By the end of the nineteenth century there were more than ten thousand cabs of various kinds, and even the new thoroughfares could scarcely accommodate the onrushing flood of vehicles of every description. Sometimes the crush grew too great, and there was a “stop” or “lock” (in the twentieth century, a “jam”). Nevertheless it is a matter for astonishment that through the centuries the city has managed to keep its avenues and thoroughfares open to the ever increasing demands of its traffic. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the endless stream of cars and buses and taxis and lorries is coursing along roads which were built in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for quite different forms of transport. The city has the ability to recreate itself silently and invisibly, as if it were truly a living thing.
London’s Outcasts
Géricault’s engraving entitled “Pity the Sorrows of a Poor Old Man” emphasises the isolation and misery of the London outcasts; the companionship of a dog continues to be a token of the wandering life in the city.
CHAPTER 64. They Are Always with ’Us
Mrs. Ambrose understood that after all it is the ordinary thing to be poor, and that London is the city of innumerable poor people”: this sentence from Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out expresses a great truth about the nineteenth century in which she was born.
The poor have always been part of the texture of the city. They are like the stones or the bricks, because London has risen from them; their mute suffering has no limits. In the medieval city the old, the crippled, the deformed and the mad were the first poor; those who could not work, and thus had no real or secure place in the social fabric, became the outcast. By the sixteenth century there were poor sections of the city such as East Smithfield, St. Katherine by the Tower and the Mint in Southwark; it could be said that by some instinctive process the poor clustered together, or it might be concluded that parts of the city harboured them. They were hawkers or pedlars or criers or chimney-sweeps, but they belong to that underclass which Defoe described as “The Miserable, that really pinch and suffer want.”
In eighteenth-century accounts we read of squalid courts and miserable houses, of “dirty neglected children” and “slipshod women,” of “dirty, naked, unfurnished” rooms and of men who stayed within them because their “clothes had become too ragged to submit to daylight scrutiny.” Those who lacked even this primitive accommodation slept in empty or abandoned houses; they sheltered in “bulks” or in doorways. In London Life in the Eighteenth Century M. Dorothy George estimated that by that century’s end there were in London “above twenty thousand miserable individuals of various classes, who rise up every morning without knowing how … they are to be supported during the passing day, or where in many instances they are to lodge on the succeeding night.” This has been plausibly related to “the general uncertainty of life and trade characteristic of the period.” So we may say that the underlying nature of London is most visible, or most sharply manifested, in the lives and appearance of its poorest inhabitants. Other city dwellers, rendered fearful, shunned the poor. The very presence of the poor increased the morbid nervousness and restlessness of all Londoners. We see the shape of the city from the shadow that it casts.
That shadow can be traced within the contours of Charles Booth’s “poverty map” of 1889 where blocks of black and dark blue, denoting the “Lowest class. Vicious, semi-criminal” and the “Very poor, casual. Chronic want,” creep among the red and gold bars of the affluent. A larger-scale map outlining the districts of the poor identified poverty in 134 areas “each of about 30,000 inhabitants”; here the dark blue areas cluster around the banks of the Thames but elsewhere there is a pattern of concentric rings “with the most uniform poverty at the centre.” They were London-born and London-bred, in Paddington and in Pimlico, in Whitechapel and in Wapping, in Battersea and Bermondsey.
Travellers noticed impoverishment everywhere and commented how degrading and degraded were the London poor, quite different from their counterparts in Rome or Berlin or Paris. In 1872 Hippolyte Taine remarked that he recalled “the lanes which open off Oxford Street, stifling alleys thick with human effluvia, troops of pale children crouching on filthy staircases; the street benches at London Bridge where all night whole families huddle close, heads hanging, shaking with cold … abject, miserable poverty.” In a city based upon money and power, those who are moneyless and powerless are peculiarly oppressed. In London, of all cities, they are literally degraded, stripped of all human decency by the operations of a city that has no other purpose except greed. That is why the poor were “abject” in the streets of nineteenth-century London and, as the city increased in power and magnitude, so did the numbers of the poor increase.
They represented almost a city within the city, and such a large aggregate of human misery could not be ignored. John Hollingshead’s Ragged London, published in 1861, suggested that one-third of the urban population lived “in unwholesome layers, one over the other, in old houses and confined rooms” which themselves were to be found in “filthy, ill constructed, courts and alleys.” The atmosphere of disgust and menace here is only barely suppressed. In London, Mrs. Cook concluded in Highways and Byways of London (1902) “misery is strangely prolific,” which suggests that the fear of the poor derived from the fact that they were likely to multiply indefinitely. She was speaking of the Borough: there poverty and misery seemed to have grown to such an extent that Southwark was overcome by it, but she could have been referring to a hundred other parts of the city. The places of the poor were “pestilential,” according to the author of The Bitter Cry of Outcast London in 1883, thus confirming the fear that this kind of abject poverty and degradation was, in the conditions of London, somehow contagious; the futility and the despair might spread throughout the rookeries, where “tens of thousands are crowded together amidst horrors.”
It is as if the streets themselves engendered these huddled masses. A newspaper report of 1862 named “Nichols Street, New Nichols Street, Half Nichols Street, Turville Street, comprising within the same area numerous blind courts and alleys.” Here the litany of street names itself is meant to conjure up degeneration, where the “outward moral degradation is at once apparent to any one who passes that way.” So the houses and lanes themselves are guilty of “moral degradation.” Does the city reflect its inhabitants, or do its inhabitants mimic the conditions of the city? Dwellers and dwelling places become inexact metaphors for one another, as in this passage from Jack London’s The People of the Abyss (1903): “Everything is helpless, hopeless, unrelieved and dirty … The people themselves are dirty, while any attempt at cleanliness becomes howling farce, when it is not pitiful and tragic … The father returning from work asks his child in the street where her mother is: and back the answer comes, ‘In the buildings.’” Observers were generally agreed that the life of the poor had reached such a level of hopelessness and squalor that “a new race has sprung up” and, further, that “it is now hereditary to a very considerable extent.” If Victorian London was itself so changed as to have become a new city, here was the new population with which it was filled.