The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London (3 page)

Dickens now did something extraordinary. Nine months before he finished
Pickwick Papers
, this man of prodigious energy, only twenty-five years old, began to write
Oliver Twist
, one of the world’s most famous novels, whose ‘Please, sir, I want some more’ is familiar even to the millions who have never read it. And then, five months after he completed
Pickwick
, he started his third novel,
Nicholas Nickleby
, before
Oliver Twist
, his second, had reached its halfway point.
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This energy, this amazing outpouring of imaginative literature, suited the age.
Oliver Twist
was being read while William IV was still on the throne, for Dickens, contrary to our easy assumptions, was not a Victorian, or not solely a Victorian. He was born in the reign of George II, although by 1836
the old king was permanently mad, as well as deaf and blind: the Regency had been declared the previous year, and the Prince Regent set the rackety and louche tone of the upper reaches of society. In 1820, when Dickens was still a boy in Chatham, the Prince Regent inherited the throne as George IV; Dickens was nineteen when the old stone London Bridge, a symbol of London for 600 years, was replaced. Even as his writing career took off, the new era had not properly begun: as Bill Sikes is hunted down at the end of
Oliver Twist
, his pursuers demand that a door be opened ‘in the king’s name’. By the time the eighteen-year-old Victoria came to the throne in 1837, Dickens was twenty-five, an established author, a magazine editor and a married man with a family. And when he died in 1870, the Victorian age still had thirty years to run. But although he was therefore not purely Victorian, Dickens’ life – and Dickens’ London – form a perfect optic through which to see the city’s transformation. His was the London of dubious beginnings, of Regency grandiosity, as well as of early Victorian earnestness and endeavour, expansionism and technological advancement.
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Dickens would describe all these qualities as though no one had ever seen them before. And after he described them, no one would be able to see them again except through his eyes. Throughout his life, peripatetic residentially as well as psychologically – living at over two dozen London addresses in a half-century – Dickens covered the whole of London, from the East End and the City, north to Camden, through Westminster and west to Hammersmith, south along the shores of the river. Even when he was officially settled, he frequently maintained several addresses at once, some known to his friends and family, others more or less kept hidden. In the 1850s, the Dickens family home was in Bloomsbury, with a country house in Kent. Dickens was proprietor and editor of the magazines
Household Words
from 1850 to 1859, and of
All the Year Round
from 1859 to his death in 1870. Both magazines had offices in Covent Garden with rooms where he stayed overnight; and Ellen Ternan, his secret mistress, lived at first
close to his early childhood home in Camden Town, then in the suburbs south of the river. Dickens could be different people at different times in different places, changing en route as he strode from one to another.

Dickens’ London was a place of the mind, but it was also a real place. Much of what we take today to be the marvellous imaginings of a visionary novelist turn out on inspection to be the reportage of a great observer. In 1853, Dickens published an essay, ‘Gone Astray’, in which the narrator tells of a day when, as ‘a very small boy indeed’, he is taken to see St Giles’ Church, lying between Covent Garden and the present-day Charing Cross Road, then on the edge of the fearsome slum of St Giles. From there his adult companion takes him to Northumberland House, which closed off the south side of what became Trafalgar Square, in a ‘narrow, crowded, inconvenient street’. There the boy-narrator loses his accompanying adult and is off on his own, walking along the Strand, down Fleet Street, past Temple Bar – the Wren-designed stone gateway where the Strand and Fleet Street meet, which was the formal demarcation line between the West End and the City – seeing from there the great dome of St Paul’s.
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He wanders through the City, past the Royal Exchange, then the Mansion House, home of the City’s Lord Mayor, and finally reaches Whitechapel: ‘This is literally and exactly how I went astray.’ It also, ‘literally and exactly’, covers the heart of Dickens’ London, the streets he walked compulsively, obsessively, before transforming them into art until his death at only fifty-eight. One journalist, a protégé of Dickens, described how the author regularly appeared like the pantomime demon, popping up anywhere and everywhere: ‘A hansom whirled you by the Bell and Horns at Brompton, and there he was, striding out, as with seven-league boots, seemingly in the direction of North-end, Fulham. The Metropolitan Railway sent you forth at Lisson-grove, and you met him plodding speedily towards the Yorkshire Stingo [pub]. He was to be met rapidly skirting the grim brick wall of the prison in Coldbath-fields,
or trudging along the Seven Sisters-road at Holloway, or bearing, under a steady press of sail, underneath Highgate Archway, or pursuing the even tenor of his way up to the Vauxhall-bridge-road.’
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The younger man found Dickens’ appearance as he walked the streets ‘decidedly “odd”’, delighting as he did in bright colours and clothes cut with dramatic flair. This was frequently commented on later in the nineteenth century by younger men who were unaware that Dickens had retained to the end of his life the Regency’s love of bright colours and dandified attitudes. (He shared this trait with another colourful dresser, Disraeli, eight years his senior.) As he walked along, this small, fine-boned man presented himself with a ‘slight flavour of the whipper-snapper’, a dashing air, and ‘remarkably upright’ carriage. Over the years, the impression he made on the street shifted from that of a ‘pretty-boy-looking sort of figure’ to ‘A man of sanguine complexion, deeply lined & scantily bearded…countenance alert and observant, scornful somewhat and sour’; yet even then, when he was ageing, he kept his ‘light step and jaunty air’. With a ‘brand new hat airily cocked on one side’, he continued to march along at breakneck pace through the city streets well into his final years.

These walks were in part a way of processing his work, thinking out his fiction with his feet. In Switzerland, he lamented to John Forster, ‘The absence of any accessible streets continues to worry me…at night I want them beyond description. I don’t seem able to get rid of my spectres unless I can lose them in crowds.’ The narrator who opens
The Old Curiosity Shop
has much in common with his author: ‘Night is generally my time for walking…it affords me greater opportunity of speculating on the characters and occupations of those who fill the streets…a glimpse of passing faces caught by the light of a street-lamp or a shop window is often better for my purpose than their full revelation in the daylight.’

But other types of walks had other purposes. There was the ‘straight on end to a definite goal at a round pace’ walk, and the ‘objectless, loitering,
and purely vagabond’ walk: walking to get places, and walking for the fun of it, for looking, and for being looked at. Many people did both, but it may be that Dickens wrote more about walking and wandering than anyone else. ‘Whenever we have an hour or two to spare, there is nothing we enjoy more than a little amateur vagrancy – walking up one street and down another, and staring into shop windows, and gazing about as if, instead of being on intimate terms with every shop and house…the whole were an unknown region to our wandering mind.’ According to his contemporaries, he was ‘on intimate terms’ with almost every district. A man who had worked with him when he had been an adolescent solicitor’s clerk said, ‘He knew it all from Bow to Brentford.’ Four decades later, at the end of his life, they were saying the same: give Dickens the name of almost any street and he could ‘tell you all that is in it, what each shop was, what the grocer’s name was, [and] how many scraps of orange-peel there were on the pavement’. His London, in the words of a reviewer, was described ‘with the accuracy of a cabman’.

Walking kept the author himself anchored to the great city. In his youth, Dickens described ‘lounging one evening, down Oxford-street’; later, as a magazine editor, he recommended to his journalists that they actively choose their subjects in the city that he still found a daily novelty: ‘Suggest to him Saturday night in London, or London Markets…the most extraordinary men…the most extraordinary things…the strangest Shows – and the wildest’. In the decade before his death, he assumed the guise of ‘The Uncommercial Traveller’ (a ‘traveller’ being a travelling salesman), ‘always on the road…I travel for the great house of Human Interest Brothers…I am always wandering here and there…seeing many little things, and some great things, which, because they interest me, I think may interest others.’

Previous essays about London, by authors such as Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt, had been filled with history, with learned asides, with a great panoply of education. Dickens, from the first, with
Sketches by Boz
, truly did sketch what he saw: the people of the streets and the world that these people lived in.
Pickwick Papers
had originally been planned as a series of vignettes ‘illustrative of manners and life in the country’, as the Londoner Mr Pickwick makes tours into different parts of the country. In the fourth
instalment the cockney servant Sam Weller appeared at the White Hart Inn, in the Borough, south of the river. His knowledge of London was much like that of his creator, ‘extensive and peculiar’, and with him Dickens found his subject and his audience – for it was with this issue that sales took off and success was assured.

For the rest of his career, Dickens continued to find his subjects in the streets, or in journalistic descriptions of the streets. In
Dombey and Son
, Rob the Grinder is a working-class boy sent to a school through a charity that obliged him to wear a specific old-fashioned uniform. The
Illustrated London News
printed engravings of these outfits four years before the novel was begun. In
Our Mutual Friend
, Gaffer Hexam, who dredges corpses out of the river, the dustmen who collect household waste and Betty Higden, the itinerant pedlar, all have their street equivalents in Henry Mayhew’s great compendium of the London street workers,
London Labour and the
London Poor
. And in
Household Words
Dickens remembered a woman who had roamed Berners Street in his childhood, and who was said to have lost her mind when abandoned by her fiancé, wearing her wedding dress ever after – the inspiration for Miss Havisham in
Great Expectations
, found on the London streets.

These streets that Dickens drew on his whole life were a hive of activity, a route for commuters, a passage from home to work and from work to home. But they were also a place of work itself, as well as one of leisure and amusement. The streets had purpose to them; they were a destination as well as a means of reaching a destination.

‘The streets’ were not, however, a stable entity throughout the century. They, like London, were undergoing an unprecedented transformation: they were old, with much of London dating to its reconstruction after the Great Fire of 1666; and they were new, as modernity gathered pace and changed the face of the city, bringing railways, street lighting and other innovations; they were constantly renewing – London was, for most of the century, one never-ending building site. In 1800, London was already the largest city ever known, double the size of Paris with more than 1 million inhabitants, living in 136,000 houses; by 1851 nearly 3 million people occupied 306,000 houses;
at the end of the century, that figure had more than doubled again, to 6.5 million people, and 6 million houses had gone up over the previous seventy-five years. These statistics omit the new roads that had been constructed, the shops that had been built, the offices, the railway and underground stations, the sewers, the water mains and all the other infrastructure of modernity that had been added to the essentially seventeenth-century city that London had been in 1800.

And within the single entity called London, many Londons existed simultaneously. At two in the morning at a street vendor’s coffee stall, young men on a night out might look for prostitutes, among the milliners’ drudges returning home after another sixteen-hour day, who themselves had passed street children sleeping on doorsteps and under the railway arches. They, in their turn, foraged for their breakfast at four in the morning among market refuse, nimbly avoiding the carriages of the wealthy, who were returning home from assemblies and balls. These vehicles crossed the paths of the watercress sellers heading for the markets before dawn, so that they could be on their suburban selling routes by six, to supply breakfast greens to the households of the now-sleeping young men. Similarly London could be measured in time as well as space, physically and metaphorically. Covent Garden was the location of the market and the thriving vice trade; it was the centre that fed the populace and the location of two of London’s most important theatres. Drury Lane, behind the market, was a byword for poverty and filth, while the Lowther Arcade, a few hundred yards away, was the haunt of the wealthy who lounged their days away shopping for luxury goods.

The economist and journalist Walter Bagehot encapsulated Dickens’ encyclopaedic embrace of the city in a neat metaphor: ‘London is like a newspaper. Everything is there, and everything is disconnected…As we change from the broad leader to the squalid police report, we pass a corner and we are in a changed world.’ Dickens’ critics complain that his characters are caricatures, with mannerisms and tics substituting for personality and emotion. But Dickens was capturing actual people as they flitted along the streets, their phrases overheard, their characters snatched on the hoof as they passed each other in London’s hurly-burly. He created, he said, a ‘fanciful
photograph in my mind’. ‘I couldn’t help,’ he wrote, ‘looking upon my mind…as a sort of capitally prepared and highly sensitive [photographic] plate. And I said, without the least conceit…“it really is a pleasure to work with you, you receive the impression so nicely”.’
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