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ENDNOTES

1
. The first citation given in the
Oxford English Dictionary
is from 1881, eleven years after Dickens’ death. But newspapers were using the term ‘Dickensian’ in 1842, when the author was just thirty years old and had yet to publish his greatest works.

2
. I will use City with a capital ‘C’ to mean that area of London that is more or less confined geographically within the old medieval walls governed by the Corporation of the City of London, which now represents the financial district of London; ‘the city’, in lower case, refers to London more generally.

3
. For an explanation of pre-decimal currency, see p. xiii.

4
. Hind was an obsolete word for a servant by the time Dickens was writing, but ‘labouring hind’ was a phrase regularly used in poetry and translations, and would have been recognized as such.

5
. Income and class, inextricably linked, are difficult to compare directly with modern income and social status. However, as a rule of thumb, between £100 and £150 was considered the entry-level income for the lower middle classes for most of the nineteenth century, and £500 was at the upper end of the middle-class scale. Although professional men who earned more (sometimes as much as £1,000) were still considered middle class, they emulated the lifestyles of the upper classes. In turn, the lower echelons of the upper classes, the gentry, often got by on £500 or even less.

6
. A list of Dickens’ major works, with the dates of serial and one-volume first publications, appears on page 425.

7
. It is for this reason that I have cheated slightly, using ‘Victorian’ in my title, even though Dickens’ dates, and the period I cover, begin earlier, and finish earlier, than the period when Victoria reigned (1837–1901.)

8
. Temple Bar, which narrowed one of London’s busiest roads to a mere twenty feet, was dismantled in 1878 after nearly a century as a traffic menace, and was purchased by a brewer to create the entrance to the grounds of his house near Enfield. In 2004, the house having long since become a conference centre, Temple Bar was returned to the City and inserted into the new development at Paternoster Square, beside St Paul’s.

9
. Dickens prided himself on keeping up a regular pace of four and a half miles per hour. Over a mere five miles, this was a ‘breather’; friends learnt to be wary of his ‘busters’, which lasted up to thirty miles.

10
. It is worth remembering that the great illustrator of Dickens’ work named himself ‘Phiz’, which was slang for face, from ‘physiognomy’; the two men together captured the faces that passed them daily, giving the anonymous crowds characters.

11
. It was for this reason that street clocks were common. The lack of timepieces generally was the source of the running joke, renewed by Dickens in
Bleak House
, where ‘we met the cook round the corner coming out of a public-house, wiping her mouth. She mentioned, as she passed us, that she had been to see what o’clock it was.’

12
. Thomas Wright (1839–1909) was the son of a blacksmith who became a tramping worker (see pp. 164–5), before finding employment as a manual labourer in an engineering firm. He studied on his own, and in 1872 became one of the first national school-board visitors, a huge step up in status, if not in pay. He wrote widely on the world of the working man into which he had been born.

13
. G. A. Sala (1828–95) was ostensibly the child of a dancing master who died soon after his birth, although it is likely that his real father was an army officer. Sala was raised by his mother, a singer and teacher, and first became an artist providing illustrations for pennydreadfuls. It was in 1851, with the essay ‘A Key to the Street’, published in Dickens’ journal
Household Words
, that he came to prominence as one of ‘Dickens’ Young Men’, before later becoming a well-known foreign correspondent.

14
. James Greenwood (early 1830s–1927) was a successful children’s author before he turned to investigative journalism in the 1860s. He was one of, if not the, first to dress to blend in with those on whom he was reporting, most famously for a stay in a workhouse’s casual ward, for which he became known as the ‘Amateur Casual’ (see pp. 198–9).

15
. Henry Mayhew (1812–87) was a journalist and social reformer. As well as being one of the founders of the comic magazine
Punch
, he compiled a monumental study of street workers,
London Labour and the London Poor
(1851, with additions until the early 1860s), based on hundreds of interviews initially conducted for a series of essays he wrote for the
Morning Chronicle
between 1849 and 1850. Scholars have since discussed methodological flaws in this work, but no study of nineteenth-century working-class street life could manage without it.

16
. By mid-century, every night was a foreign post night, but in 1839, when
Nicholas Nickleby
was appearing, the post office sent out post to different countries on set days to coincide with ships’ sailing dates: France daily, Belgium four times a week, Holland and northern Europe twice a week, but southern Europe and Malta only once a fortnight. Post to the United States went once a month, to the Caribbean twice a month. So ‘Foreign Post nights’ varied from office to office, depending on where they did business abroad.

17
. Dickens’ employers in 1827, Ellis and Blackmore, were located in Holborn Court (now South Square), Gray’s Inn, later also the address of Tommy Traddles, David Copperfield’s struggling attorney friend. The square having been heavily damaged in the Blitz, today almost all the buildings are reconstructions. The single original building is, happily, number 1, once the offices of Ellis and Blackmore.

18
. Doctors’ Commons, between Knightrider Street and Upper Thames Street (a plaque on Faraday Building on the north side of Queen Victoria Street now marks the site) was not an Inn of Court but the location of various arcane areas of law, including the ecclesiastical courts of appeal, the offices that provided marriage licences and the places where wills were probated. The lawyers here were also in charge of divorce, which until 1857 required an Act of Parliament to dissolve each marriage individually. After 1857, when divorce became part of common law, Doctors’ Commons ceased to function, and in 1867 the secluded courtyard was demolished.

19
. Despite being replaced by the Metropolitan Police in 1829, a few of the old watch hung on in unexpected places: the Temple, private land owned and run by the Inns of Court, had a watchman calling the hours until 1864.

20
. Louis Simond (1767–1831), a shop owner, had emigrated to the USA before the French Revolution, where he married an Englishwoman, before visiting England in 1809 and remaining for nearly two years. One contemporary historian has described his journal as ‘cranky and hostile’.

21
. Nineteenth-century macadam bears only an ancestral relationship to twentieth-century ‘tar-macadam’, or tarmac, which incorporates tar and creosote to bind together the surface.

22
. Alfred Rosling Bennett (1850–1928) worked on the first Indian government telegraph, and then in electrical engineering, establishing the first experimental overhead telephone line. He was noted for his great personal charm, which is amply borne out in his delightful memoir of his childhood.

23
. At one time the spot, on a traffic island in the centre of Oxford Street, where it nears the Edgware Road, was indicated by three brass markers, but at some point in the recent past they seem to have disappeared.

24
. ‘Pockets’ were not what we mean by pockets, which were surprisingly late to develop. In the eighteenth century, pockets in clothes were still mostly decorative, and working men had a pocket only in their aprons. Women’s pockets tied on with strings around their waists, like market sellers’ or waiters’ money pouches today. In the nineteenth century, pockets were made in coats and waistcoats more generally, but tie-on pockets remained commonplace.

25
. In 1866, a political group was refused permission to hold a rally in Hyde Park, and the infuriated crowd tore down the park railings. The newspapers tsk-tsk-ed about the ‘mob’, but, added the
Illustrated London News
cheerfully, ‘One useful result’ of the civic unrest was that Park Lane had been involuntarily widened.

26
. This is a private joke of Dickens, who does not name the building, but for those who recognized it, he silently contrasted the Society’s zeal for exporting religious education abroad while ignoring the illiterate crossing-sweeper on its doorstep.

27
. I use the word ‘him’ because most sweepers were male, although the wives of regular sweepers frequently stood in for their husbands when they ran errands, or were ill. In the 1860s, the diarist Arthur Munby noted a fourteen-year-old girl working as a sweeper in Charing Cross, dodging deftly between the horses and the wheels. He evidently spoke to her, as he noted that she wanted to be an orange-woman when she grew up; the very fact that he noted this, however, suggests the rarity of girl sweepers.

28
. Dustmen strictly removed only ‘dust’, the remains from coal fires. However, the word was frequently used more elastically, and many called the men whose job it was to remove human waste ‘dustmen’.

29
. The pumping was very hard work, said Alfred Bennett. His childhood home was directly across the road from a pump, and to this proximity he and the neighbouring children ‘owed our first introduction to swear words’. Note in the drawing above that the man pumping has taken off his hat and coat, which hang on the railings. He seems to have replaced his colleague, who sits on the kerb, mopping his forehead.

30
. Frederick Winsor (1763–1830) was born Friedrich Winzer in Brunswick. He was an entrepreneur rather than an engineer or inventor, bringing to the home of the Industrial Revolution discoveries that were not much regarded in France. Like many entrepreneurs, his promotional skills were better than his managerial ones, and more pragmatic men soon forced him out of the company he formed.

31
. ‘Walter’ is a conundrum. He is the pseudonymous author of the eleven-volume
My Secret Life
(published 1888–94), a supposedly autobiographical account of his, shall we say, ebullient erotic life. The book is pornography, and those sections have, no doubt, all the verisimilitude of that genre, but there follow three possibilities: (1) that Walter was indeed a man with an exhausting private life, and the autobiographical elements he includes are true, or nearly so; (2) that Walter imagined his private life, but that he did indeed live the life of the middle-class professional man he claimed to be; or (3) the entire book is a work of fiction. If (1) or (2) are the case, then
My Secret Life
is useful for the light Walter throws on many aspects of the London sex trade (for more on this subject, see pp. 393–424), and equally so for his passing descriptions of daily life; if (3), the former becomes less reliable, but there is still no reason to believe that the author did not describe daily life as he knew it. If we take Walter’s biographical hints at face value, he was born in the 1820s and died after 1894. I have based my reading of his book on this chronology. Walter does, unusually for an unknown person, have an entry in the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
, which offers suggestions as to who the real Walter may have been.

32
. Because the gradient was nearly 1 in 77, until 1844 the trains to and from Euston were pulled up or winched down by a cable to and from the engine house in Camden.

33
. Arthur Munby (1828–1910) was a civil servant in the ecclesiastical commission, but he is know today for the diaries he kept between 1859 and 1898, in which he recounted in detail his long relationship with (and ultimately marriage to) Hannah Cullwick, a servant, as well as wonderfully detailed descriptions of a fast-changing London.

34
. An 1893 book claims that Shillibeer’s buses each contained ‘a library’ of books to entertain the passengers. I would like to believe that this were the case, but the many reports on the darkness of the early buses make it seem implausible.