The Fields Beneath (24 page)

I have in my possession a little book, dated 1864 and sold then for one shilling, entitled
How I Managed My House on £200 a Year
. At an early point in this minutely detailed account we have the archetypal Victorian clerk, and paterfamilias in prospect, telling his wife that he has found a house for them in an expanding suburb ‘near Islington’:

It is instructive to compare this, and the description that follows of their removal to this new, exciting, remote spot, with the description in George Grossmith’s
Diary of a Nobody
of the Pooters moving into what might be precisely the same house, thirty years later:

It is interesting that, despite the impeccable respectability of the Pooters (Mr Pooter is a senior clerk in the firm where he had been for the last twenty years) there is a slight implication of social decline where the house is concerned. It was not, obviously, intended by the builder that the inhabitants should leave the front door locked all the time and come and go ‘to the little side entrance, which saves the servant the trouble of going up to the front door, thereby taking from her work’. Moreover the possession of only
one
servant (two was then the upper-middle-class norm) is an indication intended to place the Pooters irrevocably in a certain category. The nature of life in the inner suburbs was by then recognised by everyone; it was fossilising into a joke, and George Grossmith, Pooter’s creator, was one of those who helped to crystallise it. He was born and grew up in the Camden – Kentish Town area: he knew all about that sort of life. There is even a subtle innuendo in the address ‘Brickfield Terrace, Holloway’. Most of Holloway proper, like Tufnell Park, was not laid out till the late Victorian era, but Weedon Grossmith’s illustration clearly shows a house of the late 1850s or 1860s. The point is that, by the end of the century, the practice was in vogue of euphemising an address in barely-respectable Kentish Town as ‘Holloway’, ‘North St Pancras’ or ‘Highgate Rise’. For Kentish Town had lost, by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the battle to remain a desirable area. Palmer, writing in 1870, remarked ‘the green fields … have passed away, and lines of streets connect it with the Holloway Road’. Less than twenty years later, the
London Argus
was uncompromisingly damning about the place: ‘The district today has not much to recommend it. It is one of those shabby, prosaic, monotonous residential quarters that could well be spared from the Metropolis.’

People were to go on saying that, in various ways, for the next sixty years. The era of ‘slum clearance’ was as yet only on the horizon but was in sight – that middle-class and bureaucratic obsession with destroying the habitat of people who have no say in the matter, in the name of progress, morality and a Brave New World. A curious idea seems to have got about, which is still to be found today, that the evils of what was coming to be called ‘suburban sprawl’ can be considered in isolation from the needs of the population which have created the sprawl in the first place. William Morris spoke of the growth of London as a ‘spreading sore … swallowing up in its loathsomeness field and wood and heath without mercy and without hope’. In fact, of course, Kentish Town like most of the other old suburbs couldn’t possibly be ‘spared from the Metropolis’ because, apart from anything else, very large numbers of people lived in these areas. In 1881 the population of St Pancras reached its highest level ever – 236,258 (it has been decreasing slightly but steadily ever since). The number of houses, however, was more or less the same – under 26,000 – as it had been ten years earlier, when the population was 15,000 fewer. So evidently the overcrowding had become slightly worse. Most of the worse-crowded areas were not in Kentish Town itself, except for a few pockets in west Kentish Town, but it is clear that a lot of houses by then even in the relatively ‘nicer’ streets, were already in multi-occupation, and most remained so from then on.

Lodgers were very much a feature of Victorian and Edwardian life in both the working classes and the lower-middle class, though sometimes in the latter a polite pretence was maintained, for the landlord and the neighbours, that the outsider was a friend visiting. Indeed couples just setting up together commonly rented a house bigger than they needed, intending to balance their budget by installing some docile sub-tenant in the ‘first floor front’ or the ‘third floor back’. The song of the period,
Our Lodger’s Such a Nice Young Man
, presents the archetypal one, a young man come to London to work, of slightly higher social class than his landlord and landlady and on occasions a source of violent marital upheaval. It will be noted that Gowing, Mr Pooter’s rather more knowing friend, is a lodger in someone else’s house. But frequently couples or even whole families took what were called ‘apartments’ in someone else’s house; local newspapers of the late nineteenth century are full of advertisements for these at 20 words for 6d. – ‘Apartments, furnished – Drawing and Bedroom or Bedroom with use of Parlour, with or without Board’, ‘To Let, a Drawing Room floor of Three or Four Rooms. Gas if required. Use of kitchen.’ A frequent phrase is ‘With gas and attendance’; presumably these had by then become the recognised signs of a civilised existence. Occasionally when advertising for ‘a General Servant’ a prospective employer would stress the fact that lodgers were
not
kept, which gives one a certain insight into the life led by a general servant in houses where lodgers were a feature. Other landladies seem simply to want a tenant who would be as little trouble as possible: ‘Unfurnished room – first floor – suitable for a widow, or single person without occupation.’

That advertisement strikes a chill to the heart. Why the person offering the room should prefer an occupationless lone person to one who had at least a job to go to to dilute the absolute solitude and monotony of his or her life, it is hard to see. Presumably the advertisement is saying in code that a lodger of some modest means and therefore gentility is wanted rather than a ‘shop girl’. One recalls General William Booth’s passionate remarks on the subject:

General Booth approaches the subject from a different angle to that usually adopted by twentieth-century commentators, but in essence the diagnosis of the ‘lonely bed-sitter syndrome’ is the same. This remained a significant element in the life of the inner suburbs throughout the first half of the twentieth century, and is only dying out now under pressure of cumulative social change, greatly increased council ownership of property, and the unfortunate effects of several well-intentioned Rent Acts, which have turned the renting of rooms into a complex legal situation which erstwhile landlords and landladies are afraid to enter.

It is to be hoped that as the nineteenth century drew towards its close, and a mild emancipation of women began to create for the first time a host of female office workers living in something like independence and travelling about on the new Metropolitan Railway and the ‘Twopenny Tube’,
*
it was possible for people in places like Kentish Town to find company elsewhere than on the street. Bicycling clubs flourished in the 1890s; with the chances they offered for informal, unchaperoned but essentially respectable and healthy trips to the neighbouring countryside, they were a considerable force for social liberation. Pooter’s friends Gowing and Cummings are both eager subscribers to the
Bicycle News
. Lupin, Pooter’s unsatisfactory son, does not go in for anything quite so energetic, but prefers the opportunities for making new acquaintances offered by amateur theatricals: he is a leading light of the ‘Holloway Comedians’, and it was there that he met Daisy Mutlar who, without being (of course) a Bad Girl, is the prototype of the ‘fast young lady’ of the period.

Even Lupin, for all his tiresome behaviour, his slang and his over-high collars, subscribes basically to exactly the same set of social rules as his quintessentially respectable father. Lupin associates with City types who give him dubious tips about shares, but
never
with members of the working class, not even servant girls. The Pooters’ one servant, Sarah, seems to be young, and inevitably lives, in such a small house, at close quarters with her master and mistress: Pooter actually comes upstairs and paints her wash-stand and towel horse bright red for her, for which she is unaccountably ungrateful, but it never seems to enter anyone’s mind that she might be seen as a conceivable object for Lupin’s free-floating desires. By the same token Sarah, no doubt, kept herself to herself and would not have dreamed of paying attention to the grocer’s boy, who only appears as a dishevelled figure picking the paint blisters off the back door. He would have come (say) from Harmood Street or Inkerman Street, while the Pooters lived in (say) Leighton Road or Islip Street, near but on the opposite side of the district. From Harmood Street and its purlieus too would have come the little step girls who, in respectable streets, came and scrubbed the front doorsteps for housewives like the unfortunate Mrs Pike, who were too poor to employ a servant but too conscious of their precariously maintained status to want to be seen cleaning the step themselves. Frederick Willis, who in old age wrote
A Book of London Yesterdays
about his own youth, delineates the social hierarchy in such districts with precision:

A constant preoccupation with ‘the terrifying restraints of class consciousness’ is indeed breathed out by the musty, long-unread pages of the local press of the period. Disproportionate numbers of the people of both sexes inserting small ads seemed to wish to give private music lessons or occasionally drawing and painting lessons – the traditional resorts of the impecunious gentry too poorly educated to do anything but pass on their minor skills to pupils who would end up as ill-equipped for life as themselves. No doubt between taking in lodgers and teaching scales to the daughters of local shopkeepers, you could maintain something that would pass for a middle-class existence. To many of the struggling ‘music masters’ and the like, ‘taking a job as a clerk’, even had one been available, would have seemed a form of social defeat almost worse than loss of respectability. If a gentleman could not have a proper profession (which in strict terms meant the law, medicine, or the Church), then at least he could claim status by clinging to artistic pretensions.

Yet for the large working class of areas like Kentish Town ‘a job in an office’ was the pinnacle of ambition. To this end, ‘Mutual Improvement’ societies, private schools and evening schools flourished, both before and after the establishment of the Board Schools in 1870, for Board Schools only offered the 3 Rs. Typical was the ‘Camden Hall Evening School for Young Men … Book keeping, arithmetic, reading and writing etc’. A day school that flourished in the area was frankly called ‘The Camden and Kentish Towns Middle Class School … Terms a Guinea and One-and-a-half guineas. No extras except Greek and German.’ Others had more imposing names, such as the ‘English and Foreign Collegiate School, Bellevue House’ – which impresses till you realise that it is in the Kentish Town Road. ‘Collegiate’ was a favourite, somewhat empty term to designate a private school at the period; even the redoubtable Miss Buss used the word for the name of the school she first founded in Camden Town in 1851, where George Grossmith is alleged to have been an usher. When she founded her second school, the Camden School for Girls, in 1871, she was aiming at a slightly lower social class than the ‘gentlemen of limited means’ who fathered the clientele of the North London Collegiate School, and charged lower fees in consequence. Her new pupils – forty at the start – were the daughters of clerks, tailors, ‘civil servants’, builders, grocers, curates, a cattle salesman, a boarding house keeper, a boot maker, a police inspector, a piano tuner and a jeweller. Miss Buss found their ignorance of the most normal items of general knowledge ‘beyond belief’.