Read The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London Online

Authors: Judith Flanders

Tags: #History, #General, #Social History

The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London (93 page)

BOOK: The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London
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1. Benjamin Robert Haydon’s
Punch, or May Day
(1829) encompassed the entire world in a painting he originally intended simply to entitle
Life
. On a corner of the New Road (now the Euston Road) a Punch and Judy show,
left
, amuses both rich (in the shape of the two horsemen behind) and poor (the crossing-sweeper,
centre
, and the barefoot apple-woman on the pavement).
Right
, chimney sweeps celebrate Mayday in traditional fashion, with their ‘Queen’ dressed in her best, and a Jack-in-the-Green wearing his wicker frame covered by greenery and May flowers. Haydon depicts every stage of life from cradle to grave: a baby is held up to watch Punch; a wedding party, identifiable by the favours in their hats, comes out of St Marylebone Parish Church; at the rear a funeral passes, identified by the ‘weepers’ the coachman wears around his hat. City and country folk are represented by the farmer,
centre
, with his dog, and the police officer; the honest (the policeman, the sailor and the guardsman, whose uniform indicates he is a Waterloo veteran) and the dishonest (the boy picking the farmer’s pocket) mingle on the canvas as in the streets.

2.
Ludgate Circus
, by Eugène Louis Lami (1850),
above
, shows a traffic ‘lock’, or jam, when the mass of unregulated street transport was brought to a dead halt. To the left and right are omnibuses, with a costermonger’s cart centre front. The conductor, or cad, stands on his step at the back of the bus on the left; his comparative height makes clear how low-ceilinged and cramped the bus interiors were.

3.
Pool of London from London Bridge
, by William Parrott (1841), shows how small the passenger steamers were that chugged up and down the river every dozen minutes or so, making the Thames a great commuter highway.

4. George Scharf, a German lithographer who spent his entire working life in London, illustrated scientific journals by day. But street-life in London was his passion, and he walked the city by night and by day, sketching endlessly.
Betwen 6 and Seven O’Clock morning, Sumer
(his English spelling remained erratic), shows,
top row, second from right
and
bottom row, third from left
, a milkman and a milkmaid, and
bottom row, right
, a dustman with his cart. The small boy,
fourth left, top row
, may be a muffin seller: his white clothes and flat cap suggest it, although he carries a deep basket rather than the more usual flat covered tray, and the object in his right hand does not appear to be the muffin-seller’s bell.

5. & 6.
A Peep at the Gas Lights in Pall Mall
, Thomas Rowlandson,
above
. Awestruck Londoners come to gaze at the first gas streetlights, which appeared in 1807. Meanwhile coal fires, population growth and climate combined to create the legendary ‘London particulars’, or pea-soup fogs,
below
, in George Cruikshank’s
Foggy Weather
(1819).

7. Dozens of warehouses along the southern riverbank were destroyed in the Tooley Street fire of 1861. In the centre is the London Fire Engine Establishment’s river-engine, while sightseers take up any available viewing station, whether along the north shore, in small boats or on London Bridge.

8.
Covent Garden Market
(
c
.1829), by Frederick Christian Lewis. A market had been held on this site for two centuries, but only in the 1820s, when this was painted, were permanent structures built to house the sellers. Here the canopy is only half-built, and the central area remains open, with makeshift stalls on the right.

9.
Hungerford Stairs
, by George Shepherd (1810), shows the pre- Embankment shore, now covered by Charing Cross station. Fourteen years after this was painted, The Old Fox pub on the right had become Warren’s Blacking Factory, where the child Charles Dickens laboured. On the left was the fictional location of the ‘dirty, tumbledown public house’ where the Micawbers lodged in
David Copperfield
before they emigrated to Australia.

10. The great dust-heaps that Dickens describes in
Our Mutual Friend
were not the product of a novelist’s imagination: here, at Battle Bridge (now King’s Cross), in 1837, a single heap is painted, towering over the nearby houses and the district’s market gardens. Although the artist only shows one, Battle Bridge was home to many rows of such heaps.

BOOK: The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London
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