The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London (4 page)

Whilst these impressions were real, they were also radically reworked by Dickens’ imagination to create new realities, well recognized by his fellow artists. Henry James described Dickens’ type of fiction, with its real places and real street names, as having the ‘solidity of specification’; Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke of Dickens’ ‘London tracts’. So real were these tracts that when the American historian Francis Parkman arrived in London, ‘I thought I had been there before. There, in flesh and blood, was the whole host of characters that figured’ in Dickens – the people, the traffic: everything, he marvelled.

Details that Londoners didn’t even notice they were noticing were given a place in the sharp-eyed author’s books. Like foreigners, Dickens noted the native customs: he reproduced them faithfully for the locals, just as the visitors reported them to their audiences at home. In
À Rebours
(1884), by the French decadent novelist J.-K. Huysmans, the hero drifts into a daydream in an English bar in Paris, peopling the Parisian cellar with customers culled from his favourite Dickens novels. ‘He settled down comfortably in this London of the imagination…believing for a moment that the dismal hootings of the tugs behind the Tuileries were coming from boats on the Thames.’ As Walter Benjamin quoted half a century later, ‘Dickens did not stamp these places on his mind; he stamped his mind on these places.’ Dickens created London as much as London created Dickens.

As the city changed, what was imagination and what reportage has blurred and become hard to distinguish. Jokes that Dickens’ readers understood, dry asides on the streets that he and they walked so regularly, for us lie deeply buried. This book is an attempt to bring these details to the surface once more, to look at the streets of London as Dickens and his
fellow Londoners saw it, to examine its workings, to take a walk, in effect, through the city as it appeared in Dickens’ lifetime, from 1812 to 1870.

Mr Micawber, the young David Copperfield’s feckless but faithful friend, offered his services on David’s first day in London: ‘Under the impression…that your peregrinations in this metropolis have not as yet been extensive, and that you might have some difficulty in penetrating the arcana of the Modern Babylon…in short…that you might lose yourself – I shall be happy to call this evening, and install you in the knowledge of the nearest way.’

The arcana of the modern Babylon: like Mr Micawber, Dickens reveals to his readers the occult secrets of London, installing in us, his readers, the knowledge of the nearest, and best, way. The least we
can do is follow him.

PART ONE

The City Wakes

1810: The Berners Street Hoax

E
arly one morning in November 1810, long before breakfast, a chimney sweep knocked at the basement door of a respectable house in Berners Street, just north of Oxford Street. He had been sent for, he said. Mystified, the residents said they had no need of a sweep and closed the door. That was the last moment of peace they had that day, for soon the house was besieged by sweeps, all claiming they had been summoned. They were swiftly followed by dozens of wagons bringing coal that the drivers said had been ordered, and by legions of fishmongers with the day’s catch, also apparently required by the house’s mistress, one Mrs Tottenham.

Soon came ‘piano-fortes by dozens, and coal-waggons by scores – two thousand five hundred raspberry tarts from half a hundred pastry-cooks – a squad of surgeons – a battalion of physicians, and a legion of apothecaries – lovers to see sweethearts; ladies to find lovers – upholsterers to furnish houses, and architects to build them – gigs, dog-carts, and glass-coaches, enough to convey half the free-holders of Middlesex to Brentford’. Before this horde had retreated, on came an endless stream of tradespeople:

Invitations and orders were sent in her name,

(In truth, I must own, ’twas a scandalous shame)

To milliners, wine-merchants, lawyers, musicians,

Oculists, coal-merchants, barbers, opticians,

Men of fashion, men cooks, surgeons, sweeps, undertakers,

Confectioners, fishmongers, innkeepers, bakers,

Men-midwives – the man who exhibits a bear,

And, O worse than all! to his
lordship the mayor
.

All were earnestly begged to be at her door

Precisely at
two
, or a little before,

The surgeons first, armed with catheters, arrive

And impatiently ask is the patient alive.

The man servant stares – now ten midwives appear,

‘Pray, sir, does the lady in labor [sic] live here?’

‘Here’s a shell,’ cries a man, ‘for the lady that’s dead,

‘My master’s behind with the coffin of lead.’

Next a waggon, with furniture loaded approaches,

Then a hearse all be-plumed and six mourning coaches,

Six baskets of groceries – sugars, teas, figs;

Ten drays full of beer – twenty boxes of wigs.

Fifty hampers of wine, twenty dozen French rolls,

Fifteen huge waggon loads of best Newcastle coals –

But the best joke of all was to see the fine coach

Of his worship the mayor, all bedizen’d, approach;

As it pass’d up the street the mob shouted aloud,

His lordship was pleased, and most affably bow’d,

Supposing, poor man, he was
cheered
by the crowd…

These were followed by rows of carriages bearing the city’s grandees, all invited to a party. Then came the chairman of the East India Company and the Governor of the Bank of England, both of whom had been promised information on supposed frauds on their companies; even royalty was summoned, in the person of the Duke of Gloucester, who arrived to hear the deathbed confession of an aged family retainer.

The street now teemed with people, their anger at having their time and money wasted dissipating as tradesmen who had been turned away stayed to watch the next batch of hopefuls arrive, to shouts of laughter. But the Lord Mayor was not amused, driving off to the Marlborough Street Police Office to lay a complaint before the magistrates.

… his lordship, it seems, is no friend to such jokes…

In sooth ’twas a shame (not withstanding ’twas witty)

To make such a fool of the
lord of the city
…

Away drove his lordship, by thousands attended,

The people dispersed, and thus the hoax ended…

The magistrates ordered their officers out to disperse the crowds, but by then even more had arrived, this time great numbers of servants who had
received letters offering them positions. It was long after dark before Mrs Tottenham was left in peace.

Those in the know had, almost from the first, suspected that this was a trick perpetrated by Theodore Hook, a composer, farceur and man about town. Today his main claim to fame is that one of his plays was mocked by Byron in
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers
, but at the time the author of
Teleki
was famous in his own right, for pranks and practical jokes as much as his writing. Rumour immediately attributed this hoax to Hook, claiming that he had sent out hundreds – some said thousands – of letters ordering goods and services, answering advertisements for lost or found items, and directing all to 54 Berners Street, before hiring rooms in the house across the road so he and his friends might watch the fun in comfort.

Nancy Mathews – the wife of the actor Charles Mathews and a great friend of Hook – claimed after his death, that it was not he who had perpetrated this hoax at all: it had been, she said, ‘designed and executed by a young gentleman, now a high, and one of the most rigid Churchmen in the kingdom’. (The reality of an unnamed person is always slightly suspect, but it is worth noting that Hook’s brother, also conveniently deceased by this time, had been Dean of Worcester, and the dean’s son was a High Churchman with decidedly Tory leanings.) Mrs Mathews’ chief point was that this famous hoax was not the original. Hook, she said, had not been the perpetrator of the Berners Street Hoax, but had instead been responsible for an earlier hoax, which she said occurred in Bedford Street. For weeks, she claimed, he had assiduously replied to classified advertisements in the newspapers: ‘everything
lost
had been found by Mr. — of Bedford Street. Every thing found had been lost by Mr. — of Bedford Street. Every servant wanting a place, was sure to find an excellent one in the family of Mr. — of Bedford Street. If money was to be
borrowed
, it would be lent on the most liberal terms, by Mr. — of Bedford Street. If money was to be
lent
, it would be borrowed, on most advantageous interest, by Mr. — of Bedford Street.’

And sure enough,

on the following day, punctual as a lover, came…
honest men
leading the animals they had
found
, expecting their reward…and disconsolate owners 20 The Victorian City
of missing pets, hoping to regain the favourites they had lost. Men and maids…eager for ‘
sitiwations
’, – congregated in such numbers, that there was not a place left…by and bye came carts, with large teams…with many a cauldron of coal, labouring up the narrow slanting street, followed by pianoforte carriages – crates of china and glass…rolls of carpeting – potatoes and firewood…trays of turtle – bags of flour – packages of flannel and linen – packing cases and trunks of every dimension – chariots and horses – asses – dogs – brewers’ drays and butchers’ trays – confectionery and books – wheel-barrows, surgeons’ instruments and mangles – sides of bacon – boots and shoes – bows and arrows – guns and pistols, &c. &c.

As with Berners Street later, when the hoax was discovered at first everyone was enraged, until a change of mood overcame the crowd, and each person hoaxed remained for the sheer amusement of seeing their successors being imposed upon in turn: ‘on each arrival a loud huzza from the assembled crowd proclaimed “
a brother won!
”’

Whether the site was Bedford Street, or Berners Street, the hoax took place in public, to be enjoyed by the public, not by a discerning, selfselecting group, such as would buy a book, or a newspaper, or go to a play, but by the indiscriminate pedestrian, the random passer-by. The perpetrator of the hoax, whether Hook or the high and rigid churchman, saw the streets not as a place to pass through on the way from one building to another, but as a place worth being in. Two months later, an epilogue to a play staged at the Lyceum included a mention of a ‘
Hoax
’ that had ‘set London in a grin’ for the pleasure of giving ‘gazing mobs a treat’. The enjoyment was not for the perpetrators but for the participants: those in the street.

The streets of London in the nineteenth century were, in many cases, the same ones we walk today. But not only did they look different, their purpose was different; they were used differently. It is that use, that idea of purpose, that needs to be recaptured.

1.

EARLY TO RISE

It is 2.30 in the morning. It is still night, but it is also ‘tomorrow’. By this hour at Covent Garden market, in the centre of London, the streets are alive. Long lines of carts and vans and costermongers’ barrows are forming in the surrounding streets. Lights are being lit ‘in the upper windows of public houses – not the inhabitants retiring to rest, but of active proprietors preparing…for the new day…The roadway is already blocked up, and the by-streets are rapidly filling.’

By dawn, the streets leading into London were regularly filled with carriages, with carts laden with goods, and with long lines of men and women (mostly women), plodding down Piccadilly, along Green Park, on their way to Covent Garden, carrying heavy baskets of fruit on their heads as they walked from the market gardens in Fulham several miles away. More approached Covent Garden from the south, from the market gardens that lined the south-west side of the river.

Interspersed with these suppliers and produce sellers were many more who made their living around and in the markets. The coffee-stall keepers appeared carrying cans of coffee from yokes on their shoulders, the little smudge-pot charcoal fires already lit underneath, winking in the diminishing darkness. Then ‘a butcher’s light chaise-cart rattled past…with the men huddled in the bottom of the vehicle, behind the driver…dozing as they drove along’, followed by ‘some tall and stalwart brewer’s drayman…(for these men are among the first in the streets), in his dirty, drab, flushing jacket, red night-cap, and leathern leggings’.