The People of the Abyss, which also included pictures taken by London, was to become a hugely important social document. He discovered that the residents of the slum areas were not there through choice, or idleness, but through disease, disability or old age, resulting in an inability to work for decent wages.
In the following passage, London described the living conditions for the families condemned to live in the area:
‘Not only was one room deemed sufficient for a poor man and his family, but I learned that many families, occupying single rooms, had so much space to spare as to be able to take in a lodger or two.
‘When such rooms can be rented for from three to six shillings per week, it is a fair conclusion that a lodger with references should obtain floor space for, say, from eightpence to a shilling.’
On childhood in the area, the author commented:
‘There is one beautiful sight in the East End, and only one, and it is the children dancing in the street when the organ-grinder goes his round.’
Although he found the children were as bright and imaginative as any others, he concluded that their lives were destined to be blighted by degradation, disease and even death.
‘The outlook for children is hopeless. They die like flies, and those that survive, survive because they possess excessive vitality and a capacity of adaptation to the degradation with which they are surrounded.
‘They have no home life. In the dens and lairs in which they live they are exposed to all that is obscene and indecent. And as their minds are made rotten, so are their bodies made rotten by bad sanitation, overcrowding, and underfeeding.
‘When a father and mother live with three or four children in a room where the children take turn about in sitting up to drive the rats away from the sleepers, when those children never have enough to eat and are preyed upon and made miserable and weak by swarming vermin, the sort of men and women the survivors will make can readily be imagined.’
In an attempt to tackle drunkenness in the working classes, Parliament passed a new licensing law which gave police the power to arrest anyone who was drunk and incapable, and outlawed the sale of alcohol to ‘habitual drunkards’. Crucially, it also made it a criminal offence to be drunk in charge of a child, which was not uncommon in the poorer districts.
Dame Eileen Younghusband, an early pioneer of social work in the UK, was born in January. Her early life in Westerham, Kent, and in India was a privileged one but at 22, at the suggestion of a friend, she decided to help the less fortunate by becoming a social worker. Through her work she got to know the women and children of Bermondsey and Stepney, and felt that more should be done to help them.
She went on to become a lecturer at the London School of Economics, while devoting her spare time to the Citizens’ Advice Bureau, the Bermondsey Settlement and women refugees.
In 1955, she chaired a working party about the role of social workers and was instrumental in the regulation of training. Six years later, she helped set up the National Institute for Social Work Training. Dame Eileen died in a car accident, during a US lecture tour, shortly before her eighttieth birthday.
Just as his wife, Queen Alexandra, led the way in ladies’ dress, King Edward VII was a huge influence on men’s fashion. His dapper style made the wearing of Homburg hats fashionable, and his hunting attire led to a boom in tweed and single-breasted Norfolk jackets.
For formal meals, Edward VII introduced the custom of black tie and dinner jacket, rather than white tie and tails, and he was also the first to wear trousers pressed from seam to seam, rather than creased down the middle.
By the time of his coronation, Edward VII had become quite a portly figure, with a waist measurement of 48 inches (122cm). As a result, he would leave the bottom button of his suit jacket unbuttoned and this sparked a tradition which is still visible today.
His career as a trendsetter began in 1846 when, at the age of four, he was given a miniature version of the uniform worn by sailors on the Royal Yacht. The fame of the sailor suit spread and, by 1870, had become one of the most popular outfits for little boys.
In 1902, Madame Paquin, the first successful woman designer in haute couture, brought her wares to London.
She opened her salon in 39 Dover Street with the advertising slogan, ‘Each creation original and produced in Paris and London simultaneous’. Her stunning designs were an instant hit with fashionable London ladies and she counted the Queen among her customers.
Her expansion continued in latter years, when she opened stores in Buenos Aires and Madrid.
The first special effects were used by former stage magician Georges Melies. Since the inception of cinema five years earlier, the novelty of watching everyday events, such as workers leaving a factory, on the big screen was wearing off. The Melies film A Trip to the Moon depicted a rocket travelling through space, strange aliens and the spectacle of the moon’s animated face being struck in the eye with the rocket.
Huge crowds gathered to watch the film, which marked a new progression in the art of cinema.
On April 2, the first US cinema opened in Los Angeles. Electric Theater was the brainchild of Thomas L. Tally, who had previously been showing short films in the back of his amusement parlour. Sadly, as audiences became indifferent to the magic of moving films, their numbers declined.
The same was happening everywhere. One projectionist from New York reported that film had, at first, attracted ‘crowded houses on account of its novelty. Now everybody has seen it, and, to use the vernacular of the “foyer,” it does not “draw flies,” ’. The Electric Theatre converted to a Vaudeville venue six months after opening.
In Britain, film-maker Will Barker created the first UK studio when he bought four acres of land containing a large house and a lodge in North London, and began to use it as a setting for his movies. Five years later, he was to move the whole operation to West London – and name it Ealing Studios.
In April, the Irish National Theatre was formed by poet W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, J.M. Synge and George Russell.
In October, the society produced Yeats’ openly nationalistic play Cathleen ni Houlihan, which portrayed Ireland as an old lady asking for her four fields to be returned to her. When Irish men agree to fight on her behalf, she is transformed into a young beauty.
The lead was taken by Yeats’ muse, Maud Gonne, a militant Irish nationalist, with whom he was in unrequited love and who is the subject of many of his poems. A year later, on marrying John McBride in Paris, Maud plotted to assassinate Edward VII using their honeymoon in Spain as a cover. King Edward VII visited Gibraltar at the time but, in the end, the assassination attempt was aborted.
On the London stage, Elleline Terriss and Seymour Hicks were starring in Hicks’ plays The Cherry Girl and Quality Street. The golden couple, who had married in 1893, moved to a new home in Surrey in 1902 and the success of their play was such that the cul-de-sac that they moved to was renamed Quality Street.
Gordon Craig’s costume design for the Purcell Society’s revivals of Handel’s Acis and Galatea and Purcell’s Masque of Love gained worldwide notoriety. The New York Times reported that the outfits ‘cause much pleasantry, all dresses being made of loose strips of tape and ribbon, and bearing as little likeness to any clothes ever worn on the face of this planet as the most advanced artist could desire’.