THE SOUTHERN END of Norfolk Street ran south into a short street, which connected Mortimer and Goodge Streets. In Dickens’s day it was known as Charles Street, and it was an important street because on it stood the great institution, the Middlesex Hospital. Historically, Middlesex is an important county, the ancient country of the middle Saxons, embracing almost the entire London region north of the Thames, outside the City of London itself. The county boundary encompassed a large hinterland as well as Westminster, and most of the population of London outside the City.
Knowing Dickens’s interest in names, it seems likely that as a child he would have relished having an important street nearby named Charles Street, as it were for himself, or at least for himself and his fugitive grandfather. As he grew older, traversing London or looking at maps and street directories, young Dickens would have become aware that London had quite a number of other streets—like the one leading to Soho Square—that carried his first name.
In this chapter we’ll look at the two large institutions which stood close to Dickens’s home: the hospital and the workhouse. The Middlesex Hospital dominated Charles Street. Contemporary images make clear the importance of the place in its vicinity: taller and larger than any building in sight. There being no other hospital in that part of West London, the hospital had been founded in 1745 to meet the unmet needs of the burgeoning population who could not afford private medical care. It had originally occupied a private house in nearby Windmill Street (just off Tottenham Court Road) but had grown rapidly, and in 1757 moved to a new purpose-built building in Marylebone Fields.1
The catchment area for the Middlesex Hospital—both in terms of patients and patrons—was extensive. When the Dickens family was living in Norfolk Street in the few years before 1820, the hospital was treating thousands of patients a year. Though it went through periods of crisis, it was an institution adept at raising funds from private donors, and in generating strong loyalty among staff, patients, patrons, and local inhabitants.2
FIGURE 8. The devastated site of the Middlesex Hospital, seen looking northwards towards the Telecom Tower, from Mortimer Street. Photographed by the author, 2011. The right flank of the site was once the western side of Norfolk Street, its far corner occupied by Mr Baxter’s pawnshop, diagonally between Dickens’s old home (A) and the Workhouse (B), both of which are visible here. The hasty demolition of the Hospital was a scandalous pity, as it destroyed a fine edifice with a profound history on the site, reaching back to the fields beneath. The same fate awaited the Workhouse in 2010.
The Middlesex was an innovative hospital, and is said to have been the first in London to introduce a ward for married lying-in patients in 1747. The building on Charles Street was originally built as a large H block, on a site enclosed on three sides by housing plots, it gradually acquired and demolished over time as the institution expanded to occupy almost the entire field in which it stood. In the early twentieth century, to allow further expansion, the Workhouse building on Cleveland Street (also originally designed on an H block plan) was purchased and modernized for an annexe. It was this acquisition by the great hospital on the next block that served to preserve the Workhouse building as a functioning health facility into the twenty-first century.
Maps of Dickens’s day show the hospital with a large garden or orchard at the rear: land which much later was built upon for the Medical School. Right up until its closure in 2005–6 the Hospital preserved a garden within its central core, with shrubs and shady trees, and benches for patients and visitors. Historically, it was a large and very busy general hospital, as well as a centre for clinical innovation: a focus of medical, surgical, and nursing expertise, and forward-thinking. The garden provided an oasis of greenery at the centre of that work.
In pondering what Charles Street and its neighbourhood were actually like in Dickens’s day, we have to bear in mind that past views of the Hospital—perhaps understandably—tend to aggrandize the institution by focusing the eye upon it, and ignoring or editing out its surroundings. I had hoped that it might be possible to glimpse what Norfolk Street was like from such images, but none of those who created pictures of the old Middlesex Hospital seem to have shown much interest in its urban context. So, as yet, it has proved impossible to find a view which takes in Norfolk Street in a way that is at all informative about the shops and houses—or indeed the Workhouse—that stood there in Dickens’s day: the focus always veers towards the grand building on the adjacent block.
I live in hope that a beautiful watercolour of Charles Street will somewhere be found, showing the Hospital and Norfolk Street in perfect detail and glorious technicolour. But until then, the best image of the street I’ve yet found is a very small diagram dating from the 1830s, which appears in Tallis’s Street Views of London.3 John Tallis’s speciality was in the presentation of linear diagrams of the grand streets of London, like the Strand or Piccadilly, so it is unsurprising that the interest here is very much upon the great institution on Charles Street: the Middlesex Hospital. But next to the Hospital, this little view also includes within it a small vista looking up Norfolk Street from Charles Street. Because there is so little else to guide us in an understanding of the street and its vicinity when Dickens knew it, although the view is peripheral, it is important. We can imagine Dickens walking down his little street, or returning this way after an outing, and looking up to see the great institution which stood behind the houses opposite his home.
Tallis is not accurate in showing a single frontage as the termination of the vista up Norfolk Street: this seems to have been a device applied to other streets in his Street Views such as Berners and Nassau Streets, on the same page, where a slight bend eventually obscures the view. A map (on the same page) shows that the prospect northwards up Norfolk Street should extend much further, more like the streets De Quincey mentioned running north off Oxford Street. Cleveland Street is unusually long and straight, as London streets go. But where Tallis is extremely helpful is in the attention paid to the environment on Charles Street itself, most especially in the relative heights of buildings, and in his record of the unpretentiousness of the local housing. We shall look at this view a little more closely in the next chapter.
The life and busyness of the area around the Hospital go entirely unrecorded by Tallis’s clean lines, since he drew his streets without inhabitants of any kind. He does not show, for example, the claret-faced woman ballad-seller, who we know usually occupied a regular pitch beside the Middlesex Hospital’s gates. It was she who directed the antiquarian ballad collector Sarah Banks of Soho Square to a printer in Long Lane, Smithfield, to purchase a rare song she lacked among her own stock of half-penny ballads, strung up against the hospital’s front wall.4
FIGURE 9. The dignified central and eastern wings of the Middlesex Hospital, seen from Charles Street (now Mortimer Street), with Norfolk Street forming the Hospital’s eastern flank. The houses opposite (shown upside down) include the archway to Berners Mews. From John Tallis, Street Views of London, 1830.
Knowing about this encounter somehow gives us permission to revive the bustle of the place in imagination, and it helps to know that Charles Street was the name given to a short section of a much longer thoroughfare of many names, from west to east: Upper Seymour Street, Portman Square (south side), Lower Seymour, Edward Street, Wigmore Street, Cavendish Square (north side), Mortimer, Charles and Goodge Streets. This road was a major lateral artery more or less midway between Oxford Street and the New Road, connecting the great northerly roads north-west out to Edgware (Shrewsbury, Liverpool) and north-east to Camden Town (York, Newcastle, and Edinburgh), busy with traffic and the usual business of many shops, its adjacent business areas (generally south, towards Oxford Street) and residential areas branching off to the north, and the New Road.
In front of the Hospital, as well as the ballad-seller, there would have been much added bustle from passers-by, and the sheer number of visitors to the Hospital—walking sick and lame, nurses, students, clerks, cleaners, porters, relatives, medical men—or governors arriving in their gigs, patients arriving on stretchers or ladders, in wheelbarrows, or in hackney cabs, and of course there would have been the traffic arriving with deliveries of food and other supplies for the Hospital. Hovering about, hoping to capitalize on this activity, there would surely have been other street-hawkers and beggars, fruit and flower sellers, and, in the right season, the portable ovens of the baked potato sellers or the vendors of roasted chestnuts, providing a grateful sight (and smell and warmth) to passing Londoners on freezing days. Local bookshops, coffee-shops, bake-houses, pie-shops, and stalls catered to visitors; print-shops and other shops displayed their wares to passers-by.
FIGURE 10. The view northwards up Norfolk Street (now Cleveland Street) in 2011, from a position similar to that taken by Mr Tallis. Photographed by the author, 2011.
FIGURE 11. A Cleveland Street coffee-shop, drawn by George Sharf in the 1820s. Scharf was an acute observer of the details of ordinary London lives at the very time Dickens was growing up in this part of London: here, both the man reading his newspaper, and the woman cooking on an open fire at the back, might regularly have walked past his door.
In the 1870s, the author of Old and New London, a huge encyclopedic work on the history of the metropolis in six volumes, described a busy street market in Charles Street, and used a mid-nineteenth-century passage from Henry Mayhew concerning the liveliness of the market at the New Cut (near Waterloo) to illustrate the same kind of atmosphere near the Middlesex Hospital:
The southern side of Charles Street, which is continued by Goodge Street into Tottenham Court Road, presents a busy appearance, especially on Friday and Saturday evenings; and as one of the few street markets remaining at the West-end, and probably destined at no long interval to disappear, may claim a short notice. To the long row of stallkeepers on its southern side, who display their stores of fish, fruit, and vegetables in hand-barrows and baskets, and on movable slabs, we may apply the words of Henry Mayhew:—‘The scene in these parts has more of the character of a fair than of a market. There are hundreds of stalls, and every stall has its one or two lights; either it is illuminated by the intense white light of the new self-generating gas-lamp, or else it is brightened up by the red smoking flame of the old-fashioned grease lamps. One man shows off his yellow haddock with a candle stuck in a bundle of firewood; his neighbour makes his candlestick of a huge turnip, and the tallow gutters over its sides; while the boy shouting “Eight a penny pears!” has rolled his dip in a thick coat of brown paper, that flares away with the candle. Some stalls are crimson with a fire shining through the holes beneath the baked chestnut stove … while a few have a candle shining through a sieve. These, with the sparkling ground-glass of the tea-dealers’ shops, and the butchers’ gas-lights streaming and fluttering in the wind like flags of flame, pour forth such a flood of light, that at a distance the atmosphere immediately above the spot is as lurid as if the street was on fire.5
So far, I have been unable to verify whether there was a street market in Charles Street in Dickens’s day, but the fact that Marylebone Market developed there perhaps suggests that the street by the Hospital had a liveliness and a large enough working-class population to sustain a growing number of street stalls.
London is a curious city. One can go a couple of blocks from an area that is down-at-heel and be in the most exclusive streets. Local inhabitants know where the divisions fall. It may be that Norfolk Street fell on the wrong side of a divide: south of the street market was still an ‘acceptable’ address, north, not at all, at least not until you got to Portland Place. Dickens’s silence about Norfolk Street may show a Londoner’s tender sensitivity to such territorial markers. William Makepeace Thackeray recorded a conversation he had once with a barrister, who apologized to him for knowing people who lived in Brunswick Square! How much worse Norfolk Street might have seemed to such a small-minded snob we do not know.6
Near the Hospital, too, there were cutlers and surgical instrument makers, bandage and dressing makers, medical bookshops and manufacturers of flock mattresses and feather-beds, all with skills and stockrooms to be called upon when required by the institution and its staff. There would also have been call for the local dentists, and certainly the local undertakers. A good proportion of the vehicles and people on Charles Street would have reached there via Norfolk Street: the area was not a quiet backwater, but a back thoroughfare from Tottenham Court Road, and northwards the street was effectively part of Cleveland Street which connected directly to New Road.
Dickens would have become familiar with this locality as a small child watching from the window, and from the journeys on which he would have been taken along the various streets. We do not know whether the windows of the wards of the Middlesex Hospital were visible over the roofs of the houses opposite. It certainly looks from the Tallis view up Norfolk Street that the top storey of the Hospital was higher than the houses on Norfolk Street, so the glimmer of candlelight might have been visible from them on winter evenings. Many years later, when he had become a writer, Dickens described imagining the interior of a hospital from outside:
In my rambles through the streets of London, after evening has set in, I have often paused beneath the windows of some public hospital, and pictured to myself the gloomy and mournful scenes that were passing within. The sudden moving of a taper as its feeble ray shot from window after window, until its light gradually disappeared, as if it were carried further back into the room to the bedside of some suffering patient, has been enough to awaken a whole crowd of reflections; the mere glimmering of the low-burning lamps which when all other habitations are wrapped in darkness and slumber, denote the chamber where so many forms are writhing with pain, or wasting with disease, has been sufficient to check the most boisterous merriment. Who can tell the anguish of those weary hours, when the only sound the sick man hears, is the disjointed wanderings of some feverish slumberer near him, the low moan of pain, or perhaps the muttered, long-forgotten prayer of a dying man? Who but those who have felt it, can imagine the sense of loneliness and desolation which must be the portion of those who in the hour of dangerous illness are left to be tended by strangers,—what hands, be they ever so gentle, can wipe the clammy brow, or smooth the restless bed, like those of mother, wife, or child?7
In that vicinity it was probably not a rare occurrence to see genuine objects of charity in a pitiable condition, having been refused access to the great institution which stood there. The Middlesex Hospital, like other charitable (or what were called ‘voluntary’) hospitals, took in treatable casualties and those whose ailments were considered potentially curable. But—except for the care of cancer, in which the hospital had a specialist interest—the chronic sick, the infirm, the mentally ill, and the dying poor were turned away. This was because the great charitable hospitals of London, of which the Middlesex was one, depended for their income entirely upon private charitable ‘voluntary’ donors. To keep the money flowing in, it was important for the Hospital to keep up a rolling programme of ‘successful’ care. To take in the dying, who would make the Hospital’s statistics look poor, or those who might be a serious long-term drain on the institution’s resources (what we might now describe as ‘bed-blockers’) would skew the Hospital’s statistics in an undesirable direction.
High rates of cases successfully treated (and beds ready when necessary to accommodate well-off subscribers’ domestic servants) were crucial to keep donations flowing, without which such institutions would fail. Later in life, when Dickens was a celebrity, he described to his friend Douglas Jerrold what he had witnessed in attending a public fund-raising dinner for one of these hospitals, and it makes for fascinating reading:
Oh Heaven, if you could have been with me at a hospital dinner last Monday! There were men there who made such speeches and expressed such sentiments as any moderately intelligent dustman would have blushed through his cindery bloom to have thought of. Sleek, slobbering, bow-paunched, over-fed, apoplectic, snorting cattle, and the auditory [i.e. the audience] leaping up in their delight! I never saw such an illustration of the power of purse, or felt so degraded and debased by its contemplation, since I have had eyes and ears. The absurdity of the thing was too horrible to laugh at. It was perfectly overwhelming.8
Those who subscribed money to the hospital were given letters (larger donors received more letters) to distribute annually to ‘worthy’ recipients of hospital care. Unless they were taken in as casualties, new patients were expected to obtain one of these letters. Even in the case of casualties, hospitals demanded signed documents of financial security against burial costs in the event of death, and actively investigated marital status. A distinction was made between ‘worthy’ objects of charitable medical oversight and others, such as unmarried mothers and paupers, who were sent elsewhere. The local Marylebone Dispensary would have accepted some of them, but it, too, eventually went over to subscription letters. Those rejected for treatment often had nowhere to go for help but the final fall-back of the parish doctor and the parish workhouse.
But the Poor Law was organized in such a way that individuals had to apply to their own home parish for succour, so although the Cleveland Street Workhouse was right around the corner from the Hospital, it was an outpost of a distant parish a mile to the south in Covent Garden. A news report dating from 1810 will illustrate what these demarcations could mean for individuals:
A scene, most shocking to humanity, was witnessed on Wednesday evening near Fitzroy Square. A poor woman, actually in labour, and attended by her midwife, was delivered of a child at the door of a poor-house, to which she in vain requested admittance. A crowd was naturally collected, and the utmost indignation was expressed at the brutal indifference shewn by the officers of the poor-house, for while the poor creature was labouring in agony, they remained inexorable. The infant perished during this inhuman scene. At length the people broke open the doors of the house, and carried the unhappy mother into one of the wards.9
This event looks to have taken place outside the front gates of the Workhouse in Cleveland Street, since there was no other poor-house in the vicinity. Most likely the poor woman had been turned away at the Middlesex Hospital because she was unmarried, or had no subscriber’s letter, and was not eligible for help from the nearby Dispensary either. She was doubtless refused entry at the Workhouse because she did not belong to the parish of Covent Garden. Workhouse gatekeepers were employed to be particularly vigilant not to accept the financial burden of additional illegitimate children, which birth-entitlement entailed. What lay behind the tragedy in this case was probably the peculiar primacy of parish boundaries in the culture of the day: born outside the gates, the child was the responsibility of St Pancras; across the road, of St Marylebone; within the Workhouse gates and walls an island of exclusive governance belonged to the distant parish of Covent Garden.
A disjunction is strongly marked in this news report between the feelings of decency and humanity among those who inhabited Cleveland Street, as against the petty officiousness of the minions of Covent Garden parish. The morality of the street prevailed: an institution normally shunned was deliberately invaded, and forced to provide the care it had tried to shirk. It would not be at all surprising if the story of this sad case, involving the unseemly exposure of a poor woman’s childbirth travail in the street, and the death of an innocent child, was still circulating by word of mouth in the area when the Dickens family arrived less than five years later: it is the kind of shocking story that local women might confide to newcomers (especially pregnant women like Mrs Dickens) or that men might discuss over their cups in the local public house. The humane indignation of the inhabitants of Cleveland Street would surely have been appreciated by Dickens’s parents, and later, by Dickens himself.
On early maps of Marylebone, Norfolk Street is first shown as Upper Newman Street.10 Its naming indicates the way in which the street developed in the late eighteenth century—northwards from the centre of London, at first simply a northern extension of Newman Street. It soon acquired its own distinct name, and the even younger Cleveland Street subsequently developed northwards from it, eventually reaching all the way along the old ‘Green Lane’. At the inception of this process, when building began on the street that would become the Dickens family’s first home in London, a view up this way would have shown the Workhouse standing alone, ahead of the encroaching houses. When it was first built, the Workhouse is said to have been ‘insulated in the fields’.11
The main front four-storey H-shaped block of the Workhouse was originally erected in the mid-1770s on land owned by the Duke of Bedford, bordering on a part of that estate already sold to a Mr Goodge, after whom Goodge Street is named. Old records suggest the Workhouse had initially been conceived as developing from a little right of way called Bedford Passage from Charlotte Street rather than from Cleveland Street, which for years was still a leafy country lane, even while new streets were encroaching from the south, and rising on either side. The field on which the Workhouse was erected had been known as ‘Culver Meadow’, meaning a field of doves. Before it was acquired by the parish of St Paul Covent Garden, it had been (probably for centuries) a pasture for cattle.
The Churchwardens of St Paul Covent Garden had purchased the land in the 1770s because the parish itself was landlocked. Carved out of, and surrounded by, the larger parish of St Martinin-the-Fields, St Paul Covent Garden was a very densely populated central district, which had run out of burial space for its poor. The parish was a unit of local government as well as an ecclesiastical entity, and it was also seeking ground on which to erect a workhouse in which to house its infirm elderly parishioners and other poor dependants, to employ its unemployed and to house its homeless in times of dearth. There was no vacant land within the parish for such a purpose: buying land at a distance was the only solution.
At about the same time, during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, population pressure on inner-city graveyards led a number of London parishes to seek distant fields as ‘additional’ burial grounds for their own poor. They were not popular places for burial, being so far from their communities, and being vulnerable to predation by body-snatchers supplying the medical schools of London. Covent Garden was enterprising in using the purchase of Culver Meadow for the double purpose of erecting a new workhouse and providing a new graveyard.
Being the great landowner, the Duke of Bedford was the parish patron, who had the power of nominating its churchmen. He it was who sent meat from his own herds for the churchwardens’ annual venison supper.12 The Duke was also the developer of the still rural lands he owned to the north of the built-up centre of London, although he held out for a long time against any building between his own back windows and the fields of Bloomsbury to the north, to preserve the view.
FIGURE 12. A plan of the Workhouse and its consecrated burial ground, from measurements taken at the time of consecration in 1790. All the ground, except that actually under the footprint of the Workhouse, was consecrated—and presumably used—for burial. Dr Rogers reported that burials went very deep. Redrawn from the consecration records of the Church of England, held at the London Metropolitan Archives.
Initially the land at Culver Meadow had been acquired from the Duke on a 99-year lease, and the Workhouse was designed and erected between 1775 and 1777. But the Anglican Church declined to consecrate the land around it for burial unless the parish of Covent Garden owned the land outright. Anglican consecration cannot be limited by leaseholds as it holds in prospect a far longer time-span than any human document can encompass: until the Last Trumpet on the Day of Resurrection. So the meadowland was eventually negotiated for and purchased on more secure terms. In April 1790, the entire plot—except for the area actually occupied by the Workhouse itself, which by then had been inhabited for over a dozen years—underwent the official process of consecration.
The great parchment describing the consecration ceremony survives. It records that after a religious service at the mother church in Covent Garden, the Bishop of London—with a retinue of worthies from church and parish—journeyed to the new site. There, seated under a special tent, he was ceremonially presented with the title deeds. He then consecrated the whole of the ground not occupied by the Workhouse, announcing that it was henceforth to be separated and consecrated from ‘all common and profane uses whatsoever’, and dedicated to the burial of the parishioners of St Paul Covent Garden, for them to rest in peace, preserved from all indignities for ever.
Living inside an austere building whose garden was a walled graveyard where you knew that you yourself would eventually be buried cannot have been a very cheering experience for those inside the Workhouse, even if the Consecration Day’s events were commemorated with extra food for the inmates—perhaps the ‘pease and bacon’ they were permitted once a season.13 The enclosing brick wall might have offered a wry kind of comfort to some in the House, in terms of the security provided from body-snatching for the local medical students, but in general the confinement and the lack of a hopeful vista cannot have been comforting. Other charitable institutions, like the great Hospital for old soldiers at Chelsea—were surrounded by graveyards intended for their own inhabitants, so this arrangement—which might seem rather insensitive and objectionable today—was not unusual for the time.14
The poet George Crabbe—a country vicar known as ‘the poet of the poor’—is often thought of as an eighteenth-century figure, but he was still composing during Dickens’s childhood and youth. In one of his poems, Crabbe describes a country workhouse. The parish workhouse of St Paul Covent Garden differs from the one he described, being newly purpose-built on the edge of countryside—the rural nature of the old Green Lane was fast disappearing. Yet Crabbe’s description characterizes the sense of hopelessness these places could generate for their inmates even before the enactment of the New Poor Law:
Theirs is yon house that holds the parish poor,
Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door;
There, where the putrid vapors flagging play,
And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day;
There children dwell who know no parents’ care;
Parents, who know no children’s love, dwell there;
Heart-broken matrons on their joyless bed,
Forsaken wives and mothers never wed;
Dejected widows with unheeded tears,
And crippled age with more than childhood-fears;
The lame, the blind, and—far the happiest they!—
The moping idiot and the madman gay …
Here too the sick their final doom receive,
Here brought amid the scenes of grief to grieve,
Where the loud groans from some sad chamber flow,
Mixed with the clamors of the crowd below;
Here, sorrowing, they each kindred sorrow scan,
And the cold charities of man to man.
How would ye bear in real pain to lie,
Despised, neglected, left alone to die?
How would ye bear to draw your latest breath
Where all that’s wretched paves the way for death?15
Records concerning the regime operating in the Covent Garden Workhouse under the Old Poor Law are scanty and fragmentary: very little has survived. But from what there is, an idea can be gleaned of the kind of place it was. Numbers of deaths, especially of the elderly poor, and of unmarried mothers (like Oliver Twist’s mother) and/or their babies, took place inside the Workhouse on Culver Meadow.16 It is not known if the surrounding land had been used covertly for their burial before the consecration, or if not, where the dead from the Workhouse were taken for burial before 1790.
After the consecration ceremony, notes of burials appear occasionally in the Minutes of the Trustees of the Poor. In 1791, for example, a woman called Anne Hawkins was delivered of a ‘Dead Male Bastard Child’ (the poor child was dead, but its illegitimate status and his mother’s shame must of course be explicitly noted). While his little body was awaiting burial, another inmate, Robert Prince, died in the Workhouse. The Trustees’ minutes record: ‘they was both buried in one Coffin this day.’17
In the bleak midwinter night of 23 December 1791, Abigail Allen, John Rawson, and James Kempton all died, and were later buried ‘at this House’. All had missed enjoying the annual change on Christmas Day from the usual year-long sugarless gruel: two days later ‘veal, plumb pudding & porter’ were served to the surviving inmates.18 The parish undertaker petitioned in 1793 for money in advance, and higher fees were agreed: ten shillings for each adult coffin, and half price for a child.19
In the 1790s Mrs Owen, the retiring House Midwife, was rewarded with three guineas ‘in consideration of the great trouble and inconvenience she had been put to and the singular illness she has laboured under from attending upon many foul women in the House’. In other words, she had probably caught syphilis, or some other infection from infected women whom she had helped give birth. How many others might have acquired disease from her, nobody knew. A new midwife, Mrs Harrison, was appointed soon afterwards, being paid the usual fee of 5 shillings for each labour; she left within the year, and was again replaced.20
In these pages, the fathers of illegitimate children are searched out and chivvied for contributions for their maintenance. Prices of goods for the workhouse are negotiated for: good and sweet Butchers’ Meat, sweet Butter and Cheese, Beer, and Coals. Old folk are admitted lame or ill, lunatics confined, people are discharged when well, sometimes being given clothes, shoes, a ‘Rugg’ or a blanket as they go. It feels rather like a modern refugee camp in a disaster zone, thin pickings, but with a degree of benevolence. Quarterly payments are made to the Tinman (presumably for mending kettles, pots, metal dishes, and other objects), the Tallow Chandler (who provided cheap tallow candles and rushlights), the Baker, and the Corn Chandler. People were checked for hiding food about their persons and then complaining of shortage, and the meat had to be checked before it went into the great copper for boiling, in case the butcher had sent it maggoty, rancid, or underweight.21 Handbills were printed and distributed offering cheap labour:
The Churchwardens acquaint the Inhabitants of this Parish that Plainwork, Mangling, paper Bagg making, Cotton winding, Silk winding, and Quiltmaking are done at the Workhouse … in the best and cheapest manner possible.22
Various Workhouse Masters and Matrons were discharged from their positions of power over the Workhouse—for being ‘by no means competent’ or for systematic fraud—and new ones appointed.23 One parishioner, Ann Ellis Atkins, came to appear especially before the Board of Trustees to ‘return thanks for the great care and services rendered to her during her illness in this House’.24 Another, Mary Wilson, presumably recovering from an amputation, was provided with a new wooden leg, and granted a Shift, a Gown, an Apron, a Handkerchief and a Shoe.25 A Mr Burrows was instructed to ‘make a proper erection for Beating Carpets upon’, which was to prove a long-term and lucrative funding stream for the Workhouse, and a source of noise and filthy dust in the environment of the Workhouse until Dr Rogers’s time there in the 1860s. Carpet-beating was one of the jobs adult men were required to do at Cleveland Street, in return for their bed and board. The paupers—including the children—were instructed in various remunerative forms of labour by the schoolmaster, who was also the superintendent of the Workhouse on-site ‘Pinheading Manufactory’, and who received a small percentage of the profits.
Older children were put out individually to apprentice—after a trial ‘on liking’—and larger groups of girls and boys were disposed of by being sent over 150 miles away from the Workhouse to a Calico Manufactory in Macclesfield. These children seem not to be heard of again. For the authorities at Covent Garden Workhouse, silence from Macclesfield was probably welcome, as the unremitting responsibility of finding funds to support unmarried mothers and their children was a constant headache, worsening in times of dearth. The documentary silence about the fate of these factory children has echoes of the story of Robert Blincoe, who as a child of 7 was sent from St Pancras workhouse in the 1790s into ‘cotton-mill bondage’ in an isolated factory near Nottingham, where severe physical cruelty and abuse, unprotected dangerous machinery, and malnutrition caused deaths and deformities among the children, which were never adequately investigated. He survived but others didn’t.26
The four-storey Workhouse in Cleveland Street and its burial ground were in active use throughout both periods when Dickens was living only doors away. Like the Regent’s Park up the road, the Workhouse inhabited an enclosed space. But it was not an entirely closed institution: what went on there influenced the locality in more ways than we can imagine. The front gateway, for example, carried a stern message, recorded by a Victorian observer as a ‘sermon in stone’. In its brick pediment there stood a sculpture … which broadcast its judgemental warning continually to passers-by, and to all who entered there: ‘an ideal figure of an old man holding and pointing to a piece of drapery, with the motto: “AVOID IDLENESS AND INTEMPERANCE” ’27
Cleveland Street was not unique in this; other Georgian workhouses carried these kinds of messages too: the frontage of the Bishopsgate Workhouse, for example, carried two figures in niches, and the legend: ‘GOD GIVES PEACE TO INNOCENCE AND PLENTY TO INDUSTRY’.28
The many windows of the Cleveland Street building’s frontage overlooked the street, so from across the road faces might be seen behind the glass, and perhaps human voices heard. The life of the entire institution was coordinated by the regular jangle of the workhouse bell, which punctuated the working day within the institution at the hour of rising, working, dining, and sleeping.29 A great workhouse bell intended to be heard in every ward and across the backyard and forecourt of this large institution can hardly have been inaudible in the surrounding streets. Other sounds might also have escaped beyond the walls of the institution: both the lying-in ward and the ward for lunatics were at the front of the building, so on occasions moans and wails might have mingled and merged audibly outside.30 The overpowering smell of the place, which even Poor Law correspondents, who generally understated institutional shortcomings, referred to as ‘fetid exhalations’ (something apparently generic, of which the poet Crabbe was also unpleasantly aware), was commented upon by Dr Rogers, who also spoke with disgust of the choking clouds of dust from the paupers’ carpet-beating and stone-breaking, particles from which must surely have freighted the ambient air of nearby streets.31
The Workhouse gate was usually kept firmly shut.32 The gateman, whose double gatehouse stood on each side of the entrance, inside the Workhouse front wall on Cleveland Street, was expected to keep firm control over access. The stout gates (most likely of panelled timber) probably had a smaller inner door or wicket and perhaps a barred visor set within the gate, rather like the secure sub-door in the great gateways of prisons, allowing the gate-keeper to observe applicants for entry, preserve security while examining their documentation, and permit one person in or out at a time.
The gateman required a written order from arrivals before opening the gate, searched visitors individually for ‘spiritous liquors’ as they entered, accepted and documented deliveries, checked all those who left the House, and noted everything in a great ledger. We do not know whether he was summoned by bell or knocker, but both would have been audible on the street as well as inside his gatehouse. Tradesmen, visitors, pauper funerals arriving for the graveyard, and pauper applicants for admission would all have had to wait outside until he verified their credentials. There would have been times, no doubt, when the queue was long.33
We do not know what attitudes he may have shown to the poor inmates on entering or departing; nor with what obsequious bowings and scrapings the gateman might have welcomed the parish Beadle, or the august personnel attending or departing from the monthly meetings of the management held in the Workhouse Board Room upstairs. Nor do we know—when the gates were locked at night, and the great keys carried indoors by the Workhouse master—what shouts or pleadings might have punctuated the stillness of the night.
