The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London (83 page)

35
. Some tube stations today – the Angel, Royal Oak and Swiss Cottage – are still named for pubs, just as London buses continue to move between fare
stages
.

36
. These watermen were not the same as those who earned a living on the river. The waterman on a cabstand was so-called for the water he used to wash down the cabs, rather than for the more obvious watering of the horses, although this was also one of his duties: the watermen kept order generally, ensuring there was no ill-usage of the horses, feeding, watering and attempting to keep them warm. He also helped passengers and their baggage in and out of the cabs. For this he was paid 1d by each driver as he joined the rank, and another ½d from the driver when he was hired by a fare. (He also stood hopefully by, expecting to be tipped another 1d by the passenger.)

37
. Hansom (1803–82) spent a lifetime producing innovative work that he could somehow never make pay: he and his architectural partner built the Town Hall in Birmingham, but went bankrupt by underestimating costs; he founded
The Builder
magazine, but was forced to give it up, again through underestimation of costs; and although he patented his enormously successful safety cab, he never received the many thousands of pounds the rights were ostensibly sold for.

38
. The original version had the driver on a perch on the right of the cab, as can be seen in an illustration in Chapter 2 of
Pickwick Papers
.

39
. According to
The Traveller’s Oracle
of 1828, those households that did not keep a footman would be wise to fit their carriages with a set of spikes at the rear: ‘
Do not permit Strangers to place themselves behind your Carriage
at any time, or under any pretence whatever,’ as they will either rob you or steal bits off the carriage, including the ‘Check Braces, and Footmen’s Holders’ (the lead-strings by which passengers notified the driver they wanted to stop, and the leather straps that the footmen on the steps at the rear held on to) ‘in half the time that your Coachman can put them on’. Therefore, ‘unless you think that two or three outside passengers are ornamental or convenient, or you like to have your Carriage continually surrounded by Crowds of Children, incessantly screaming, “Cut! Cut behind!”’, the ‘Spikes are indispensable’. This may have been no exaggeration: the illustration on p. 384 shows children clambering unmolested across the top of a coach.

40
. The word ‘shay’, often heard on the street and sometimes used in literature, was a back-formation from chaise, created under the impression that ‘chaise’ was plural: one shay, two chaise. A chaise was an all-purpose word to describe many types of carriage: it could have two or four wheels, was generally open (although it might have the folding hood known as a calash), and often simply meant a light carriage or cart used for pleasure rather than work.

41
. The dancer Marie Taglioni (1804–84) was in the 1830s at the height of her fame, having starred in Paris in Meyerbeer’s ground-breaking opera,
Robert le Diable
, leading the famed ‘dance of the nuns’, and dancing ballet’s first Sylphide in her father’s
La Sylphide
in 1832. In London she dazzled audiences, with Princess Victoria an ardent fan.

42
. Two picaresque novels of London life fought it out in 1821: Pierce Egan’s
Life in London, or, the Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, esq., and his elegant friend, Corinthian Tom, accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian, in their rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis
, with illustrations by George and Robert Cruikshank, and Jonathan Badcock’s
Real Life in London, or, The Rambles and Adventures of Bob Tallyho, Esq., and His Cousin, the Hon. Tom Dashall, Through the Metropolis; Exhibiting a Living Picture of Fashionable Characters, Manners, and Amusements in High and Low Life
, with illustrations by Thomas Rowlandson. Egan’s won, but both stories of young rich men out on the razzle are useful guides, if not to authentic London life, at least to how most readers
wanted
to see the city.

43
. The passenger, Friedrich von Raumer (1781–1873), was a professor of both history and political science, at the universities of Breslau and then Berlin. He travelled widely in Europe between 1816 and 1855.

44
. The old Palace of Westminster, consisting of the medieval buildings where Parliament sat, together with the Royal Courts of Justice, burnt down in 1834. (For more on the fire, see p. 331.) The only surviving buildings were Westminster Hall, the Cloisters of St Stephen’s, St Mary Undercroft Chapel and the Jewel Tower. The new Palace of Westminster, today’s Parliament buildings, was designed by Charles Barry with Augustus Pugin, after Barry won the competition for the design. Building began in 1840, and in 1847 the new House of Lords was used for the first time, although further building work continued for decades.

45
. The remaining Victorian stations built after the 1848 fiat were: King’s Cross (1852), the Brunel station at Paddington (1854), Victoria (1860), Broad Street (1865), Cannon Street (1866) and St Pancras (1868), Holborn Viaduct (1874, becoming Thameslink in 1990), St Paul’s (1886, becoming Blackfriars in 1937) and, just at the close of the century, Marylebone (1899).

46
. Costermongers, or costers, sold fruit, vegetables and fish from carts on the streets. For more on street sellers, see pp. 140–62.

47
. One small indication of their importance is seen in the number of pubs that have ‘horse’ in their name. In one 1851 list, there were twenty-one pubs named for Queen Victoria, but twenty-five named the Black Horse, twenty-seven named the Horse and Groom, fifty-four named the White Horse, plus additional ones with names like the Horseshoe, or the King on Horseback. There were also fifteen Watermen’s Arms.

48
. One report of these ice suppliers came at the height of London’s worst cholera epidemic, although the water-borne nature of transmission was not yet recognized.

49
. Men rarely if ever wore short sleeves, no matter how dirty their work. Some indoor jobs allowed for rolled-up shirtsleeves (in
Our Mutual Friend
the potboy of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters has ‘his shirt-sleeves arranged in a tight roll on each bare shoulder’), or men sometimes held their sleeves up with a band. Copying clerks and those in inky trades, as well as those doing outdoor work, where men wore jackets, all wore calico oversleeves, almost always just called ‘sleeves’. (Plate 17 shows a pair.) In
Bleak House
, Mr Snagsby, the well-to-do law-stationer, wore a grey shop-coat with black sleeves over it. Sleeves were tied on at the upper arm, with strings until the arrival of ‘gutta-percha’, or elastic. Most were black, although bakers and muffin men, among certain other trades, wore white sleeves as a badge of their ‘clean’ calling.

50
. Warren’s Blacking was the original company, based at 30 Strand, but Warren’s brother set up in competition, advertising as ‘
Warren’s Blacking, 30
Hungerford Stairs,
Strand
’. This latter was the company that employed the young Charles.

51
. In the ever-growing city, brickmaking should be understood for the huge industry it was. Like the ‘horse’ names for pubs, there were fifteen Bricklayers’ Arms in London in the early 1850s.

52
. This usage is not recorded in the
Oxford English Dictionary
, but the shoemaker used it as if the term were common enough; certainly his meaning is not in doubt.

53
. A search was instituted for the child’s family, but without success. Henry was raised by the workhouse surgeon, with contributions made from ‘private individuals’ towards his education. In 1852, he appeared again before magistrates to get permission to join the surgeon, who had emigrated to Melbourne.

54
. Contrast that to the British Museum at the time, which permitted visitors to see the exhibitions only if they had a letter of introduction signed by a trustee.

55
. The Fleet was shut down preparatory to a planned rebuilding, but Holloway prison was built instead, the beginning of the movement of prisons to the suburbs. In 1846, the Fleet was demolished and the site left derelict for over twenty years, before the land was sold to the London, Chatham and Dover Railway.

56
. The list of those without homes in Dickens’ fiction includes: Oliver Twist’s mother, who ends in the workhouse, as well as the children who work for Fagin; Nicholas and Smike after they run away from Dotheboys Hall in
Nicholas Nickleby
; Nell and her grandfather in
The Old Curiosity Shop
; the prostitutes Martha and Little Em’ly in
David Copperfield
, and David himself on his way to find Betsey Trotwood; Jo the crossing-sweeper, a nameless woman passed by Esther and Inspector Bucket, and even Lady Dedlock on her final flight, in
Bleak House
; both Stephen Blackwood and his wife, and Tom Gradgrind in
Hard Times
; nameless homeless people ‘coiled up in nooks’ in
Little Dorrit
;Magwitch in his youth in
Great Expectations
; Betty Higden, and the ‘half-dozen’ who die of starvation in the street that Mr Podsnap dismisses as ‘not British’ in
Our Mutual Friend
.

57
. ‘Naked’ in the nineteenth century generally meant wearing only underclothes, but it also had a less formal secondary use: to describe people in the street as ‘naked’ appears to have meant that they were not wearing outdoor clothes – no hats, and the men might have had no jackets. It seems likely that here ‘naked’ means that in mixed company the men were in shirtsleeves and the women possibly were not wearing their neck handkerchiefs, leaving their
décolletage
uncovered bare over low-cut dresses.

58
. Mr Tulkinghorn’s address was also a private joke: Dickens’ friend Forster lived at 58 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and it is either his house, or the one next door (designed by Inigo Jones), that Dickens describes.

59
. The OED’s earliest usage of ‘gonoph’, to mean pickpocket, from the Yiddish ‘thief ’, is attributed to Dickens in this novel. But in the previous decade
The New Swell’s Night Guide to the Bowers of Venus
tells of ‘having put the green culls fly to the fakements of the mots and the
gonnifs
’ (that is, ‘having made the innocent dupes aware of the trickery of the whores and thieves’). This book is a guide to brothels (see pp. 404–6), and I am not suggesting that this is where Dickens learnt the word, just noting that it was already current.

60
. The French social critic and activist Flora Tristan (1803–44) made two stays in London, one in the 1820s, one the following decade, which together formed the basis for her
London Journal
. I use her reports with some caution: her material was chosen to heighten her political and socio-economic points; in some places it is demonstrably taken from other writers whose reliability I question. (See p. 408.)

61
. In a middle-class home, the back kitchen was the scullery, most commonly where the pump was to be found; a front kitchen was where the range was, and the cooking was done. In the next sentence, the front one-pair is the front room on the first floor, that is, up one pair of stairs.

62
. Jennings’ Buildings was across the road from St Mary Abbotts, near where what used to be Barkers department store stood for a century, and is now the
haut-bourgeois
Whole Foods market.

63
. One contemporary historian has suggested that the publication of this letter was arranged – and possibly part written, or at least elaborated – by Charles Cochrane, a sanitary-health agitator. Perhaps, but it is no less heartrending.

64
. Dorcas societies were named for the woman who ‘was full of good works and almsdeeds’ in Acts 9: 36; they were organizations of church ladies who met to make clothes for the poor.

65
. This term, when applied to fog, was apparently invented by Dickens in this novel. Previously it had referred to a type of Madeira.

66
. Joseph Hékékyan, or Hékékyan Bey, as he was known (1807–75), an Armenian, was the son of a translator for the Khedive of Egypt, who paid for his education, first at Stonyhurst, then as an engineer. He returned to Egypt in 1830 and became president of the Board of Health, before becoming a pioneering archaeologist, most notably at Memphis.

67
. In the UK in 2008, the average person used thirty-three gallons daily.

68
. One of the baths built after this Act was passed, the Old Castle Street bathhouse, in Whitechapel, is today the Women’s Library of London Metropolitan University.

69
. Simon (1816–1904) was the descendant of French immigrants and gave his last name the French pronunciation.

70
. Chadwick (1800-90) was one of the instigators of the idea that workhouses be made less ‘eligible’ than poverty (see p. 169): he was a dedicated social reformer, but one with a fairly robust distaste for the masses.

71
. Typhus and typhoid were recognized as distinct diseases only in 1869. Typhus, or gaol fever, is transmitted by lice or fleas, and was therefore linked to poverty; typhoid is water-borne, transmitted by ingesting food or drink contaminated with faeces. It was the latter that was said to have killed Prince Albert in 1861, although stomach cancer is today suggested as the cause: there were no other reported cases of typhoid in the area, and he had suffered for four years from an undiagnosed stomach ailment.

72
. In the nineteenth century, the terms English or summer cholera referred to symptoms that today are grouped together as gastroenteritis – fever accompanying gastric illness.

73
. The nearly 50 per cent mortality rate was terrifying, but so too was the speed with which cholera killed. It was reported that one-third of deaths occurred less than a day after the symptoms first appeared, two-thirds within forty-eight hours.