The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London (28 page)

Little Dorrit
presents a rather orderly, domestic image of the prison, where families lived according to middle-class norms as best they could. But the rules of the prison suggest otherwise: there were fines for taking other people’s property; for throwing urine or faeces out of the windows or into other people’s rooms; for making noise after midnight; for cursing, fighting, dirtying the privy seat, urinating in the yard, stealing from the taproom and singing obscene songs. Rules, by their prohibitions, tell us what people really do, as there is no need to create rules for things people do not do. The Marshalsea was clearly not a pleasant place to live.

Early in the century, like the Fleet and the King’s Bench, inmates could live within the rules outside the Marshalsea, in an area a later writer on prison reform referred to as covering ‘nearly half the south side of London’. The Marshalsea also had a system of ‘liberty tickets’, whereby the indebted prisoner, for sums ranging from 4s 2d to 11s 10d, purchased between one and three days’ leave from the prison entirely. This, however, was abolished once the Marshalsea moved to its new site, and there living conditions mirrored those of any slum.

Throughout the century there were ongoing attempts to improve conditions. Pentonville, a prison for convicts and for those awaiting transportation,
opened in 1842 as a ‘model’ prison. Cells were generously sized, ventilated ‘on the newest scientific principle’ and heated by ‘warm air’, while inmates were supplied with good bedding and food. But others, such as Millbank, also for convicts, remained a blot on the landscape, no matter how good the intentions. Millbank was the largest prison in England, made up of six buildings spread over sixteen acres. (Tate Britain now stands on the site.) The ground in this historically poor district was marshy and considered to promote fevers. One journalist claimed that ‘Here the cholera first appears’. Although cholera had first reached London via the docks (see pp. 216), Pimlico somehow had that feel about it as Dickens describes in
David Copperfield
:

The neighbourhood was a dreary one...as oppressive, sad, and solitary by night, as any about London...A sluggish ditch deposited its mud at the prison walls. Coarse grass and rank weeds straggled over all the marshy land in the vicinity. In one part, carcases of houses...rotted away...Slimy gaps and causeways, winding among old wooden piles, with a sickly substance clinging to the latter, like green hair...led down through the ooze and slush to the ebb-tide. There was a story that one of the pits dug for the dead in the time of the Great Plague was hereabout; and a blighting influence seemed to have proceeded from it over the whole place

Even more blighted, and just as intermingled in the life of the streets, were the prison hulks, which had been established during the American Revolution, when criminals could no longer be shipped off to the colonies. Here prisoners were held in decommissioned ships berthed at Woolwich and other navy yards, in theory on a temporary basis during wartime. But long after transportation to Australia had replaced transportation to the former colonies, the hulks continued to be used. Sometimes prisoners were held on the hulks while awaiting transportation, as was the case with Magwitch in
Great Expectations
. All the prisoners on those in London worked in the navy yards alongside regular employees, providing free labour that the government found invaluable, loading and unloading ships, hauling coal and doing whatever heavy unskilled work was necessary in tandem with paid workers.

Thus prisons and slums were equated in people’s minds: the prisons housed the criminally poor; the slums the merely poor. Throughout the century, as many journalists toured the slums as the prisons, describing for their readers what they saw. While these generally middle-class accounts are reports from outsiders looking in, they are with few exceptions all we have

For poor children, like Oliver Twist, it was often but a short step from poverty to crime, with the punishment being prison, transportation or worse. Accounts of the homeless – particularly homeless children – pervade Dickens’ work, fiction and non-fiction alike.
⁵⁶
Partly this was to do with his own feeling of having been, as he later called it, ‘thrown away’ as a child, when, ‘but for the mercy of God, I might easily have [become], for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a little vagabond’. There is little difference between this response and that of the semi-autobiographical David Copperfield. When David finally finds his aunt after having been thrown away himself, he says, ‘I thought of all the solitary places under the night sky where I had slept, and...I prayed that I never might be houseless any more, and never might forget the houseless.’ The great nineteenth-century creator of the idea of ‘home’ was driven by this childhood sense of homelessness.

Dickens’ horror at the destitution he saw all about him appears over and over in his accounts of his long night walks, barely changing over the decades. On one evening, in 1856, in a piece he carefully entitled ‘A Nightly Scene in London’, he spotted five ‘bundles of rags’ sleeping on the pavement in the rain outside the Whitechapel Workhouse. Being Dickens, he
of course went to question the Master and, being Dickens, he also received a truthful answer: ‘Why, Lord bless my soul, what am I to do? What can I do? The place is full. The place is always full – every night. I must give the preference to women with children, mustn’t I?’ One of the women outside said she hadn’t eaten all day, apart from refuse picked up off the ground at the market. Dickens gave her and her companions 1s each to buy some food and get a few nights’ lodging. A crowd of starving collected around him as he did this, but ‘the spectators...let us pass; and not one of them, by word, or look, or gesture, begged of us...there was a feeling among them all, that their necessities were not to be placed by the side of such a spectacle; and they opened a way for us in profound silence, and let us go.’

On another night, this respect, or perhaps resignation, was absent:

I overturned a wretched little creature, who, clutching at the rags of a pair of trousers with one of its claws, and at its ragged hair with the other, pattered with bare feet over the muddy stones. I stopped to raise and succour this poor weeping wretch, and fifty like it...were about me in a moment, begging, tumbling, fighting, clamouring, yelling, shivering in their nakedness and hunger. The piece of money I had put into the claw of the child I had over-turned was clawed out of it, and was again clawed out of that wolfish grip, and again out of that, and soon I had no notion in what part of the obscene scuffle in the mud, of rags and legs and arms and dirt, the money might be.

The visceral response that is so close to the surface is not just born of his sympathy for these people ‘thrown away’, but derives from the knowledge that, had life turned out only a little differently, he might have been one of them.

Much of the middle-class disdain for the poor was the result of incomprehension, owing to the increasing separation of the classes. Previously, the rich and poor had lived in the same districts: the rich in the main streets, the poor in the service streets behind. As London expanded, to meet the needs of the growing numbers of workers and residents in the City and the West End the houses of the poor were demolished (up to 25 per cent vanished between 1830 and 1850 alone). Their residents were forced into areas that
were already slums, or would soon become so through overcrowding, while the prosperous, in turn, moved out of the city centre to the new suburbs.

Slums developed for a range of reasons. In some areas, where speculative building had failed – huge houses were built in Notting Dale for the prosperous who never came, put off by the nearby piggeries and brickfields – the houses were divided up into lodgings for the poor. Some areas failed to attract the affluent for reasons no one quite understood. Portland Town, on the north-east corner of Regent’s Park, never had the cachet of St John’s Wood next door; Pimlico, on the edge of Belgravia, should have been a desirable location for the middle classes, but was not, perhaps because of its marshy ground; Chelsea, despite being near the country and with good roads into town, was low-lying and prone to flooding. Other areas degenerated as employment patterns changed: in Spitalfields, as the weaving industry was destroyed by industrialization and the abolition of import duties on foreign textiles, the once-prosperous workers’ houses were subdivided among multiple tenants. By 1851, Hampstead housed 5.3 people per acre and Kensington 16.2 per acre, while Chelsea accommodated 65.4, Westminster 71.5, St Martin-in-the-Fields 80.8, Marylebone 104.5, St Giles 221.2 and the Strand 255.5. The poor had become an alien race.

At the beginning of the century, there were a dozen or so large slum districts. In the centre of town, St Giles – sometimes known as the Holy Land, possibly for its large number of Irish residents – ran south from Tottenham Court Road and Bloomsbury, with Soho on its western edge, down to Seven Dials on the east; St Martin-in-the-Fields ran westwards from the church to Swallow Street, off Piccadilly; the Devil’s Acre, around Tothill Fields, and Old and New Pye Streets, clustered near Parliament. Heading east, Clare Market ran from High Holborn to the Strand; Saffron Hill or Field Lane were two names for one slum, in Clerkenwell, bordering the Fleet Ditch. Smithfield held more tenements and back-courts, as did the area around Golden Lane and Whitecross Street. Further east still, around Shoreditch, Old Nichol was a slum district, as were increasing areas of Bethnal Green. In Spitalfields, Rose Lane, Flower Street, Dean Street and Petticoat Lane were the centre of another slum; in Whitechapel, the slum areas developed around Rosemary Lane. South of the river, the
slums of Old Mint lay in Bermondsey, as did Jacob’s Island, which was not an island at all but a swampy area where the River Neckinger met the Thames.

Several of these districts were used in
Oliver Twist
: Fagin’s ‘ken’ is ‘in the filthiest part of Little Saffron-Hill’, and his second hideout is ‘in the neighbourhood of Whitechapel’, while Sikes lives in Bethnal Green, possibly in Old Nichol Street itself, while his final hideout was Jacob’s Island. The tone was set for readers when Oliver first walks into London: the route he follows is ‘across the classic ground which once bore the name of Hockley-in-the-hole’, which many would have then recognized as a district in
The Beggar’s Opera
, that eighteenth-century celebration of rogues and thieves.

These areas were presented to middle-class readers as a voyage into the unknown, with myriad references to the confusion created by the mazes of courts and alleys. In
Sketches by Boz
, a stranger in Seven Dials is faced with alleys that ‘dart in all directions’ before they vanish into an ‘unwholesome vapour’, like a ship at sea moving into the foggy distance. Anyone even attempting to navigate the courts, warned Sala, was liable to become ‘irretrievably lost’; despite living in Great St Andrew Street (roughly where Charing Cross Road is today), he wrote: ‘I declare that I never yet knew the exact way, in or out of that seven-fold mystery.’ And the way itself was always presented as dangerous. Donald Shaw, a sporting upper-class gent with a military background, described going to the ‘dens of infamy’ in the 1860s, where he enjoyed himself enormously by imagining that the ‘motley groups’ of drunken sailors he passed all had ‘deadly knives at every girdle’, watched by ‘constables in pairs’ – that is, these were supposedly places where constables were not able to patrol singly because of the danger. He and his friends were taken to an East End pub said to be ‘the most dangerous of all the dens’, and he was thrilled to be told, ‘We’ve got a mangy lot here tonight; they won’t cotton to the gents. If they ask any of their women to dance it will be taken as an affront, and if they don’t ask them it will be taken as an affront.’ Yet the leader of his clique, the Marquess of Hastings, had only to shout out, ‘What cheer...my hearties,’ and everyone settled down amicably to drink together. (Shaw appears not to notice that this rather invalidates his shivery thrill at the danger.) More realistic was
Dickens, mocking that sort of fearful gloating when he wrote to a friend: ‘I...mean to take a great, London, back-slums kind of walk tonight, seeking adventures in knight errant style.’

Field Lane was renowned as being ‘occupied entirely by receivers of stolen goods, which...are openly spread out for sale. Here you may
re
-purchase your own hat, boots, or umbrella.’ Thomas Trollope claimed that in 1818, aged eight, he had visited the notorious street, drawn by adult stories of its wickedness. It is notable that, if his story is true, an eight-year-old child could venture there without hindrance, much less violence. Dickens was sharp on the notion of no-go areas. Even in failing health, in the year before he died, he routinely visited these districts with no trouble at all: ‘How often...have I been forced to swallow, in police-reports, the intolerable stereotyped pill of nonsense, how that the police-constable informed the worthy magistrate how that the associates of the prisoner did...dwell in a street or court which no man dared go down.’ He was aware, however, that both the public and many magistrates believed such stories.

Dickens walked at night for journalistic purposes, and in his sympathetic portrait of a night-walking doctor in
Bleak House
– ‘he often pauses and looks about him, up and down the miserable by-ways. Nor is he merely curious, for in his bright dark eye there is compassionate interest; and as he looks here and there, he seems to understand such wretchedness and to have studied it before’ – it is hard not to see a portrait of the night-walking author. In
Household Words
the previous year, he had described going to St Giles to see a tramps’ lodging house, where, as the door opens, the visitor is ‘stricken back by the pestilent breath that issues from within’: ‘Ten, twenty, thirty – who can count them! Men, women, children, for the most part naked, heaped upon the floor like maggots in a cheese!’
⁵⁷
These lodging houses were different from ‘lodgings’. Many of the comfortably
middle class, and even rich, lived in lodgings, or rooms rented in a house, while lodgings for working people were single rooms converted for a whole family, perhaps several families. In
Nicholas Nickleby
, in the poor clerk Newman Noggs’ lodgings, ‘the first-floor lodgers, being flush of furniture, kept an old mahogany table – real mahogany – on the landing-place...On the second storey, the spare furniture dwindled down to a couple of old deal chairs...The storey above, boasted no greater excess than a worm-eaten wash-tub; and the garret landing-place displayed no costlier articles than two crippled pitchers, and some broken blacking-bottles.’ (The blacking bottles were Dickens’ own secret poverty indicator, a reminder of his days in the blacking factory.)