The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London (52 page)

Perhaps the most masculine of all entertainment arenas was to be found in the variety of places where animal baiting occurred throughout the century. In theory, this was a Regency hangover that faded away with Victorian respectability. In reality, there are mentions of various types of baiting throughout the period, both in fixed venues and more loosely organized by individuals. One early memoirist recalled places for bull-baiting, badgerbaiting, dogfighting ‘and such like “manly sports”’. Lying between Parliament and Millbank was a house owned by William Aberfield, better known as
‘Slender Billy’, where bear-baiting and dogfighting were conducted, while the similarly characterfully named ‘Harlequin Billy’ presided over bear- and badger-baiting in a cellar in Whitechapel every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, at eight o’clock, all year round. The compiler of a notebook in the possession of the magistrate John Silvester recorded that Mrs Cummings, a fence, may have owned the cockpit in Bambridge Street, which had twiceweekly fights.
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It also stated that Mrs Smith, near Blackfriars, ‘has a Bear Bait twice a week, Mondays & Thursdays, in a Shed at the back part of the House’. Both places charged 6d admission. So although women could not attend, at least a few ran these activities.

A fictional bear-baiting was described in
Real Life in London
in 1821, where the two men on the razzle remind themselves to button their jackets tightly and ‘be awake’ for pickpockets in the audience they mix with, who ‘bore the appearance of Butchers, Dog-fanciers and Ruffians, intermingled here and there with a few
Sprigs of Fashion
...
Coster-mongers
, Coal-heavers, Watermen, Soldiers, and Livery-servants’. The bear stands on his hind legs, chained to a wall by its neck. Dogs are loosed on him and bets laid as to ‘how long the bow-wow would bother the ragged Russian’. (See Plate 18.) Each time a dog retreats wounded, a new dog is brought out, until at last the bear is taken away to be bandaged until he had healed enough to fight again. Pierce Egan’s novel,
Life in London
, in the same year describes a monkey fighting dogs at Westminster Pit, near Tothill Fields, a famous location for all types of animal baiting.

Both these instances are fiction, but the Westminster Pit was a real place, and newspapers routinely carried advertisements for fights throughout the 1820s. In 1822,
The Times
ran an advertisement for ‘A grand MAIN [match] of
COCKS
to be
FOUGHT
at the Cockpit Royal, Westminster’, over three days, ‘for 5 guineas a battle, and 100 the odds’, with two fights scheduled daily, at two and five o’clock. As late as 1865, there were reports
of cockfighting, although by that time they were balanced by reports of police-court appearances of men arrested in raids on illegal fighting dens. (Fights were legal as long as the premises were licensed.) Dogfighting also continued throughout the century, together with ratting. In the late 1840s, handbills were distributed announcing a ‘great hundred rat match’ in a pub in Graham Street, off the City Road, for an audience of the familiar mix of sporting types, costers, soldiers and tradesmen. The 1s entry fee gave visitors access to an upstairs room, where wooden boards created a small ring six feet in diameter, ‘about as large as the centre flower-bed’, lit by a large gaslight and surrounded by benches and tables. A dozen or so rats were loosed and the dogs set on them. As the rats were killed, their bodies were flung into a corner, the little arena swept clean, and the process began again. Dogs also fought each other, generally on the sly, in the backyards of beer shops, or on Sundays in the fields and waste ground surrounding the city.

The purpose of animal baiting was gambling. There was a middle-class sense that London was full of gamblers, card-sharpers, extortionists and other conmen, all waiting to leap upon the young naïf up from the country. In
Martin Chuzzlewit
, Dickens mocked this foreboding when the rather simple Tom Pinch arrives in London for the first time and finds, to his surprise, that he was not once ‘the prey of ring-droppers, pea and thimble- riggers, duffers, touters, or any of those bloodless sharpers ... H e fell into conversation with no gentleman who took him into a public-house, where there happened to be another gentleman who swore he had more money than any gentleman, and very soon proved he had more money than one gentleman by taking his away from him; neither did he fall into any other of the numerous man-traps which are set up without notice, in the public grounds of this city.’ Despite these generalized fears for country bumpkins, some of the worst mantraps were designed for the upper classes. The fanciest gambling den in London in the first half of the century was Crockford’s in St James’s Street, founded in 1826 by a retired fishmonger. Crockford ensured that his club, apart from being a place where the rich could lose their shirts in decent privacy, in all other respects resembled the best gentlemen’s club: it was exclusive and had a good chef. Indeed, it even laid on special late supper hours during the parliamentary season, when an exhausted legislator could
stagger up the road from the Houses of Parliament and be refreshed at any hour from midnight to five in the morning.

There were thousands more clubs and drinking places to suit every socioeconomic level and every purpose. The attitude to drinking was almost entirely class based.
Hints to Men About Town
, published in 1840, warned that ‘as every Man about Town is liable to be placed in situations where it is almost impossible to escape perfectly sober’, such a young man needed to learn how ‘to take his glass ... without making a fool of himself ’. The author, who called himself ‘The Old Medical Student’, advised young men to eat as well as drink, to stick to one type of wine, not to get rowdy and, above all, ‘Do not be prevailed upon to sing’ (which is surely good advice today too). This was followed by a section on what to do when a friend passed out from drink and how to cure a hangover. It was all very matter-of-fact.

The Servant Girl in London: Showing the Dangers to which Young Country Girls are Exposed
was published in the same year, but could not be further away in tone, even though its author had similarly pragmatic views. Readers were instructed that many pubs were entirely respectable, having been established by servants of gentry, and in them one could expect to meet ‘some of the most pleasant company...The conversation is often very instructive, and well expressed...about politics, the news of the day, parish intelligence, and the like.’ It was the taproom that was the danger: ‘Here collect the working men, male servants in and out of place, hackney-coachmen, omnibus cads, &c.’, who ‘drink far more in proportion than those in the parlour...and frequently insult most grossly’ the servant girls from local houses, the ‘wives of mechanics [artisans], poor tradesmen, and the brokendown gentlewoman who keeps a school’. These blameless females, while waiting to collect the supper beer, were obliged meanwhile to mingle with ‘the washerwoman, the market-woman, the basket-woman, the gaudilyattired courtesan, the sad street-walker’. This mixing, warned the author, was ‘highly dangerous’, but it was the mixing he was warning about, not the drinking.

From the mid-eighteenth century, there had been a shift from gin, the historic drink of the people, to beer. Bad harvests and the 1751 Gin Act had made the spirit much more expensive, while the licensing laws for
beer were being gradually loosened. Pubs were also changing. Previously, a pub had been a terraced house like any other, its ground-floor front room the public area, laid out and decorated like any front room, where people who knew each other sat together, as if they were at home. With increasing urbanization came a greater anonymity; a counter was installed so that the pub workers had access to the drink, while the customers (who were strangers, after all) no longer did. As early as the 1830s, this homely space was becoming more formal, more businesslike. A plan for a model pub showed a ‘shop’, that is, the bar, with an area for customers to stand on one side. A counter divided it from the bar-parlour, which was still considered a private part of the house and was decorated as a private sitting room ‘for the master and mistress’, where customers ventured only by invitation. A ‘company parlour’ led off to the right; and behind the shop was the taproom, the largest of them all. Later on, pubs also had jug-and-bottle departments, where householders would go with their own jugs to collect beer for home consumption, instead of using the shop, which was given over to drinking on the premises. The rooms were socially graded by their
furnishings: taprooms had cheap wooden tables and benches; furniture in the parlour was mahogany, perhaps with upholstered chairs; while the barparlour retained its domestic furnishings.

On Sundays, pubs were legally required to close during the hours of church services. It was not only drinkers who waited for opening hours: the child on the left in this 1850 illustration holds a jug to carry home the dinner beer.

With different rooms serving different types of customers, most pubs also expected to attract a number of regular clients. In
Sketches by Boz
, two pubs, one in Henrietta Street, and one in Fleet Street, draw a group of ‘steady old boys’ who are ‘always to be seen in the same taverns, at the same hours every evening’, where they sit and smoke and drink and tell stories; or they meet there, go half-price to the theatre, and then return after the show, for steak and oysters.
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These were central London pubs. Some were attached to coaching inns, both for passengers and for those meeting them, later providing the same function at railway stations. Some served those regular commuters walking past, who made up a substantial market. Pubs were therefore to be found on all the major arteries in and out of London, where possible on a corner site, to catch two streams of pedestrians. So essential were they to daily life that when speculative builders began to develop any area, a pub was routinely the first building to be erected, with the builder as licensee. The pub gave his workmen a place to eat and drink (as well as a place for their wages to be directed back into the contractor’s own pocket); then, when a few houses had been built, the pub lease was sold off to provide more capital for further building. Augustus Mayhew’s
Paved with Gold
described a new suburb in the mid-1850s: ‘Of the residences already erected, the large majority were still unfinished [but]...D otted all about was a thick sprinkling of public-houses.’

In the 1830s, pubs especially relied on a variety of customers when they began to face direct competition from a new type of drinking establishment, the gin palace. In 1834, a Select Committee on the Prevailing Vice of Drunkenness heard from a grocer in Tothill Street, near the Houses of Parliament, that a pub ‘nearly opposite to my residence, where the consumption of
spirits was very trifling’ had been converted into a gin palace. From being ‘a low dirty public-house, with only one doorway’, it was transformed into ‘a splendid edifice, the front ornamented with pilasters, supporting a handsome cornice and entablature, and balustrades, and the whole elevation remarkably striking and handsome; the doorways were increased in number from one, and that a small one...to three, and each of those eight to ten feet wide; the...doors and windows glazed with very large single squares of plate glass, and the gas fittings of the most costly description...when the doors were opened, the rush was tremendous; it was instantly filled with customers, and continued so till midnight.’

Gin palaces flourished with the arrival of gas lighting and plate-glass windows, making them a thing of wonder, places of light and warmth for those whose lives held little of either: undoubtedly, as Dickens observed, the poorer the neighbourhood, ‘the more splendid do these places become’. In 1835, amid the filth and despair of St Giles, he recognized that the gin palaces were ‘All...light and brilliancy...the gay building with the fantastically ornamented parapet, the illuminated clock, the plate-glass windows surrounded by stucco rosettes, and its profusion of gas-lights in richly-gilt burners, is perfectly dazzling when contrasted with the darkness and dirt we have just left.’ Soon the enormous gaslights outside became the distinctive marker of a gin palace. One such place in the Ratcliffe Highway, in the East End, had ‘a revolving light with many burners playing most beautifully’ over one door; over a second, ‘about fifty or sixty jets, in one lantern, were throwing out...brilliant gleams, as if from the branches of a shrub’; while a third had ‘no less than
THREE
enormous lamps, with corresponding lights’. The man describing them was a temperance campaigner, so he might have been somewhat carried away by the enticements on offer, but not by much.

The decor, it seemed to Dickens, was, if possible, ‘even gayer than the exterior’. ‘A bar of French-polished mahogany, elegantly carved, extends the whole width of the place; and...Beyond the bar is a lofty and spacious saloon...with a gallery running round it, equally well furnished.’ This luxury contrasted sharply with the gin palace’s customers: two washerwomen; two old men who had ‘finished their third quartern’ – their third
quarter of a pint – of gin and are ‘crying drunk’; and some ‘fat comfortable-looking elderly women’ drinking rum shrub (rum with lemon and sugar). ‘A throng of men, women, and children...have been constantly going in and out, [but late in the day this] dwindles down to two or three occasional stragglers – cold, wretched-looking creatures, in the last stage of emaciation and disease.’ Dickens is both realistic and sympathetic here, ending by commenting that if temperance societies could provide against hunger and want, the gin palaces would vanish; since they could not, who could blame the drinkers for gravitating to the warmest, most attractive place available? (It is also worth considering that people who rarely had enough to eat would easily become drunk on very little alcohol.)