The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London (36 page)

Day of the hideous disaster in the Regents Park...I had gone to the Garrick [Club] to meet [the musician] German Reed. I walked, on my way, about 2.15 through the ‘Ornamental’ [Garden, near the water], & great numbers were skating. It was a fine day. I had half decided on hiring skates, & trying whether I had forgotten the work – I could skate fast in old days; but I thought my shoes were unsuitable, & I went on. Reed was late, & when I left him to walk home it was 5.10. At the Clarence gate I saw several cabs & carriages, & some groups, but it was dark, & being in a hurry, I asked no questions. On getting into the hall Reginald rushed out[.] ‘O papa, there has been a dreadful accident, the ice broke, & at least 30 are drowned.’ Then I had the details from poor Emily, who had been fearfully frightened. The boys had gone to see the skating in the Botanic [Garden, on the other side of the park], & at their prayers, she had at last relaxed the order not to go on the ice. Mrs. Linton called, & while they were talking...Hawkins rushed in – ‘the ice had broken, where were the boys.’...Of course she dashed out with Mrs L. & hurried among the crowds, saw the frightful scene, heard the women shrieking & wailing, & witnessed many agonies – and though told by several that her boys were all right, was convinced that no one really knew. She went into the Humane Tent, where was a boy, in bed, but a moment told her he was not hers, & she went out again. At last she met them, strolling leisurely up to the scene. She was soon crying over them by her fireside. I returned to hear all this...After [dinner]...went into...the tent. That work was over – all who were in that lake were dead – but eight or ten bodies had been taken out...Rego cried – Cecil was silent, he would not eat, & scarcely slept. That night Emily & I thanked God for the children.

The next morning, volunteers arrived to break up the ice, to try to find the bodies under the surface; they were watched by as many as 3,000 on the shore. Even as the light faded once more, 1,000 still kept watch, Shirley Brooks and his wife among them: ‘We saw the cutting, the dragging, & the bringing out a body, a man, in black, his arms extended & bent – they brought him across the island, to our very feet. The crowds were great. Four bodies have been got out today up to the time I write (12).
Two boys
in Hanover Terrace, next to us, are
dead
...’

Three days later, bodies were still being taken from the water, and forty men were hired at 2s a day to help. On the following Monday, another 104 were employed, and still another 207 on the Tuesday, a full week later, as the search continued. And still the spectators stood on the banks, even if their numbers were ‘considerably less’ than the week before. It was not until 22 January, seven days after the accident, that the list of the forty dead could be compiled:

Frederick Beer, 21, paper-hanger

R. Born, 13, the stepson of a publican

John Broadbridge, aged 10

John Bryant, 29, costermonger

Thomas Chadwick, 22, porter

James Crawley, 28, coach-joiner

William Davies, 22, medical student

Henry Gamble, aged 14

Harold Giles, 15, schoolboy

Frank Glanfield, 15, son of a butcher

James Griffin, 28, orange-seller

Henry Hardiman, 17, cabinetmaker

Richard Harnack, aged 10

Thomas Harries, 29, gentleman

Thomas Harvey, 17, medical student

James Justice, 21, corn-chandler

James Jobson, 35, painter

Charles Jukes, 9, the son of a carpenter

C. E. Luckman, 24, warehouseman

Donald Macintyre, aged 26, silk-merchant

James Mitchell, 26, organ-builder

David North, aged 13

Samuel Olley, 20, wood-turner

William Parkinson, 18, organ pipe-maker

Edward Pullan, 25, commercial traveller

George Rhodes, 20, paper-hanger

William Robertson, 33, dentist

Robert Edwin Scott, 29, clerk

Charles Smith, 13, son of a coachman

Thomas Wilson Spencer, 25, solicitor

Arthur Reginald Stevens, 16, the son of an army officer

Edward Thurley, 30, butler

John Vincent, aged 10

Joseph Waite, 22, clerk

Charles William Wake, 20, law student

John Thomas Whatley, 14, schoolboy

H. Woodhouse, 16, son of a colonial broker

John Spencer Woods, 18, upholsterer

unnamed, aged 13

unnamed, 20, gas-fitter

9.

STREET PERFORMANCE

In the 1830s, a building running between Oxford Street and Regent Street was turned into a ‘bazaar’, a warren of small luxury-goods shops. The Pantheon, as it was named, boasted vestibules filled with sculptures, a hall, a series of galleries, ‘a species of atrium’, a conservatory eighty-eight feet long ‘in the Moorish style’, complete with ‘stands for parroquets’, a fountain and goldfish.
⁷⁷
Those who wanted to shop could do so, but the Pantheon was primarily used as a place to meet, walk, chat and watch the world, especially when it was raining. For there was a type of lounging about the fashionable streets, watching the world go by, that was the prerogative of the man about town. According to Thackeray, ‘now a
stroll
, then a
look-in
[to a shop], then a
ramble
, and presently a
strut
’ was the right way for a gent to occupy his day.

When the day was fine, the fashionable crowds came to Regent Street at the fashionable hours, between two and five o’clock, peaking around four. What today we call window-shopping was part of the life of the street, a performance participated in by those who could afford actually to go in and buy, as well as by those who could not. Thus window-shopping, and shopping itself, were different: one was part of the performance of street life, the other consumption. The former included the ‘carriages...in groups in front of Swan and Edgars silk shop...gentlemen [on horseback] wishing to pay their respects to the ladies...The pavements...swarming with pedestrians,
idlers, or shoppers bent on a visit to the gunmaker, the haberdasher’s or the jeweller’s.’ The Regent Street shop windows were considered to be the most glamorous, displaying, wrote Dickens in the late 1830s, ‘sparkling jewellery, silks and velvets of the richest colours, the most inviting delicacies, and the most sumptuous articles of luxurious ornament’. In the first half of the century, the street encompassed a wide range of shops, not merely those selling luxury goods, and their displays were enjoyed by all. In Regent Street alone, Sala itemized ‘a delightful bird-stuffer’s shop...with birds of paradise, parrots, and hummingbirds...[a] funeral monument shop, with the mural tablets, the obelisks, the broken columns, the extinguished torches, and the draped urns in the window’, an ‘Italian statuary shop’ and a ‘filter shop, with the astonishing machines for converting foul and muddy water...into a sparkling, crystal stream’, in between bakers, staymakers, stationers, a grocer and an optician with a model of a steam engine in his window. Two decades later, the luxury trade had taken over, and the street was the home of ‘Fancy watchmakers, haberdashers, and photographers; fancy stationers, fancy hosiers, and fancy staymakers; music shops, shawl shops, jewellers, French glove shops, perfumery, and point lace shops, confectioners and milliners’.

All this glamour was seasonal for the upper classes and depended on the parliamentary calendar, around which all social occasions were scheduled. When Parliament sat, towards the end of January or in February, the wealthy returned from country to town, although the more sporting did not appear until March, when the hunting season ended; the Royal Academy summer exhibition in April or May was the signal for entertainment to get under way at full tilt. In August, Parliament rose and, together with the partridge-shooting season, caused the main exodus back to the country. Many of the gentry and landed classes did not return to London until January, but professionals and businessmen took as holiday just the single month of August. The shops that supplied them, therefore, frequently closed for August too. In 1853, Dickens complained that ‘The West End of London is entirely deserted...I went to three shops this morning...Blackmore the tailor was at Brighton. Butler the tailor was...in the bosom of his family. Only two subordinates were in attendance at Beale’s the hosier’s, and they
were playing at draughts’. Shops that were open were staffed by temporary employees ‘who are imperfectly acquainted with the prices of the goods, and contemplate them with unsophisticated delight’. The milkwomen didn’t even bother to water down their milk they had so few customers. All the luxury trades were affected, even prostitutes, whose clients also vanished.

There were many shopping streets that were not as fashionable as Regent Street, and therefore did not suffer in the same way, even in the same fashionable West End districts, and yet the street life they promoted was every bit as lively. ‘In secluded corners’ near by, Dickens noted, there were many little shops ‘withdrawn from public curiosity’, shops that traded with servants, both selling them goods and buying their perquisites: the cook sold offcuts of food, the butler got rid of empty wine bottles, the valets and the lady’s maids the second-hand clothes they had been given.

There were several types of second-hand shop, whose names supposedly indicated what they bought, although the names could be misleading and the goods in which they dealt often overlapped. Marine stores sold and bought nothing nautical, but stocked pretty much the same thing as the rag-and-bone shops. In
Bleak House
, Krook, who calls his shop a ‘Rag and Bottle Warehouse’, says he is also a dealer in ‘Marine Stores’, and he buys old furniture, paper, rags, bones, kitchen equipment and ‘kitchen-stuff’ (food waste), fire-irons, iron, old clothes, bottles, old books, pictures, tools and bits of metal. The paper was sold to tradesmen for wrapping goods; the dirty rags for breaking down for fertilizer, clean ones to paper mills; bones for soap or fertilizer; kitchen stuff to the pig-keepers; grease to tallow makers; old iron to manufacturers. Dripping and old clothes were sold either directly to the poor, or to wholesalers who resold them through the Rag Fair market.

A step above these were the pawnshops. In rich districts, pawnshops looked like ordinary jewellers, and only the notice at the door, announcing that money was advanced on goods and advertising a ‘fireproof safe’ in which to keep them, indicated their real function. Inside, instead of an open counter, as Martin Chuzzlewit discovered, many pawnshops were fitted with ‘a series of little closets, or private boxes’, so that each customer could remain hidden from his or her neighbour. Items pawned in the West
End might include decorative household objects such as drawings, vases, statuettes, or personal items like jewellery and cashmere shawls; in St Giles, by contrast, the pawned items were more likely to be petticoats, shirts and workmen’s tools. Here the same items were pawned every week, ‘not because the man is a drunkard or an idler’, wrote Dickens sympathetically in
Household Words
, ‘but because he is a poor jobbing carpenter, without a penny of monied capital: who, when he has a small job in hand, and has done the sawing part of it and wants [to purchase] the nails and glue to finish it, pawns the saw to provide them, until he is paid and can redeem it’. By 1850, there were more than 400 official pawnbrokers in London (and probably thousands more of the unofficial sort: see below).

On pawning a watch valued at, say, £2, its owner was given £2 and a pawn ticket. The watch could be redeemed any time over the next year by paying back the £2, plus interest, which usually ran to 15 or 20 per cent a year. If it were not redeemed within fifteen months, the pawnbroker was allowed to sell it. But there were many tricks of the trade. Unscrupulous pawnbrokers made customers take two tickets each for half the value of an item, since the interest was calculated from a base rate, and this way the value for an inexpensive item could be doubled. Some sewed a farthing into the lining of a coat: when customers making a purchase felt it, they chose that coat over others of better quality, imagining that someone had secreted a high-value coin there for safety and then forgotten about it. Other pawnbrokers were sympathetic to their clientele and accommodated their needs, whether it was routinely accepting carpenters’ tools at a pawnshop by the dockyards, or in the West End allowing their regular customers, prostitutes, to take their jewellery out of hock for a night ‘for a consideration’.

Many marine stores, Krook’s included, hung a small black-faced doll in the window, to indicate they were dolly shops, that is, unlicensed pawnbrokers that offered money on goods considered too contemptible to be accepted by a regular pawnbroker. Dolly shops, said Dickens, took on the air of their neighbourhood by the accumulation of goods that were pawned. Around Drury Lane, the stock leant towards ‘faded articles of dramatic finery, such as three or four pairs of soiled buff boots...worn by a “fourth robber”, or “fifth mob”’, while around the Marshalsea the clothes were of
better quality than usual, having been pawned by formerly well-heeled debtors as money grew scarcer; near the docks, the main items were sailors’ clothes. Below the dolly shops in the hierarchy came leaving shops, for items that even the dolly shops wouldn’t take: a single knife or fork, or a baking dish to be redeemed on Saturday, payday, for the Sunday meal. This is the type of shop run by Pleasant Riderhood in
Our Mutual Friend
. She has other income – she lets rooms, and her father earns his own living – which makes the contents of her fictional shop slightly superior to a real one in a Southwark slum in 1858, kept by a paralysed ex-sewerman and his wife. Pleasant’s window contains a couple of handkerchiefs, a coat, some ‘valueless’ watches, tobacco, pipes, sweets and a bottle of walnut ketchup. The sewerman’s shop contained, as its entire stock, ‘a handful of sugar candy, a few brandy-balls, four sugar-plums contained in pickle-bottles, three herrings and a half, five dip candles and a half...a quart of parched peas, in a broken plate’.