The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London (84 page)

74
. This site had been burying Dissenters since
c.
1665. Today it is famous as the last resting place of William Blake, Bunyan, William Defoe, Isaac Watts and George Fox, although one wonders how much of their remains in reality survived Victorian burial methods.

75
. She was followed there by many others of the Dickenses’ acquaintance: Thomas Hood, Leigh Hunt, Thackeray, John Leech, Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins and George Cruikshank.

76
. The Temple gardens were much more than simply a nice square of green: they covered three acres in the middle of the busiest part of London.

77
. The building later became the National Institute to Improve the Manufactures of the United Kingdom, then a wine shop, and today it is a Marks and Spencer, for many years known as their ‘Pantheon’ store.

78
. Johann Rudolf Glauber was a seventeenth-century alchemist; Esculapius (now more commonly Asclepius) the Greek god of medicine. I am not aware of the former being as common a motif as the latter as this passage implies.

79
. It is for this reason that soldiers are ‘gazetted’: that is, their promotion is announced in the
Gazette
.

80
. Tipu Sultan (1750–99), ruler of Mysore, was a demon figure in nineteenth-century Britain. He had won a series of battles against the British, before being killed at the battle of Seringapatam. His attitude to the British can be seen in ‘Tipu’s Tiger’, a half-life-sized clockwork tiger, which he commissioned. When wound up, the tiger savages a prostrate redcoat, to the accompaniment of growls from the tiger and squeaky wails from this prey. The piece was looted by the British after his defeat and is now in the V&A. It is too fragile to be played, but can be seen in action on vimeo.com/8973957.

81
. Although the parks continued to be closed for the occasional civic event throughout the nineteenth century – Green Park was closed for the day of the Duke of Wellington’s funeral, for example, so the gentry could watch in comfort – the last long-term closure was under Queen Anne (reigned 1702–14), when the public was barred from much of St James’s Park.

82
. Little more than the ground-plan of Nash’s great project survives. Every building Nash designed in Regent Street has long gone; the Quadrant lasted only decades, being demolished in 1848: it was ‘both inconvenient and injurious to the inhabitants’, as ‘doubtful characters’ lurked in its shelter; in the park itself, only the Holme, the house designed by Decimus Burton, even vaguely resembles its original construction, although substantial alterations and additions were made in the twentieth century; the other houses were razed or completely rebuilt. The terraces surrounding the park are in the style of Nash, in that they are white stucco, but few are actually to his designs. All Soul’s Church, Langham Place, still valiantly hangs on. Up close it is dwarfed by the BBC’s loomingly vast new Broadcasting House, but from Oxford Circus it appears to be gently encircled, echoing Nash’s curves.

83
. The statue still remains
in situ
although now, dwarfed by Trafalgar Square and marooned on a traffic island, it has become so insignificant as to be virtually invisible. And it is worth noting here that the pretty story that Charing Cross was named for Edward I’s
chère reine
Eleanor of Castile is just that, a pretty story. More prosaically, the medieval village of Charing derived its name from the Anglo-Saxon
cerr
, a turning, referring to the sweep of the Thames. The ‘cross’ outside Charing Cross station does stand on the spot where one of twelve markers indicated the resting places of Eleanor of Castile’s coffin on its way to Westminster Abbey, but the original was demolished by the Puritans in 1647; today’s cross is Victorian.

84
. The office block behind South Africa House is still named Golden Cross House, although one doubts whether its occupants know why.

85
. It is for this reason that the numbering of St Martin’s Lane still today does not begin at ‘1’: numbers 1 to 28 St Martin’s Lane had stood in the section of the lane that was sacrificed to create the open area of Trafalgar Square.

86
. This was not London’s only geographico-legal anomaly. Ely Place, in Clerkenwell, and the surrounding land belonged to the Bishop of Ely, and the land was technically governed by Cambridgeshire. Other Alsatias were in Whitefriars, between Salisbury Square and Hanging Sword Alley in the City, once owned by the Carmelites and therefore a religious sanctuary, but by the nineteenth century merely a place where thieves felt secure, as they did in the Alsatia in the Mint, in Southwark.

87
. It still survives, under the care of the National Trust, behind the closed Aldwych tube station (although at least one historian has suggested that it is eighteenth century rather than Roman).

88
. A later architectural historian claimed that the domes are the problem, set out, he puts it, like pots on a mantelpiece.

89
. And so it proved. Barry planned statues of William IV and George IV on the north side of the square, for the east and west corners, but the money was never forthcoming. George IV paid for his own, and the commission was eventually carried out. The north-western corner remains empty today, or, rather, a rotating series of contemporary pieces have been installed since 1998, most a useful means of uniting all passers-by in contempt. Much the same was felt at the time for the sculptures on the south side of the square: the statue of Sir Charles Napier, conqueror of Sindh in 1842 and later Commander-in-Chief of the army in India, was installed in 1856, and described by the
Art Union
journal as ‘perhaps the worst piece of sculpture in England’; Sir Henry Havelock, who recaptured Cawnpore after the Indian Mutiny in 1857, joined him in 1858. But good or bad makes no difference: in the vast wastes of Trafalgar Square they are all barely noticeable.

90
. A dog cart was not drawn by dogs, but was a small open cart with a double bench running the length of the cart, with, underneath, space that was originally used in the country to transport hunting dogs. The carts therefore had a somewhat raffish, sporting air, hence these clerks hiring one. Because the carts were easy to drive, however, in the countryside upper- and middle-class women also frequently drove themselves in them.

91
. The number of passengers does not appear to be an exaggeration. In 1878, the
Princess Alice
foundered and sank on a similar excursion, killing 650, with nearly 200 more being rescued.

92
. Roundabouts were powered either by the roundabout owners, or, when they could find them, by small boys: ‘having no half-pennies of their own, [they] were always ready to push round their luckier companions for the reward of a ride later on’.

93
. It has recently been suggested that it is a mistake of our day to assume that oysters were once food for the poor, and that Sam Weller is suggesting that the desperation indicates the poor man is eating above his station. But I think that the differentiation is between poor and destitute. Mayhew’s oyster seller is clear: her customers include men who look like ‘poor parsons down upon their luck’ or ‘The poor girls that walk the streets’ but her ‘heartiest customers…are working people, on a Saturday night…The
very
poor never buy of me…A penny buys a loaf, you see, or a ha’porth of bread and a ha’porth of cheese…My customers are mostly working people and tradespeople’: poor by middle-class standards, but not poverty-stricken.

94
. Sellers’ mysterious cries were a running joke among the middle classes. A visiting American claimed that one woman regularly called ‘Stur-ur-ur!’ outside his window, to sell her watercresses. Other cries were just baffling: a seller near Portland Place called ‘cats’-meat’, but in fact he was selling cabbage plants, while a man calling ‘chickweed’ had watercresses for sale. The tourist thought that the cry didn’t matter, as the sellers had regular beats and were recognized by the cry, not the content, but some of these calls do seem counter-productive.

95
. Nineteenth-century muffins were, of course, not American cake-like muffins. The modern ‘English muffin’ (an American anomaly too) is the descendant of what was being sold here. Made from a yeast batter, they were cooked on a griddle rather than baked, then cut in half, and served hot, spread with butter.

96
. The Corn Laws were passed in 1815, as Britain moved to a peacetime economy after a quarter of a century of war. The import of grain (corn in this context generally meaning wheat, but legally all grain) from abroad was prohibited unless the home price rose above a certain – astronomical – level, to protect the home markets. Even though the laws brought immense hardship, repeal did not come until 1849, such was the hostility of the great landowners to competition from abroad.

97
. The origin of the word ‘hokey-pokey’ is uncertain, but it is probably connected to the novelty of ice cream – milk (or turnip) is, ‘hocus-pocus’, magically turned into a delicious treat.

98
. Working-class cookshops were also places where street sellers had their food cooked in bulk, as with the baked-potato sellers on pp. 283–4.

99
. If Dickens is to be believed, men kept almost everything they owned in their hats. It is almost quicker to itemize those characters who did not use their hat as a handy man-bag. Those who did include: Mr Pickwick, who keeps his glove and handkerchief there when he goes skating; in
Oliver Twist
a hat is home to Mr Bumble’s handkerchief; the Dodger brings hot rolls and ham for breakfast in his; his pickpocket colleague Toby Crackit puts a shawl in ‘my castor’ [‘castor’ = beaver]; in
Nicholas Nickleby
, Newman Noggs, flustered, tries to fit a parcel ‘some two feet square’ into his, as well as keeping at different times a letter there, ‘some halfpence’ and a handkerchief, while the moneylender Arthur Gride keeps large wedding favours (see p. 315) in his; in
The Old Curiosity Shop
, Kit’s handkerchief is in his hat; in
Martin Chuzzlewit
, Montague Tigg keeps old letters, ‘crumpled documents and small pieces of what may be called the bark of broken cigars’ in his, while the stagecoachman uses his to store his parcels for delivery; in
Little Dorrit
, Pancks, the moneylender’s clerk, keeps his notebook and mathematical calculations there; and finally, in
David Copperfield
, David puts a bouquet for Dora ‘in my hat, to keep it fresh’ – possibly the only fully middle-class person in Dickens’ novels to use this caching spot. Much later in the century Sherlock Holmes notices a bulge in Watson’s hat, which indicates he has stashed his stethoscope there, but there are few other mentions in fiction. I suspect it was a standard location for a man’s handkerchief, and for all the other items Dickens merely thought it was funny.

100
. Boxes appear to have been a recognized coffee-room feature. In an essay Dickens refers to the arrangements at a Ragged School, where ‘each class was partitioned off by screens adjusted like the boxes in a coffee-room’.

101
. If a waiter served a third of the average 600 customers each day, even deducting half his earnings for his place and for the laundry and supplies, he would earn about 8s a day, which was a good enough wage. One book published in 1840 claimed that waitresses paid as much as 20s a day for their places, although it also claimed that a 2d tip was average, double the sum quoted in every other source. The waitress would thus need to serve 125 customers before her fee was covered (and much more likely 250). This seems feasible, but I think it’s likely that her tips, too, were usually 1d, and given that the average working day in a coffee house was fifteen hours, it would therefore have been possible for her to earn her fee plus another 7–8s a day.

102
. For those with an interest in pre-decimal sums, or food prices, this translates as: four servings of veal-and-ham at 9d each (3s), four servings of potatoes at 1d each (running total now 3s 4d), one cabbage at 2d (total 3s 6d), three servings of marrow at 3d each (total 4s 6d), six servings of bread at 1d each (5s), three servings of cheese at 1d each (5s 3d), four half-pints of half and half (porter and ale mixed) at 3d each (6s 3d), four glasses of rum at 6d each (8s 3d), tip for three diners at 1d each (or 8s 6d for lunch for three).

103
. By 1875, the Albion had taken over the cigar divan and become Simpson’s Divan Tavern, at 103 the Strand, where it remains as a restaurant today, although the building is more recent, and its street number is now 100.

104
. Peel lived in Whitehall Gardens, which was on the river before the Embankment pushed out the shoreline (see p. 225ff.), behind the Banqueting House and more or less where the Ministry of Defence is now.

105
. The arch now faces Apsley House, at Hyde Park Corner, but the statue was almost unanimously disliked from the outset, and by 1883, when the arch was moved to its current location, the statue was removed to Aldershot. The sculpture now on top of the arch is twentieth century, Adrian Jones’
The Angel of Peace Descending on the Chariot of War
.

106
. From the sixteenth century, the Lord Mayor’s Show had taken place on 29 October; with the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in 1751, when eleven days were ‘lost’, it moved to 9 November. In 1959, the date became moveable, and the show is now held on the second Saturday in November. The only year the show has not been held was in 1852, when the Duke of Wellington’s funeral prevented the event (see pp. 335–46). The Lord Mayor today has a mainly ceremonial role as mayor only of the Square Mile, and is not to be confused with the mayor of London.

107
. The sorry saga of the marriage of Caroline and the Prince Regent, later George IV, is too long to rehearse here: it is enough to say that before their wedding in 1794, the Prince had already secretly morganatically married Maria Fitzherbert. The royal couple separated within a year, after the birth of their daughter, Charlotte. The Regent made three formal attempts to find evidence of his wife’s adultery, to enable a divorce; when their daughter died, her mother was not notified but left to find out by chance. On the Regent’s accession to the throne in 1820, Caroline, who was physically barred from his coronation, became a rallying point for opponents of the unpopular new king.