The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London (55 page)

Public events were celebrated by massive illuminations on public buildings and private houses alike. Here the Ordnance Office in Pall Mall marks the end of the Crimean War in 1856 with flags, an illuminated Order of the Garter and a giant VR, for Victoria Regina.

This physical impasse was not unprecedented. When Leonard Wyon set off with his wife from their house in St John’s Wood to see the illuminations in the West End that marked the end of the Crimean War, they too had difficulty walking: ‘the crowd was so great, and the carriages so thickly packed in Oxford Street that we could not cross the road without going a good deal out of the way.’ They were deeply impressed by the illuminations on public buildings and on the mansions that lined Park Lane, including one that required 2,000 feet of gas a minute to light the coat of arms encircled with gas jets and the façade’s eighteen pillars ‘decorated with spiral twists and flags of all nations’. Even the railway stations were decorated, one having ‘a beading of gas running along the top and sides of the principal face of the [station], with a monster reflecting star in the centre’. In Lincoln’s Inn Fields, three large transparencies showed the Allies attacking Sebastopol, with the word ‘Peace’ next to the coats of arms of England and the Allies. A shopkeeper in the Strand proudly boasted a transparency that read:

MAY THE

DESTROYERS OF PEACE

BE DESTROYED BY US.

TIFFIN & SON,

BUG-DESTROYERS TO HER MAJESTY.

While individual choices were made by each resident or shopkeeper, the decision to illuminate at all came from the top. The end of the siege of Sebastopol in 1855 had led to many houses being decorated, but, admonished the
Illustrated London News
severely, ‘this was not by any means general; no intimation having been given that any external marks of rejoicing on the part of the people would at present be expected’. Later in the week, the French ambassador’s residence ‘was splendidly illuminated’ with 10,000 lamps, even though ‘the order for illumination was not given until half-past six in the evening’.

When they first heard about the illuminations, Wyon and his wife had bought ‘half a dozen French Lanterns’ to tie to their balcony before they
realized that only ‘people of note’ were obliged to join in. The danger must have been one factor – those vast quanitites of gas in temporary pipes cannot have been entirely safe; the cost another; and, finally, a heartfelt cry in
The Times
suggested that many people did not want to participate. ‘Mr. (with the consent and approbation of Mrs.)
GLASS
’ wrote in to say:

I have not met with a single person in society who has not spoken of the illumination of private houses as a nuisance, which no one would incur if it were not for the fear of a stone through his drawing-room window...I rest my appeal on the absolute nastiness of smoke, grease, and gas...I agree most willingly to my share in the cost...of the public illuminations. I am perfectly willing, if any public or parochial boards will undertake to exhibit supplementary fireworks or transparencies in the open spaces of each quarter of the town, to be rated or to subscribe for that purpose; but I object, with all my heart, to be coerced into a piece of domestic dirt and discomfort.

On the one hand were the people in the street, public entertainment and street theatre; on the other, ‘domestic dirt and discomfort’. In nineteenthcentury London, there was no competition: the street won every time.

14.

STREET VIOLENCE

Entertainment and street theatre often met and, when they did, the result could be violent. Not all violence was condemned and suppressed by the state and its authorities. In fact, some violence was state-sanctioned; nor was it even seen as violence, but as the individual’s just deserts. Some cruelties only gradually came to be seen as such: as the norms of behaviour and personal interaction changed, so what had been acceptable at one end of the century appeared shocking at the other.

In 1836, Dickens wrote ‘The Great Winglebury Duel’, presenting duelling as a relic from the past, a matter for farcical treatment – mistaken identities, runaway marriages and all. But even as he wrote, newspapers from time to time reported on duels still occurring. In 1842, two men from genteel St John’s Wood trekked out to Putney Heath for a duel over a political disagreement. Both were wounded, but there was no hint of censure in the report of the incident, one magazine even calling it an ‘affair of honour’. In the following year, an Anti-Duelling Association was formed, aiming to see ‘the disgraceful practice’ ‘speedily exploded’, but six weeks later two officers fought a duel in Camden Town and one died. The ensuing investigation produced an interesting set of mixed signals. The inquest found that the duellist had been murdered by his opponent; the seconds and the attending doctor were charged with murder in the second degree. Yet after a series of trials, only the duellist was convicted, with the jury giving a strong recommendation for mercy. This was endorsed by the judge, who even as he passed the death sentence assured the prisoner that it would not be carried out.

As late as 1869, what was in effect an upper-class brawl was treated as another affair of honour. Lord Carrington ‘horsewhipped, or something
like it’, a man for writing a scurrilous article about Carrington’s father. Carrington was charged with both common assault and for challenging the writer to a duel. Despite this, public opinion was obviously with him, and while he was found guilty of the assault, it was ‘under circumstances of the greatest provocation’. He was merely bound over to keep the peace for a year, on his own recognizance. Four months after the conviction, in a sign of how the establishment regarded the incident, the Prince of Wales made a highly public visit to Carrington’s country house. Yet at the same time, the lower orders found that their violent behaviour was seen as less acceptable. A few months before Carrington carried out his horsewhipping, a licensed victualler was charged with assaulting a policeman who had stopped him for furious driving. He was given two weeks’ imprisonment, with hard labour, although the newspaper noted that, not that long before, he would have been let off with a minimal fine. This type of force, except for grandees, was now harshly punished.

This was a great change from the early years of the century, when mob rule was far more visible in the streets, beginning with the literally theatrical, and mostly non-violent, protests, the Old Price Riots. Covent Garden theatre had burnt down in 1808; when the new theatre opened in 1809, it was discovered that the galleries and pit – the lower-priced areas – had been reduced in extent to create more seating for the prosperous, while ticket prices had been raised throughout. On the first night, the noise from the pit and galleries was so loud that nothing at all could be heard of the performance above drumming feet and voices shouting, ‘Old prices!’ On subsequent nights, the demonstrations, both inside and outside the theatre, became more vehement, more focused and more purely theatrical, as the participants began to sing Old Price songs and dance the Old Price dance, stamping their feet and banging their sticks in tempo. A coffin bearing the epitaph ‘Here lies the body of the New Price’ was paraded through the streets and into the theatre. The manager, John Philip Kemble, hired Daniel Mendoza, the retired pugilist, to restore order. This was a major error, raising the emotional temperature and pushing the previously good-tempered crowds towards mayhem. After more than a month of performances where all the theatre took place in the auditorium, Kemble had the Riot Act
read one night to disperse the audience.
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This was another misjudgement, producing even greater fury as well as even less likelihood that the demonstrators would permit performances to proceed. It was another month before Kemble admitted defeat and returned to the old prices, whereupon the crowds held up a gracious banner: ‘We are Satisfied.’

The Old Price riots, taking place at one of London’s two patent theatres, attracted attention, but riotous assembly was not uncommon. What were called riots by those in authority were often just street brawls, sometimes organized as an accepted form of channelling popular aggression. In 1821, in St Giles, about 200 people assembled, ‘armed with sticks and other weapons...each party being decorated with distinguishing colours’. They set on each other with a will; one side was gradually pushed back towards High Holborn before regrouping and in turn forcing its opponents back into St Giles. The two groups then made an unspoken alliance and turned on the parish watchmen who, with twenty flurried assistants, had been sent to deal with the problem. It took the Bow Street patrol – the precursors to the police – to charge with swords drawn, taking thirteen into custody, before the crowd dispersed, clearly feeling a good day had been had by all – or by all but the four dead and the twenty wounded badly enough to require hospitalization.

Some gangs were more permanently constituted and more focused on gain. In 1826, a gang of marauders gathered (and possibly lived) near a brickfield in Spitalfields, preying on the drovers on the road to Smithfield and Barnet markets, singling out and stealing prize cattle. Their looting was serious enough to be discussed in Parliament, with the Secretary of State questioning whether the men were ‘distressed weavers’ – the highly skilled silk weavers who had inhabited Bethnal Green for centuries who had recently been reduced to poverty by the lifting of import bans on luxury goods at the end of the French wars. The Spitalfields gangs were
not weavers, although violence from them was not unusual either. In 1829, two men who had been hired to repossess some silk from a weaver felt it necessary to ask the patrol to accompany them. They were right to be afraid: they were followed by over 500 men, and when they repossessed the goods, ‘bricks, stones, and whatever came to hand, were showered’ on them. Even though they were greatly outnumbered by the outraged mob, which extended halfway down Bethnal Green Road, the patrol foolishly drew their weapons. They were immediately surrounded and themselves had to be rescued from the crowd of angry, semi-starving men.

In the late 1820s and early 1830s, riots became less random outbreaks of unfocused rage and more, as with the weavers, a desire to express a political and social point. Their being linked with these earlier outbreaks, however, permitted the perception that all political gatherings of the working classes were potential riots. Even so, the formation of Robert Peel’s Metropolitan Police force in 1829 improved matters: no longer were armed soldiers brought out at the first intimation of danger. In November 1830, a political rally was held in Blackfriars Road. After the speeches, the crowd raised a flag with ‘Reform’ painted on it. To the cry of ‘Now for the West End!’ a thousand men, shouting ‘Reform’, ‘Down with the police’, ‘No Peel’ and ‘No Wellington’, crossed Blackfriars Bridge and surged down Fleet Street and the Strand, heading for Parliament. As they reached Downing Street, the New Police caught up with the action, forming a line at the end of King Street, to prevent the men reaching the Houses of Parliament. The novelty lay in the fact that this force, armed only with truncheons, could disperse crowds without resorting to killing.

Four months later, public expressions of anger were refocused. As cholera ravaged the city, the government nominated 21 March 1831 as a national Day of Fasting and Humiliation, when prayers would be offered and a twenty-four-hour fast observed as a sign of submission to divine will, in the hope that this would lift the epidemic. The Political Union of the Working Classes, representing the economic group that was bearing the brunt of the epidemic, issued a counter-proclamation, announcing ‘their intention to distinguish that day by the distribution of bread and meat amongst the lower orders’: as they so sharply pointed out, fasting was something they
did all too routinely. By 11 a.m., nearly 15,000 workers, ‘many of whom appeared to be in the greatest possible distress’, had gathered in Finsbury Square, and three hours later the number had grown to 25,000. The plan had been to ‘perambulate in procession into different parts of the metropolis’, but the very fact of the gathering was considered dangerous, and the police were out in force, determined to clear the square and prevent the march, even though there had been few signs of incipient trouble.

This political response to the epidemic was unusual. Far more common were outbursts, even violent ones, aimed at medical personnel, for the epidemic had produced a strong link in the public mind between doctors and what were known as resurrection men. Over the previous decades, medical schools had expanded, while the supply of cadavers for study remained finite. Only the corpses of executed criminals were legally available for dissection, leaving most medical schools unable to teach anatomy or surgery. Resurrection men had therefore prospered by digging up freshly buried bodies to sell to the schools. In the first decade of the century, Joseph Naples, an ex-gravedigger and a member of a south London gang of resurrectionists, most unusually kept a diary, which showed how profitable the trade was. On 14 January 1812, he wrote: ‘went to St Luke’s [church graveyard and disinterred] 2 adults...1 large and 1 small, took them to barthow [St Bartholomew’s Hospital]. Came home and went to St Thomas’ [Hospital], afterwards went to the other end of town for orders.’ The gang then met ‘at the Hartichoak’ pub, to divide their takings: £8 4s 7½d to each gang member, or about four months’ income for a street seller. In 1831, two men who were tried for the murder of an Italian street boy admitted that they had sold more than 500 bodies to the London hospitals in the previous decade.

The 1832 Anatomy Act was passed in order to shut down this thriving business. Now medical schools were entitled to claim for dissection any bodies that were to be buried at the parish expense – in effect, the bodies of paupers, or the working poor whose families could not afford a funeral. By this Act, many thought, anatomization had been transformed from being a punishment for capital crime into being a punishment for poverty. When the first wave of cholera arrived simultaneously with the change in the law,
some believed that this new disease was a pretext to lure the unwary poor to hospital, where they would be killed as a precursor to being anatomized. In June 1832, a hospital porter was attacked in Oxford Street as he carried a man dying of cholera to hospital; police were needed to disperse the crowd. On the same day, a woman was assaulted when bringing a patient to the Lime Street cholera hospital, the infuriated mob baying ‘Burker!’ at her.
¹⁴⁴
Later a surgeon making a house call in Vauxhall was attacked; when the parish surgeon arrived after the patient’s death, he found that the body had been hidden, for fear it would be taken for anatomization. Those gathered outside whispered that he and his colleagues ‘merely wanted to get the poor into their clutches to burke them’, and once more the police were called. Sala remembered as a child watching a similar incident from his nursery window in North Audley Street. One of the Earl of Clarendon’s servants had died of cholera and ‘a great crowd’ had gathered before the earl’s door, all ‘violent and clamorous...My nurse says that they will have to send for the “padroll” with “cutlashes”.’
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