Capital gains and losses
Philip Hensher
VICTORIAN LONDON: THE LIFE OF A CITY, 1840-1870 by Liza Picard Weidenfeld, £20, pp. 363, ISBN 0297847333 London is such a Victorian city in its substance that one forgets that it would have seemed a very different place in the 19th century. Of course, it would have absolutely stunk. Nobody washed themselves or their clothes; before the sewers were constructed, human and animal waste was just washed into the Thames to ripen. Even in small households in the East End, it was very common to keep not just hens, but a pig. Every household added to the stink, not just by its waste, but by the constant burning of coal.
It was already an enormous city, but at the beginning of Liza Picard’s period, 1840, still relying on a basically 18thcentury, if not mediaeval substructure. The results quickly brought the city to the brink of catastrophe. Traffic jams could be as bad then as they are now. The public transport system was so disorganised that omnibuses had no formal ‘stops’, but just veered about, touting for trade from any likely-looking passer-by. The whole question of sewage came to an awful head in the Great Stink of 1858. After that, Joseph Bazalgette started constructing his great scheme, to which we are all still greatly in his debt.
Bazalgette is remembered for his sewers, but also by the more visible construction of the Embankments, which added 45 acres to London. But Victorian London was full of such bold figures, and audacious, huge projects. Paxton’s Crystal Palace, or Thomas Cubitt’s magnificent, speculative building projects like Belgravia, or the Underground Railway, begun in 1860, or the great railway stations, above all Brunel’s Paddington for the Great Western Railway — the list is far too long even to begin on. But the spirit of ingenuity was exercised on much smaller scales; household manuals’ suggestions about methods of cleaning repay reading. Miss Picard expresses surprise at the wide use of ‘ox gall’, but it yields an efficient bleachlike substance which within living memory was used in butchers’ shops.
Victorian London was filled with trades which to us would be unfamiliar curriers, tanners, match-girls — and ways of living which have now passed into history — those huge armies of domestics, or men, like Boffin in Our Mutual Friend, who made fortunes out of dust-heaps. The massive numbers of the destitute and ragged would shock us, as would the sheer decrepitude of the older parts of the city. In some ways, we would be surprised that it did not fulfil our expectations; for instance, it was a much less religious city, and a much less religious time, than we suppose; more than half the population didn’t go to church, according to a ‘religious census’ carried out in 1851. Religious practice was very much a mark of respectability, or perhaps aspiration; it required money to pay for things we wouldn’t think about, as, for instance, a private pew.
In the absence of an organised system of public funds which people had learnt to take for granted, a great deal more things were arranged by private subscription. The Royal Albert Hall sold 999-year leases on its boxes — something which until recently meant that heavily sold-out events still nevertheless exhibited quite empty boxes, someone’s forgotten property. (They seem to have sorted that out, but only in the last few years). Great museums, even major engineering projects, were not obviously the responsibility of the state. The disgraceful negligence which produced such conspicuous poverty had another side, inspiring a spirit of invention and daring which has never subsequently been matched.
Liza Picard has written three previous books about different incarnations of London, Elizabeth’s London, Restoration London and Dr Johnson’s London. They have been very enjoyable examples of popular history, amassing large numbers of titbits from historical sources to build up a convincing picture of the time. She is an engaging companion, always wondering out loud about the sort of questions which you’ve often asked yourself, such as (in the present case) how they managed for lavatories at the Great Exhibition. She’s an amusing and generally competent guide, though I find her chatty interjections in the text and even the notes (‘what a thought, leeches in your mouth’) less enchanting than she apparently anticipates.
This latest is also an enjoyable book which covers a good deal of ground: the railways, food, clothing, housing, health, religion, water supply (not constant until 1904). At the risk of infuriating the author, who must know very well how vast and inexhaustible the subject is, I will say that she has neglected some opportunities. Were there really no spectator sports at all in London before 1870? Certainly, there is no mention of any here. She should have talked about the bridges across the river a lot more. Nor do we hear much about museums, surely one of the totems of the Victorian mind; there is one sentence about the British Museum’s opening hours and nothing at all about the National Gallery, on which Prince Albert was so keen. One would like to know about the black and Asian Victorian Londoners; about sexual minorities; about the literary world and the publishing industry; and, oddly, she seems to have decided that the whole subject of manners is beyond her scope.
The decision not to refer to any novels or poetry is understandable but regrettable. Though the factual sources tell us a great deal about the facts, Picard is much engaged with people’s perceptions of their city, and she has ruled out a valuable body of evidence. It is surely interesting that, while the railways were transforming the country, an intelligent observer like Tennyson laboured under the impression that trains ran in grooves (‘Locksley Hall’); and, though Dickens’s obsessions have somewhat distorted our idea of the city, he gives us vivid pictures of aspects of Victorian London life. At the very least, Picard’s ordinance should have permitted her to quote from An Uncommercial Traveller.
There are some trivial mistakes: Prince Leopold was not Queen Victoria’s second son; ‘the wife of Shah Sooja’ (which one?) wasn’t the ‘previous owner’ of the Koh-iNoor before the British; Lady Frederick Cavendish becomes ‘Lady Cavendish’. It wasn’t called the Victoria and Albert Museum until 1899; in Picard’s period, it was ‘the South Kensington Museum’. More troubling is an occasionally cavalier way with sources. A dialogue reported from a funerary outfitters must be a comic burlesque, but Picard only refers one to the secondary source she’s lifted it from. There’s a passage purporting to be an ‘amalgam’ of advice to anyone wanting to be a lady, which I just don’t believe; it includes, among other things, the supposedly Victorian sentence, ‘I earnestly advise you never to attempt a sticky pudding,’ an expression which I doubt came into the language before 1990.
I wonder, too, whether she believes the Victorians a little bit too much. Certainly, when it comes to food, to interior decoration, to personal dress, particularly among the fashionable classes, she uses commercial sources rather literally, as if we were to describe respectable London dress now with reference to the pages of Vogue. In the case of food, she doesn’t realise that even Mrs Beeton had a strongly aspirational element, and along with the practical advice comes a great deal of unrealistic fantasy; her Book of Household Management contains a ludicrously implausible recipe for soup made from a giant turtle, and the cookery writer quoted here who dwells on larks and lapwings is obviously not in earnest. Judicious use of novels and poetry might have saved her from this trap.
What all these omissions convince us of is that, even if you reduce the idea of ‘Victorian London’ to 30 years, and decide to ignore the keenest observers of the period, it still proves too big a subject for one book. This one goes at such a dash that it often seems to be telling us hardly anything about the most interesting aspects of the city. On one of Miss Picard’s recurrent questions, the lack of public lavatories for women, I think I can help. Havelock Ellis’s memoirs recall his being taken, as a small child in the mid-1860s, for a walk in the park by his nanny. Occasionally, he was surprised that she simply paused in her tracks, gazing ahead seraphically; she was, in fact pissing beneath her voluminous skirts. The reason Victorian parks have gravel paths, according to Havelock Ellis, is to allow easy drainage in such circumstances. Happy to have cleared that one up.
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