The Night Side of London

INTRODUCTION

It is said of a stranger who came to London for the first time, and took up his quarters in one of the most crowded city streets, that he remained standing at the door the whole of the first day of his London existence, because he waited until the crowd had gone. A man, says Max Schlesinger, who would do that, ought to rise and go to bed with the owl. The owl is the symbol of wisdom; for once I would prevail upon the reader to do as the owls do, and become wise as they. You may live at Clapham all your life, come into the city every day, attend on a gospel ministry, as the slang phrase is, – for it is not only wicked people that talk slang, – and know no more of London than the British public do of Timbuctoo.

Think of what London is. At the last census there were 2,362,236 persons of both sexes in it; 1,106,558 males, of whom 146,449 were under 5 years of age; and 1,255,678 females, of whom 147,173 were under 5 years of age. The unmarried males were 679,380, ditto females 735,871; the married men were 399,098, the wives 409,731; the widowers were 37,080, the widows 110,076. On the night of the census there were 28,598 husbands whose wives were not with them, and 39,231 wives mourning their absent lords. In 1856 the number of children born in London was 86,833, only one in 25 of which is illegitimate; in the same period 56,786 persons died. The Registrar-General assumes that, with the additional births, and by the fact of soldiers and sailors returning from the seat of war, and of persons engaged in peaceful pursuits settling in the capital, sustenance, clothing, and house accommodation must now be found in London for about 60,000 inhabitants more than it contained at the end of 1855. Think of that – the population of a large city absorbed in London, and no perceptible inconvenience occasioned by it! Houses are still to let; there are still the usual tickets hung up in windows in quiet neighbourhoods, intimating that apartments furnished for the use of single gentlemen can be had within; the country still supplies the town with meat and bread, and we hear of no starvation in consequence of deficient supply. London is the healthiest city in the world. The city death-rate, according to Dr. Letheby’s report for 1857, is 22.5 per 1000, and in all England it is 22.2. During the last ten years the annual deaths have been on the average 25 to 1000 of the population, in 1856 the proportion was 22 to 1000; yet, in spite of this, half of the deaths that happen on an average in London between the ages of 20 and 40 are from consumption and diseases of the respiratory organs. The Registrar traces this to the state of the streets. He says: “There can be no doubt that the dirty dust suspended in the air that the people of London breathe often excites diseases of the respiratory organs. The dirt of the streets is produced and ground now by innumerable horses, omnibuses, and carriages, and then beat up in fine dust, which fills the mouth, and inevitably enters the air-passages in large quantities. The dust is not removed every day, but, saturated with water in the great thoroughfares, sometimes ferments in damp weather, and at other times ascends again under the heat of the summer sun as atmospheric dust.”

London, says Henry Mayhew, may be safely asserted to be the most densely populated city in all the world; containing one-fourth more people than Pekin, and two-thirds more than Paris – more than twice as many as Constantinople – four times as many as St. Petersburg – five times as many as Vienna, or New York, or Madrid – nearly seven times as many as Berlin – eight times as many as Amsterdam – nine times as many as Rome – fifteen times as many as Copenhagen – and seventeen times as many as Stockholm. “London,” says Horace Say, “c’est une province couverte de maisons.” It covers an area of 122 square miles in extent, or 78,029 statute acres; and contains 327,391 houses. Annually 4000 new houses are in erection for upwards of 40,000 new-comers. The continuous line of buildings stretching from Highgate to Camberwell is said to be 12 miles long. It is computed if the buildings were set in a row they would reach across the whole of England and France, from York to the Pyrenees.

When the stone in Panyer’s Alley was placed on its site three centuries since, the circumference was about five miles. At present, however, to make a pedestrian expedition around the metropolis would, to most persons, be an undertaking of some importance, as may be seen by referring to the following particulars, which have been gathered from a recently published map: – From Chiswick to Kentish-town, 12 miles; from Kentish-town to Millwall, 17½ miles; from Millwall to Chiswick, 28 miles – total, 57½ miles, very nearly three days’ journey, at the rate of 20 miles a day; and it will be observed that in the line drawn, Battersea, Clapham, Canning-town, and many other places, which even at present can be scarcely said to be separated from London, have been left out. “As the crow would fly” across streets and houses from the point whence we started at Chiswick to the farthest east, the distance is nearly eleven miles, and the greatest width from north to south upwards of seven miles. The metropolis is divided into 38 different poor-law districts, some of them parishes, and some of them unions, but each managing separately their own poor. Of these, 27 are in Middlesex, two in Kent, and nine in Surrey. Of the 27 in Middlesex, 10 are unions of various extent; 17 are single parishes, many of them of great extent, and comprising a large amount of property and population. The unions in Middlesex consist of a small number of parishes, two consisting of two parishes, two of three, one of five, one of four, one of six, one of seven, and one of nine parishes. The city of London consists of 98 parishes, some of them small in extent, but containing a large amount of property and population. The unions in Kent consist of four and seven parishes. Of the nine in Surrey three are unions, consisting, one of two parishes, another of three, and the third of six parishes. The remaining six are all single parishes, each administering its own affairs. The total population of these districts is 2,500,000; the average number of paupers to be dealt with 105,000; the amount of expenditure for the year ending Lady-day, 1856, was £875,000; and the net rateable value of the property contributing to the relief of the poor was £10,900,000. The proportion which the metropolis bore to the whole of England and Wales was, as to population, one-eighth; as to pauperism, one-twelfth.

London has 10,500 distinct streets, squares, circuses, crescents, terraces, villas, rows, buildings, places, lanes, courts, alleys, mews, yards, rents. The paved streets of London, according to a return published in 1856, number over 5000, and exceed 2000 miles in length; the cost of this paved roading was 14 millions, and the repairs cost £1,800,000 per annum. The Post Office employs 3200 officials in London alone. London contains 1900 miles of gas pipes, with a capital of nearly £4,000,000 spent in the preparation of gas. The cost of gas-lighting is half a million. It has 360,000 lights; and 13,000,000 cubic feet of gas are burnt every night. Last year along these streets the enormous quantity of upwards of 80 millions of gallons of water rushed for the supply of the inhabitants, being nearly double what it was in 1845. Mr Mayhew says, if the entire people of the capital were to be drawn up in marching order, two and two, the length of the great army of Londoners would be no less than 670 miles, and supposing them to move at the rate of three miles an hour, it would require more than nine days and nights for the average population to pass by. To accommodate this crowd, 125,000 vehicles pass through the thoroughfares in the course of 12 hours; 3000 cabs, 10,000 private and job carriages and carts, ply daily in the streets; at the present time there are upwards of 800 omnibuses running along various routes in the metropolis, and of this number 595 are the property of a single and mostly foreign proprietary, the London General Omnibus Company. 600 omnibuses, with horses and harness and goodwill, were purchased by the company for a sum of £400,000, or for very nearly £700 for each vehicle. The 595 omnibuses of the company ran in London, in the week ending 31st of October, 1857, not less than 222,779 miles, or nearly ten times the circumference of the globe, and they carried not less than 920,000 passengers. Assuming that the remaining one-fourth of the London omnibuses, not belonging to the company, carried an equal proportion, we shall have, as the travelling portion of the population of London, 1,115,000 persons. 3000 conveyances enter the metropolis daily from the surrounding country. In the year 1856 the total revenue derived from the duty on omnibuses within the area of the great metropolis amounted to £74,270 against £85,965 in 1855, and £108,051 in 1854. The revenue from cabs in the metropolis was £82,110 against £75,281, and £64,210 in 1854. Of the revenue on omnibuses last year, £69,493 accrued from mileage duty, £3791 from license duty, and £983 from drivers’ and conductors’ licenses. As regards the cab duty, £74,736 accrued from weekly duty, £5292 from license duty, and £2081 from drivers’ and watermen’s licenses.

Speaking generally, Tennyson tells us —

In London, 169 people die daily, and a babe is born every five minutes. The number of persons, says the Registrar-General, who died in 1856, in 116 public institutions, such as workhouses and hospitals, was 10,381. It is really shocking to think, and a deep stigma on the people, – or on the artificial arrangements of society, by which so much poverty is perpetuated, – that nearly one person out of five, who died that year, closed his days under a roof provided by law or public charity. In 1856 the police report 147 suicides. Dr. Wakley says, 4000 infants die annually of neglect. It is calculated 500 people are drowned in the Thames every year. In the first week of last year there were five deaths from intemperance alone. How much wretchedness lies in these facts, – for the deaths from actual intemperance bear but a small proportion to the deaths induced by the immoderate use of intoxicating liquors; and of the 500 drowned, by far the larger class, we have every reason to believe, are of the number of whom Hood wrote —

A meeting was held last year of the unemployed, chiefly the carpenters, bricklayers, and bricklayers’ labourers of the metropolis, in which it was stated that their number – though very probably there may be some exaggeration here – is 35,000. If these men are married and have families, we get a further idea of the deep distress in this wealthy and luxurious capital, – this capital where the gold of Australia, the jewels of Golconda, the silks and spices of the East, come for sale, and are lavished as freely on the most questionable purposes and persons as on the noblest specimens of humanity and the most glorious objects for which men care to live. Then think of the inmates of the lunatic asylums, and the poor-houses, and the hospitals, in most cases sent there as the result of their own ignorance or imprudence. Last Christmas day the dinners provided at the workhouses for the inmates fed between 30 and 40,000. Add to these our prison population, and our criminal classes, and our prostitutes, – and what a picture we get of the Night Side of London, of the classes whose existence is a reproach or a curse. In London one man in every ninety belongs to the criminal class.

According to the last reports, there were in London 143,000 vagrants admitted in one year into the casual wards of the workhouses. In 1856 it appears that in all 73,240 persons were taken into custody, of whom 45,941 were males, and 27,209 females; 18,000 of the apprehensions were on account of drunkenness, 8160 for unlawful possession of goods, 7021 for simple larceny, 6763 for common assaults, 2914 for assaults on the police; 4303 women were taken into custody as prostitutes. The period of life most prolific of crime is that between the 20th and 25th years. The convictions upon trial in 1856 were in the following proportions: – Under 10 years of age, 1; 10 years and under 15 years, 91; 15 years and under 20 years, 610; 20 years and under 25 years, 770; 25 years and under 30 years, 390; 30 years and under 40 years, 410; 40 years and under 50 years, 188; 50 years and under 60 years, 90; 63 years and upwards, 37. The committals for murder in the year 1856 were 11; they were 12 in 1855, 10 in 1854, 7 in 1853,11 in 1852, 8 in 1851, 11 in 1850, 19 in 1849, 11 in 1848, and 10 in 1847. Of the larcenies in dwelling-houses last year, only 315 were committed by means of false keys, as many as 2175 through doors being left open, 679 by lifting up a window, or breaking glass, and 31 by entering attic windows from empty houses. Again, 1595 such larcenies were committed by lodgers, 1701 by servants, and as many as 673 by means of false messages. The cases enumerated under the last three heads are such as the police could hardly be expected to prevent. 2371 persons were reported last year to the police as lost, and of these the police restored 1084. The City returns, for which I am indebted to the kindness of G. Borlase Childs, Esq., surgeon to the force, are for 1856, as follows: number of persons taken into custody; males 3030, females 1014; of these, 1083 males and 450 females were discharged; 1628 males, 517 females were summarily convicted or held to bail; 319 males and 77 females were committed for trial: 8 males and 1 female under 10 years of age; 322 males and 37 females under 15; 755 males and 152 females under 20; 645 males and 235 females under 25; 341 males and 165 females under 30; 497 males and 220 females under 40; 300 males and 116 females under 50; 125 males and 78 females under 60; and above that age 41 males and 20 females. Tried by the education test of the whole number taken into custody, 782 males and 421 females could neither read nor write; 1925 males and 570 females could read and write imperfectly; 317 males and 23 females could read and write well; 6 males come under the head of superior instruction. The value of property stolen was £11,425; of property recovered £3829; the return of destitute persons taken in charge by the police is, men 141, women 115, children 79. During the same period 1603 males and 1097 females were brought to the station house. Children missing and found by the police; males 496, females 319. The return of the metropolitan police for 1857, was 2825 brothels, and 8600 prostitutes. In the City, the number of such houses and persons is very small; the prison population at any particular time is 6000, costing for the year £170,000. Our juvenile thieves cost us £300 a-piece. The average income of the London thief is estimated at £2 per week.

Again, let us look at the classes whose labours and occupations and modes of life are inconsistent with health, or not favourable to any great development of moral principle. Almost 20,000 persons are engaged in Sunday trading; the number of ragged children is nearly 30,000, the number of families living in one room is estimated as high as 150,000. It appears from a report by Mr. Goderich, officer of health in the parish of Kensington, that in a place called the Potteries there are 1147 human beings and 1041 pigs congregated within a space of less than nine acres, the present number of pigs being below the usual average. The dwellings of a large proportion of the inhabitants of this locality are mere hovels with shattered roofs and unglazed windows, the floor is below the level of the external soil, which has been raised by excessive accumulations of filth of all kinds, and the walls are at all times partially damp and giving out pestilential gases, intolerable to those who have not been born among them, fatal to the health of those who have. Another portion of the miserable population has converted old caravan bodies, removed in some cases from their wheels, into houses; others have no other dwelling than ruinous post-chaise bodies, for which a rent of sixpence per week is paid. In one of the caravans eight persons dwell, among whom a child suffering from small-pox was battling with death at the time of Mr. Goderich’s visit in March.

Mr. Timbs calculates the number of professional beggars in London at 15,000, two-thirds of whom are Irish. 30,000 men, women, and children are employed in the costermonger trade; besides, we have, according to Mr. Mayhew, 2000 street sellers of green stuff, 4000 street sellers of eatables and drinkables, 1000 street sellers of stationery, 4000 street sellers of other articles, whose receipts are three millions sterling, and whose incomes may be put down at one. Let us extend our survey, and we shall not wonder that the public-houses – and the gin palaces – and the casinos – and the theatres – and the penny gaffs – and the lowest and vilest places of resort in London, are full. In Spitalfields there are 70,000 weavers with but 10s. per week; there are 22,479 tailors, 30,805 shoemakers, 43,928 milliners; seamstresses, 21,210; bonnet-makers, 1769; cap-makers, 1277. What hard, wretched work is theirs!

In the first week of January this present year, a poor woman named Martha Duke was brought up at the Thames police office, charged with attempting to commit suicide. She was a poor needle-woman, and found the misery of that mode of life greater than could be borne. Speaking not of this case in particular, but of needlewomen in general, Mr. Burch, the resident medical officer of the London Hospital, stated that “a large number of patients had been under his care, and he had carefully investigated a considerable number of cases, and was satisfied that needle-women were the most ill-paid class of people and the most hard-working on earth. They were miserably paid,” he added, “and he knew that numbers of them, with constitutions broken down, earned from 3s. to 4s. per week only, and for that scanty pittance were compelled to work from three o’clock in the morning till ten at night. They soon became enfeebled by insufficient diet and over-work, and when broken down either had recourse to suicide or prostitution.” In 1844 the operative tailors instituted an inquiry into the sweating system, and then it was found that there were at the West End 676 men, women, and children working under sweaters, and occupying 92 small rooms, the majority of which measured eight feet by ten. The sweater, it may be as well to state, is the man who contracts with the large houses to supply them with shirts, or clothes, or any other kind of slop work; the more his victims sweat, the more are his gains. The sweater is often a Jew, never a Christian.

Let the reader walk with us to a fashionable clothing establishment – a mart, we believe, as it is called. The building, as you approach it, seems a palace. It is redolent with polished mahogany and plate-glass and gilt. You pass it when the lamps are lit, and you think of the Arabian Nights. It is illuminated as if peace had just been proclaimed, or some great national desire had been realised. You enter with cash, and all is fair and smooth within. Whatever you want in the way of apparel is there, and at a price for which no honest tradesman can afford to sell it. Honest! asks the reader, is not the man honest? Does he steal the cloth? Certainly not. Does he not pay rent, and taxes, and wages? Most certainly he does. Do not his creditors all get twenty shillings in the pound? Most undoubtedly they do; the law protects them, and with them the man, willing or not, must keep himself right. So far as they are concerned, honesty is the best policy. How, then, does he make his profit? How is this monster establishment maintained? Out of what fund is it that its glitter and glare are paid for? We shall now see. Come down this stinking court. Go up those creaking stairs. Enter that miserable garret. Look at those men, who know nothing of labour but its curse, and of life but its misery. Mark the haggard faces already stamped with the impress of death. If you can bear the polluted atmosphere, you will hear from these men how they toil from early morning far into the night for two shillings a day; how for them the fine air and the golden sunshine, and the rest of the sabbath, exist not; and it is by them, by their sweat and blood and sinew, that the profit is made. And now go back and look into the gilded shop, and it will seem to you a Golgotha – a place of skulls. Is another illustration needed? Up in yon miserable chamber, without fire – without food – without furniture – almost without clothes, Martha Duke is stitching to earn the few pence by which she prolongs life, and its misery. Once, youth was hers, with its bright hopes and joys; but they are gone, and with an aching heart and pallid brow she plies her daily task. Is it wonderful that, wanting coals or something better than dry bread, the shirt or the waistcoat should be pawned? Is it not more wonderful that such bleak and hopeless poverty should be so honest as it is? And yet from such poor forlorn, forgotten women as these, proceed the profits which pay for dazzling window and gorgeous pile. Is it strange that the city missionaries for last year show an increase of fallen women in their districts of 1035?

Bear in mind also that corporal labourers are shorter lived and endure more physical evil than the mental labourers. The coal-whippers’ work – the most wasteful, unscientific, and pernicious expenditure of human muscle ever devised, writes Dr Chambers – overstrains the fibres of the heart, and the organs become diseased. Painters again are liable to palsy and colic, from the use of white lead. The tailor sits till the stomach and bowels becomes disordered, the spine twisted, the gait shambling, and the power of taking the exercise necessary to health obliterated. Shoemakers and bootmakers suffer equally from a constrained position and the pressure of the last against the stomach. Heart-burn and indigestion are so common among them, that a pill in the Pharmacopeia is called the cobbler’s pill. Then there is the baker’s malady, which carries off a large proportion of its victims. Dressmakers are peculiarly subject to the attacks of consumption; workwomen constantly suffer from varicose veins.

There are two worlds in London, with a gulf between – the rich and the poor. We have glanced at the latter; for the sake of contrast let us look at the former. Emerson says the wealth of London determines prices all over the globe. The revenue of the corporation of the city of London for 1856 was £2,595,216 16s. 4½d. In 1853 the money coined in the mint was £11,952,391 in gold, and £701,544 in silver. The business of the Bank of England is conducted by about 800 clerks, whose salaries amount to about £200,000. The Bank in 1857 had £26,683,790 bank notes in circulation. In the same year there were about 5 millions deposited in the Savings Banks of the metropolis. The gross Customs revenue of the port of London in 1849 was £11,070,176. 65 millions is the estimate formed by Mr M‘Culloch of the total value of the produce conveyed into and from London. The gross rental as assessed by the property and income tax is 12½ millions. The gross property insured is £166,000,000, and only two-fifths of the houses are insured. The amount of capital at the command of the entire London bankers may be estimated at 64 millions; the insurance companies have always 10 millions of deposits ready for investment. 78 millions are employed in discounts. In 1841 the transactions of one London house amounted to 30 millions. In 1840 the payments made in the clearing house were £974,580,600, – an enormous sum, which will appear still greater when we remember all sums under £100 are omitted from this statement. All this business cannot be carried on without a considerable amount of eating and drinking. The population consumes annually 277,000 bullocks, 30,000 calves, 1,480,000 sheep, 34,000 pigs, 1,600,000 quarters of wheat, 310,464,000 pounds of potatoes, 89,672,000 cabbages. Of fish the returns are almost incredible. Besides, it eats 2,742,000 fowls, 1,281,000 game. Exclusive of those brought from the different parts of the united kingdom, from 70 to 75 millions of eggs are annually imported into London from France and other countries. About 13,000 cows are kept in the city and its environs for the supply of milk and cream; and if we add to their value that of the cheese, and butter, and milk, brought from the country into the city, the expenditure on dairy produce must be enormous. Then London consumes 65,000 pipes of wine, 2,000,000 gallons of spirits, 43,200,000 gallons of porter and ale, and burns 3,000,000 tons of coal; and I have seen it estimated that one-fourth of the commerce of the nation is carried on in its port. On Boxing Night it was estimated that 60,000 persons visited the various theatres and places of amusement in London. In 1856, 361,714 persons visited the British Museum; 161,764, Hampton Court; 344,140 went to Kew Gardens. The total number of bathers in the Serpentine were 20,000 persons. On the last Derby, the South Western Company alone conveyed 37,700 passengers. In London in 1853, according to Sir R. Mayne, there were 3613 beer shops, 5279 public houses, 13 wine rooms. The theatres and saloons licensed by the Lord Chamberlain are, the Haymarket Theatre, Adelphi, Olympic, Princess’s, Strand, Surrey, Queen’s, Soho, City of London, Marylebone, Standard, Pavilion, Victoria, Sadler’s Wells, St James’s, Lyceum, Astley’s, Her Majesty’s, Drury Lane, Grecian Saloon, Albert, Britannia, Bower, Earl of Effingham. Literary Institutions shut up. The Great Globe itself is a doubtful property. That beautiful building, the Panopticon in Leicester-square, was a failure, and the Adelaide Gallery has long been closed. An attempt was made to form an educational association in Charing Cross, where, by means of a library and cheap lectures, the popular mind could be improved and instructed and amused, but the attempt did not succeed; dancing, drinking, theatrical representations, – most of them adaptations from the French, – music, are the only pleasures which a London population cared for. Even as in the old Hebrew days, Wisdom lifts up her voice in our streets, and no man regards her testimony.