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Authors: Judith Flanders

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The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London

The Victorian City

Judith Flanders, a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Buckingham, is the author of the bestselling
The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed
(2003); the critically acclaimed
Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain
(2006);
A Circle of Sisters
(2001), which was nominated for the
Guardian
First Book Award; and, most recently,
The Invention of Murder
(2011). She lives in London.

ALSO BY JUDITH FLANDERS

The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed

Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

A Circle of Sisters: Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne-Jones, Agnes Poynter and Louisa Baldwin

The Invention of Murder

First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Atlantic Books,

an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

The moral right of Judith Flanders to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-84887-795-5

E-book ISBN: 978-0-85789-881-4

Designed and typeset in Adobe Garamond by Lindsay Nash

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For Ravi

With thanks

One may easily sail round England, or circumnavigate the globe. But not the most enthusiastic geographer…ever memorised a map of London…For England is a small island, the world is infinitesimal amongst the planets. But London is illimitable.

F
ORD
M
ADOX
F
ORD
,
The Soul of London

Cityful passing away, other cityful coming, passing away too: other coming on, passing on. Houses, lines of houses, streets, miles of pavements, piled up bricks, stones. Changing hands. This owner, that. Landlord never dies they say. Other steps into his shoes when he gets his notice to quit…Pyramids in sand. Built on bread and onions. Slaves. Chinese wall. Babylon. Big stones left. Round towers. Rest rubble, sprawling suburbs, jerrybuilt…built of breeze. Shelter for the night.

No one is anything.

J
AMES
J
OYCE
,
Ulysses

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

A Note on Currency

Maps

List of Illustrations

Introduction

PART ONE: THE CITY WAKES

1810: The Berners Street Hoax

1. Early to Rise

2. On the Road

3. Travelling (Mostly) Hopefully

4. In and Out of London

PART TWO: STAYING ALIVE

1861: The Tooley Street Fire

5. The World’s Market

6. Selling the Streets

7. Slumming

8. The Waters of Death

PART THREE: ENJOYING LIFE

1867: The Regent’s Park Skating Disaster

9. Street Performance

10. Leisure for All

11. Feeding the Streets

12. Street Theatre

PART FOUR: SLEEPING AND AWAKE

1852: The Funeral of the Duke of Wellington

13. Night Entertainment

14. Street Violence

15. The Red-Lit Streets to Death

Appendix: Dickens’ Publications by Period

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is the product of a lifetime of London-loving and Dickens-loving, and I must first and foremost thank those great London and Dickens scholars who have enriched my reading: Peter Ackroyd, Philip Collins, John Drew, Madeline House, Susan Shatto, Michael Slater, Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson.

As always, I am indebted to the members of the Victoria 19th-century British Culture and Society mailbase for their tolerance of my seemingly random queries, and for their vast stores of knowledge. And to Patrick Leary, list-master
extraordinaire
, go not merely my thanks for creating such a congenial environment, but also for pointing me towards the Regent’s Park skating disaster.

I am grateful to my agent Bill Hamilton for his skill, and for his patience and tolerance.

I thank, too, all those at Atlantic Books, past and present: Alan Craig, Karen Duffy, Lauren Finger, Richard Milbank, Sarah Norman, Bunmi Oke, Sarah Pocklington, Orlando Whitfield and Corinna Zifko. My thanks too to Jeff Edwards, Douglas Matthews, Lindsay Nash, Leo Nickolls and Tamsin Shelton. The wonderful pictures were found by Josine Meijer, while Celia Levett, with her sensitive and rigorous copy-editing, improved every sentence of the text.

Finally, I owe my career to Ravi Mirchandani, now my publisher but, before I became a writer, my friend. ‘Stop talking about it,’ he told me then. ‘Write it.’ So I have. This book is for him.

A NOTE ON CURRENCY

Pounds, shillings and pence were the divisions of the currency. One shilling is made up of twelve pence; one pound of twenty shillings, i.e. 240 pence. Pounds are represented by the £ symbol, shillings as ‘s’, and pence as ‘d’ (from the Latin,
denarius
). ‘One pound, one shilling and one penny’ is written as £1 1s 1d. ‘One shilling and sixpence’, referred to in speech as ‘one and six’, is written as 1s 6d, or ‘1/6’.

A guinea was a coin to the value of £1 1 0. (The actual coin was not circulated after 1813, although the term remained and tended to be reserved for luxury goods.) A sovereign was a twenty-shilling coin, a half-sovereign a tenshilling coin. A crown was five shillings, half a crown 2/6, and the remaining coins were a florin (two shillings), sixpence, a groat (four pence), a threepenny bit (pronounced ‘thrup’ny’), twopence (pronounced tuppence), a penny, a halfpenny (pronounced hayp’ny), a farthing (a quarter of a penny) and a half a farthing (an eighth of a penny).

Relative values have altered so substantially that attempts to convert nineteenth-century prices into contemporary ones are usually futile. However, the website http://www.ex.ac.uk/~RDavies/arian/current/howmuch.html is a gateway to this complicated subject.