The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London (31 page)

Greenwood’s report caused a sensation, even toned down as it had been by the
Pall Mall Gazette
’s editor, ‘to avoid suspicion of exaggeration’. Much of the discussion focused on the institutionalized contempt shown to the inmates, the sham work forced upon them, the cruelty through regimentation, such as making men stand barefoot and in nightshirts outdoors. But these men had at least managed to gain admittance, and were fed.

The conditions in the 1860s for many were no better than when Oliver asked for ‘more’ in 1838. In the 1840s, the
Illustrated London News
reported numerous inquests on those who had died after being refused relief by the parish. Twenty years later, over a third of the children at the Great Ormond Street Hospital suffered from that disease of malnutrition, rickets. Dickens saw these walking dead and, through the decades of his writing life, made sure his readers saw them too. In 1852, at a Ragged School dormitory, an elderly alcoholic printer was dying of starvation and next to him ‘was an orphan boy with burning cheeks and great gaunt eager eyes, who was in pressing peril of death too’. Both were taken to the workhouse to die. Or, as
Dickens addressed the authorities directly, after Jo dies in
Bleak House
of a similar fever: ‘Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen...Dead, men and women, born with heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.’

8.

THE WATERS OF DEATH

Death from lack of food was ever-present for the majority of London’s population. However, death from water was even more likely, and not by drowning in it, but by drinking it. The rivers of London have so far vanished from sight that today it is hard to remember how much they defined London’s shape and history. In 1810, a labouring man visiting London for the first time went to see ‘the metropolitan curiosities...a glimpse of the public buildings, the river, and the shipping; together with the docks and their warehouses’, before walking up to Hampstead to view ‘the noble river, with its “forest of masts”’, and then rowing out to see Greenwich Hospital from the river. For him, the sights of London revolved around the Thames, as Dickens’ fiction emphasizes: three out of his fifteen novels –
Bleak House
,
Great Expectations
and
Our Mutual Friend
– begin with a scene on the river.

Had the visiting labourer but known, in going to Hampstead from his lodgings he was crossing even more rivers, for London, built on a flood plain, is saturated with rivers that debouch into the Thames. By the nineteenth century most of them had been built over and made invisible. On the north side of the river, from west to east, Stamford Brook runs from Wormwood Scrubs to Chiswick; Counters Creek covers the same districts; the Westbourne runs from Hampstead to Chelsea; the Tyburn, along part of its route renamed the Aye, from Hampstead to Westminster; the Fleet, from Highgate and Hampstead to the City; the Walbrook, from Islington to Cannon Street; the Black Ditch, from Stepney to Poplar; and Hackney Brook from Hornsey to the River Lea. South of the river, from west to east, Beverley Brook runs from Wimbledon to Barnes; the Wandle, from
Merton to Wandsworth; the Falconbrook, from Tooting to Battersea; the Effra, from Norwood to Vauxhall; the Peck, joined by Earl’s Sluice to the Neckinger, from East Dulwich to Bermondsey and Rotherhithe; and the Ravensbourne from Bromley to Deptford.

Most of these rivers have entirely disappeared, both from our sight and from our consciousness, except for small breaks where from time to time one briefly surfaces, or when perhaps the name of a street or district reminds us of what lies underneath. For in London, these names are legion, evidence that the ground beneath our feet is rarely as solid as we think. Many roads or districts are named for the rivers they are built over or beside: Fleet Street, Place and Road, Effra Road, Neckinger Street, the districts of Wandsworth (‘Wandle-worth’) and Peckham. There is also more generic naming, such as Angler’s Lane, Creek Road, Pont Street, and Brook Street, Brook Green and Brook Drive. Conduit Street, Mews, Place, Drive and Way all mark river culverting. Then there are Bayswater and Coldbath Fields, and all the ‘bournes’ and ‘burns’: Bourne Street, Marylebone (a corruption of Mary-le-bourne), Kilburn, Holborn, Langbourne, Westbourne Grove. There are ‘bridge’ names: the generic Bridge Street, Place, Road and Lane, and Knightsbridge, Uxbridge and Stamford Bridge (originally Stanbridge, or ‘stone bridge’, it became Sandford, indicating the ford in the river, then Stamford); as well as all the ‘fords’, too: Hungerford, Dartford, Deptford, Romford and Brentford. Dozens of springs are marked by their surface eruption as wells: Wells Street, Way and Terrace Mews; Chadwell Street, Amwell Street, Sadler’s Wells, Bagnigge Wells, Shadwell, Camberwell, Stockwell, Clerkenwell, Bridewell, Muswell Hill.

Much of London’s physical topography too was created by rivers, which carved out great valleys that were still visible in the nineteenth century but are less so today as infill has been used to minimize the difficulties created by the steep gradients. The main one in London was the Fleet Valley, ‘once almost a ravine’. Although the ground level has risen over thirteen feet since the nineteenth century, part of the hill from King’s Cross still has a gradient of 1 in 17. ‘Fleet’, deriving from the Anglo-Saxon for ‘inlet’, indicates that this river was originally large enough to be navigable at its mouth. The Fleet has two sources: the ponds on the west side of Hampstead Heath (today’s
mixed-bathing ponds), from where it runs down Fleet Road to Camden Town; and the ponds in the grounds of Kenwood and those on the east side of the Heath (today’s men’s and women’s bathing), whose waters run down Highgate Road. The two sources meet north of Camden, at Kentish Town Road – and such is the volume of water here, that when the Fleet flooded it created a pool sixty feet across. The river then runs under the Regent’s Canal, past St Pancras Church, to Battle Bridge (now King’s Cross), where it was channelled into a brick conduit, to become the Fleet sewer. This runs almost exactly parallel to Farringdon Road, which was built at the same time as the sewer, and then along the valley that bears its name, spanned by Holborn Viaduct, before it ultimately reaches the Thames as a tidal inlet at Blackfriars.

The Tyburn runs from Hampstead, too, from Shepherd’s Well, through Swiss Cottage and down to Regent’s Park, where it meets a tributary running from Belsize Park. It is carried by aqueduct at Regent’s Canal and then reappears as the boating lake on the southern side of the park. Marylebone Lane was originally the left bank of the stream, which explains its meandering path. After the Tyburn crosses Oxford Street, it runs under Grosvenor and Berkeley Squares, under Piccadilly and then towards Green Park, where it gets lost on the marshy lands heading for the river. (Tyburn, now Marble Arch, was not actually near the River Tyburn at all; it was built beside a tributary of the Westbourne known as Tyburn Brook, the brook taking its name in this instance from the gallows it ran past.)

Only slightly smaller than the Fleet, the River Westbourne also rises up on Hampstead Heath but then heads south-west, meeting more tributaries near Kilburn and running towards Bayswater Road, into Hyde Park, where it bubbles up into Londoners’ consciousness as the Serpentine, where the river had been dammed in the previous century. After that, it leaves the park via Knightsbridge and can be seen in outline once again at Sloane Square tube station, where a metal culvert carrying the river runs over the District and Circle line platforms. From there it is diverted to a reservoir for the Chelsea Waterworks and debouches as the Ranelagh Sewer, which as late as the 1960s was still visible in the Thames at low tide. Until 1834, the Ranelagh sewer discharged its effluent into the Westbourne. At that point a
collateral sewer was built to divert the waste away from the Serpentine, but ‘a communication’ was left between the two. By the mid-1840s, the ‘effluvia from under the arches’ of the Serpentine’s bridge ‘were so offensive’ that they had to be closed off, while the Serpentine itself was said to be ‘nine feet of mud’ under a mere ‘eighteen inches of water’, and ‘not mud of an ordinary description, but a compound of decayed animal and vegetable refuse’ – that is, sewage. ‘The Serpentine has been, in fact, transformed into a vast metropolitan laboratory of cholera.’ Despite this, as late as the end of the 1840s the Serpentine was piped as drinking water to many Londoners, including the inhabitants of Kensington Barracks, Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey.

One of the effects of the watery nature of the capital was frequently visible, as well as oppressive. There had always been fogs in London, but as the population increased and coal fires spread, so a pall of dark smoke, by the early 1830s estimated at nearly thirty miles across, regularly hung over the city. By the 1860s, the 2 million residents, the animals, the gasworks, the industry and the home fires combined to make London two to three degrees warmer than the surrounding countryside. We take it for granted today that this is what happens in dense population centres; then it was a new phenomenon.

The fogs were seasonal, arriving in late autumn, persisting through the worst of the winter and lifting somewhat in the spring. But most contemporary accounts portray them as omnipresent, and the fogs became a part of almost every description of London, by visitor or resident, from the start of the century. As early as 1805, the artist Benjamin Robert Haydon saw London’s ‘smoke’ as a ‘sublime canopy that shrouds the City of the world’, but he also wrote that it ‘drifted’, so it appears that at this date it remained a relatively gentle component of the weather. By the 1820s, it was permanent enough for Byron to think of it as architectural: a ‘huge, dun Cupola’. A visitor in the same decade confirms this: London, he wrote, was covered with a dense cloud of smoke ‘as usual’.

Yet the fog was still not the smothering menace of later years. Dickens may have backdated his memories in some of his fiction.
A Christmas Carol
,
set in the 1820s, was written in 1843, and in Scrooge’s counting house ‘it had not been light all day...The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense...that...the houses opposite were mere phantoms.’ In
Bleak House
, which Dickens started to write in 1852 but which was set during the 1830s, fog also epitomizes the city. When Esther arrives in London from Reading, she asks ‘whether there was a great fire anywhere? For the streets were so full of dense brown smoke that scarcely anything was to be seen.’ But no, she is told, it is just ‘a London particular’.
⁶⁵

The fog in turn created a city of black buildings. The Portland stone façade of St Paul’s was not well suited to the London atmosphere, but then, ‘it is difficult to conceive of
any
colour except black, which can long preserve its identity, in an atmosphere perpetually charged with coal-smoke, which would speedily tarnish a palace of gold.’ Dickens described the cause as well as the effect of this blackening, as he watched ‘Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes – gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.’

From the late 1830s, it was the colour of the fog rather than the buildings that fascinated and disturbed. It was most commonly the same shade as coal smoke, and smelt of coal smoke too, but then suddenly it changed, becoming bottle-green, or ‘a dilution of yellow peas-pudding’. In
Our Mutual Friend
, in the 1860s, Dickens was even more precise: in the countryside the fog was grey, at the edges of the suburbs it became dark yellow, ‘and a little within it brown, and then browner, and then browner, until at the heart of the City...it was rusty black’. The American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, however, described it as ‘very black indeed, more like a distillation of mud than anything else; the ghost of mud, – the spiritualized medium of departed mud, through which the dead citizens of London probably tread’. In 1858, Dickens took an Italian friend to the Crystal Palace: ‘I asked him to try to imagine the Sun shining down through the glass, and making broad lights and shadows. He said he tried very hard, but he couldn’t imagine the
sun shining within fifty miles of London under any circumstances.’

Even after gas lighting arrived in the streets (see pp. 53-55), the fog physically swallowed up most of the illumination, by depleting the oxygen and causing the gas to ‘burn on dim, yellow and sulkily’, while candles gave ‘a haggard and unwilling’ light. The smothering lack of oxygen, too, made breathing difficult, and many more deaths among those with respiratory illnesses were registered during periods of extreme fog. Even the young and healthy found it troublesome: ‘Dear me, you’re choking!’ says Mr Grewgious to Edwin Drood in the novel of the same name: ‘It’s this fog...it makes my eyes smart, like Cayenne pepper.’

For those like the comfortably-off Mr Grewgious, who stayed at home and had his supper delivered to his chambers, the fog was a nuisance, no more. The real problem was for those who had to navigate the streets, whether commuting to work, or working in the streets themselves. In
Bleak House
, Dickens described ‘Implacable November weather’ with ‘Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners’. As the fog thickened, street conditions worsened: ‘You step gingerly along, feeling your way beside the walls, windows, and doors, whatever you can, until at least you tumble headlong into some cellar,’ or run against some ‘respectable old gentleman, with whom you have a roll or two in the gutter, thankful that you did not fall on the other side, and stave in the shop-front...Porters with heavy burdens, women and men with fish, watercresses, &c., you run against every few minutes...As for your watch...you saw the fellow’s arm that dragged it out of your pocket, and that was all; it was a jerk amid the deep fog...you might as well hunt for a needle in a bottle of hay, as attempt to follow the thief in that dusky, woolly, and deceptive light.’ Meanwhile, on the river, the boats could not run, while ‘Many lives have been lost through foot-passengers mistaking the steps at the foot of some of the bridges for the...bridge itself, and...rolling head-foremost into the river.’ Ultimately, there was nothing to be done but make a joke of it: many Londoners swore that in a fog the quickest way of getting to Temple Bar from Charing Cross, a twenty-minute walk eastwards in normal circumstances, was to set off due
south and ‘walk...without once turning your head. In three hours or so, ‘you would be pretty sure of reaching the point aimed at, should you not be run over’.