The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London (50 page)

For those without titles and replica uniforms, it was the event itself that made good street theatre. In 1829, the young Hékékyan Bey, studying in England, heard ‘sudden cries of “fire” and the noise of running footsteps’. Looking out, he saw a fire apparently a few hundred yards from the house. Despite the heavy rain, ‘the street was crowded with people of both sexes hastening to the conflagration’, and without any hesitation he too rushed out to join them. Sala, two decades later, would have understood
this perfectly: at the call of ‘Fire! fire!’ he wrote, ‘It matters not how late the hour be, how important the avocations of the moment, that magic cry sets all legs...in motion...A minute past, I was at Evans’s [Supper Rooms], tranquilly conversing…now I find myself racing like mad up St. Martin’s Lane, towards St. Giles’s...running after that hoarse cry, and towards that awful Redness in the sky.’ This particular fire was at an oil shop, which went up like a rocket, with ‘columns of flame, and…billows upon billows of crimson smoke, the whole encircled by myriads of fiery sparks that fall upon the gaping crowd and make them dance and yell with terror and excitement.’ Sometimes viewers set up to watch these blazes at a distance: in 1847, a fire in Battersea drew busloads of spectators who stood all along the north side of the river and on the bridges, even venturing out in small boats.

It is unsurprising, therefore, to find that in Dickens’ day journalists ‘prowl continually about London...in search of fires, fallings in and down of houses, runnings away of vicious horses, breakings down of cabs, carriages, and omnibuses; and, in fact, accidents and casualties of every description. But especially fires. Fatal accidents are not unnaturally preferred…and in the case of a fire a slight loss of life is not objected to.’ Street theatre was, after all, discerning in its disasters.

PART FOUR

Sleeping and Awake

1852: The Funeral of the Duke of Wellington

T
he great duke was dying. In a way, the great duke had been dying for so long that no one believed he would actually die. He had had a stroke in 1839, which had been fairly successfully hidden from the public, and well into his seventies he continued to ride out, unaccompanied, in his quaintly old-fashioned clothes. Another stroke followed on one of these rides. Then another, in the House of Lords. These were harder to hide, and the end was coming.

The vanquisher of Napoleon was the man people remembered. Forgotten was the execrated politician, the public face of anti-Reform sentiment of the 1820s and 1830s. Forgotten was the man who was known to have long been on intimate terms with a married woman who was not his wife. In the late 1820s, one American tourist had seen him in the street, a man, he commented, ‘who might have rendered himself the idol of the nation’, but whose name, instead, was ‘scarcely ever mentioned’ except accompanied by ‘some epithet of reproach’, even his ‘
military
talents’ being condemned, ‘so strong is the dislike he has incurred’ by his ‘domestic habits’. At that time, there had been no admiration, much less veneration. In 1830, on the way to the Abbey for the coronation of William IV, his carriage ‘rolled on in solemn silence, as if to a funeral’, while that of Lord Brougham, the populist reforming chancellor, was ‘hailed by the shouts and acclamation of all’.

By 1852, this had been forgotten and the old duke was once more part of the city’s landscape. Apsley House, at Hyde Park Corner, his home since 1817, was known as ‘Number 1, London’, and by now people assumed that it was so-called because of its famous owner. (More prosaically, it had simply been the first house on the very western edge of the city in the eighteenth century.) Long forgotten too, or at least regarded as a foible of age, was the reason why the windows of Apsley House had been covered with sheets of iron since 1831. In that year the government’s rejection of Reform had
seen a mob surge down Piccadilly, breaking windows. Stones had been thrown at the windows of Apsley House, too, until the butler came out to remonstrate: the Duchess of Wellington had just died, and her body still lay inside, awaiting burial. The mob passed on, but the bitter, furious duke – who had been famously unpleasant to his wife throughout their marriage (‘I was not the least in love with her. I married her because they asked me to do it’) – ostentatiously had great iron shutters nailed over the windows and left them there for the remainder of his life. In 1852, many full-grown adults could not remember Apsley House with open windows, but they were seeing him now not as a statesman of disastrous political ineptitude but as the soldier, the hero of Salamanca and of Vittoria, of Badajoz and, of course, of Waterloo.

Yet, when the end finally came, on 14 September, at the duke’s home at Walmer Castle, near Deal, in Kent, the public response was initially muted. Lord Stanley, parliamentary under-secretary at the Foreign Office, wrote to Disraeli that the duke’s death had not produced ‘the slightest impression out-of-doors...no crowd of enquirers round Apsley House...We telegraphed down to Balmoral without delay: but I don’t imagine the Chief [the Earl of Derby: both prime minister and also Stanley’s father] will find it worth his while to come up [to London].’ It was another week before it was announced that a state funeral would take place, but that the date was to be decided by Parliament, which was in recess and would not reconvene until 11 November.

While the public initially displayed an interest that was devoid of emotion or excitement, the newspapers viewed it as a bigger event. The day after it was decided to hold a state funeral, the
Illustrated London News
was already advertising that its ‘Regular Subscribers will receive
GRATIS
splendid large
ENGRAVINGS
of the
PROCESSION
and
PUBLIC FUNERAL
of the DUKE OF
WELLINGTON
, a lasting memorial of the national mourning’. Other papers were more ambivalent, at least at first. The
Daily News
noted that before Nelson’s funeral in 1805 the vergers of St Paul’s were said to have made over £1,000 by taking payments to let people in to see the preparations. And, it reminded its readers, that funeral had cost the country £14,698. It added, without comment, that the duke was earning nearly £10,000 a year. (This
was made up of his salary as commander-in-chief, an allowance as colonel of the Grenadier Guards, a salary as colonel-in-chief, Rifle Brigade, a salary as Lord Warden, Cinque Ports, a salary as Constable of the Tower, and a ‘Forage Allowance’ of £700 a year. The article left unmentioned the fact that more than £400,000 had been voted him by Parliament as reward for his role in the Napoleonic wars, or the quarter of a million pounds paid by the nation for his country estate.) Instead, the newspaper stressed that the funeral should be in keeping with ‘the simple, the severe spirit of the man’, although, it added hastily, it didn’t ‘grudge’ a ‘penny’. Not that anyone knew how much anything would cost, because it was nearly two months before the Earl Marshal announced even the date of the funeral or its route.

Perhaps those intervening two months of uncertainty were what drove the public into such a frenzy. About ten days after the duke’s death, advertisements began to be placed for Wellington-related entertainment: the Gallery of Illustration (a quasi-theatre, for people whose religious scruples did not permit them to attend real theatres) mounted ‘The Diorama of Wellington’s Campaigns’, showing twice daily. Portraits and engravings, biographies and histories of his battles went on sale, together with a ‘
N A T I O N A L S O N G
’ dedicated to his memory, and a copy of an equestrian sculpture (in plaster for five guineas, or bronze at fifty guineas), a Minton bust and likenesses in gold or silver, suitable for mounting in mourning rings and other jewellery.

By the middle of October, newspapers were running advertisements for seats along what was expected to be the procession’s route. ‘
FUNERAL
of the
GREAT DUKE
. – The Nobility and Gentry are informed that any number of
SEATS
or
FLOORS
, to view the Procession, may be obtained of
MR. THEARLE
, the masonic jeweller, 198, Fleet-street, near Temple-bar’ was a fairly representative example. By the end of October, a single room in the Strand was offered for an astonishing 100 guineas, while a grocer in St Paul’s Churchyard was reputed to have rented out the upper storeys of his house for £500. Most papers were carrying two or three of these advertisements daily; by early November, this had risen to half a dozen or so, and the tourist market was not overlooked: ‘Sitze für die Beerdigung des Herzog von Wellington’. A lack of solemnity was apparent: those
taking rooms, advertised Messrs Purssell of Cornhill, ‘can be supplied with
REFRESHMENTS
of any kind, including wines, and the use of china, glass, cutlery, &c.’

The churches were determined not to be left behind. St Mary-le-Strand advertised one-guinea seats in a gallery to be erected in front of the church. St Clement Danes joined in in early November, its seats ‘exclusively [for] ratepayers of the parish’ for the first week, then available to the public at large. (At the end of the year St Clement’s divided its takings of £223 among seven charities and made donations of ‘many other...smaller amounts’, all from this sale of seats for the funeral.)

An advertisement in the
Morning Post
warned, ‘It has been computed that one million of individuals will visit London to witness the melancholy procession of departed greatness, and at this inclement season of the year ... it is most important that the feet should be kept free from damp’, for which, happily, it provided the solution: ‘
AMERICAN OVER-SHOES
should be worn, both by those attending the funeral and those waiting, perhaps for hours, to see the procession pass.’ Glenny’s Irish Hand-knit Stockings and Socks reminded readers that ‘
THE FUNERAL
of the
DUKE OF YORK
was attended with loss of life to several illustrious Statesmen, in consequence of taking cold in the feet.’ Other establishments attempted to appear less openly commercial: Moses and Son, a well-known City firm selling ready-made, inexpensive men’s clothing, produced a rare black-bordered notice: ‘E. Moses and Son are no way desirous of making this a business affair, but, prompted by a disposition to offer every accommodation to their patrons...they have prepared for this occasion a Stock of Mourning Habiliments.’

It was becoming clear that this was an occasion that hundreds of thousands did not want to miss. Train schedules were revised to depart from towns and cities in the middle of the night, to get spectators to London first thing on the morning of the funeral. Even shipping was affected. The Mount Alexandra line announced that its packet ships, due to sail to Australia that week, would ‘In consequence of the request of many of the passenger ... not leave the East India Docks until after the day of the funeral of the Duke of Wellington’.

For by now the funeral was turning into an extravaganza. On 10 November the embalmed body of the duke was conveyed to London by special train from Kent. It arrived at the Bricklayers’ Arms after midnight, a time when no spectators might have been expected. Nevertheless, ‘a very considerable number of persons’ waited there for hours, as they did all along the route, even though the train made only two stops, chugging without pause through the other stations. Even those platforms were ‘lined with railway officials holding lamps in their hands, which served to show further back groups of spectators...every one...in mourning’.

The duke’s body was taken, with military escort, to the Great Hall of Chelsea Hospital, where the hall was hung with his ‘trophies of great military achievements ... from the banners of the “Mysore Tiger” to the Eagles of the “Grand Army”’. The staging was dramatic: a vestibule was draped in black, with ‘an enormous plume of black feathers, descending in the form of a chandelier’, while the inner hall was lit by eighty-three candelabras displaying sable hangings that entirely covered the walls and ceiling. The niches were lined with soldiers from the duke’s regiment in pairs, their arms reversed. A passageway led to a dais covered with cloth of gold under a canopy of black velvet, spangled with silver stars and a silver fringe, with, at the front, a heraldic mantle, the arms in gold, lined with black-spangled silver fabric, all looped up in festoons. The coffin itself was placed on a raised platform with ‘an ornamental fence, massively silvered’ around it, with lions rampant carrying shields on pedestals. Ten hollow columns, made to resemble bundles of spears bound with laurels, marched down the hall, containing reflectors to light the bier, on which stood another dozen smaller silver candelabra. Behind hung the flags of the conquered from all Wellington’s battles; in front were displayed his military insignia and decorations, including the ones given by foreign governments, his marshal’s batons and Waterloo sword. At the head of the coffin chairs were placed for the chief mourner and two ‘assistant mourners’, who changed by rota, the places being filled by ‘some of the most distinguished personages in the kingdom’.