Dickens, the inspiration and source for this book, was addicted to walking the London streets at night. A man who felt uneasy in the countryside without a pavement beneath his feet, he was said to know the mean streets of London better than any cabbie. His skill was to write about the city in his own time, describing the world of the London poor as if they had never been seen before. Dickens realised that to understand London, you need to know how to read the street. That is the idea behind Judith Flanders’s new book.
Like Dickens, Londoners walked everywhere. In 1866 an estimated three-quarters of a million pedestrians poured in to work each day, a thick line of black-coated clerks tramping the streets. The city created a constant, crashing roar, making it hard to hear, even indoors. Street sellers — coster-mongers (veg, fruit and fish), match boys and girls — brought their stuff to you: there was no need to seek out a shop. Entertainment was improvised by urchins, and the streets were places to eat as well: fast food such as puddings and pies, hot potatoes and hot eels could all be bought there.
The very poor, whom Dickens observed so acutely on his night walks, eked out a living by sweeping crossings, picking pockets or selling watercress — the watercress girls, who bought their produce at the market at 4 a.m. and walked the streets until 10 p.m., were the most marginal of the street-sellers. But the homes of the poor were disappearing from view. Victorian slum clearance flattened the ramshackle, overcrowded alleys and courts in districts such as Seven Dials or St Giles, creating wide, clean, safe streets which delighted the middle class.
But, as Flanders points out, the poor were expelled and given nowhere else to live, forcing them to cram into the ever more overcrowded slums which still remained. Lack of drains and running water meant that all sewage flowed into cesspools, and in poor districts these were never emptied, but oozed and leaked stinking excrement into basements and streets.
Flanders is definitive on matters such as the London road surfaces which then, as now, were uneven — some were Macadam (granite gravel laid with stone blocks), some were granite and others were wood. Nor are London traffic jams a recent development. Population growth, coupled with railways debouching passengers into the capital, created congestion, and this was made much worse by tolls. The book is densely packed with interesting facts. I was fascinated to learn that in 1867 hundreds of people were skating in Regents Park when the ice broke and 40 were drowned.
Flanders’s research is truly prodigious — and it is no doubt not her fault but her publisher’s that the reference notes are annoying to use. But for a writer as good and perceptive as Flanders is, this book at times seems slightly lacking in ambition. Using Dickens to show what London was really like is problematic. As a novelist and polemicist, he was under no oath to tell the truth. How far Dickens’s novels can be treated as reportage is a question that I wanted to know more about.
Flanders’s impressive bibliography lists the many historians who have written about London, but she engages with them very little. Instead she bases her account largely on the contemporary sources, and this sometimes makes it hard to know how much of her material is new, how much is familiar. The question of why doesn’t much concern her here, nor is she interested in conceptualising.
Thus, she gives a vivid description of chophouses, which served up hot joints to clerks sitting on hard seats in steamy rooms with sanded floors. But the question of why Londoners preferred all-male eating houses of this sort and despised restaurants — why restaurants failed to develop in London as they did in France — is not considered. Again, she details the public amusements available to men but closed to women — pubs and clubs and music halls — but declines to speculate as to what this might tell us about relations between the sexes or public/private spaces in Victorian Britain.
At times the book reads like a list — a very well-researched and readable list, but nevertheless a list. This is a pity, as the sections where Flanders does get stuck into debate and gives us less Dickens and more history, such as the chapters on prostitutes or slums, are excellent and interesting.
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