London in the nineteenth century is almost impossible to summarise, though many contemporary writers tried, including Charles
Dickens’s son Charles Jr in Dickens’s Dictionary of London, an alphabetical listing of everything from tourist sites to bus timetables. In fact, the London scene was a common genre,
both visually, in illustrations, and in novels and periodicals throughout the century. Dickens proved to be the most influential
of all. In 1876, six years after his death, a popular writer, Thomas Edgar Pemberton, published Dickens’s London: or, London in the Works of Charles Dickens, the first of many books to codify nineteenth-century London as particularly Dickens’s London.
At the beginning of the century London was still a collection of neighbourhoods or parishes that, until the Metropolitan Board
of Works was established in 1855, had their own government, welfare system (the hated Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 that
established local workhouses for the indigent is the subject of the first quarter of Oliver Twist), refuse removal, street cleaning and paving, and lighting. There was also local responsibility for public order, though
in 1829 the home secretary Sir Robert Peel established the Metropolitan Police, who have ever since borne his nickname ‘bobbies’.
The incommensurability of nineteenth-century London, however, was not just its identity as a collection of different neighbourhoods
but, more crucially, it was the product of rapid, uncontrolled growth and change. London increased in population from around
1 million inhabitants at the end of the eighteenth century to over 4½ million towards the end of the nineteenth century. An
average of 300,000 new residents came into the city every decade. The diameter of its boundaries grew from less than four
to more than six miles. There was sustained, continual building work of all sorts. Sir John Summerson estimated that some
73,000 new structures were built in the metropolitan area in the 1860s, though bits and bobs of the older London survived
even back to the Roman city of Londinium.
1As Roy Porter says, ‘everywhere continuity and change coalesce; forms and functions mutate, past buildings and townscapes
enhance but inhibit the present, the future refashions the debris of the past’.
2The most important transformative building work was undertaken due to the rapid expansion of the railways through the first
two-thirds of the century. The building of the railways ‘kept central London viable as a commercial centre, while blighting
the inner suburbs … [though] the railway made outer suburbs possible’.
3 The human cost is indicated by the fact that in the last fifty years of the century about 100,000 people in central and inner
suburbia had their homes destroyed by the railways. In
Dombey and Son, Dickens describes both the havoc the building of the railways wrought on the neighbourhood of the fictitious but representative
Staggs Gardens in Camberling (Camden) Town, and also the opportunities it brought the area’s resident Mr Toodles, who gets
ahead as an engineer.
All the main railway lines came into London and the most wonderful structures were built as their terminal stations, including
the extensive glass structure in Paddington designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1854), and the Gothic excess of St Pancras
(1868). New major roads were constructed: the Commercial Road in the East End, around the docks; Oxford Street in the West
End; and the New Road to the north. Four new bridges replaced ancient ones (London, Westminster, Blackfriars, Vauxhall), and
three entirely new bridges were built (Southwark, Hungerford and Waterloo). The iconic Tower Bridge opened in 1894. Many important
public buildings were also erected during the century: the Gothic-style Palace of Westminster (Houses of Parliament) by Charles
Barry (1840–60); the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington (begun in 1889); a new Renaissance-style palace for the
Foreign Office. G. E. Street designed the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand, where Dickens spent four years walking to
and fro, first as a solicitor’s clerk in Gray’s Inn and then as a freelance reporter at Doctors’ Commons.
There was a significant building programme of public works. Joseph Bazalgette, the chief engineer of the Metropolitan Board
of Works, designed and supervised the construction of a sewer system for London (1855–75), still used today, which had one
of the most extraordinarily ornate architectural structures of the century – the Sewage Pumping Station built in 1868 in Abbey
Mills, Stratford, and elaborately decorated in the Moorish style with a great oriental dome. Bazalgette also developed plans
to reclaim the mudflats, embank the Thames and install walking promenades. The year 1863 saw the opening of the first underground
railway in the world, the Metropolitan Line, which was the start of a plan to link by underground all the overground railway
stations. There were new libraries; the much loved London Library opened in 1841. Nor were the dead ignored; new cemeteries
were built during the century, the best known at Kensal Green (1833), Norwood (1837), Highgate, where Karl Marx is buried,
(1839), Nunhead (1840) and Stoke Newington (Abney Park, 1840).
There was also a continual housing boom – Thomas Cubitt was the major builder – as improved public transportation first enabled
the middle classes to move from the crowded centre to suburban areas. In 1864 the Cheap Trains Act brought in a working man’s
fare, which enabled members of the working classes, who had previously needed to live near their work, to move to outlying
areas. Throughout the century many people of different classes lived close together and were frequently intermixed. As a result,
many contemporary commentators used a set of contrasts as an organising principle for their attempts at a total vision of
London – rich and poor, old and new, East End (where the docks served as the only place in London where one could get work
without a reference) and West End (where the government and administration were located). Though there were many candidates
for the most dangerous slum, the area most often mentioned was around Ratcliffe Highway and Whitechapel in the East End, ‘where
the often desperately poor population trebled in the first 10 years of the nineteenth century reaching a peak of
c. 17,000 in 1861’.
4Bleak House, one of the greatest London novels, demonstrates how classes and neighbourhoods impinged on each other. Lady Dedlock, from
the highest society and located in a country house in Lincolnshire, is brought together in a rotting cemetery off Drury Lane
with the illiterate London crossing sweeper Jo, a product of the slum Tom All Alone’s. Tom’s, located near Clare Market, Holborn,
was probably based on the rookeries of Seven Dials and St Giles near Bloomsbury, which the young Dickens may have visited
with his step-cousin.
Many characters of all classes are thrown together around the courts, where in the court of Chancery the long-running lawsuit,
Jarndyce v.
Jarndyce, involves everyone from Lady Dedlock to Miss Flite, who, along with Captain Hawdon, Lady Dedlock’s lover and Esther’s father,
lives in lodgings owned by Krook the rag-and-bottle man. Snagsby, the law stationer, is located in Cook’s Court, Cursitor
Street. The law clerk William Guppy, who first notices the similarity between Lady Dedlock and Esther, lives north at Penton
Place, as does the parasite Harold Skimpole, at Somers Town. The moneylenders the Smallweeds live further north,
at Mount Pleasant, Islington, an area Esther and Sergeant Bucket go through in search of her mother. Esther herself is located
in Bleak House with John Jarndyce and Ada in St Albans, but they also have a house on Oxford Street, from which Esther visits
the Jellybys in Thavies Inn near Holborn Circle.
London was not an industrial centre, though its skilled trades, including building, clothing and footwear, wood and furniture,
metals and engineering, printing and stationery, and precision manufacture were a kind of industrial base. London was, however,
the most important city in the nineteenth century in terms of trade, commerce and finance. The great East End docks, the centre
of London’s commerce and trade, were built during the century, and they and the mammoth warehouses built on the shore made
it the largest port in the world at the time, bringing raw materials in from the rest of the world and shipping out British-manufactured
goods, and spawning an astonishing variety of work from porters and carriers to clerks in counting-houses. All this was made
possible by the tidal Thames River, called the great or the silent highway. The trade on this highway was centred in the Pool
of London, from Limehouse Cut in the east to London Bridge, and at least five new canals were built to link to it.
The streets of London were another great commercial highway. Some 40,000 men, women and children made a living – and sometimes
lived on – the streets, including 30,000 costermongers or traders in fresh food, which they purchased at the London markets:
Covent Garden for fruit, vegetables, and flowers; Billingsgate for fish; Leadenhall for meat, poultry, fish, fruit and vegetables;
Smithfield for meat and, until 1852, live animals. Though the markets at Smithfield, Leadenhall and Billingsgate were ancient,
their halls were built new by Sir Horace Jones in the late nineteenth century. In addition to produce and meat, almost every
possible product was sold on the streets, including dogs and birds, coffee, hot potatoes, hot eels, pies and sweet stuff,
as well as manufactured goods such as shoelaces, tinware, blacking and glue. Some street-sellers, such as Silas Wegg in
Our Mutual Friend, sold ballads and other printed materials. There were also many street entertainers who performed for tips – sword swallowers,
acrobats, hurdy-gurdy men and Punch and Judy shows. As Henry Mayhew said, they ‘are all bawling together – salesmen and hucksters
of provisions, hardware, and newspapers, – the place is a perfect Babel of competition’.
5There were also groups of ‘finders’, such as the ‘pure finders’ who collected dogs’ dung to sell for use in the tanneries.
Of course there were
plenty of pickpockets like Fagin’s gang, and prostitutes like Nancy. There were beggars with an amazing range of appeals and
cons, from little girls selling violets to the crippled nutmeg-grinder seller or Blind Sarah with her hurdy-gurdy whom Mayhew
befriended. The streets were lined with many shops selling the same goods as the street-sellers, as well as many upscale shops
where goods were made to order. (The department store was also an invention of the nineteenth century.) At night the resulting
crush of humanity, vehicles and animals was transformed into a mythically exciting and dangerous world by the hundreds of
gas streetlights (well established by 1835) and by the recurrent dense fog caused by damp air and smoke from the coal fires
that heated all the buildings and which provides the memorable opening of
Bleak House.London was created as the greatest metropolitan city in the nineteenth century during the years of Dickens’s life (1812–70).
In its growth and excitement, Dickens found his creative energy. He came to London when he was 10 years old, moving with his
family into a shabby neighbourhood in Camden Town. He had an extended family in London and this enlarged his knowledge of
the city. His godfather was a sail-maker and ships’ chandler who lived in Limehouse. His step-cousin, James Lamert, lived
close to Seven Dials. Dickens also had an uncle in Gerrard Street, Soho, who lived over a second-hand bookstore within a few
blocks of Covent Garden.
Dickens wove all the sights and sounds he accumulated into his work. He wrote about current urban experience in his sketches
and journalism: ‘Bill Sticking’, ‘Shy Neighborhoods’, ‘Arcadian London’, ‘Night Walks’, ‘City of London Churches’, ‘The Detective
Police’, ‘A Walk in a Workhouse’. In his novels, he could be up to date as well, as he was in Dombey and Son where Dombey finds his second wife after a quick train ride from London to Brighton.
But like the city itself, Dickens’s cumulative portrayal of both the city and the process of expansion and change could be
temporally layered. He also recalled the older world of London: as Andrew Sanders says, Dickens’s fictional London ‘is physically
Georgian London, but a Georgian London given a newly intense charge by the burgeoning of its Victorian population’.
6 In
Great Expectations, for example, the mood of alienation and loss is characteristic of the 1860s when the novel was written and published, but
it is set in the 1820s, as we see when Pip comes to London to claim his expectations by stagecoach and not the railroad.
With the exception of
Hard Times, all Dickens’s novels are set, at least partly, in London, and in a majority of them London is the central setting.
The prisons of London play a recurrent part in Dickens’s works: Newgate, the Fleet, the King’s Bench and the Marshalsea. The
novels are full of street names, many of which still exist, such as Little Britain, where Jaggers in
Great Expectations has his offices, and in
Little Dorrit Bleeding Heart Yard, where the working-class Plornishes live along with the Italian refugee John Baptiste Cavaletto. Part
of the sense of breadth and depth of Dickens’s vision, particularly from 1847 and
Dombey and Son, comes from his descriptions of official buildings, shops, houses, street scenes, culs-de-sac, trains, omnibuses, horses,
crossings, not to mention the many urban characters who populate his London, such as the cockney Sam Weller, the pickpocket
Artful Dodger and the crossing sweeper Jo, who ‘knows nothink’ and whose ‘job’ is to sweep (for tips) the refuse away at curbs
so ladies’ dresses would not be dirtied.
But London meant more to Dickens as a writer than as a setting for his books or subjects for his journalism. London, especially
its streets, was as crucial to his creative production as pen and paper. He was from age 10 an obsessive walker of the streets,
looking at everything, absorbing everything, remembering everything. In his journalistic piece ‘Shy Neighbourhoods’, which
he wrote for
All the Year Round in May 1860, he described two ways of walking the city: ‘one, straight on end to a definite goal at a round pace; one, objectless,
wandering and purely vagabond’,
7 the latter describing his own tendency. This walking all over the city provided his creative energy. When in the 1840s he
took his family to Italy to live for a time, he found he missed the London streets too much. He wrote to Forster: ‘I can’t
express how much I want these. It seems as if they supplied something to my brain that it cannot bear, when busy, to lose.
For a week or a fortnight I can write in a retired place … and a day in London sets me up again and starts me – but the toil
and labour of writing without that magic lantern is
IMMENSE.’
8 Two of his earliest publications were the sketches ‘The Streets – Morning’ and ‘The Streets – Night’, published in the
Morning Chronicle and the genesis of his first book,
Sketches by Boz. As he said: ‘What inexhaustible food for speculation, do the streets of London afford.’
9As a result his novels are ‘crammed’ – as his biographer Edgar Johnson says – with lively evocations of the byways of London,
‘from the narrow lanes darkened by the walls of Lincoln’s Inn to the tall genteel houses between Portland Place and Bryanston
Square’.
10 His characters traverse the streets as he did and are frequently overwhelmed as he seemed never to be. Oliver Twist has a
phantasmagoric experience as he is dragged by Bill Sikes on foot across all of London – Bethnal
Green in the east to the western suburb of Falliford. The view of London from the roof of Todgers’s boarding house, near the
monument in the City in
Martin Chuzzlewit, is one of the great panoramic descriptions of London. Florence Dombey’s early life is forever marked by being lost on the
London streets, ‘stunned by the noise and confusion’ (ch. 6). The threatening mixture of crime and commerce that she experienced
is repeated in Pip’s first encounter with London as he disembarks from the coach on to Little Britain Street just out of Smithfield
meat market in the heart of legal London. Little Dorrit and Arthur Clennam achieve a qualified happiness walking hand in hand
in the anonymous ‘roaring streets’ at the end of their novel. Dickens had an ‘attraction of repulsion’ to the byways of London,
as John Forster described it,
11 and this complex fascination is translated into all his works. As late as the 1860s, he was still wandering the city as the
Uncommercial Traveller. After his death, his friend George Augustus Sala wrote how he had met Dickens ‘in the oddest places
and most inclement weather – in Ratcliffe Highway, on Haverstock Hill, on Camberwell Green, in Gray’s Inn Lane, in the Wandsworth
Road, at Hammersmith Broadway, in Norton Folget, and at Kensal Town … equally at home in the intricate byways of narrow streets
as in the lengthy thoroughfares’.
12 Though nineteenth-century London had plenty of critics, arguably it is Dickens’s much loved London – exciting, dangerous,
busy, multiple – that epitomises it for us. As Rosalind Vallance says, ‘the half-historical, half-phantasmagorical world that
we think of as “Dickens’s London”, [is] a place to which there is no guide but his own books’.
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