Selected Further Reading

When you find yourself looking at a nineteenth-century street map, or a similarly old street photograph or engraving, there is sometimes that strong yearning to physically enter the past: to see the people, the shops and the traffic, to summon the sights and flavours, the smells in the air. While researching this book, there were so many times – buried in various volumes and original Victorian documentation – when I found myself in a trance-like state. From the prospect of mules pulling blue-liveried trams along the Euston Road to the dense, clanking, nocturnal industry of the great rail terminals to the first widespread use of electric light and the fascinating tokens of immigration, the London of 1879 seemed, at once, a different world and incredibly close at hand. For those who want to know more, there are a few fascinating books focusing in on these and related areas.

Little Germany: Exile and Asylum in Victorian England by Rosemary Ashton (Oxford University Press, 1986). This is a gorgeously detailed overview of German immigration to Britain in the nineteenth century, focusing on the poets, philosophers, political radicals, the composers, the authors. It is excellent on the ideas and the innovations that came with them. Quite apart from the ideas of Marx and Engels, there was also the popular introduction of the kindergarten and of German beers and lagers to public houses. Given that there currently seems to be such an intense focus on Europe and its future cohesion, it is wonderfully instructive to find out more about an age which had genuine freedom of movement.

The Victorian Home by Jenni Calder (Batsford, 1977). Again, for me, one of the most fascinating aspects of the Bastendorff story was the character of the household and the day-to-day nature of domestic life. Calder’s book is illuminating, not only on the history of interiors, but also on their meanings and the psychological impulses that could be detected in the way homes were made.

Psychiatry for the Poor by Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine (Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1974). For the part of this story that ends in the Colney Hatch hospital, I confess I went in with heavily weighted preconceptions about the nature and quality of Victorian mental health care. This book is a corrective to that, tracing the development of the first properly medical institutions, with specific focus on Colney Hatch and the efforts made not only to cure, but also to treat patients with kindness and compassion.

A Magazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine 1800–1914 by Margaret Beetham (Routledge, 1996). I was very keen to understand about the growth of womens’ magazines in the late nineteenth century and the sorts of features that appealed to readers then: this wonderful book contains many reproduced images and is of serious social historical fascination. One might imagine that it was a more innocent age: yet there appeared to be a sly, humorous knowingness about some magazine features.

Victorian Prison Lives by Philip Priestley (Methuen, 1985). Again, the Victorian prison system is one that we imagine we are at least partly familiar with; this book both confirms and confounds preconceptions of punishment and rehabilitation. Throughout the Victorian era, attitudes towards penal servitude swung like a pendulum: periods when liberal reformists came forward, demanding better opportunities for former convicts; and times when prison meant retribution through soul-crushingly futile labour and floggings for minor infractions.

The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant by Pamela Horn (Gill and Macmillan, 1975). There are so many layers to explore in stories of servants and employers; not just in terms of exploitation and low pay, but also in terms of how essential strangers sharing the same home in these circumstances negotiated means of living with one another.

The Nether World by George Gissing (Smith, Elder, 1889). Written in 1889, but set some ten years beforehand, Gissing’s novel is a powerfully evocative piece of social realism. While in previous decades, even the poorest of Dickens’s characters were animated with colour and eccentricity and energy, here are Londoners who are crushed under a sky that seems perpetually low and grey. Set in and around the streets of Clerkenwell, about a mile away from Euston Square, it also gives a valuable taste of the sharp contrasts between different districts and even streets; and also a sense of the lives that are lived behind doors that never usually get a second glance.

The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad (Methuen, 1907). Though written (and set) some years after the Euston Square mystery, this profoundly unsettling story of anarchists and radicals and terrorists prowling the narrow London streets feels in some ways like the culmination of the real-life political fervour that had been building in the taverns around Fitzrovia and Euston Square – embodied, as we saw, in the case of Inspector Hagen arresting Johann Most in 1881. Here is a city seething with firebrand figures from Germany to Russia: from spies to bomb throwers. And, indeed, in real life, there is a fascinating and direct line from the socialists handing out revolutionary literature in the 1870s, and Stalin’s sojourn in Whitechapel at the turn of the century.

In addition, there are some rather more obscure titles that can be found in the stacks of the London Library and the British Library. Among them are Charles Wittingham’s The Wilds of London (Chatto and Windus, 1881) and The Golden Guide to London (Chiswick Press, 1879), roughly synchronous with the Euston Square mystery and quite simply captivating in their own right – peregrinations through the Victorian city, the writer gazing upon all the quite new marvels that it boasted. There is also the magisterial six-volume Old and New London (Illustrated) by Walter Thornberry (Cassell, Petter, Galpin, 1881), and taking us, district-by-district, through every corner of London with exquisite engravings. These volumes are a little more widely available and are worth seeking out as works of art in their own right. They are a glimpse of huge Victorian pride in the capital.

Also beguiling are works on the development of music hall (one such is DF Cheshire’s Music Hall In Britain (David and Charles, 1974); and the story of Euston Station itself in Alison and Peter Smithson’s The Euston Arch and the Growth of the London, Midland and Scottish Railway (Thames and Hudson, 1968), with a foreword by Nikolaus Pevsner himself. And indeed, for those who want a further taste of the rural world in which the Bastendorff family grew up, WJ Taylor Whitehead provides a charming insight in the very rare volume Luxembourg: Land of Legends (Constable, 1951).