The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London (58 page)

Thackeray, who had attended Courvoisier’s execution too, wrote that ‘I came away...that morning with a disgust for murder, but it was for
the murder I saw done
.’ Two weeks later he still felt ‘degraded at the brutal curiosity which took me to that brutal sight’. It is simplistic to present a picture of the savage unfeeling workers enjoying the sight of death, while the fastidious bourgeoisie recoiled. One upper-class man happily recalled an outing he and his friends had planned to the gallows as late as 1864, when they rented a window across from Newgate to watch the hangings of five men known as the ‘Flowery Land pirates’ (they had attacked a ship named the
Flowery Land
). These spectators were West End types, soldiers in fashionable regiments. On the day of the execution, they woke to morning-after-the-night-before headaches, grey skies and rain. Despite having paid possibly as much as fifty guineas for their window, they contemplated not going, until ‘the sight of three or four cabs, a couple of servants, and a plentiful supply of provender decided the question, and the procession started’.
¹⁵⁰
Food, drink, transport: their requirements were no different from those of the working-class onlookers.

As the century progressed, many of the middle and upper classes were likely to evince distaste, or shame, at least in public, at the mere notion
of executions, pillories and heads on spikes, which gradually ceased to be considered an acceptable part of city life. In 1819, a guidebook had highlighted Temple Bar as a place ‘particularly
distinguished
’ (my italics) by the ‘exhibition of the heads of those who have been executed for treason’. By the 1839 edition, this was reduced to half a sentence in passing – ‘The heads of persons executed for high treason were formerly exhibited on this gate’ – before the authors hastened to focus on Temple Bar as the place where the City Corporation received the royal family on its visits to the City. Public displays of body parts were no longer something to promote to visitors.

The final public execution in Britain was not the fiesta that Courvoisier’s or Mrs Manning’s had been. The death of Michael Barrett took place against a background of the independence struggle in Ireland by the Fenians (named for the legendary Irish army, the Fianna). Richard O’Sullivan Burke, the Irish Republican Brotherhood’s arms’ agent in Britain, was arrested late in 1867. An escape plan was hatched to blast a hole in the wall of the Clerkenwell House of Correction, where Burke was being held; in the confusion, Burke was to make his escape. But the Home Office was tipped off by an informer and Burke was moved to a different part of the prison. Even now, the Fenians still had a chance, as the police had failed to act quickly enough to prevent their laying explosives. The rebels miscalculated the amount of gunpowder, however, and instead of a hole being neatly blown in one section of the wall, the whole thing was lifted from its foundations, while the façades of the entire row of houses across the road were ripped away like peel from an orange. And when the dazed conspirators peered through the gaping hole, they were confronted with armed guards taking up positions to defend the gaol. The Fenians scrambled away from the site of this humiliating debacle just as 3,000 Metropolitan police constables descended on the scene.

Six people had been killed by the blast, another six later died of their wounds, while 120 were seriously injured, with fifteen left permanently crippled. The bomb had plunged the streets into total darkness, and before any rescue attempts could begin, the paving had to be lifted to gain access to the gas mains. Fifty firemen and a regiment of the Household Guards, later joined by the Scots Fusiliers, worked all night, first putting out the blazes
caused by burst gas mains and destroyed chimneys, then searching through the rubble for the dead and the injured, slightly hampered by sightseers. For as always, ‘The streams of visitors, in spite of mud, and rain, and barriers, and walls of impassable police, have continued unabated...Corporationlane was closed...although last night announcements were posted outside the end houses that the public would be admitted to them to view the ruins for sums varying from sixpence to a penny.’ A greengrocer even set up a ladder so that people could peer over the hoardings to the destroyed prison wall: ‘numbers of persons paid their money for the view’. Meanwhile, ‘Photographers and artists were taking pictures and making sketches throughout the morning’ for their newspapers and journals.

Michael Barrett was arrested in January 1868, along with five others. The Crown’s case wasn’t merely poor: it barely existed. One of the accused turned informer; another admitted on the witness stand that he was being paid by the police; against one of the accused, the Crown offered no evidence; against another, there was only the word of the informer. A single witness, the police informer, said he had seen Barrett in London on the day of the explosion, while several disinterested witnesses placed him in Glasgow at the relevant time. In the end, the jury found five not guilty, and Barrett guilty.

Fearing another Fenian rescue attempt at his execution, the police were armed with revolvers and cutlasses, rather than just truncheons, but, in the event, ‘They never had easier work.’ Surprisingly few turned out on 26 May 1868 to see what everyone knew would be the last public execution in Britain. Popular antipathy to such things was stronger than anti-Fenian outrage: one shopkeeper with premises overlooking the scaffold said ‘he had not [fallen] so low as to let his windows to see a fellow creature strangled’. Some claimed that only 2,000 people were waiting at Newgate at dawn, in a gathering that was ‘one of the smallest...that has for a long time assembled in front of the Old Bailey’. Most of the onlookers appeared to be respectable working men and tradesmen who had come because it was to be the last public execution, not for political reasons. So sparse was the assembly that some of the police, who had regularly done duty at Newgate and knew the ‘“hanging” crowds...as familiar acquaintances, were puzzled, and almost grieved’.

Yet the memory of Newgate as a place of violent public death lingered. The year after Barrett’s execution, Dickens could still write that it was a setting of ‘fire and fagot, condemned Hold, public hanging, whipping through the city at the cart-tail, pillory, branding-iron, and other beautiful ancestral landmarks’.

15.

THE RED-LIT STREETS TO DEATH

What struck most people on seeing London for the first – or the thousandth – time was its vastness, its unknowability, not merely in terms of its streets and buildings, but in terms of its people. Dickens referred to one of his characters in
Martin Chuzzlewit
as belonging to ‘a race peculiar to the City; who are secrets as profound to one another, as they are to the rest of mankind’. Visitors from more sparsely populated nations felt this the most. Even if they lived in capital cities themselves, none was the size of London. One American wrote: ‘How utterly lost a stranger feels in London. In the midst of that great mass of human life and activity, a stranger is perfectly alone’, yet at the same time, ‘No matter...how far he walks, he cannot get beyond the crowd.’ In
A Tale of Two Cities
, the narrator, on entering ‘a great city by night’, considers how ‘every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret...[and] every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts...is...a secret to the heart nearest’. Moreover, each stranger on the street was a secret, and London was filled with millions of strangers. Many of these strangers were women, going about lives that seemed incomprehensible to their fellow men. These women aroused fears by their number, as well as by their unknowability.

It cannot be stated too emphatically that we have
no
firm knowledge of the number of prostitutes on the streets of London for most of the nineteenth century. First, there is the question: what is a prostitute? Apart from a woman actively soliciting on the streets, does the term include a woman living with a man to whom she is not married, on a long-term, monogamous basis, who does not work and is supported by that man? Does it encompass a woman in employment, who intermittently or regularly is
given additional cash by a long-term, or short-term, partner? Does it take into account a woman whose wages do not entirely support her, or who is temporarily out of work, who receives financial help from one or more men? The rigid separation of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ women did not hold even according to Victorian morality. There were women who enjoyed a nightlife that was not acceptable to moralists, but who pursued it for pleasure rather than money; equally, there were women in long-term relationships living in communities that traditionally did not resort to the church for sanctification.
¹⁵¹
Many in the nineteenth century regarded any and all of these women as prostitutes. In
London Labour
, the widespread nature of this term could not be plainer: ballet girls, it was said, were ‘in the habit of prostituting themselves when the occasion offers, either for money, or more frequently for their own gratification’ – that is, they had sex outside marriage, which is not our definition of prostitution at all.

None of this stopped experts from attempting to enumerate the prostitutes of London as though they were a single, countable class. In 1791, the police magistrate Patrick Colquhoun had estimated (and it should be noted that he used the word ‘estimate’, as well as ‘conjecture’, although this element of doubt was later ignored) that there were 50,000 prostitutes in London. He then separated this figure into two groups, allowing that at least half were not what he called ‘common prostitutes’, by which he meant those who walked the streets soliciting. More than 25,000, he believed, were kept women, by which he meant those who fitted the commercial definition of this term, as well as those who lived with long-term partners outside wedlock. The remaining figure of 25,000 is still much higher than the police and court reports of the period indicate, yet by 1817, this was supposed to have soared to 80,000, although no source for it was ever given. It might be an extrapolation of Colquhoun’s figure of 50,000, taking into account the rising population.

By 1851, William Acton, a surgeon specializing in genito-urinary disorders and one of the main contributors to the debate on prostitution, published statistics showing that there were 210,000 prostitutes in London, calculating this by taking as his starting point the 42,000 live births to unwed mothers recorded that year. These women had ‘taken the first step in prostitution’. From that, he went on to posit that each one would go on to work as a prostitute for an average of five years, giving a total, over the five years, of 210,000 women, or one in every twelve unmarried females in Britain.

Similar claims were made by Michael Ryan, who wrote
Prostitution in London
(1839). Even with his background as the editor of the
London Medical and Surgical Journal
and a lecturer on midwifery and medical jurisprudence, he appeared even more credulous and every bit as innumerate. ‘Every [fallen] girl, or woman, has her fancy man, or bully,’ he wrote, ‘who lives upon her prostitution, and seldom confines himself to one female.’ Despite making their livings from these women, such men were ‘thieves, pickpockets, and often murderers...Bullies spend the day in public-houses, and the night in brothels, in which they always assist in robbing, and often in murdering their victims.’ He could make these assertions despite the fact that, a few pages earlier, he had discussed the police reports on brothels, in only one of which was anyone robbed and no one murdered.

Ryan then moved on from what these women did to how many there were: ‘suppose that the number of prostitutes be 80,000, as already concluded, and that
each
has a bully [my italics: this despite writing a few lines earlier that a bully ‘seldom confines himself to one female’], then there would be this great number of thieves and vagabonds let loose on the community.’ As if that weren’t enough, ‘an enlightened medical gentleman’ had told him that, near the Fleet Ditch, ‘There is an aqueduct of large dimensions, into which murdered bodies are precipitated by bullies, and discharged at a considerable distance in to the Thames, without the slightest chance of discovery.’

Acton was more realistic: incidents of ‘robbery and violence in brothels’ were ‘rare and scattered’, he wrote, and the murderous aqueducts ‘extraordinary inventions’. Mayhew’s
London Labour
repeated the aqueduct story
in order to reject it, but that didn’t prevent the same volume citing Ryan as an authority elsewhere. On the streets, the police reported substantially lower numbers of streetwalkers and, what is more, Acton at least knew it. In 1838, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police believed that there were fewer than 7,000 prostitutes in London (excluding the City). On the page before Acton came up with his figure of 210,000, he noted that in 1841 the police had estimated that there were 9,409 prostitutes throughout the city (although that does seem an implausibly precise figure).

Preconceptions clouded the causes of prostitution, too. The Edinburgh surgeon William Tait, in his book
Magdalenism: An inquiry into the extent, causes and consequence of prostitution in Edinburgh
¹⁵²
(1840), divided prostitutes into two groups: those ‘naturally’ inclined to a life of vice from ‘Licentious Inclination – Irritability of Temper – Pride and Love of Dress – Dishonesty and Desire of Property – Indolence’, and those who became prostitutes because of their personal circumstances, that is, poverty, lack of skills, abandonment by or the death of their parents. Yet once he had developed his theme, he concluded that all the middle-class women, such as governesses, were apparently led into prostitution by such life events – by being seduced and abandoned, for example – while all the workingclass women ended up as prostitutes because they had ‘a looseness in their characters’.