So although in the early nineteenth century there were still reports of bands or gangs of beggars roaming within the metropolis, particularly after the ending of the Napoleonic Wars, the general focus of interpretation was upon the individual figure. It is a strange reversal of the dominant mood, when “classes” were emerging from the heterogeneity of eighteenth-century London and when the whole emphasis came to rest upon the “systems” of the city; yet this process itself rendered the individual beggar more isolated and in a literal sense déclassé.
In 1817 J.T. Smith published Vagabondiana: or, Anecdotes of Mendicant Wanderers through the streets of London; with Portraits of the most Remarkable drawn from the life, which emphasised the postures and expressions of the blind and the crippled. One example is that of “A Legless Jewish Mendicant of Petticoat Lane,” in which an aged patriarch with a battered hat sits in a kind of wooden cart upon wheels. Behind him is a wall with a graffito of a grinning man, or skeleton. A hundred years before, the hordes of vagrants would have defied individual representation.
Four years later the French painter Théodore Géricault depicted two scenes of poverty and beggary on the streets; it was the year after he had exhibited The Raft of the Medusa in the Egyptian Hall off Piccadilly, and all the tenderness of his nature found expression in Pity the Sorrows of a Poor Old Man whose Trembling Limbs have Born him to Your Door and A Paraleytic Woman. In the first of them the helpless old man leans against a wall; he is accompanied by a dog, with an old twisted rope for a lead. The dog, the “bufe” in beggars’ cant, has always been the companion of the London outcast; its presence not only suggests a wandering life, but also marks a type of friendlessness and isolation. The dog is the beggar’s only companion in this world of need; it has connotations, too, of blindness and general affliction. In Géricault’s second sketch a young mother and child look back at the paralysed old woman, with a gaze both of pity and of apprehension. Once more her solitude is being emphasised, quite different from the solidarity and conviviality of the “beggar brotherhoods.” There is another aspect of this isolation, in the sense that no one wishes to come too close. The fear of contagion proves too strong; it is not just the contagion of disease, however, but that of fear and anxiety. What if I were to become like you?
The records of nineteenth-century street-life are filled with memories and recollections of these phantoms. “Perhaps some of my readers,” Mayhew once wrote, “may remember having noticed a wretched-looking youth who hung over the words “I AM STARVING” chalked on the footway on the Surrey side of Waterloo Bridge. He lay huddled in a heap, and appeared half-dead with cold and want, his shirtless neck and shoulders being visible through the rents in his thin jean jacket; shoe or stocking he did not wear.” The author of Highways and Byways of London recalled an old man who had a particular corner along Oxford Street-“feeble, pitiful, wizened, who carried an empty black bag, and stretched it out to me appealingly. The contents, if any, of the black bag I never discovered; but I often gave him a penny, simply because he was so unutterably pathetic. He is gone now, and his place knows him no more. But he always haunts my dreams.” There was a crippled beggar who always sat under the picture gallery in Trafalgar Square, his “frail body propped on a padded crutch” and his “lean long fingers fluttering the keys of an old accordion.”
Joanna Schopenhauer, the mother of the philosopher, published her account of London in 1816, and left her description of one remarkable beggar who was supposed to be the sister of Mrs. Siddons the actress. She had been brought low by misfortune, and perhaps madness, but was always greeted with a curious reverence on the streets of London where she preferred “to live on the charity of strangers. We often saw this curious apparition. She always wore a black silk hat, which left her face and features clearly visible, a green woollen dress, a large snow-white apron and a kerchief also white.” She was supported by two crutches, and never begged or asked for anything, yet still those who passed her felt “obliged, even driven, to give her something.” She was a native of the streets, a tutelary presence to which offerings had to be made.
Charles Lamb wrote an essay in the 1820s, entitled “A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis,” which remarked upon one of those sporadic and inconclusive attempts by the civic authorities to “clear the streets”; there have through the centuries been proclamations and policies, but the beggars always return. Lamb in elegiac mood, however, anticipated their passing. “The mendicants of this great city were so many of her sights, her lions. I can no more spare them than I could the cries of London. No corner of the street is complete without them. They are as indispensable as the ballad-singer, and in their picturesque attire as ornamental as the signs of old London.” The beggar somehow embodies the city, perhaps because he or she is an eternal type; like the games and songs of children, endlessly recurrent. As Lamb suggests, the beggar “is the only man in the universe who is not obliged to study appearances. The ups and downs of the world concern him no longer.” Beyond the fleeting appearances of the world he represents unchanging identity. So beggars became “the standing morals, emblems, mementoes, dial-mottos, the spital sermons, the books for children, the salutary checks and pauses to the high and rushing tide of greasy citizenry-look upon that poor and broken bankrupt there.” The example of the bankrupt is apposite; in a city devoted to the pursuit of money there is a dignity to be derived from complete impoverishment, and in his rags the beggar was a standing reproach to those intent upon “appearances.”
By the mid-century, when all forms of urban existence were under intense scrutiny, the beggar became the object of research and record. The growth of social control and system in mid-Victorian London, for example, covered the phenomenon of beggary. A “Mendicity Society” was established in Red Lion Square, where all the beggars of the metropolis were classified and described. Charles Dickens was in many respects a generous benefactor to the poor, but he was never slow to “report” an apparently shamming beggar, or begging-letter writer, to the society.
Charles Babbage, the inventor of the Analytic Engine and “father of the computer” as well as the author of Tables of Logarithms, made a systematic study of London beggars. He records that, walking home “from the hot rooms of an evening party” he was often followed “through a drizzling rain” by “a half-clad miserable female, with an infant in her arms and sometimes accompanied by another just able to walk” begging for a little charity. He asked for details of their circumstances, and discovered that they lied to him. He was once introduced, in a dense fog, to “a pale emaciated man” who in the words of the owner of a common lodging house “has tasted nothing during the last two days but water from the pump on the opposite side of the street.” Babbage gave him some clothes and a little money, and the young man said that he was about to accept a situation “of steward in a small West Indiaman.” But again he was lying. “He had been living riotously at some public-house in another quarter, and had been continually drunk.” So Charles Babbage brought him before the magistrates. He was remanded for a week, duly lectured and discharged.