This was the urban phenomenon which Engels diagnosed, and which he watched closely. In St. Giles, “the extent to which these filthy passages are fallen into decay beggars all description … the walls are crumbling, the door posts and window frames are loose and rotten.” Marx lived a few yards away in Soho. So the condition of the mid-nineteenth-century city directly inspired the founders of communism; it might be said that their creed issued out of the slums of London, and those Victorian observers who believed that some great or alarming new reality would emerge from the pervasive presence of the poor were not wholly wrong. The London poor did indeed generate a new race or class, but in countries and civilisations far distant.
In Long Acre, Engels noticed, the children are “sickly” and “half-starved.” He conceded that the worst forms of poverty were not visited upon all “London workers,” but “every working man without exception may well suffer a similar fate through no fault of his own.” This was one of the most tenacious visions of poverty as a palpable threat, this the despair that the city could breed, precisely because the conditions of London itself were enough to drive people into the slums. The uncertainty of employment, for example, was one of the most pressing reasons why people “broke” (to use an early nineteenth-century word) and were reduced to beggary. A cold winter meant that dockers and building workers were thrown out of work or, in the phrase of the period, “turned off.” To turn someone off-in an age when all the talk was of energy and of electricity, this was the ultimate dehumanising and degrading force.
Areas where the poor lived were also “turned off.” The city had grown so large that they could be concealed in its depths. Engels quotes one clergyman who declared that “I never witnessed such thorough prostration of the poor as I have seen since I have been in Bethnal Green,” but who reiterated that this area was quite unknown to, and unvisited by, other Londoners. In other quarters of the city “about as little was known … of this destitute parish as the wilds of Australia or the islands of the South Seas.” The image of the wilderness once more emerges, but now with connotations of darkness and impenetrability.
Here again was another monstrous feature of the great metropolis, where rich and poor could live side by side without noticing each other’s existence. Engels quotes from an editorial in The Times of 12 October 1843, which suggested that “within the most courtly precincts of the richest city of GOD’s earth, there may be found, night after night, winter after winter … FAMINE, FILTH AND DISEASE.” From this vantage Engels looked at the whole society of London, and concluded that it was not sane or whole. “The more that Londoners are packed into a tiny space, the more repulsive and disgraceful becomes the brutal indifference with which they ignore their neighbours and selfishly concentrate upon their private affairs.”
So London has created a new phase in human existence itself; its poverty has in a real sense impoverished all who, in the mad pursuit of getting and spending, have created a human society of “component atoms.” A new race was therefore being created not only in the tenements of St. Giles but over the whole face of London where “the vast majority … have had to let so many of their potential creative faculties lie dormant, stunted and unused.” Engels suggests that this is the real poverty within the city, which only a revolution could extirpate.
Nineteenth-century London, then, created the first characteristically urban society on the face of the earth. What now we take for granted-“they rush past each other as if they had nothing in common”-was then greeted with distaste. For anyone who marvelled at the greatness and vastness of the Victorian city, there were others who were disturbed and horrified. Here, in the streets of London, real “social conflict, the war of all against all,” actually existed. It was a harbinger of the future world, a cancer that would not only spread throughout England but eventually cover the great globe itself.
One of the great studies of poverty in late nineteenth-century London was, and remains, Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London (1903); it ran to seventeen volumes, and went through three editions. Like the city that it was examining, it was on the largest possible scale. A monumental work, it is filled with suggestive details and suffused by a curious pity. It is in fact the vision of London lives which renders Booth’s work so significant. “The last occupant of the back room was a widower, scavenger to Board of Works, a man who would not believe in hell or heaven … At No. 7 lives a car-man in broken-down health. He fell off his cart and being run over broke his leg. On the floor above is a very poor old lady living on charity, but a happy soul expectant of heaven.” In the neighbourhood lived a man who was “a notorious Atheist, one who holds forth on behalf of his creed under railway arches, saying that if there be a God he must be a monster to permit such misery as exists. This man suffers from heart disease, and the doctor tells him that some day in his excitement he will drop down dead.” These are the permanent inhabitants of London. “On the ground floor live Mr. and Mrs. Meek. Meek is a hatter and was engaged in dyeing children’s hats in a portable boiler. A cheery little man … At the back lives Mrs. Helmot, whose husband, formerly an optician, is now at Hanwell suffering from suicidal melancholia.” All the variety of human experience is revealed here; the cheerful hat-maker and the suicidal optician are more suggestive than any characters in nineteenth-century urban fiction.
It is as if the city had become a sort of desert island, upon which its occupants picked their way. But there was another life which, against all the odds, kept on breaking through. “How the poor live,” a nurse told Booth, “when they are helpless remains a mystery, save for their great kindness to each other, even to those who are strangers. This is the great explanation.” A Nonconformist preacher also told him that “It is only the poor that really give. They know exactly the wants of one another and give when needed.” A Roman Catholic priest informed him, “To each other their goodness is wonderful.” Here is another reality lying concealed beneath all the descriptions of filth and squalor. The intimate experience of shared suffering did not necessarily injure the spirits of the very poor. The conditions of urban life could lead to despair, and drunkenness, and death, but there was at least the possibility of another form of human expression in kindness and generosity to those trapped within the same harsh and noisome reality.
Booth ends his account with a memorable paragraph: “The dry bones that lie scattered over the long valley that we have traversed together lie before my reader. May some great soul, master of a subtler and nobler alchemy than mine, disentangle the confused issues, reconcile the apparent contradictions in aim, melt and commingle the various influences for good into one divine uniformity of effort and make these dry bones live, so that the streets of our Jerusalem may sing with joy.” It is an astonishing revelation. Charles Booth more than any other man understood the horror and the misery of nineteenth-century London, yet he invoked the image of a joyful Jerusalem to conclude his discourse.