The accounts of foreign travellers suggest the unique status of London in this period. A Greek visitor reported that the treasures in the Tower were “said to exceed the anciently famed wealth of Croesus and Midas,” while a Swiss medical student reported that “London is not said to be in England, but rather England to be in London.” There was a standard guided tour for visitors, who were first taken to the Tower and the Royal Exchange before being escorted to the west, with Cheapside, St. Paul’s, Ludgate and the Strand viewed, before a magnificent arrival at Westminster and Whitehall. The roads were unpaved in parts, but a journey on horse was still sometimes preferable to that upon the Thames. Giordano Bruno, spy and magician, has left a graphic account of his attempts to hire the services of a wherry. He and his companions, wishing to travel to Westminster, spent a great deal of time looking for a boat and vainly crying out “Oars!” At last a boat arrived with two elderly boatsmen-“After much question and reply as to whence, where, why, how and when, they brought the prow to the foot of the stairs.” The Italians believed they were at last on their way to the destination but then, after about a third of the journey had been completed, the boatsmen began to row towards the shore. They had reached their “station,” and would go no further. This is a small incident, of course, but it reveals the rudeness and obstinacy which was seen by strangers to be characteristic of London behaviour. Just as typical, perhaps, is Bruno’s arrival on the shore only to find a footpath thick with mud where he was forced to journey through “a deep and gloomy hell.”
Other reports emphasise both the violence and xenophobia of ordinary Londoners. A French physician, in London between 1552 and 1553, observed that “the common people are proud and seditious … these villains hate all sorts of strangers” and even “spit in our faces.” Gangs of apprentices were also likely to set upon foreigners in the street, and one traveller saw a Spaniard being forced to take refuge in a shop from a mob after he dared to wear his national costume. The Swiss medical student was in that respect perhaps too kind when he mentioned that “the common people are still somewhat coarse and uncultured … and believe that the world beyond England is boarded off.”
Yet the city also lives in its details gathered in these foreign accounts. One traveller noted that it was remarkable for the number of kites which were “quite tame” and wandered through the streets as if they owned them; they were the city’s scavengers and the butchers threw out offal for them to consume. The number of butchers’ shops was matched only by the number of taverns. A passion for privacy was also noted, with individual dwellings separated from their neighbours by walls of stone; the same conditions applied in the taverns themselves, where wooden partitions were set up “so that one table cannot overlook the next.” It may be that in a teeming and overcrowded city such attempts at privacy were natural or inevitable, yet they also represent a significant and permanent aspect of the London character.
In other accounts “between meals one sees men, women, and children always munching through the streets.” The same children, when not eating apples and nuts, could be seen “gathering up the blood which had fallen through the slits in the scaffold” after a beheading on Tower Hill. The executioner on this occasion wore a white apron “like a butcher.” We seem to have come full circle in a city dominated by violence, blood, meat and continual consuming appetite.
CHAPTER 9. Packed to Blackness
There was once a Dark Lane, in the medieval city; a tavern was erected there, known as the Darkhouse. That narrow thoroughfare was then renamed Dark House Lane, and is to be seen on eighteenth-century maps of London. On the same site there now stands Dark House Wharf, which is dominated by the headquarters of the Bank of Hong Kong. This building is clad in dark blue steel and dark, tinted glass. So does the city maintain its dark secret life.
Dust, mud, soot, slime and smut were the objects of continual dissatisfaction. “Though a chamber be never so closely locked up,” John Evelyn complained in the seventeenth century, “men find at their return all things that are in it evenly covered with a black thin soot.” In the same century a Venetian chaplain described “a sort of soft and stinking mud which abounds here at all seasons, so that the place more deserves to be called Lorda (filth) than Londra (London).” The “filth of the city” was also depicted as being “rich and black as thick ink.” In the eighteenth century the road outside Aldgate “resembled a stagnant lake of deep mud,” while in the Strand the puddles of filth were three or four inches deep so that they “fill coaches when their windows happen not to be up, and bedaub all the lower parts of the houses.” If they were not strewn with mud, the streets were filled with dust. Even in the mid-nineteenth century, according to the Quarterly Review, there was not a man or woman in London “whose skin and clothes and nostrils are not of necessity more or less loaded with a compound of powdered granite, soot, and still more nauseous substances.” It was said that St. Paul’s Cathedral had a right to be blackened because it was built with a tax upon sea coal, but it was hard upon the animals of the city which were similarly affected by the smoke and dirt; the feathers of the redstarts and the martins were suffused with soot, while the dust of London was believed to clog the breathing and dull the senses of the omnipresent spiders. All creatures were affected and, as a late twentieth-century character in Iris Murdoch’s novel The Black Prince puts it, “I could feel the thick filth and muck of London under my feet, under my bottom, behind my back.”
Yet it is more than material filth. There is a drawing of Fish Street Hill by George Scharf, executed in the late 1830s, as accomplished and as detailed as all his work. But in the foreground a vast shadow obscures the people and the house-fronts; it is in fact the outline of the Monument, otherwise concealed from sight, but in that shadow Scharf has somehow managed to depict something of the nature of London itself. It has always been a shadowy city.
As James Bone, the author of The London Perambulator, remarked in 1931, it resides in “the appearance of great shadows where there can be no shadows, throwing blackness up and down.” This is also the London vision of Verlaine, who writes of “l’odieuse obscurité … quel deuil profond, quelles ténèbres!” within “la monstrueuse cité.” Much of the slate used in London building is striated by what geologists term “pressure shadows” but they are inconspicuous beside the blackened surfaces of Portland stone. One foreign traveller remarked that the streets of London were so dark that the citizenry seemed to delight in playing “hide and seek” with the light, like children in a wood, while in the summer of 1782 Charles Moritz noted that “the houses in general struck me as if they were dark and gloomy.” The gloom affected him profoundly: “At that moment I could not in my own mind compare the external view of London with that of any other city I had ever before seen.”
There were almost a score of Dirty Alleys, Dirty Hills and Dirty Lanes in the medieval city; there were Inkhorn Courts and Foul Lanes and Deadman’s Places. Lombard Street in the City, at the centre of capitalist imperialism, was a notoriously dark street. At the beginning of the nineteenth century its brick was so blackened with smoke that the walls resembled the mud in the road. Today, in the twenty-first century, it is still just as narrow and just as dark, its stone walls constantly echoing to the sound of hurried footsteps. It is still close to what a century ago Nathaniel Hawthorne called “the black heart of London.” Hawthorne’s compatriot Henry James also noticed the “deadly darkness” but he revelled in it as if he were a “born Londoner.” In the 1870s Hippolyte Taine simply found the darkness “horrible”; the houses from a distance looked “like ink-stains on blotting paper” while from a closer vantage the “tall, flat straight façades are of dark brick.” The darkness of London seems to have entered Taine’s soul with his crepuscular invocations of “a bone-black factory” which is a London dwelling, of “porticoes foul with soot … every crevice inked in … long ranks of blind windows … the fluting of the columns full of greasy filth, as if sticky mud had been set flowing down there.”