid (Prince Albert died of typhoid fever), smallpox (23,000 died in 1871) and, most notably, cholera. This first hit London in 1832 and killed thousands for fifty years. The water of London was foul, contaminated by human, animal and industrial waste, either accumulating in or leaking from thousands of cesspits, or draining somehow into the Thames (1858 was the year of ‘The Great Stink', when eight miles of the river fermented and stank). Edwin Chadwick's report on the sanitary condition of London led to the Public Health Act of 1848, but there was little significant improvement; in 1854 John Snow shut off a main waterpump in Broad Street that fed neighbouring Regent, Wardour, Brewer and Great Marlborough Streets, producing an immediate large decline in cholera deaths in that area. From 1868, Joseph Bazalgette was responsible for the construction of London's great drainage and sewerage systems, that eventually transformed London life.

Increased population meant more buildings, of varying styles and qualities. Until the mid-nineteenth century London was, architecturally as in many other ways, largely Georgian, with neo-classical or Italianate stucco buildings. Increasingly, as in the Palace of Westminster and the hundreds of new churches, Gothic developed, with granite, spires, and polychromatic tiles; by the late 1870s, Queen Anne and Flemish Renaissance styles were also competing. The years 1857 to 1877 saw much rebuilding in the central area, with great public buildings and big new offices. Close to the wealthy centre were the rotten, teeming slums (such as Saffron Hill where Fagin lived, or Bethnal Green and Bermondsey where Bill Sikes lived and died), home to disease, crime and the working poor, needing ready access to their workplaces and cheap accommodation. For most, work was irregular, often seasonal and affected by the weather. In winter, there was less work but increased food and fuel expenses: in 1861, when the middle classes skated on the Serpentine, there were bread riots. The railways ripped through the slums for their viaducts, yards, great termini and hotels, displacing thousands, with little or no compensation, into greater overcrowding nearby, or the workhouse. Railway-building inflated land values, provoking much speculation and profiteering; there was less profit in building for the poor, but renting proved extremely lucrative.

The central areas were increasingly clogged by commercial development and made ever less attractive by threats to health, slums and fears of crime (with panics about garrotters and street robbers in 1856) and the working classes (there were 1,000 Chartist demonstrators in the new Trafalgar Square in 1848, and 10,000 rallied for trade unionism in Hyde Park in 1867). The middle classes steadily moved out into the new suburbs, with their fresh air and gardens (conservatories, rockeries and croquet), commuting by means of the extending rail services. Within London one could travel by brougham, hansom cab or horse-drawn omnibus, but most, especially the working people, walked – though with so many street traders and entertainers, one sometimes wonders how people got anywhere!

While trade has been touched on here, one of the main businesses of London – entertainment – has not: that is the concern of the next section.

* * *

CITY AND PEOPLE

London is the largest and wealthiest, as well as the most populous of the cities of the world. It is at once the centre of liberty, the seat of a great imperial government, and the metropolis of that great race whose industry and practical application of the arts of peace are felt in every clime, while they exert an almost boundless influence over the moral and political destinies of the world. About to become the theatre of an event of the highest moral importance, it is desirable that the stranger in our giant city should be made acquainted with its organization and structure – with its trade and commerce – with the sources of its social and political greatness – with its many treasures hidden from the eye of the superficial observer. . . .

In 1841 the population of the metropolis was taken as 1,998,455, and it is now about 2,250,000, being the city of the greatest ascertained population and greatest number of houses in the world. . . .

The number of persons taken into custody yearly is 60,000 (males 40,000, females 20,000) . . . Of those taken into custody, 20,000 can neither read nor write; 35,000 read, or read and write imperfectly; 4,500 read and write well; and 500 have superior instruction.

John Weale and Henry Bohn,
The Pictorial Handbook of London
(1854 edn)

THE SPORT IN VIEW

The extremes, in every point of view, are daily to be met with in the Metropolis; from the most rigid, persevering, never-tiring, down to laziness, which, in its consequences, frequently operates far worse than idleness. The greatest love of and contempt for money are equally conspicuous; and in no place are pleasure and business so much united as in London. The highest veneration for and practice of religion distinguishes the Metropolis, contrasted with the most horrid commission of crimes; and the
experience
of the oldest inhabitant scarcely renders him safe against the specious plans and artifices continually laid to entrap the most vigilant. The next-door neighbour of a man in London is generally as great a stranger to him, as if he lived at the distance of York. And it is in the Metropolis that
prostitution
is so profitable a business, and conducted so openly, that hundreds of persons keep houses of ill-fame, for the reception of girls not more than
twelve or thirteen
years of age, without a blush upon their cheeks, and mix with society heedless of stigma or reproach; yet honour, integrity, and independence of soul, that nothing can remove from its basis, are to be found in every street in London. Hundreds of persons are always going to bed in the morning, besotted with dissipation and gaming, while thousands of his Majesty's liege subjects are quitting their pillows to pursue their useful occupations. The most bare-faced villains, swindlers and thieves walk about the streets in the daytime, committing their various depredations, with as much confidence as men of unblemished reputation and honesty. . . .

‘Life in London' is the sport in view, and provided the
chase
is turned to a good account, ‘
seeing Life'
will be found to have its advantages; and, upon this calculation, whether an evening is spent over a bottle of champagne at
Long's,
or in taking a ‘
third of a daffy'
(third part of a quartern of gin) at
Tom Belcher's,
if the Mind does not decide it barren, then the purposes are gained. Equally so, in
waltzing
with the
angelics
at my
Lady
Fubb's assembly, at Almack's [a fashionable and exclusive assembly-hall], or
sporting a toe
at Mrs Snooks's
hop
at St Kit's [Kate Hamilton's notorious ‘night-house'], among the pretty
straw
damsels and
dashing
chippers, if a
knowledge
of ‘Life', an acquaintance with
character,
and the importance of
comparison,
are the ultimate results.

Pierce Egan,
Life in London
(1821)

THROUGH THE STREETS OF LONDON

. . . Through tracts of thin resort,

And sights and sounds that come at intervals,

We take our way. A raree-show is here,

With children gathered round; another street

Presents a company of dancing dogs,

Or dromedary, with an antic pair

Of monkeys on his back; a minstrel band

Of Savoyards; or, single and alone,

An English ballad-singer. Private courts,

Gloomy as coffins, and unsightly lanes

Thrilled by some female vendor's scream, belike

The very shrillest of all London cries,

May then entangle our impatient steps . . .

As on the broadening causeway we advance,

Behold, turned upwards, a face hard and strong

In lineaments, and red with over-toil.

'Tis one encountered here and everywhere;

A travelling cripple, by the trunk cut short,

And stumping on his arms. In sailor's garb

Another lies at length, beside a range

Of well-formed characters, with chalk inscribed

Upon the smooth flat stones: the Nurse is here,

The Bachelor, that loves to sun himself,

The military Idler, and the Dame,

That fieldward takes her walk with decent steps.

Now homeward through the thickening hubbub, where

See, among less distinguishable shapes,

The begging scavenger, with hat in hand;

The Italian, as he thrids his way with care,

Steadying, far-seen, a frame of images

Upon his head; with basket at his breast

The Jew; the stately and slow-moving Turk,

With freight of slippers piled beneath his arm!

Enough; – the mighty concourse I surveyed

With no unthinking mind, well pleased to note

Among the crowd all specimens of man,

Through all the colours which the sun bestows,

And every character of form and face:

The Swede, the Russian; from the genial south,

The Frenchman and the Spaniard; from remote

America, the Hunter-Indian; Moors,

Malays, Lascars, the Tartar, the Chinese,

And Negro Ladies in white muslin gowns.

William Wordsworth,
The Prelude
(1850)

SWEET THAMES

(I)

Never, perhaps, in the annals of mankind, has such a thing been known before, as that the whole stream of a large river for a distance of seven miles should be in a state of putrid fermentation. The cause is the hot weather acting upon the ninety millions of gallons of sewage which discharge themselves daily into the Thames. And by sewage must be understood not merely house and land drainage, but also drainage from bone-boilers, soap-boilers, chemical works, breweries and gas factories – the last the most filthy of all. It is quite impossible to calculate the consequences of such a moving mass of decomposition as the river at present offers to our senses.

Medical Officer of Health's Report, 1858

(II)

What a pity it is that the thermometer fell ten degrees yesterday. Parliament was all but compelled to legislate upon the great London nuisance by force of sheer stench. The intense heat had driven our legislators from those portions of their buildings which overlook the river. A few members, indeed, bent on investigating the subject to its very depths, ventured into the library, but they were instantly driven to retreat, each man with a handkerchief to his nose. We are heartily glad of it. It is right that our legislators should be made to feel in health and comfort the consequence of their own disregard of the public welfare.

Anon.,
The Times,
1858

‘THE CAPITAL OF CHOLERA'

[Jacob's Island, Bermondsey; and see
Oliver Twist,
Chapter 50]

The blanched cheeks of the people that now came out to stare at us were white as vegetables grown in the dark. . . . As we now passed along the reeking banks of the sewer, the sun shone upon a narrow slip of water. In the bright light it seemed the colour of a strong green tea . . . and yet we were assured that this was the only water the wretched inhabitants had to drink. As we gazed in horror at this pool, we saw drains and sewers emptying their filthy contents into it, we heard bucket after bucket of filth splash into it, and the limbs of the vagrant boys bathing in it seemed, by pure force of contrast, white as Parian marble. And yet, as we stood gazing in horror at the fluvial sewer, we saw a child from one of the galleries opposite lower a tin can with rope, to fill a large bucket that stood beside her. In each of the rude and rotten balconies, indeed, that hung over the stream, the self-same bucket was to be seen in which the inhabitants were wont to put the mucky liquid to stand, so that they might, after it had been left to settle for a day or two, skim the fluid from the solid particles of filth and pollution which constituted the sediment. In this wretched place we were taken to a house where an infant lay dead of the cholera. We asked if they
really did
drink the water. The answer was, ‘They were obliged to drink the ditch unless they could beg or thieve a pailful of the real Thames.'

Henry Mayhew,
London Characters
(1874)