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 (94 page)

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11. The great projects of the industrial age were often built by low-tech means – manual labour. Here, in 1825, George Scharf sketched the workers building the new Fleet sewer. Vic

12. One of the world’s earliest photographs,
c
.1841, by Fox Talbot, captured the building of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. St Martin-in-the-Fields is to the left, with the new Morley’s Hotel (where South Africa House now stands) behind the column. The statue of George IV,
left
, is already in place, but the rest of the square is still a wasteland behind the advertisement-laden hoardings.

13. & 14. Scharf carefully documented the many buildings that were about to be destroyed when, in 1830, the new London Bridge was re-erected 60 yards upriver from its old site. As well as memorializing the old, he also recorded the workers creating the new, giving singular view of their clothes and construction methods.

15. Scharf also painted the chimney sweeps dancing on their Mayday holiday. Here he shows the ‘Queen’ with her attendants. She holds the spoon into which, traditionally, donations were dropped, while behind her the Jackin-the-Green in his beehive of foliage follows along.

16. Scharf drew the northwest end of the Strand in 1824, shortly before it was razed to create an access road to the new Trafalgar Square. Before the London Fire Engine Establishment was formed in 1833, fires were the responsibility of individual insurance companies, and the Sun Fire Office’s man, wearing the Sun’s red-and-gold uniform, directs his men pumping away at the green engine behind him. The Strand was one of London’s busiest streets, yet even here the paving was erratic, with a pile of loose paving-stones visible beside the lamppost.

17. The funeral car of the Duke of Wellington. The carriage itself was bronze, and the canopy, seventeen feet high, had to be lowered en route, to allow it to pass under Temple Bar. (A trial run was carried out in the middle of the night to make sure the weight and height of the vehicle would not cause it to topple over, or stick in the mud – which it did, briefly, only once on the day.) On the carriage were the duke’s many military honours, the collection dwarfing the red coffin at the top. This over-lavish display in 1852 was a turning point, and popular taste subsequently embraced less elaborate funerals. Vic

18.
Greedy Old Nickford Eating Oysters
, by William Heath (late 1820s),
left
, caricatures the owner of Crockford’s, an upper-class gambling-den, as the devil, swilling at a tub as rooks, symbolizing the young men being ‘rooked’, or cheated, fly towards him as he calls out to ‘Brother Mace’, mace being slang for a swindler. At
bottom right
, the oyster shells have been arranged to form a grotto, of the type children built on the first day of the oyster season, when they called out, ‘Please to remember the grotto’ as passers-by gave them pennies.

19. Upper-class men also amused themselves at animal-baiting. Here, in this 1821 watercolour, a tethered bear is set upon by terriers, and wagers are laid as to how long each one will last.

20. The caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson depicted two men in the pillory at Charing Cross, in 1819, by the equestrian statue of Charles I, which still stands on the south side of what is now Trafalgar Square. The man under the statue appears to be about to throw something, while the woman,
centre front
, in green, bends down to gather mud for the same purpose. Spectators watch from nearby windows, and also the rooftops. After 1816, the pillory was used only to punish perjurers, and the crowds – and violence – diminished. The punishment itself was discontinued after 1830.

21. The Riot Act is read from the stage of Covent Garden in 1809 in an attempt to end the Old Price riots, sparked by increased ticket prices when the theatre was reopened after a fire. The actor-manager John Philip Kemble, dressed for
Macbeth
, holds up his hands in supplication to the rioting audience, to no avail, as audiences singing Old Price songs, and dancing Old Price dances, made performances impossible for the next month.

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