The Edge of the Crowd

2 Over-exposure

Ten and sometimes twenty yards ahead, a small knife-thin figure in threadbare fustian led Henry Hilditch past the fish merchants and marine insurance offices of Lower Thames Street. They had walked, one before the other, from the West End and the guide showed no sign of slackening his brisk pace nor of indicating proximity to their destination.

Hilditch’s footsteps clacked loudly on flint-dry cobblestones. A flaring street lamp briefly distinguished a pale face and hands from uniformly black apparel and showed him to be young. His voice, however, choked with the irritation of dissatisfied middle age. ‘A guinea for a bit of mutton and some dressed crab!’ he snorted. ‘A guinea!’ and shook his head as he increased his pace to match that of the small creature scuttling ahead. The decision had been his own and so the folly keener felt.

A temptation to brush buttons with society had lured him from the free and fresh air of Hyde Park to the over-priced and over-decorated restaurant rooms in which he had found himself among a crush of excursionists, the disengorgings of special trains from the Midlands and the North. Gore House, despite its finery and the presence in the kitchens of the remarkable Alexis Soyer, was clearly only another conduit for Exhibition cash.

Conceivably, he could have rescued something from the occasion. He knew that he might have furthered his observations of the London poor by talking to the pot boys, the cellar men, the grooms and the footmen, the under-cooks and scullery maids, to the mob of hungry men and women assembled in hope by the kitchen doors.

The singular occasion of the Great Exhibition was already furnishing unique and significant information. Henry Mayhew, whose startling publications on London’s poor were opening wide the eyes of their more affluent neighbours, had himself acknowledged this much. And now, Henry Hilditch, engaged by a rival newspaper to exploit Mayhew’s success, had also found much to interest him and much more to provide sensational copy for the readers of the Morning Messenger. Mayhew’s reporting of the Exhibition would be sensible, worthy and full of facts but it would lack the drama that Henry’s editor always insisted upon and which Henry always provided.

As an entrée to the evening’s investigations, Hilditch had found himself exchanging banalities with his countryfolk: among the outpourings of Lancashire, the Potteries and the Black Country he encountered a house-builder from York, a confectioner from Pontefract and a landowner he knew by sight from Whitby, men he might have met at any time, in a past life. There was no profit in this nor in the substance of the intercourse itself. Half a mile from the Exhibition, Paxton’s glasshouse and its cornucopia of invention was the main course of all conversations.

Enfin, Hilditch admitted, the most valuable contact he had made the whole evening had been with a waiter, whose own personal history Hilditch had quickly dismissed as trite but who had hired out the kitchen boy as his guide for preliminary explorations of London’s East End. He had intended to go from Hyde Park directly to an address at which he had been advised he would find the poor at play and material sufficiently interesting for inclusion in his own survey of London’s lower classes. Not only would this satisfy the curiosity of his readers but it would go some way towards answering a need of another sort that was lodged deep in the heart of the young man himself.

The waiter had confidently asserted that boy Daniel knew just the place to interest the gentleman and so it proved, but only after the waiter had consented to take a shilling and Daniel himself had pocketed a shiny sixpence.

Now, digested by black anonymous streets and cuts in which one soot-blackened tenement back was the same as the next, Hilditch found himself unwilling host to an insidious and unreasonable dread that had been welling slowly since they had left the West End. The last rays of the sun that had scorched Hilditch’s neck all afternoon in Hyde Park had glanced off the dome of Wylde’s Monster Globe as they crossed Leicester Square and now it was only when moonlight found access and lit up the name of a street or the sign above a shop or lodging house that he dispelled the fantastical notion that he had wandered down some abysmal path to blackest Hell, and was still in the overworld. In these slums and rookeries were the very subjects of his investigations; he had realised that meeting London’s poor on his West End ground was insufficient; that he must eventually follow them to their homes. But now, on his first visit to the deeper reaches of the East End at night, he found himself breathing hard and stumbling to keep up with the boy in a labyrinth of nameless passages. Then, when the inclination to run hell-for-leather until he found a main thoroughfare and a passing cab was strongest upon him, just up ahead he saw light and heard a commotion.

‘Whitechapel!’ the boy exclaimed, and Hilditch berated himself for his foolishness as he hurried out of the empty by-way into streams of pedestrians. But no sooner had he stepped upon a wide and well-lit street than Hilditch again lost sight of his companion among crowds gathered about line upon line of costermongers’ barrows and fish-fryers’ stoves. Hilditch held fast his purse and called out, but his ‘Halloa, boy!’ was lost among a dissonant chorus of street-cries, the braying of donkeys, the sizzling of frying fish and the hubbub of Londoners out on a Saturday spree. He pushed past faces made hellish by burning braziers or jaundiced by grease lamps and candles; knocked down a uniformed beggar outside the Three Tuns; had his coat seared by a fire-eater outside the Alhambra’s noisy dancing rooms and roughly apprehended the wrong boy among a crowd of young people leaving the shabby premises of a penny gaff theatre.

‘What’s your game, guv’nor?’ the boy demanded, shaking free of Hilditch’s grasp and showing a face pock-marked with disease.

‘A mistake only,’ said Hilditch. ‘See here, I am looking for a boy.’

‘I might be that boy. A lot of toffs wants boys here. Depends on your price and what you wants.’

‘No, that boy – there!’ said Hilditch as he remarked his guide, stroking a small dog clasped by a boy of about his own age. ‘Over here, boy, over here!’ Hilditch gestured while the pock-marked boy bowed ostentatiously to the other.

‘Your ’umble pardon, Dan’l! I didn’t know this gent was engaged with you.’

‘None o’ that, Pineapple Joe,’ said Hilditch’s boy. ‘I’m a respectable fellow in regular employ.’

‘Wiv no time for your old pals, is that it?’

‘I ha’n’t got time for no one tonight,’ said the other. ‘My old un’ll skin me if I ain’t home at the soonest.’

‘You’ll be back, Dan’l Saggers, when he turns on you agin. And then you can ’ave your old spot by the Three Tuns.’

The boy frowned and rejoined Hilditch. Cutting between the premises of a tallow chandler and a sponge merchant they plunged once more into backstreets and alleys. ‘That’s put us behind and I’m sorry for it,’ the boy said. ‘But I was ’opin to get the loan of a good dog. A nice little dog might have put my old man in a ’menable mood. But no money no dog, says he. Well, such is life. And now we’ll have to be double quick.’

‘It must be after eleven now,’ Hilditch said. ‘Are we not too late already?’

‘Wiv luck we ain’t, sir. They don’t like to start until arter the drinkin when the folks is more free with their money.’

The boy now fairly clipped along, leaping foul gutters and pulling Hilditch through murky alleys which seemed to him a succession of convergences, where buildings staggered ever closer together and each street was narrower and meaner and darker than the last. Black shapes glanced by with rustles of petticoats or rough imprecations. Unbidden, the mind of Hilditch flashed with the memory of a reported murder of a young girl in just such a place and of what perils might beset not only himself but another who might be lost upon these very streets. ‘Daniel!’ he called out, failing to master a tremor in his voice. ‘Where am I?’

Small fingers squeezed his own. ‘You’re all right, sir. Not far now.’ Hilditch took a deep breath and kept the boy’s hand as they crossed the entrance to a malodorous court and splashed through water or nightsoil before coming upon a broader and less gloomy street and then a gap in a crumbling brick wall. ‘Here we are, safe and sarn!’ said the boy and then snatched at Hilditch’s sleeve. ‘Stop, sir, stop! Mind the steps or you’ll break your neck!’

Hilditch took a careful step forwards and discovered that beyond the gap and lit faintly by lights he could not see was a long and precipitous flight of wooden stairs, connecting the road above with a deep railway cutting below. He caught his breath and let the boy go down first. When Hilditch had descended with measured tread to the first of two small landings, he found himself a little above the first-floor windows of a ramshackle and venerable building which was supported on two sides by stout oak buttresses, like a collapsing drunk held up by constables. Below the first-storey windows, from which gaslight glared and illuminated men busy at some work, depended a heavy wooden sign on which might faintly be discerned the image of a grey swan. Under this, two lean men stood behind stacked barrels. These men were engaged in earnest argument with a fatter, much larger third, who was shaking his head vigorously. The exchange was heated and voices raised sufficiently for Hilditch to comprehend.

‘There it is. It’s a fair offer. You won’t do better tonight,’ the fat man was saying.

‘The agreed price was two guinea. I can’t take less’n that, Villum!’

The fat man spat and yanked a string from the other’s hand, winding in a large, stocky dog.

‘Ten bob’s your lot, you thieving gypsy. And you’ll still be turning a handsome profit, I’ve no doubt.’

The man cursed but was dissuaded from further remonstration by the whispered advice of his friend. He pocketed a handful of coins and started up the stairs, querying Hilditch with a glance before disappearing into the gloom. Below, the fat man was stooping to inspect his purchase when he saw the boy, immobile in a pool of sickly window-light.

‘Just in time, Dan’l,’ he said. ‘Now let’s be having the money. I’m lucky tonight, I know it!’

The boy made some reply too faint for Hilditch’s ears.

‘What? You done what?’ the fat man roared. ‘My ears is bad, Dan’l, you’ll have to repeat that ’un for me!’

But without awaiting the reply, he seized at ragged clothing and severely shook the boy’s flimsy frame. The fat man looked about him, as if seeking some place to dispose of unwanted rubbish. ‘Wait, wait!’ the boy cried, but the man was already hurling him off his feet, smashing him against the door post of the inn and causing a big man in an apron to look out from the doorway. ‘There’ll be time to knock some respect into the villain later, Bill,’ he said. ‘They’re wanting you up my two pair of stairs now.’

But the fat man picked up the boy and struck the side of his head with sufficient force to send him reeling backwards where he lost his balance and tumbled noisily over an empty barrel. Now Hilditch could hear the boy as he protested to his antagonist. ‘It weren’t my fault, guv’nor! I tole you them rich folk wan’t to be trusted!’

The man snatched up the boy and pressed his own fist against a hollow cheek. Hilditch heard a low and menacing rumble like the approach of a distant train.

‘Trusted?’ the fat man snarled. ‘You gets a place hard by the Shibition itself and can’t make no money? Don’t give me that barrikin. And where’s the silver I told you to bone? Don’t tell me nothing stuck to you? You’re either the laziest boy in London or a stunning imbecile. Look at this – I’ve got Carver’s dog at last and nothing to bet. Curse you, the only money I’ll make on it tonight is when I sell it!’ He seized a stave of wood and hoisted it above his head.

The boy looked about wildly for some defence and at the same moment footsteps on creaking stairs alerted his assailant to Hilditch’s approach. ‘Who’s that?’ the fat man hissed and laid down the wood. He lifted the boy to his feet. ‘Is ’e with you, Dan’l?’

The boy nodded and passed a sixpence to the man. ‘And he give me this jest fer walking him across town.’

The man looked more carefully at the stranger. ‘Did ’e truly? Well, well, that was handsome.’ He appraised Hilditch with a top to toe glance, threw him a quick smile and ducked inside the public house.

Hilditch descended the last few steps and regarded the boy. ‘I suppose you are hurt?’

The boy dusted off his thin clothes and shrugged. ‘That wasn’t hardly nothing. I’ve had wuss’n that. It’s all over anywise. I won’t remember this once it starts upstairs.’

They pushed past the men at the doorway and others who lined a cramped corridor and entered a packed bar room in which was a crush of bodies and a fug of tobacco smoke, stale beer and unwashed linen. Glasses toppled from slops-laden tables as Henry Hilditch was drawn through a mangle of sandy corduroy, scarlet uniform and spittle conversations.

‘Is this the singular spectacle we have come far to see? These people, this pandemonium?’ Hilditch shouted, for the bar room was loud with cursing and laughter, soldiers’ songs and the insistent barking of dogs.

‘Just you foller me and you’ll see,’ the boy called back as he held open a door.

They mounted a narrow staircase and entered an upper chamber whose area had been greatly enlarged by the removal of a central wall, which arrangement obliged those passing the length of the room to step nimbly through the surviving uprights of a timber frame. Old doors and timbers mounted upon barrels served as tables, and on rough-hewn chairs and makeshift settles were already installed some thirty-five or forty patrons all contributing to a bedlam of chatter and contention. Beyond the timber wall-frame was a room in which more men were grouped about a cleared area of better illumination.

The boy showed Hilditch to a table where an army officer in an unbuttoned tunic sat already and on which there seemed little room for anything more than the Staffordshire bull terrier which stood upon it. The soldier, prising open its jaws so that its saliva pooled on the table, acknowledged Hilditch’s arrival with a curt nod as he conversed with a smock-coated man who held his hat doffed beneath his arm.

‘Strong teeth, you’ll agree, Cap’n?’ He parted the dog’s legs and cupped pendulous testicles in his hands. ‘Two onions in a string bag, eh? He’s all dog, Cap’n, just what you want for the fancy!’

The soldier, applying a flaring Lucifer to his pipe of tobacco, kicked the dog from the table and rested polished boots in its place. He removed the pipe and spat out a shred of tobacco. ‘Teeth and testicles are very well, but many’s the good-looking cur that hasn’t earned his meat when set to it.’ He turned to Hilditch. ‘What say you, sir?’

Henry Hilditch struggled to sort and arrange the loud tumult of strange sights and sounds: the shifting curtain of corduroy, fustian and bombazine; the children appearing with tankards of ale and disappearing with pots and coins; the abnormal number of dogs straining on strings or held in their owners’ arms, or peering out from under coats, whose apparent ancestors – petrified in a full range of aggressive poses – were preserved and displayed in glass cases on shelves above.

The soldier nudged Hilditch. ‘Well, sir, what say you? Which is the top dog tonight?’

‘I couldn’t say, I’m sure,’ said Hilditch, as if he would much rather avoid conversation and be left to himself.

The boy, who had been awaiting a convenient moment to speak, now held out a hand to Hilditch. ‘You’ll feel more yourself with a drink inside you. A gent like you would take some port, I ’spect? Or maybe some French brandy? Give me a bob or two and I’ll see to it.’

The soldier’s moustache brushed Hilditch’s ear. ‘You keep close, is that it? Well, that might be the wisest course.’

The boy was tugging upon Hilditch’s sleeve like a restless puppy. ‘Drink, sir? There’s champagne, I believe.’

‘Champagne, that’s the ticket, eh!’ said the officer. ‘No beer and porter for us, eh, sir?’

‘What will it be, sir, brandy or champagne?’ said the boy, extending again his small hand.

‘No drink,’ said Hilditch. ‘Not while I am about my business.’

‘What’s that? You’ll not take a drink with Jack Ratcliffe of the Life Guards?’

‘No drink, thank you,’ said Hilditch, and in retreating behind his coloured spectacles provoked the soldier to swear and then to rise unsteadily.

‘Rum sort of fellow you are, sir,’ he said and stepped through the frame and into the area beyond, in which someone was ringing a bell. The boy remained at Hilditch’s side and sighed theatrically. ‘It is conventional to take a drink first,’ he declared. ‘You must have the drink, you know.’

‘This has been a mistake,’ Hilditch was saying as the noisy crowds about him pressed into the adjoining chamber. Some peered at him closely as they passed and others laughed at remarks made by the captain which evidently had concerned the newcomer. Even when abroad, Henry Hilditch had never felt such a stranger. He realised that he had been unprepared for such an Odyssey and wished for nothing more than to be safely returned to the West End. When he had first taken in this room, he had been delighted at the abundance of exotic subjects, any one of whom would most likely make a memorable portrait for the Messenger. Thoughts of over-leaping Henry Mayhew had raced through his mind. He saw An Entomology of the Working Classes, by Henry Hilditch. And if just one of these denizens of the streets and alleys of the East End had noticed a strange girl newly come among them … But as quickly as these thoughts fled had come the unsettling fear that he had crossed some invisible line and that his presence here was suspected and unwelcomed by all about.

‘If you will just see me back upon the high road …’ he said to Daniel, but immediately he was swept up by the tide of men and women who were crowding through one room and into the other, where, guided by the boy, he now found himself pushed and pulled until he was pressed hard up against the wooden siding of a circular pit about twelve feet in diameter. The pit was empty, though about its walls men were wedged tightly and behind them were others, pushing, shuffling and arranging themselves into positions of better vantage. The larger part of the audience stood upon furniture, sat upon a billiard table or swung their legs from the sills of high windows. Hilditch, hot about the collar, feeling not only the discomfort of his own strangeness, was nauseous too as he breathed the cloying atmosphere of decaying teeth, poor ale and dogs. As he became more accustomed to the scene he perceived that the only object of any interest at that moment to those other spectators whose pipes and elbows hung over the siding was himself.

‘’E won’t see much with ’is blinkers on!’ commented a stout woman as someone at Hilditch’s back ran a hand over the pile of his coat and observed that it must have cost a bob or two. It was unbearable to be the focus of such attention and to feel like a bug under glass and yet, Hilditch mused, perhaps, in their own way, these people were admiring him. They had already marked him as different. Conceivably, they might think him a princely stranger come among them for a mysterious purpose. Preoccupied in this way, a sudden blow to his shoulder took him unawares.

‘Mind yer back!’

Unnoticed by Hilditch, a man carrying another, larger dog had made his way through the crowd behind and now knocked him roughly as he passed. The dog was offered over the barrier and dropped into the pit.

‘Here’s a capital dog for someone,’ said William Saggers as he stood in the centre of the ring, which was lit from above. He uncoiled a length of rope and threw it over an oak beam, from which depended a great iron fitting with six flaring flames. No sooner was the rope tied off than the animal broke free, leapt into the pit and seized the rope’s end, locking its teeth upon a great knot.

‘That’s the style, Nipper!’

The rope was pulled hard and the dog launched into the air. Flexing the muscles of its neck, it swung from side to side, frantically arranging a better hold for its teeth. These struggles and contortions were observed with keen interest by all about the pit. Saggers stood back and waved a hand at the gyrating animal. ‘Did you ever see a stronger dog? Here’s more muscles than Billingsgate! Who’ll have him? Who’ll make me a decent offer?’

The dog gave out joyous, slobbering growls as it arced wildly, but then, unable to unfix its teeth from thick hemp, it started to choke on its own saliva.

‘He’s had his fill already, Willum,’ observed a man. ‘What’s wanted is a dog with tenacity!’

‘I’ll show you that!’ said the other and before the animal could extricate itself and drop to the floor, William Saggers had taken a guttering candle from a table and slipped it directly beneath the beam. Now whenever the dog passed over the source of heat, it convulsed and thrashed wildly as it tried to remove itself from the source of pain. It swung high but, inevitably, its pendulum course returned it to the flame where it shuddered and flailed with increased violence. The mob cheered with one voice as the squealing dog was scorched again and roundly condemned the soldier Ratcliffe when he stepped into the pit and kicked away the candle. ‘Enough, you half-wit, Saggers, I want some dog left, don’t I?’

‘You’ll ’ave ’im, then, Captain? A reg’lar bargain he is, at five guineas.’

‘You’ll get your money afterwards,’ said Ratcliffe. ‘Anyone can hang on a rope and no doubt some of us will. I’ll see the dog going about his business first.’

The soldier quietened the quaking dog and quit the ring as William Saggers said, ‘Bet now, gentlemen, and remember that this fine dog is for sale arterwards to the highest bidder. Never mind that the captain’s set ‘is expert eye on him.’

Saggers climbed from the pit and stepped up to his chair, an old Windsor carver which was elevated upon some unseen dais and situated at one side of Hilditch. Thus enthroned, he began taking money, giving change and marking slips of paper presented by those about. A shadowy figure without the inn, the ring of gas flames above showed Saggers to be a figure worthy of more particular notice. His face was jowly, his eyes squinty and the line of his mouth thin. Beneath his eyes, below his forehead and lip, shadows had formed that exaggerated the lines of his middle age and his foreshortened visage looked as if it had been sat upon and crumpled, like a mislaid hat. His head weighed upon his shoulders like a cannon ball on a soft cushion, folding into his flabby blue-chinned neck which was squeezed so tightly into its collar that folds of flesh spilled over the top. Neither his waistcoat nor his overcoat were buttoned and nor did it seem possible that the two sides of his apparel could ever be caused to meet.