Dicken's London: The East End



Long after the last traces of the Crystal Place had been removed from the lawns of Hyde Park, and a memorial to Albert, dead in 1861 at the age of forty-two, was erected on its site. This statue was in Victorian Gothic and consisted of a canopy 175 feet high covering Albert among some 178 life-size figures. Albert was to look forever over the scene of his greatest triumph.

Albert died of typhoid fever, a reminder that even the highest in society could not ignore the debased conditions of sanitation and housing in which the mass of London's population lived. Buckingham Palace was connected with the poorer districts of London by its sewers and it shared their water supply. So, the aristocracy of the new mansions of Belgravia or Regent's Park were prey to the epidemics of typhus, cholera, typhoid, and febrile influenza that swept the poorer districts.

In the 1840s, a tough-minded reformer called Edwin Chadwick dramatized the plight of the poor by publication of a large number of official reports on the state of public health in the unsanitary cities and especially in London. Chadwick's studies were followed over the next half-century by a large number of detailed, well-documented exposés, of which the most influential was the seventeen-volume Life and Labour of the People in London (1886-1903) of Charles Booth, a philanthropic Liverpool shipowner.

During the same time, some of England's novelists, with Charles Dickens preeminent among them, found among the teeming poor of London the subject matter for their stories. The problems of urban growth were thus approached in a unique, double-barreled way: in the reports, the problems were analyzed in meticulous depth and feasible solutions, proposed, while the novelists prepared the public for acceptance of these solutions by making the problems comprehensible in human terms.

I. The slums of London

The mushroom growth of nineteenth-century London had been responsible for many of its problems. London had developed from two nuclei, Westminster where the king resided and Parliament met, and the City of London where the port, trading companies, and financial offices were situated. By the end of the eighteenth century, when London had a population of about 800,000, the two nuclei were joined in a continuous band of buildings, with the thoroughfare called the Strand joining the older sections. Much of the expansion had been in aristocratic or middle-class quarters, but already London possessed the slum areas that fascinated painters like Hogarth. They were small, however, compared with those that sprang up in the first forty years of the nineteenth century when London's population increased by a million.

Better medical care, including vaccination and hospitals, accounted for some of the rise. New employment opportunities were provided by huge new docks and by the expansion of London's own industries like foodstuffs, drink, building materials, and soap. Service industries grew to supply the growing numbers in commerce and administration. The bulk of the new population lived in the boroughs to the east of the City, down both sides of the river from the Tower of London in what came to be called the East End. While the aristocracy were building their town houses in the elegant squares and crescents near Westminster in the West End, about one-third of London's population lived in Stepney, Poplar, Bethnal Green, Bermondsey, and Southwark in the oppressive squalor that Chadwick described in 1842 in his Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Classes.

The contrast of West and East ends, which increased during the century, fascinated both English and foreign observers. The reason was obvious. "I was yesterday . . . over the cholera district of Bermondsey," the novelist Charles Kingsley wrote his wife in 1849. "And, oh God! what I saw! people having no water to drink - hundreds of them - but the water of the common sewer which stagnates full of . . . dead fish, cats and dogs, under their windows." Owing to an almost total lack of public administration in the newer areas - London did not get a city government until 1888 - there were few public services. Water, often polluted, was supplied by nine private companies at a profit, and usually was turned on only a few hours a day three times a week. Drainage was inadequate; uncovered ditches emptied the cesspools into the river Thames, which became, in Punch's words, a "foul sludge and foetid stream."

Cemeteries were overcrowded, and bodies buried above street level; shallow graves were inadequately provided, in pest fields and plague pits, for victims of the epidemics. No controls were extended to housing contractors, who threw up the slums called rookeries. the author of one report found 1,465 families in an area near London's most fashionable church, living in 2,174 rooms with only 2,510 beds among them. But it was Dickens, in Bleak House, who permitted the London bourgeois to follow Kingsley's advice: "Go, scented Belgravian, and see what London is."
Jo live - that is to say, Jo has not yet died - in a ruinous place, known to the like of him by the name of Tom-all-Alone's. It is black, dilapidated street, avoided by all decent people; where the crazy houses were seized upon, when their decay was far advanced, by some bold vagrants, who, after establishing their own possession, took to letting them out in lodgings. Now, these tumbling tenements contain, by night, a swarm of misery. As on the ruined human wretch, vermin parasites appear, so these ruined shelters have bred a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in walls and boards; and coils itself to sleep, in maggot numbers, where the rain drips in; and comes and goes, fetching and carrying fever, and sowing more evil in its every footprint than Lord Coodle, and Sir Thomas Doodle, and The Duke of Foodle, and all the fine gentlemen in office, down to Zoodle, shall set right in five hundred years - though born expressly to do it.

II. Working Conditions

The vast numbers of poor were compelled to seek work in conditions of great hardship. The worst exploitation did not take place in factories but among small employers, particularly in the clothing trade where so-called sweated labor was normal. women and children worked at sewing in their homes for very small wages; they received four shillings and sixpence for sewing a dozen shirts. As a result of the lack of regular employment, thousands turned to trades like hawking and others less legal.

Henry Mayhew, in his very influential book London Labour and the London Poor (1861) estimated that there were 13,000 street traders, many of whom he interviewed. They included the children called mud-larks, who scraped the Thames mud for scraps of coal dropped by the bargers; sellers of sheeps' trotters, ham sandwiches, flowers, and birds' nests; and costermongers, who sold fish, fruit, and vegetables. There were also the dredgers, who went into the river for dead bodies, and the sewer hunters, who searched for bottles or iron that could be sold. Mayhew's books became a mine for novelists like Kingsley and Dickens; but Mayhew's own fear for the language of the interviewed and the illustrations he published were as effective as any novel in waking the conscience of London. His twenty-two-year-old birds'-nest seller told him:
Mother died five years ago in the Consumption Hospital at Chelsea, just after it was built. I was very young indeed when father died; I can hardly remember him. He died in Middlesex Hospital: he had abscesses all over him; there were six-and-thirty at the time of his death. . . . I'm a very little eater, and perhaps that's the luckiest thing for such as me; half a pound of bread and a few potatoes will do me for the day. If I could afford it, I used to get a ha'porth of coffee and a ha'porth of sugar and make it do twice. Sometimes I used to have victuals given to me, sometimes I went without altogether; and sometimes I couldn't eat. I can't always.
It was hardly surprising then that crime, especially theft, was rampant. The police believed that some 20,000 children were being trained in thieving in the 1860s, in the way Dickens described in Oliver Twist. Prostitution was widespread. Gambling was a full-time profession for 10,000 people. By the 1880, it was common for reformers to compare the London slums unfavorably with the jungles of central Africa being described contemporaneously by England's explorers and missionaries. General Booth's In Darkest England and the Way Out began with the comment, "The lot of the Negroes in the Equatorial Forest is not, perhaps, a very happy one, but is it so very much worse than that of many a pretty orphan girl in our Christian capital?"

III. Metropolitan Reform

The authors of these reports were clear on the reforms needed to remedy the problems of unplanned urban growth. They did not condemn the whole structure of capitalist society as the Socialist reforms were doing, but as practical men, they suggested practical reforms. London needed public construction and maintenance of a network of drains and sewers; public provision of pure water; slum clearance and provision of decent public housing; and public asylums for the insane and public hospitals for the indigent sick; and above all it needed a metropolitan government to deal with the problems of the whole sprawling area in a unified way.

Slowly the reformers gained their way. In the 1850s, there was established a Metropolitan Board of Works, which began a large-scale building program and sanitary improvements. Parks were purchased. Burial boards, an asylums board, a school board, and finally in 1888 a London Country Council were created. Life was still hard for the London poor, as the riots known as Bloody Monday in 1886 and Bloody Sunday in 1887 demonstrated. But a start at least had been made in remedying the most blatant grievances.

IV. The English Novel

In making the general public aware of these problems and receptive to a solution, the novelists of the mid-nineteenth century played a significant part. By then, the novel had been developed into a perfect vehicle for this task, although its history had been relatively short. Only a hundred years earlier, with the publication of Samuel Richardson's Pamela, the modern form of novel had been invented. There had obviously been story-telling in prose for two millennia at least, in Apuleius's The Golden Ass, for example, and the Arabian Tales of a thousand and One Nights. But in London in the mid-eighteenth century, writers used the story in prose to prove human motivation and explore individual character, and to present a reconstruction of all the varieties of contemporary life, as they engaged in a dramatic form of infinite complexity.

With Henry Fielding, who was a magistrate in the Bow Street law court and head of the equivalent of the London police, the great variety of the London underworld first entered the English novel; and in his masterpiece Tom Jones, after the rollicking scenes of bucolic life in the West Country, we are thrown into the rough slums of London that Hogarth depicted in Gin Lane. By 1836, when Charles Dickens had swept his way to fame by depicting the meeting of Mr. Pickwick and his inimitable valet, Sam Weller, in the fifteenth number of the serialization of The Pickwick Papers, the novel had won a vast public among the middle-class patrons of the monthly magazine and the lending library. With Jane Austen, it had explored the art of showing subtleties of character through the niceties of conversation; with Walter Scott, it has spread itself over vast panoramas of time and space, becoming the instrument for the Romantic movement's re-creation of the imagined dramas of medieval life; with Disraeli, it had begun to explore the nature of English class distinction. But Dickens was able to create a world in his novels that for many of his readers had a greater reality and coherence, and thus a more poignant message, than the necessarily restricted sphere of their own daily lives.

V. Dickens's London

For them, Dickens described the parts of London they had never known, or gave meaning to the parts they did. In Bleak House, it was the law courts along the Strand and the lawyers' chambers in Lincoln's Inn Fields, characterized by the fog that penetrates everything. "Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. . . . And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln's Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery." In Oliver Twist, it is the dark recesses along the river bank where Fagin's gang lurks, where "the old smoke-stained storehouses on either side rose heavy and dull from the dense mass of roofs and gables, and frowned sternly upon water too black to reflect even their lumbering shapes." And there is the den in the slums where Fagin trains his boys as pickpockets, "these foul'd and frosty dens, where vice is closely packed and lacks the room to turn." Mr. Pickwick is consigned to a debtors' prison, just as Dickens's own father had been:
"Ohr," replied Mr. Pickwick, looking down a dark and filthy staircase, which appeared to lead to a range of damp and gloomy stone vaults, beneath the ground, "and those, I suppose are the little cellars where the prisoners keep their small quantities of coals. Unpleasant places to have to go down to, but very convenient, I dare say." "Yes, I shouldn't wonder if they was convenient," replied the gentleman, ""seeing that a few people live there, pretty snug." . . . "My friend," said Mr. Pickwick, "you don't really mean to say that human beings live down in those wretched dungeons?" "Live down there! Yes, and die down there, too, very often!" replied Mr. Rocker; "and what of that? Who's got to say anything agin it?"

VI. The Londoners of Dickens

But even more than he did with places, Dickens brought alive a vast gallery of London characters. His anger blazed against the heartless and irresponsible among the middle classes. Mr. Snawley abandons his stepchildren to Mr. Squeers's nightmarelike school of Dotheboys Hall, in Nicholas Nickleby:
"Not too much writing home allowed, I suppose?" said the step-father hesitating. "None, except a circular at Christmas, to say they never were so happy, and hope they may never be sent for," rejoined Squeers.
"Nothing could be better," said the step-father, rubbing his hands.
Unscrupulous lawyers abound in his pages. It is through the machinations of the firm of Dodson and Fogg that Mr. Pickwick finds himself in the Fleet prison. In Bleak House, the trial of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce has been prolonged for years, the symbol of the profitable legal procrastination of the court of chancery, "which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in every churchyard." The bureaucrats who froze an army to death in the Crimean War appear as the Tite Barnacles of the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit. There is the cheap, hypocritical crook, like Uriah Heep in David Copperfield; and in Oliver Twist the violent, unthinking thief, like Bill Sikes, and Fagin, the almost likable trainer of pickpockets and psychological master of outcast children. Only occasionally is there an oasis of quiet and good will, like Pickwick's Christmas with the Wardles at Dingley Dell.

Usually Dickens's characters cannot avoid the great swelling tide of social injustice and the human malice that grows in such a system. For all his humor, Dickens's London was a place where the sufferings of human beings needed remedy. His method, which was to create innumerable scenes of the great macrocosm of metropolitan life, and then to multiply the effect by showing those scenes through the eyes of a large number of characters, was perfect for this task.

Dickens was able to bring alive the different worlds of London, and especially those in need of reform - the prisons, hospitals, mortuaries, slums, poorhouses, schools, countinghouses, law courts, hustings, ministries, factories, shipyards, cab stands, fishmarkets. "Heart of London," he wrote, "I seem to hear a voice within three that sinks into my heart, bidding me, as I elbow my way among the crowd, to have some thought for the meanest wretch that passes, and, being a man, to turn away with scorn and pride from none that wears the human shape." In spite of his sentimentality and sensationalism, or perhaps because of them, Dickens impressed on his huge reading public his own vision of a London in which the mechanism of society had not kept up with the needs of its diverse humanity. He was the reformers' finest ally.