The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London (42 page)

All along the river, from Rotherhithe to Deptford and then on to Greenwich, ‘a whole riverside full of tea-gardens’ could be found flourishing. ‘Here come, emphatically, the public; the working, toiling, sweating, patient’ people with their families, out for a day’s river excursion.

The river had long provided amusement. In
Great Expectations
, set in the 1820s, once Pip becomes prosperous he takes up sculling as a suitably gentlemanly pastime, something Dickens himself had done as a young man when he could afford it. Those with less cash went to riverside pubs such as the Dolphin and Swan taverns, both at Hungerford market, where customers ‘used to drink and smoke, and pick periwinkles’, sitting on the roof terraces and tossing pennies to mudlarks. Numerous regattas were held; occasionally there might be swimming matches (one, from London Bridge to Greenwich, in a week when 678 Londoners died of cholera). More commonly, rowing competitions, often for professional watermen, offered prizes by ‘the ladies and gentlemen’ of the neighbourhood. In the 1840s, a
Thames Watermen’s Royal Regatta was a two-day event, while even after the Great Stink of 1858 two single scullers raced for the ‘championship of the Thames’ between Putney and Mortlake, watched by passengers from a dozen steamers, as well as from the banks, ‘the trees being almost borne down by their living weight’. In addition there were the one-off events. In 1844, a clown from Astley’s theatre announced he would make his voyage downriver from Vauxhall to Westminster Bridge in a washing-tub pulled by four geese. The crowd that turned out to watch ‘was very great’, lining the road past the new Houses of Parliament down Millbank, while across the river wharves and barges were filled with spectators. More followed his progress from boats that accompanied the clown, in full clown-suit, as he travelled downriver (having scheduled his trip so that he was more or less floated along by the tide).

Many amusements were to be found on the banks of the river. Middle-class men had long been accustomed to jaunts to Greenwich to eat fish dinners, the Trafalgar Tavern being the most famous destination. The arrival of steamers made that treat available to greater numbers, so that by the 1850s various river suburbs vied for custom. In Blackwall, Lovegrove’s, the Brunswick or the Artichoke were the places to go. Other favoured establishments were the Star and Garter in Richmond, or inns at Hampton Court, Mortlake, Staines, Ouseley, Chertsey or Gravesend. Edmund Yates remembered that, in the 1850s on a Sunday, ‘a serried phalanx of fifty or sixty…carriages, drags, barouches, cabriolets, broughams and hansoms’ stood waiting outside the numerous hotels that specialized in these dinners. The type of transport is an indication of the diners’ considerable financial resources.

Fish dinners were often organized by professional men to forge professional bonds, as well as pass a pleasant evening. Twenty pupils and assistants of the architect Sir Charles Barry gave such a dinner in 1850, with Sir Charles as the guest of honour, ‘on the occasion of their forming a society or club among themselves for the purpose of continuing or increasing the[ir] friendship…and to evince their appreciation of the high talent of Mr. Barry’. The importance the participants placed on the gatherings can be seen from the fact that in 1854, during the Crimean War, cabinet ministers Lord John Russell, Lord Palmerston, Lord Canning, Lord Stanley and even
Sidney Herbert, then the Secretary at War, still turned out for their annual fish dinner at Greenwich.

In 1842, a dinner was given for Dickens at the Trafalgar Tavern in Greenwich, to mark his return from America. The dinner took very much the standard form, in which over two dozen men ate turtle soup and whitebait, with Frederick Marryat (author of
Mr Midshipman Easy
and
The Children of the New Forest
) in the chair, and the journalist William Jerdan his vice-chair. They sang in chorus and then each man did a solo turn, whether a comic skit, an impression, a recitation or a song. They toasted ‘the Boz’, who returned his thanks with a speech. The Revd Richard Barham (author of
The Ingoldsby Legends
) and the illustrator George Cruikshank then sang again. ‘Mrs Boz’, who was of course not present, was toasted, followed by more songs and more toasts, before all shook hands in friendship. This was an event involving the upper middle classes, taking place in private; but publicly Dickens also sent his financially stretched lower-middle-class characters for riverside dinners on special occasions. In
Our Mutual Friend
, Bella Wilfer and her father, a poor clerk, sneak away for a day out to Greenwich, where they eat ‘dishes of fish’; when she marries the ostensibly poor John Rokesmith, this is where they return for the wedding breakfast.

Once steamer fares dropped, the trip itself became the focus of the day for many. Steamers ran from London Bridge (sometimes Westminster) to Gravesend, or nearby Rosherville, or Greenwich. In the late 1860s, the journalist James Ritchie described a jaunt to Sheerness and back in the
Princess Alice
. They left London Bridge at 10.30, and, as they went downriver, everyone had ‘a good dinner on board, well served and at a very moderate price’, supplemented by tea and shrimps later. Ritchie (who had a temperance streak) disapproved of the ‘unnecessary demand for beer’ and judged that ‘smoking may be carried to excess’, but added patronizingly that it was, after all, only a ‘little wildness’. The 700 or 800 excursionists then spent an hour and a half in Sheerness before the return journey, with a band and dancing on board, before reaching London Bridge again at 9 p.m.
⁹¹
Dickens himself chartered a steamer as late as 1860, going from Blackwall to Southend and back with a group of friends for a day on the river.

But throughout the period, the main destination remained Greenwich. In the summer, people went there for the fish dinners, or the park, or the Observatory, or the many taverns, or simply for pleasant walks. At Easter, however, it was Greenwich Fair that drew the masses. Fairs declined through the first half of the century and in many cases ceased to exist as major civic events. In 1819,
Leigh’s New Picture of London
listed eighty-six fair-days in nearly thirty locations around London. ‘[E]stablishments so popular, and so productive of honest joy,’ it foresaw, ‘will never be discountenanced by a wise legislature.’ By the 1839 edition of the same guidebook, the sole surviving fair in central London was Bartholomew Fair, and ‘this antique nuisance’ was, the author shrugged in disdain, now a display of ‘flagrant evils’.

Bartholomew Fair was held in Smithfield, with the market space ‘entirely parcelled out in booths and standings’. In the centre were sellers of oysters and sausages, surrounded by rows of exhibitions; on the pavements behind were sellers of gilt gingerbread, a Barts speciality, and toys. At the beginning of the century, a number of major shows returned annually: Wombwell’s Wild Beast Show, and his competitor Atkins, Ballard’s Menagerie, Astley’s and Clark’s Equestrian Shows and Abraham Saunders’ theatre troupe (as a child Edmund Kean was said to have appeared with Saunders, but this was probably a myth). Richardson’s, Gyngell’s and Scowton’s theatres also mounted yearly productions, plus ‘the usual variety of conjurors, wire-dancers, giants, dwarfs, fat children, learned pigs’. The stalls that housed these shows were vast – some twenty-five feet long, and all at least seven feet high – and they lined the streets for hundreds of yards around the square. But although the fair continued to be accorded prime status – it was opened by the City’s Lord Mayor each year – by 1848 there were only three gingerbread stalls, ‘a few beggarly stalls for the sale of oysters and fruit’, and nothing else.

With the help of the steamers, Greenwich Fair maintained its status for longer. In 1838, when Bartholomew’s Fair still drew 100,000 visitors, Greenwich attracted only half the number, dispersed over a much larger space, with the park covering more than two miles. Yet Bartholomew Fair’s
visitors eventually vanished, while Greenwich’s returned every year. From the landing stage to the park gates, the ‘road is bordered on either side with stalls, games, and hand-waggons, containing goods or refreshments’. In 1838, about forty stalls alone offered a variety of amusements, such as ‘the holes and the sticks’ game, in which a prize (a penknife, a snuffbox) was balanced on a staff, and for a penny participants got three sticks to try to knock them down. If that didn’t appeal, there were sellers of ‘Waterloo crackers and detonating balls…percussion guns, to shoot with at targets for nuts’, or sellers of those rattles known as ‘All the Fun of the Fair’ (see p. 153). At the upper park gates were fortune-tellers and donkey rides, leading to a thoroughfare of orange stalls, food stalls, toy stalls and, to the puzzlement of the American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, a large number of weighing machines, leading him to speculate that perhaps Englishmen wanted to know ‘how solid and physically ponderous they are’. There were also roundabouts
⁹²
and swings, waxworks, peep-shows, freak-shows and shows with learned animals that counted, or knew the alphabet. Then came a row of theatre booths, with drummer boys, or ‘brawny fighting-men’, or jugglers, or ‘posture-makers’ (contortionists and acrobats), performing outside to draw the crowds.

Many other Greenwich amusements were both self-generated and free: the young and ‘even staid men and women’ rolled down One Tree Hill ‘in giggling avalanches’; oranges were thrown at passers-by and were in ‘nowise to be resented, except by returning the salute’. The favourite pastime was Kiss in the Ring: ‘A ring is formed…into the centre of which steps an adventurous youth’, who leads a girl to the centre, where he ‘salutes her on the lips, and retires’, while the girl then does the same with another boy, and so on. Sometimes a girl threw a handkerchief into the ring, and the boy who caught it was permitted to kiss her, ‘always politely raising his hat at the critical instant’. At dusk the bands started to play, and by ten o’clock the dancing booths were filled to bursting.

Both day and night, people danced, and ate, and drank. The road to the fair was lined with booths selling gingerbread, brandy snaps, shellfish, eels – ‘pickled, stewed, and in pies’ – puddings, cold fried fish and oysters (‘in June!’ shuddered one fastidious reporter). Outdoor eating, eating in the streets, was, after all, what most people did, most of the time.

11.

FEEDING THE STREETS

The eight-year-old David Copperfield, alone and adrift in London, buys his meals as most other working men, women and children did: on the street. He has a penny loaf and a pennyworth of milk for breakfast; with supper another penny loaf ‘and a modicum of cheese’. On his way to work he passes ‘the stale pastry put out for sale at half-price at the pastrycooks’ doors’, which he finds difficult to resist, even though it makes a large dent in ‘the money I should have kept for my dinner’. If he succumbs, he either goes without his dinner, or reduces it to a roll or a slice of pudding (a suet and flour savoury dish, which survives as Yorkshire pudding, rather than today’s sweet dishes). ‘I remember two pudding shops, between which I was divided, according to my finances.’ One puts currants in its puddings, and therefore charges double the price of the ordinary pudding, which is ‘stout pale pudding, heavy and flabby’. Nonetheless, ‘many a day did I dine off it’. On days when he rejects the allurements of the stale pastry, he has enough to dine ‘handsomely’ on a saveloy, or cold sausage – salami – and another penny loaf, or ‘a fourpenny plate of red beef from a cook’s shop; or a plate of bread and cheese and a glass of beer, from a miserable old public-house opposite our place of business…Once, I remember carrying my own bread (which I had brought from home in the morning) under my arm, wrapped in a piece of paper…to a famous alamode beef-house [see p. 296] near Drury Lane, and ordering a “small plate” of that delicacy to eat with it.’ When in funds, David buys coffee and bread and butter from a coffee stall for his tea; otherwise he makes do with looking at the butchers’ shops and the markets. ‘I know,’ he says simply, ‘if a shilling were given me…I spent it in a dinner or a tea.’

Even for street urchins, therefore, the range of street food was wide and merged imperceptibly into indoor dining – taking one’s own food to places where other items were prepared, or buying food outdoors that was then taken indoors to be eaten. A fair-sized section of the street-selling population devoted itself to prepared food, and much of it was available virtually round the clock, from pre-dawn breakfasts to post-theatre and post-drinking sandwiches and oysters.

Those selling cooked shellfish on the streets started early, to buy their stocks and prepare them. Hot eels, which were cheap and, because of their gelatinous consistency, filling, were a favourite of labourers and those who worked outdoors. The sellers bought the eels at Billingsgate; then their wives cut them in small pieces and boiled them, thickening the cooking water with flour and flavouring it with parsley and spices. This stew was sold in halfpenny cupfuls, with a dash of vinegar and pepper, from about 10.30 in the morning to about ten at night. Boys were the hot-eel sellers’ most regular customers, and so popular was the dish that most sellers did not even have to shout their wares; the ones who did called, ‘Nice hot eels – nice hot eels!’ or ‘Warm your hands and fill your bellies for a halfpenny!’ Whelk sellers also began their preparations early: the whelks were boiled, drained, then covered with more boiling water and stirred with a broom handle to clean out the mud and dirt, and also make it easier to ‘worm’ them – remove the digestive tract – without damaging the shell. Having been shaken up in cold water, they were ready to set out in little saucers, for between two and eight whelks for a penny. Children were also the main customers for crab claws, which the sellers bought at Billingsgate and boiled up in the yards of their lodgings.

Oysters were legendary as a poor man’s food. In
The Pickwick Papers
, Sam Weller says sagely, ‘poverty and oysters always seem to go together…the poorer a place is, the greater call there seems to be for oysters …Blessed if I don’t think that ven a man’s wery poor, he rushes out of his lodgings, and eats oysters in reg’lar desperation.’
⁹³
Many costers did a daily round selling
fruit and vegetables, later adding another round of oysters, purchasing a bushel at a time and going to poor neighbourhoods. After 6 p.m., when workers were walking home, the sellers shifted to the main streets to sell them a snack at the end of their workday. Alfred Bennett remembered many improvised corner stalls in his childhood, selling four oysters for a penny, ‘opened, vinagared and peppered’. Monday was the best day, when workers still had their wages from Saturday; as the week progressed, business steadily declined.