The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London (46 page)

In this early piece Dickens used the editorial ‘we’ to signify the predilection of much of the populace. Even so, his own delight in a street row was considerable, and remained with him for ever. Twenty years later, when he was planning some private theatricals, he asked advice from Astley’s, which staged theatrical extravaganzas with horses. The next thing he knew, ‘an open phaeton drawn by two white ponies with black spots all over them (evidently stencilled)’ rattled in at his gate at a great rate before circling ‘round and round’ the central flower bed, ‘apparently looking for the clown’. This tickled the fancy of the established, middle-aged author as much as the drunken man had amused the hopeful young journalist. It was, he crowed, ‘One of the finest things…I have ever seen in my life.’

The carriage had been followed by ‘a multitude of boys’, many of whom, Dickens thought, had run all the way from Astley’s, south of the river, to his Marylebone house, nearly three miles in all. This was neither surprising nor unexpected. Amusement was found on the streets by rich and poor alike, and boys were at the forefront of what might be termed street theatre,
creating drama, watching it and enhancing it. If they found nothing to entertain them, such as an artificially spotted pony, they were happy to manufacture their own amusement. When a tray of wedding rings was removed from a jewellery store window for customers’ inspection, boys gathered outside and made ribald comments audible to the abashed couple inside. Men standing at oyster bars in the Haymarket and other nightspots were hardened to boys sharing their thoughts on their eating habits and manners: ‘He don’t take no winegar with his’n,’ and, ‘Look at that chap, he swallows ’em like soup!’ Boys were not alone in openly showing curiosity. Adults of all sorts felt it entirely natural to take an interest in the goings-on in the streets. When a police van carrying prisoners became stuck in a traffic jam, the bus driver as a matter of course chaffed the van driver: ‘What’s yer fare…?’ Meanwhile the cad added to the merriment by paraphrasing to the prisoners his standard request to his inside passengers: ‘Won’t any of your inside gents be so good as to ride outside to obleege a lady?’ Prisoners being moved around the city were of abiding interest. A van daily transported prisoners from Bow Street magistrates court to the various gaols. Daily the street outside would be ‘studded with a choice assemblage’, just as the departure of the mailcoaches also summoned a throng.

Dickens might be thought to be indulging in novelistic fancy when in
Martin Chuzzlewit
the nurse Betsey Prig buys salad from a street seller in High Holborn, ‘on condition that the vendor could get it all into her pocket’, which is ‘accomplished…to the breathless interest’ of an entire hackney-coach stand full of people. Yet the journalist James Ritchie noted the same universal interest in the mundane: ‘Hail a cab in any part of London,’ he wrote, and ‘you will observe that several grown-up persons and a large number of boys will stop to see you get in the cab.’ When the Serpentine in Hyde Park was drained of its stagnant, sewage-infected water in 1869, ‘a small army’ could not have kept bystanders from gathering to watch as the park’s fish were scooped up and transferred temporarily to the Round Pond. Crowds also gathered outside houses where some disaster had occurred: murder, violence, death. In
Dombey and Son
, when Walter miraculously returns long after being given up for dead in a shipwreck, ‘groups of hungry gazers’ could be found outside his uncle’s house ‘at any time between sunrise and sunset’, staring at its closed shutters. This too echoed reality. In 1850, when riding along Constitution Hill, Sir Robert Peel was fatally injured after being thrown from his horse and then crushed by the falling animal. For the few days that he survived, a great mass of people ‘thronged’ the ‘little garden’ at Whitehall, and even as night fell, ‘respectful groups’ remained standing outside well after 10 p.m.
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Aside from miraculous returns from the dead and incidents involving famous statesmen, mundane events also drew huge gatherings. When in 1843 a family of ten was evicted from their room in Clerkenwell for non-payment of rent, ‘an immense mob was forthwith attracted’, numbering possibly a thousand people, to commiserate with the homeless and shout abuse at the landlord’s men.

Street theatre might spring from the most unlikely events. When Sir Robert Peel was injured in a fall from his horse, crowds gathered daily outside his house until he died. Not only did these people find staring at a house interesting; journals like the middle-class
Illustrated London News
thought that its readers would enjoy an engraving of it too.

Sometimes street events might be more extraordinary still, lasting days or even weeks. At the beginning of March 1842, the
Morning Post
reported a ‘Singular Delusion’: ‘for some weeks past…the lower classes of Irish residing in the metropolis’ had believed that London was about to be hit by an earthquake ‘which is to swallow up the capital’ on the 16th. The other papers eagerly picked up the story, recounting how many of London’s residents had left for the country, or gone to Ireland, or merely east of Stepney, ‘on the supposition that the earthquake is not to extend beyond that’. A week later, ‘popular credulity’ suggested that ‘St. Paul’s Cathedral has already sunk five feet’, prompting hundreds to turn out to see for themselves. The papers published over a hundred stories in the next four weeks, many running three or four of them a day. Some readers thought it a joke, some a Chartist plot (see pp. 375–6), but most took it as an opportunity to laugh at the credulity of the labouring Irish. Even so, by the 17th, the day after the earthquake had been scheduled to take place, it was clear that it was not only the poor who had been taken in. Certainly the slums were either unusually empty, or rang with ‘frantic cries [and] the incessant appeals to Heaven’. However, the wharf for the Gravesend steamer at London Bridge was also ‘thronged by crowds of decently-attired people’, while Brighton experienced an influx of expensive carriages, and hordes gathered on the well-heeled heights of Hampstead, Highgate and Primrose Hill. When nothing happened, people sheepishly returned to their everyday lives, but took away no lasting lesson. In October, reports circulated that a ghost ‘in snow-white apparel’ was to walk through the churchyard of Whitechapel Church, and the surrounding streets became impassable for the best part of a week.

The middle classes enjoyed other types of one-off events in the streets, as when a crowd gathered in Hyde Park to watch the arrival of ‘a huge truck drawn by forty of [brewer] Mr Goding’s finest cream-coloured horses bedecked with green bays’, co-opted to pull M. C. Wyatt’s vast equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington, which was to be placed on top of Decimus Burton’s triumphal arch outside Apsley House.
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Even preparations for a
public event drew multitudes. In 1863, two full days before the arrival of Princess Alexandra of Denmark for her wedding to the Prince of Wales, Arthur Munby went down to London Bridge to look at the decorations being erected: ‘an huge [sic] mass of people of all kind [sic] was struggling to and fro’. The next day, ‘The Strand was scarce passable’, with ‘Crowds all the way’ from Inner Temple along Newgate and Cheapside to London Bridge, ‘the crush increasing’ with every step, ‘till at the Monument I found I could get no further; being indeed borne backward by the mass of people coming the other way’. The attraction for these people was just the decorations and bunting, not even the arrival itself (see pp. 315–17).

Events of state, especially declarations of war and peace, produced more formal street ceremonies and celebrations. In 1853, at the start of the Crimean War, the City’s mace bearer and the Lord Mayor’s gate porter processed from the Mansion House to the Royal Exchange in their black robes of office, drawing a crowd of 300: ‘The news spread in all directions, and a rush was made to the point of interest’, to hear, and to cheer, as the queen’s declaration of war with Russia was read aloud. Enthralled, spectators watched as the royal standard was raised and ‘the sword of state belonging to the Corporation was unsheathed’. Over the next two years, battles were ceremonially marked: cannon were fired from the Tower and St James’s Park throughout the day to celebrate the victory at Alma. In the City, the Lord Mayor carried the news first to the London Tavern, where ‘the leading members of the Corporation’ were to be found, and only then conveyed it to the Royal Exchange ‘for the purpose of more publicly proclaiming the news. The civic trumpeter having sounded several times’, he read the news of the victory to a crowd of 500.

The coming of peace had long been a street event. In 1814, the Peace of Paris had been marked by a festival, with all the central London parks decorated and lit up to resemble pleasure gardens, with mock battles enacted on the Serpentine, hot-air balloons and theatre booths at the fairs. After a ‘Grand National Jubilee’ on 1 August, however, the fairground people in
Hyde Park refused to strike their very prosperous pitches and finally had to be evicted by soldiers. When the Crimean War ended in 1856, there were more fireworks in Hyde Park, but this time a stand was erected with seats costing 1s 6d apiece, to make the crowds easier to control.

Far more moving, and more involving for the populace, was the return of the soldiers from the Crimea. Just over two years after the first troops had embarked, four brigades of 3,200 men emerged from Nine Elms station in formation, still wearing their weather-beaten, battle-damaged uniforms, to a band playing ‘Hail the Conquering Hero Comes’, ‘amidst a tremendous burst of cheering’. They marched along below balconies and windows thick with spectators: ‘Every point on the route was positively thronged,’ with the crowds nearly a couple of hundred yards deep in places. At Whitehall and Old Palace Yard, every window in the Houses of Parliament was crammed with MPs, peers and their families. The bells of St Margaret’s, Westminster’s parish church, pealed and guns were fired in the park. From the windows of the houses that lined Parliament Street, flags hung and flowers rained down on men ravaged by battle injuries and disease.

As they neared Buckingham Palace, the queen appeared at a window – the sole window not bursting with cheering men and women. The troops assembled in the forecourt as the queen and Prince Albert emerged, Albert accompanying the men as they marched up to Hyde Park, while the queen rode in her carriage to meet them. Up to 100,000 people had been waiting in the park for hours. The soldiers arrived at 12.30, after which Queen Victoria and Albert inspected the troops, before taking the salute. The troops then cheered the royal family, placing their bearskins on the tips of their bayonets and waving them high overhead. Once the royal party had left, the people lining the streets were expected merely to cheer the guards as they marched to their barracks. Instead, tens of thousands broke through the barriers to where the soldiers were mustered. At first the soldiers closed ranks, but this onslaught was not one of aggression, but an expression of gratitude. The crowds washed around the troops, hurrahing, waving their hats and handkerchiefs, reaching to clasp the shoulders of men who had seen thousands of their brother soldiers die, shaking their hands over and over, walking alongside them and cheering them all the way to their quarters.

Less emotional, but more frequent, was the Lord Mayor’s Show, held every 9 November to celebrate the incoming Lord Mayor of the City of London.
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Throughout the City, shops either didn’t open at all or closed early, while ‘streamers are hung out from the houses…amiable street-boys at every corner’ waved flags, and all was ‘brass bands and confusion and endless cheers!’ The new Lord Mayor swore his oath before the aldermen of the City, then set off on a quasi-coronation procession, accompanied by the previous mayor, the aldermen and other City and guild officials, preceded by ‘the city heralds, trumpeters, men in brass armour’. By tradition, the route passed through the parish in which the mayor was himself an alderman, a mark of favour celebrated by exceptional street decorations. Officials then went upriver on the City barges to Westminster, where the Lord Mayor swore another oath of allegiance before the judges at the Court of Exchequer and then returned by barge once more, to Blackfriars Bridge. Once ashore, the procession ‘increases in splendour and magnificence’, as the wives of the mayor and officials joined them in the City’s state coaches, followed by ‘Princes, Ministers of State, the Judges of the land, and the Foreign Ambassadors’, all taking the road to the Mansion House, for the day’s highlight: the civic dinner.

Prime ministers, Lord Mayors, even royalty were a regular sight in the streets, although the public response was not uniformly admiring. In his day the Prince Regent rarely showed himself to the unmediated populace, who had a nasty habit of shouting at him, ‘You d—d rascal, where’s your wife?’
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Under Victoria, public response was more muted, to the point
where the presence of royalty excited little notice, much less enthusiasm. Leonard Wyon noted in his diary, ‘as we were in the Edgware Road in an omnibus we saw P. Albert P. of Wales and Col. Grey riding behind us,’ adding immediately afterwards, ‘dear Mary bought me a handsome walking stick.’