Dickens's England (4 page)

The first step towards the morning's work was the appearance of workmen about 4 a.m.; this was immediately followed by a rumbling sound, and one realised that the scaffold was being dragged round. A grim, square, box-like apparatus was now distinctly visible . . .

The tolling of St Sepulchre's bell about 7.30 a.m. announced the approach of the hour of execution; meanwhile a steady rain was falling, though without diminishing the ever-increasing crowd. As far as the eye could reach was a sea of human faces. Roofs, windows, church-rails, and empty vans – all were pressed into service, and tightly packed with human beings eager to catch a glimpse of seven fellow-creatures on the last stage of life's journey. The rain by this time had made the drop slippery, and necessitated precautions on behalf of the living if not of those appointed to die, so sand was thrown over a portion, not of the drop (that would have been superfluous), but on the side, the only portion that was not to give way. . . . The sand was for the benefit of the ‘ordinary', the minister of religion, who was to offer dying consolation at 8 a.m., and breakfast at 9.

The procession now appeared, winding its way through the kitchen, and in the centre of the group walked a sickly, cadaverous group securely pinioned, and literally as white as marble. As they reached the platform a halt was necessary as each was placed one by one immediately under the hanging chains. At the end of these chains were hooks which were eventually attached to the hemp round the neck of each wretch. The concluding ceremonies did not take long, considering how feeble the aged hangman was. A white cap was first placed over every face, then the ankles were strapped together, and finally the fatal noose was put round every neck, and the end attached to the hooks. One fancies one can see Calcraft now laying the ‘slack' of the rope that was to give the fall lightly on the doomed men's shoulders so as to preclude the possibility of a hitch, and then stepping on tiptoe down the steps and disappearing below. . . .

The silence was now awful. One felt one's heart literally in one's mouth, and found oneself involuntarily saying, ‘They could be saved yet – yet – yet,' and then a thud vibrated through the street announced that the pirates were launched into eternity. . . . Death, I should say, must have been instantaneous, for hardly a vibration occurred, and the only movement that was visible was that from the gradually-stretching ropes as the bodies kept slowly swinging round and round. . . .

The drunken again took up their ribald songs, conspicuous among which was one that had done duty pretty well through the night, and ended with, ‘Calcraft, Calcraft, He's the Man', but the pickpockets and highwaymen reaped the greatest benefit. It can hardly be credited that respectable old City men on their way to business – with watch-chains and scarf-pins in clean white shirt-fronts, and with unmistakable signs of having spent the night in bed – should have had the foolhardiness to venture into such a crowd; but they were there in dozens. They had not long to wait for the reward of their temerity. Gangs of ruffians at once surrounded them, and whilst one held them by each arm, another was rifling their pockets. Watches, chains and scarf-pins passed from hand to hand with the rapidity of an eel; meanwhile, their piteous shouts of ‘Murder!', ‘Help!', ‘Police!' were utterly unavailing. The barriers were doing their duty too well, and the hundreds of constables within a few yards were perfectly powerless to get through the living rampart.

One of the Old Brigade [D. Shaw],
London in the Sixties
(1908)

ARISTOCRATS AND LAND

The great wealth of the landholders of England must always strike people from the Continent, where the landed proprietors are the poorest class, and the least protected by laws and institutions. Here everything conspires for their advantage. It is very difficult for the fundholder to acquire the free and full possession of land. Almost the whole soil is the property of the aristocracy, who generally let it only on lease; so that when a great man calls a village
his,
this does not mean, as with us, merely that he has the lordship (Oberherrschaft) over it, but that every house is his absolute property, and only granted to the actual inhabitants for a certain time. You may conceive what enormous and ever increasing revenues this must bring them, in a country where trade and population are continually on the increase; and may admire with me the concert and address with which this aristocracy has contrived for centuries to turn all the institutions of the country to its own advantage.

[In 1873 the ‘New
Domesday Book'
reported that fewer than 7,000 people owned four-fifths of the land.]

Prince von Pückler-Muskau (trans. S. Austin),
Tour by a German Prince
(1832)

PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS

Anything like election in the plain sense of the word is unknown in England. Members are never chosen for parliament as deputies were for a Cortes, because they are the fittest persons to be deputed. Some seats are private property – that is, the right of voting belongs to a few householders, sometimes not more than half a dozen, and of course these votes are commanded by the owner of the estate. The fewer they are, the more easily they are managed. A great part of a borough in the west of England was consumed some years ago by fire, and the lord of the manor would not suffer the houses to be rebuilt for this reason. If such an estate be to be sold, it is publicly advertised as carrying with it the power of returning two members; sometimes that power is veiled under the modest phrase of
a valuable appendage to the estate, or the desirable privilege of nominating seats in a certain assembly.
Government hold many of these boroughs, and individuals buy in at others. . . . You will see then that the house of commons must necessarily be a manageable body. This is as it should be; the people have all the forms of freedom, and the crown governs them while they believe they govern themselves. Burleigh foresaw this, and said that to govern
through
a parliament was the securest method of exercising power.

In other places, where the number of voters is something greater, so as to be too many for this kind of quiet and absolute control, the business is more difficult, and sometimes more expensive. The candidate then, instead of paying a settled sum to the lord of the borough, must deal individually with the constituents, who sell themselves to the highest bidder. Remember that an oath against bribery is required! A common mode of evading the letter of the oath is to lay a wager. ‘I will bet so much,' says the agent of the candidate, ‘that you do not vote for us.' ‘Done,' says the voter freeman, goes to the hustings, gives his voice, and returns to receive the money, not as the price of his suffrage, but as the bet which he has won. . . . It is said that at Aylesbury a punch-bowl full of guineas stood upon the table in the committee-room, and the voters were helped out of it. The price of votes varies according to their number. In some places it is as low as forty shillings, in others, at Ilchester for instance, it is thirty pounds. ‘Thirty pounds,' said the apothecary of the place on his examination, ‘is the price of an Ilchester voter.' When he was asked how he came to know the sum so accurately, he replied, that he attended the families of the voters professionally, and his bills were paid at election times with the money. A set of such constituents once waited upon the member whom they had chosen, to request that he would vote against the minister. ‘D––n you!' was his answer; ‘What! have I not bought you? And do you think I will not sell you?'

Robert Southey,
Letters from England
(1807)

A BED FOR THE NIGHT

(I)

Mr Jorrocks: A Countryman Visits London

‘Hup they come, leavin' their quiet country 'omes just as their sparrowgrass [asparagus] is ready for heatin' and their roses begin to blow – neglectin' their farms – maybe their families – leavin' bulls to bail themselves, cattle to get out of the pound, and wagrants into the stocks, as they can; hup, I say, they come to town, to get stuck in garrets at inns with the use of filthy, cigar-smokin', spitty, sandy-floored, sawdusty coffee-rooms, a 'underd and seventy-five steps below, at a price that's perfectly appallin'. Vot misery is theirs! Down they come of a mornin', after a restless, tumblin', heated, noisy night, to the day den of the establishment, with little happetite for breakfast, but feelin' the necessity of havin' some in order to kill time. A greasy-collared, jerkin', lank-'aired waiter casts a second-'and badly-washed web over a slip of a table, in a stewy, red-curtained box, into which the sun beats with unmitigated wengeance. A Britannia-metal teapot, a cup, a plate, a knife and a japanned tea-caddy make their appearance. Then comes a sugar-basin, followed by a swarm of flies, that 'unt it as the 'ounds would a fox, and a small jug of “sky-blue” [watered milk], which the flies use as a bath durin' the repast on the sugar. A half-buttered muffin mounts a waterless slop-basin; a dirty egg accompanies some toasted wedges of bread; the waiter points to a lump of carrion wot he calls beef, on a dusty sideboard, and promises the
Post
as soon as it is out of 'and. Sixteen gents sit at sixteen slips of table, lookin' at each other with curiosity or suspicion, but never a word is exchanged by any on them. Presently they begin to wacate their slips of wood . . . and the coffee-room is gradually emptied into the crowded streets.'

R.S. Surtees,
Handley Cross
(1845)

(II)

[In the Low Lodging-Houses]

‘Why, sir,' said one man, who had filled a commercial situation of no little importance, but had, through intemperance, been reduced to utter want, ‘I myself have slept in the top room of a house not far from Drury Lane, and you could study the stars, if you were so minded, through the holes left by the slates having been blown off the roof. It was a fine summer's night, and the openings in the roof were then rather an advantage, for they admitted air, and the room wasn't so foul as it might have been without them.' . . . He had slept in rooms so crammed with sleepers – he believed there were 30 where 12 would have been a proper number – that their breaths in the dead of night and in the unventilated chamber, rose (I use his own words) ‘in one foul, choking steam of stench.' . . .

In some of these lodging-houses, the proprietor – or, I am told, it might be more correct to say, the proprietress, as there are more women than men engaged in the nefarious trade carried on in these houses – are ‘fences', or receivers of stolen goods in a small way.
Their
‘fencing', unless as the very exception, does not extend to any plate, or jewellery, or articles of value, but is chiefly confined to provisions, and most of all to those which are of ready sale to the lodgers.

Of very ready sale are ‘fish got from the gate' (stolen from Billingsgate); ‘sawney' (thieved bacon), and ‘flesh found in Leadenhall' (butcher's meat stolen from that market). . . . Some of the ‘fences' board, lodge and clothe two or three boys or girls, and send them out regularly to thieve, the fence usually taking all the proceeds, and if it be the young thief has been successful, he is rewarded with a trifle of pocket-money, and is allowed plenty of beer and tobacco. . . .

In some of these establishments, men and women, boys and girls – but perhaps in no case, or in very rare cases, unless they are themselves consenting parties – herd together promiscuously. . . . Boys have boastfully carried on loud conversations, and from distant parts of the room, of their triumphs over the virtue of girls, and girls have laughed at and encouraged the recital. Three, four, five, six and even more boys and girls have been packed, head and feet, into one small bed; some of them perhaps never met before. On such occasions any clothing seems often enough to be regarded as merely an incumbrance. . . . The indiscriminate admixture of the sexes among adults, in many of these places, is another evil. Even in some houses considered of the better sort, men and women, husbands and wives, old and young, strangers and acquaintances, sleep in the same apartment, and if they choose, in the same bed. Any remonstrance at some act of gross depravity, or impropriety on the part of a woman not so utterly hardened as the others, is met with abuse and derision. . . . There is no provision for purposes of decency in some of the places I have been describing, into which the sexes are herded indiscriminately, but to this matter I can only allude.

Henry Mayhew,
London Labour and the London Poor
(2 vols, 1852; 4 vols, 1861–2)

A COUNTRY TOWN

[Hardy's Casterbridge, i.e., Dorchester, in the 1830s]

The travellers returned into the High Street, where there were timber houses with overhanging stories, whose small-paned lattices were screened by dimity curtains on a drawing-string, and under whose barge-boards old cobwebs waved in the breeze. There were houses of brick-nogging, which derived their chief support from those adjoining. There were slate roofs patched with tiles, and tile roofs patched with slate, with occasionally a roof of thatch. . . .

The agricultural and pastoral character of the people upon whom the town depended for its existence was shown by the class of objects displayed in the shop windows. Scythes, reap-hooks, sheep-shears, bill-hooks, spades, mattocks and hoes at the ironmonger's; bee-hives, butter-firkins, churns, milking stools and pails, hay-rakes, field-flagons, and seed-lips at the cooper's; cart-ropes and plough-harness at the saddler's; carts, wheelbarrows and mill-gear at the wheelwright's and machinist's; horse-embrocations at the chemist's; at the glover's and leather-cutter's, hedging-gloves, thatcher's knee-caps, ploughmen's leggings, villagers' pattens and clogs. . . .

[Market Day]

It was about ten o'clock, and market day, when Elizabeth paced up the High Street . . . The front doors of the private houses were mostly left open at this warm autumn time, no thought of umbrella stealers disturbing the minds of the placid burgesses. Hence, through the long, straight entrance passages thus unclosed could be seen, as through tunnels, the mossy gardens at the back, glowing with nasturtiums, fuchsias, scarlet geraniums, ‘bloody warriors', snap-dragons and dahlias, this floral blaze being backed by crusted grey stone-work remaining from a yet remoter Casterbridge than the venerable one visible in the street. The old-fashioned fronts of these houses, which had older than old-fashioned backs, rose sheer from the pavement, into which the bow windows protruded like bastions, necessitating a pleasing
chassez-déchassez
movement to the time-pressed pedestrian at every few yards. He was bound also to evolve other Terpsichorean figures in respect of door-steps, scrapers, cellar-hatches, church buttresses, and the over-hanging angles of walls which, originally unobtrusive, had become bow-legged and knock-kneed.