The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London (48 page)

Until 1837, one of the highlights of street life was the procession of the mailcoaches on the king’s birthday. (George III was born in June; both George IV and William IV in August.) As this was the ‘royal’ mail, for the birthday procession the coaches were freshly painted and varnished; the horses’ manes decorated with flowers, their harnesses with rosettes. The coachmen and guards all received new livery, and wore flowers in their hats, whips and buttonholes. Their families, in their Sunday best, had places of honour inside the mailcoaches as the parade wound its way from St James’s Palace to the main post office. Friedrich von Raumer, quietly reading in the Athenaeum, was roused by the club secretary to watch the coaches pass, such was the popularity of this annual event. In Victoria’s reign, the parade changed its date and was then discontinued, most likely as in the 1830s the mail began to be carried by rail.

Other events of greater or lesser formality, attracting popular attention in varying degrees, occurred throughout the year. On Ascension day (the fortieth day after Easter), ‘the ceremony of beating the Parochial bounds’ was enacted by the parish officials and churchwardens, to denote the limits of each district by walking along the boundary lines between parishes and, with staffs or tree branches, beating, or tapping, the markers that showed the boundaries.
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In the City, well-behaved charity-school children were rewarded by being chosen to beat the bounds, and in Holborn an elaborate ceremonial pantomime was played out annually. The Inns of Court, under ancient statutes that gave them civic rights over their own land, ceremonially closed their gates to the parish authorities, who annually requested – and were refused – permission to enter to enact this civic ritual.

A more spontaneous festivity was the parading of the sweeps on May day. During the year, dirty-faced chimney sweeps were a necessary but not
interesting part of London life. On May day, however, they cleaned themselves up and, with their wives and children dressed in their best, ‘They go about [the streets] in parties of four or five.’ Dickens recalled seeing them ‘dancing...bedecked with pieces of foil, and with ribbons of all gay colours, flying like streamers in every direction...Their sooty faces were reddened with rose-pink, and in the middle of each cheek was a patch of gold-leaf, the hair was frizzed out, and as white as powder could make it, and they wore an old hat cocked for the occasion, and in like manner ornamented with ribbons, and foil, and flowers. In this array were they dancing through the streets, clapping a wooden plate...and soliciting money from all whom they met.’ The women played tambourines or sang, and were traditionally accompanied by a Jack-in-the-Green, a man covered ‘down to the boots with a circular wicker frame of bee-hive contour, carried on the shoulders, and terminating in a dome or pinnacle above his head. This frame was entirely concealed by green boughs and flowers, May blossoms preponderating’, as he ‘pranced, twirled, jumped and capered to the music, while the others danced round’.

As with so many folk customs, throughout the century people complained that the sweeps’ celebration was no longer as it had been when they were children. Dickens in the mid-1830s was already recalling that the sweeps and their wives once used to dress as ‘My Lord’ and ‘My Lady’. Although ‘the “greens” are annually seen to roll along the streets...[and] youths in the garb of clowns, precede them’, it seemed to him that these performers were no longer always sweeps, now being joined by brickmakers, costermongers and other labourers. And while everyone continued to lament the demise of the ritual they remembered, at the same time they reported its observance annually, right through to Dickens’ death in 1870, with Munby that year seeing a ‘May Day band of chimney sweepers’ in Whitehall. Together with the traditional Jack-in-the-Green, there was a ‘King in gilt cocked hat & gilt coat, and a Queen in a black velvet jacket with spangles...gay with ribbons, & pink stockings…All danced around the “Green”, & the Queen…danced vigorously down the street by my side, till I gave her something.’

Derby Day was less of a ritual, but every bit as much a participation event. For many if not most people, going to the races was not the point:
watching those who were going was sport enough. By nine in the morning, ‘Open carriages, with hampers lashed to the footboard, emerge from every turning...At the Regent-circus [now Piccadilly Circus], omnibuses and stage-coaches, “Defiances” and “Resolutions”, “Paddingtons” and “Royal Blues”, have clapped on four horses, and tout for passengers; men on the roofs play horns to attract notice.’ Once on the road and into suburban London, residents could be seen ‘seated on the tidy lawns, or leaning over the garden-walls, watching the mob of vehicles dart past. in front of all these...dwellings were seated mammas and daughters, and at the upper windows the servant-girls were leaning over the sills.’ One journal even memorialized the outing in verse:

With lots of prog
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and lots of grog

Away some thousands scampered,

I cannot tell how much with wine

Their carriages were
hampered
.

They went in gigs, they went in carts,

In coaches and in chaises;

And some in vans adorned by hands

With buttercups and daisies...

Oyster day came later in the year, to mark the start of the oyster season (then on ‘Old St James’s Day’, 25 July, because a shell was the emblem of St James). On the day, boys and girls collected empty oyster shells and built them into little heaps on street corners, or in doorways, setting a candle or a reed light inside to illuminate it. Some children ‘made windows with bits of coloured glass or tinsel’ in their grottoes and stood beside them, soliciting the passers-by for halfpennies or farthings with, ‘Please to remember the grotto.’ (Plate 17 shows a grotto, bottom right.)

Similar solicitations came on 5 November, Guy Fawkes Night, commemorating the unravelling of the 1605 plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament and assassinate James I in order to install a Catholic monarch on the throne.
In the early decades of the nineteenth century, boys made ‘guys’ by stuffing suits of old clothes, which they carried about on chairs, calling out,

Please to remember,

The fifth of November,

Gunpowder, treason and plot.

With the proceeds they would buy fireworks. By the 1840s, Mayhew thought that ‘the character of Guy Fawkes-day has entirely changed’, with a festival, May-day-ish element creeping in. The guys had become much larger than life-sized and were paraded in barrows and carts by boys dressed as clowns, with musicians and dancers tagging along to serenade the guy.

In 1844, Mayhew saw his first ‘celebrity’ guy – that is, the first guy created as a caricature of a popular figure, rather than simply an upright ragbag. The evening had always had an element of anti-Catholic sentiment, owing to its origins, but in a renewed period of anti-Catholic unrest Cardinal Wiseman and the pope were both transformed into guys, with accompanying verses:

A penn’orth of cheese to feed the pope,

A twopenny loaf to choke him,

A pint of beer to wash it down,

And a good large fagot to smoke him!
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In the 1850s, during the Crimean War, a guy of Tsar Nicholas was also accompanied by a verse:

Poke an ingun in his eye –

A squib shove up his nose,
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sirs;

Then roast him till he’s done quite brown,

And Nick to old Nick [that is, the devil] goes, sirs.

Many of the costermongers’ barrows that were used to parade the guys were marked with the names of battles in these years: Inkerman, Balaclava, Sebastopol. In one Peckham neighbourhood in 1855, the locals subscribed £250 for fireworks, in a celebration involving a procession of carriages, bands and possibly 200 people carrying torches, with guys in uniform representing the Crimean generals, all surrounding a guy of the Tsar. After the Indian Mutiny, many bonfires consumed guys with blackened faces bearing signs identifying them as ‘Nana Sa hib, the murderer of women and children in Cawnpore’. By the early 1860s, supporters of both sides of the American Civil War carried guys, ‘the sympathisers with the North exhibiting various phases of slavery’, while southern supporters ‘paraded Mr. President Lincoln in all sorts of vicious shapes’.

The symbols of death when it occurred at home were just as visible to the public on the streets and were designed to elicit a response from strangers. Blinds were drawn in a house of mourning and, for those who could afford it, mutes, men ‘habited from top to toe in suits of sables, their faces composed to decent sympathy’, were stationed outside on the day of a funeral, holding wands, large staffs from which depended black crape drapery, known as weepers.
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Further public indications of family loss were swags of funeral drapery, ‘black or white, as the sex and age of the defunct may be’, hung across the ground-floor façade of the house. For the more prosperous, the fabric might be velvet or embroidered with silver; for the less well off, plain wool. An aristocratic death was marked by a hatchment – a large diamond-shaped shield of canvas with the family’s coat of arms painted on it – hung over the doorway of the house in mourning.
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A black funeral
hearse and carriages, with coachmen and attendants in black and drawn by black-plumed black horses ‘(either by nature or dye-stuffs)’, arrived to transport the coffin and the family. The only variant was when a young girl died, when by tradition the mourning accoutrements were all white, and the coffin was attended by her friends, also in white. For those for whom this level of expenditure was impossible, there were walking funerals, where the coffin was carried, followed by a train of mourners. Or, sadder still, ‘the coffin of a child [was borne] aloft on the shoulders of a single bearer, and followed only by the sorrowing members of the family’.

For public figures in the first half of the nineteenth century, the ceremonial of death was a street event in which outsiders and passers-by were expected to take part. In 1831, an American tourist noticed a funeral procession in the yard of Westminster Abbey. There were just seven official mourners, but, he was happy to see, they were trailed by ‘a respectful multitude’ of strangers. in 1847, the 3rd Duke of Northumberland died. He had attempted to wreck the Slave Trade Abolition Bill, was vehemently anti-Catholic and anti-working-class, as well as being considered rather stupid and extremely arrogant by the public and his peers alike. Yet ‘crowds of persons’ lined the streets to watch his funeral procession travel from Northumberland House to Westminster Abbey.

It was after the mass orgy of ostentatious ceremonial that was the Duke of Wellington’s funeral in 1852 (see pp. 335–46) that funerals of the great, the good and the not-so-good became for the most part quieter events, with less public participation. Less, that is, not none. When Prince Albert died in 1861 he had requested that his funeral be ‘of the plainest and most private character’ and was accordingly buried in a private ceremony at Windsor. Even so, the general public saw themselves as participants in the ritual. On the streets of London, ‘Every one [is] in mourning; all shops boarded across with black; even brass door plates covered with crape’. Cab and bus drivers attached crape rosettes to their whips. Everyone, down to ‘the very poorest and meanest...had put on “decent mourning”, were it only in the shape of
a ribbon or a crape bow’, which custom dictated should be worn for two months. Palmerston’s funeral in 1865 marked a brief return to the old style of bigger and more ostentatious funerals than had been seen for years on the streets of London: for him, White’s, Boodle’s and Brooks’s clubs in St James’s all covered their façades in black drapery. The Reform club topped that with ‘a sable curtain, bearing a viscount’s coronet and the letter “P”, with yellow wreaths of immortelles tastefully festooned...and the pillars and balustrades dressed in black and white’.

This is so foreign to us today that Dickens’ distaste for these elaborate ceremonies seems normal. At the time, however, it was the author’s views that were unusual. Most people thought that outward show conveyed inward respect, even as they also recognized the mercenary spirit behind this trade in the artefacts of death. Mr Mould, the undertaker in
Martin Chuzzlewit
, is thrilled to discover that for one funeral ‘there is positively
NO
limitation...in point of expense!’ and he can ‘to put on my whole establishment of mutes; and mutes come very dear’, as well as ‘any number of walking attendants, dressed in the first style of funeral fashion’. In his will, written the year before his death, Dickens rejected these attitudes once more: ‘I emphatically direct that I be buried in an inexpensive, unostentatious and strictly private manner…that those who attend my funeral wear no scarf, cloak, black bow, long hatband, or any other such revolting absurdity.’
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These were symbols of death rather than death itself, but the actuality was also often seen on the street. The starving poor died publicly where they fell; transportation accidents were common; even more routine was violent death from natural, or man-made, disasters.

In 1857, Dickens was accused of basing his depiction of the collapse of Mrs Clennam’s house in
Little Dorrit
on the recent fall of four houses that made up Maple’s shop on Tottenham Court Road. Stung, he replied that that instalment of the novel had gone to press before the buildings fell,
adding that he had foreshadowed precisely this collapse at the very beginning of the novel, which had begun serialization eighteen months earlier. He need hardly have protested, nor was the Maple’s collapse a one-off. In 1826, a German nobleman, Prince Pückler-Muskau, had written home: ‘A house, by no means old, fell last night in St. James’s-street, close by me, just like a house of cards.’ In 1840, in
The Old Curiosity Shop
, Sampson Brass says: ‘I am a falling house, and the rats...fly from me,’ as we might say, ‘Rats leave a sinking ship.’ Dickens might equally have pointed to newspaper reports of the buildings that had fallen in St Paul’s Churchyard in July 1852, or to the two in Seven Dials three months later, or to the ‘great portion’ of the Excise Office that collapsed in Old Broad Street, killing two, in 1854. Vast numbers of houses, in an arrested state of half falling and being shored up by timber struts, can be seen in almost any contemporary picture of the London streets.