The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London (54 page)

N, stands, for Nicholson, of ‘Town’ chaps few so true,
¹³⁷

O. you know is opera, where swells must keep a box,

P. stands for patent pills, Phoenix Alley and the P— [pox],

Chorus &c.

Q. is Q—m and Queen’s-Bench, queer places to be in,

R. Rhodes rogering hole, where you’ll always go again,
¹³⁸

S. is sponging houses, Shire-lane, saloons, and s—ing.

T. you know is thimble-rigs, and Tattersalls [horse-auction rooms]

low-cunning.

Chorus &c.

U is an uprighter or hunt with hasty dressing,

V. is the venereal that follows as a blessing,

W. stands for Waterford, of spreeing he’s the king,
¹³⁹

X. is a
cross
[double-cross] so you must
square
it while I sing.

Chorus &c.

Y. you know are yokels, but if now there’s any here, as

Z. is my last letter, why he must be a Zany.

My song now is ended, I hope you’ll have not cause,

To say I am not wide awake, or grudge me your applause.

So do not think me foolish, or think a flat you see,

I know the swell coves alphabet, and say the A B C.

By comparison, some songs had only mildly bawdy elements: ‘The Bill Sticker’ describes how the bill-sticker of the title, ‘Holloway’s ointment and Paris pills, the last a great reformer, / I plaster’d to Miss Kembles tail the first night she play’d Normer’.
¹⁴⁰
Or, to the tune of ‘God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen’, lyrics concerning

some queer old gentlemen

That nothing can dismay;

Who crawl about the city,

Almost every day;

And look for game – I mean young girls,

To lead them all astray,

And rob them of comfort and joy.

Several were far less respectful about authority figures than we might assume today.
The Cockchafer
presented ‘A Celebrated Parody on The King, God Bless Him’, while a song about the burning of the Houses of Parliament told the story of Bill, a hackney coachman, who fell down the House of Commons privy: ‘they said, Bill, are you dead, no I’m only
inturd
.’

The songbooks claim that all these songs were sung in many supper clubs, of which the Coal Hole had the worst reputation, while still being a place where a respectable man could be seen. The Coal Hole began life as the Wolf Club in 1817, a working-class pub down ‘a dingy-looking alley’ at the bottom of Southampton Street, near where it met the Strand, before moving to the Strand proper, where Simpson’s restaurant is now. It was only when it began its harmonic meetings that it became fashionable. Thackeray depicted it as the Cave of Harmony in
The Newcomes
, where it is run ‘by the celebrated Hoskins’, a place where men go late at night when they want
‘welsh-rabbits and a good old glee’. However, by the time
The Newcomes
appeared in the 1850s, it had changed radically. In 1841, at the Garrick pub, in Bow Street, Renton Nicholson had set up what came to be known as ‘Judge and Jury’ evenings, appointing himself ‘the Lord Chief Baron’ and presiding over mock trials, with audience members acting as the jury. Favourite subjects were current crim. con. cases, or trials for alienation of affection, adultery and divorce. Since the entertainment, like all of these supper rooms, was confined to men, there was also a certain amount of cross-dressing as the parts were acted out. The 1s fee bought entry, ‘a glass of grog and a bad cigar’. ‘Men about town, city clerks ... betting men, and provincials ambitious of initiation into the shady side of London life’ made up the audience. Three years later, Nicholson moved these Judge and Jury evenings to the Coal Hole, where they, and he, flourished until 1846, when they returned to the Garrick. The Coal Hole settled down to being a regular supper room, but kept up its risqué reputation, with
poses plastiques
: semidraped women in tableaux recycling episodes from history and literature, while providing soft-core leering opportunities.

These evenings were all for men, and even the cheapest of them involved some cost. One amusement that was available to both men and women, city-wide and without charge, was to be found throughout the streets: illuminations. Long before Paris, London was known as the city of lights. In 1805, when Frederick Winsor began his experiment of lighting the streets by gas at Carlton House, he began not with the functional but with the decorative, erecting thirty-two gas burners, including a four-branched one shaped like the Prince of Wales feathers. Over the gateway he set up a transparency, a painting on a semi-opaque fabric, lit from behind to display the initials ‘G R’ and a crown, with, on the other side, an illuminated address beginning ‘Rejoice, rejoice, ’tis George’s natal day’.

Gas illuminations in the early days were a novelty strictly for free-spending princes, but they built on a popular tradition. For state celebrations and public events, illuminations were a regular part of London’s night-time celebrations via hundreds and thousands of small oil lamps hung from windows and along the façades of buildings, with glass of different colours,
to build up images and even words. These lamps appeared not only on government buildings and on shops, but also on private houses, offering an indicator – in the mind of one tourist, at least – of an individual’s loyalty ‘by the quantity of oil consumed’. Even he, cynic that he was, admitted that the ‘effect on the whole was very pretty’, even ‘brilliant’.

As the long French wars drew to a close and Wellington roared across Europe, the two technologies for a time coexisted. In 1813, the victory at the battle of Vittoria was celebrated over three nights: ‘The fronts of Carltonhouse and Somerset-house, exhibited...a blaze of light, with the name of Wellington formed with [oil]-lamps, and allusions to the hero’s exploits’, while other oil lights spelt out ‘The Grand Alliance’. In 1814, for the Grand National Jubilee marking the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, an illuminated Temple of Concord was set up on a revolving platform in Green Park, while St James’s Park was lit by large paper lanterns hung from the trees, their painted paper shades illustrating battles, heroes ‘and every variety of subject’. So bright were the illuminations, or so dark were cities more usually at the time, that their light was visible nearly fifteen miles away, in Bromley, Kent.

However great these celebrations were, they were surpassed when London became ‘one continual scene of uproar and joy in consequence of the total defeat of Bonaparte at Waterloo by Lord Wellington...Friday and Saturday night all the public buildings and many private ones were illuminated. Many fanciful and beautiful devices were exhibited.’ One house in St James’s mounted a replica ‘fortress with cannon, flags, etc...A publican who keeps a tavern with the sign of a cock, had a large transparency representing a game cock strutting over his fallen combatant with the inscription, “England, the cock of the walk!”’

By the coronation of William IV, in 1830, street illuminations had become even more elaborate, with ‘various, most ingenious, and fantastic devices – always, however, representing in some form the initials or full names, of the king and queen – the principal centre of which ordinarily would be a crown’. Sometimes these would be created by the new technology, for private houses as well as palaces: ‘Here and there a temporary gas machinery had been erected, on which the slightest breeze would occasion
a sportful dance of lights and shadows by blowing out some portions, and lighting others, in rapid succession – at one moment showing the whole tracery in full blaze, and then only parts.’ Seven years later, when Princess Victoria, heir to the throne, attained her majority, the streets, according to the footman William Tayler, were decorated by a ‘grand ilumination’. Six months later the princess had become a queen and on the occasion of the Lord Mayor’s installation made her first formal visit to the City as monarch. ‘The sitisens are making great preperations to receve her. All the streets ... will be very briliantly eluminated. It is said it will cost eight hundred pound to eluminate Temple Bar alone, and many thousands to eluminate the Citty.’

The illuminations varied in quantity and quality with the event being celebrated, and to a degree it is possible to trace popular enthusiasm for royalty, or lack thereof, through the reports. When the Prince of Wales was born in 1842, ‘The illuminations on Wednesday night were few, and many of the club-houses were not illuminated at all. Pall-mall contained but one illumination.’ The United Services Club in Trafalgar Square, however, was ‘beautifully illuminated’, complete with an illuminated ‘Ich Dien’ and a set of Prince of Wales feathers. Unfortunately, ‘the night being wet the streets were nearly deserted’. In 1847, when Prince Albert had still not achieved the popularity that came in the last decade of his short life, his birthday was ‘observed in the metropolis with the usual rejoicings. In the evening the Royal tradesmen illuminated their houses’, making a business proposition of this supposed happy day. Attitudes were very similar in 1859 when the Prince of Wales turned eighteen: ‘in the evening the theatres Royal and the houses of the purveyors to the Royal household were illuminated.’
¹⁴¹
And the ho-hum air continued even with the queen herself. For her fifty-first birthday in 1870, nearly a decade after Albert’s death, at a time when her subjects were heartily tired of a seclusion that seemed to mean she could attend only the events she enjoyed, ‘The various clubhouses, theatres, and residences of the members of the Ministry were
illuminated, as were also the establishments of the Royal tradesmen’, but evidently there was nothing further.

It had not always been like this. In 1853, riding a wave of emotion after the success of the Great Exhibition, which Albert was seen to have steered so successfully, the illuminations on the queen’s birthday were ‘more than usually brilliant and the various devices in gas and coloured lamps [were]...worthy of the occasion...O n no former anniversary of her Majesty’s birthday has the illumination been so good.’ Particularly worthy of mention were the illuminations at the Junior United Services Club, in Waterloo Place, which included ‘A large bulging-crown’ with a ‘V’ inside the order of the garter, and the motto
Honi soit qui mal y pense
, together with ‘two irradiated stars of Brunswick, military flags and ensigns, wreaths of laurel, scrolls’.

A grand effort was made for the wedding of Princess Alexandra to the Prince of Wales. For the previous week the gas companies had been ‘economising gas, and the street lamps were not lighted till long after the usual time...Circulars...were sent round...asking that the inhabitants would burn as little gas as possible inside, in order that there might be enough to supply the innumerable jets which were to blaze on the outside of their houses.’ The results amply justified the scrimping. The dome of St Paul’s was given ‘a fiery coronet’, while its base was surrounded by a ring of yellow lamps, with the supporting pillars having ‘a ring of red lamps’. In addition to these gas illuminations, limelight was projected onto the dome, so that ‘from a distance, the high fires darted out rays...and the streams of light thrown upon the building looked like the water forced from a fire-engine’.
¹⁴²
The most spectacular displays in the City were at the Mansion House, the Bank and the Royal Exchange buildings. The Mansion House had strung lamps along all its cornices and pediments, as well as five large gas stars, and its columns were covered with crimson cloth, with illuminated swags of flowers hanging between the columns.
At the Royal Exchange a row of lights ran along the pediments, ‘and its columns [were] twined by thousands of small oil lamps of various colours’. The effect was enhanced by oil lamps spelling out: ‘The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof ’ in coloured lights. The West End did not lag behind. The National Gallery began with Prince of Wales feathers, moving on to a more ambitious transparency of two medallion portraits, with ‘two guardian angels crowning them with wreaths’ and a star of St George made of crystal, surmounted by a series of mottoes: ‘Long Life to the Prince and Princess of Wales!’ and ‘England’s Hope!’ in ‘amber-coloured crystal glass’. In addition the fountains in Trafalgar Square were lit by that dazzling new technology, ‘the electric light, which was also at intervals directed upon the Nelson Monument’. That night the streets were so densely crowded by people out to see the illuminations that it was almost impossible to walk through them, and Hungerford Bridge was closed at six that evening, for fear it would collapse. All night there were ‘dead locks’ of pedestrians, ‘during which no one progressed more than a dozen yards in an hour’.