Georgian London: Into the Streets (13 page)

Being in the workhouse was undesirable, but it wasn’t seen as a punishment. For many of the poorest families it was viewed as a temporary solution to the temporary problem of destitution. They could, and did, leave when they thought they would be able to make their own way again. It was often far harder to get into the workhouse than it was to get out. There are instances of non-parish women in labour and victims of industrial accidents being turned away. For the duration of their stay inmates had to submit to rules on sobriety, smoking and visitors. Sometimes children were taken in alone, during periods of parental absence or inability to provide care. Sometimes wives and children were taken in when the wife was sick, and the husband would visit once or twice a week whilst continuing to work, trying to get the family back on their feet.

Workhouses not only provided food and shelter, they were also where medicine and care could be found. Soon after the Workhouse Act, many workhouses introduced separate infirmaries.
St Sepulchre’s installed
‘an oven’ in which to heat inmates’ clothing to kill pests, and this was also offered as a public service to the parish poor outside the workhouse.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, more and more people had to move to towns to find work, gain skills and better themselves. The young men and women who left their rural backgrounds to take up offers of work in London had no safety net other than friends or family already there. If it didn’t work out, they were faced with a long trudge home or a scramble to find other employment. In 1796, Matthew Martin opened his Mendicity Enquiry Office at 190 Piccadilly. His idea
was simple, but effective: he produced 6,000 numbered tickets, each promising the bearer threepence upon its presentation at the Office. To earn their 3d the bearer had to submit to an interview which Martin had devised in order to shed light upon both the causes and conditions of the increase in desperate poverty in London.

In under eight months, he filled dozens of volumes with the stories of over 2,000 adults and their 3,000 dependent children. He excluded 600 individuals who would not consent to being labelled as beggars. What emerges is that the vast majority of Martin’s poor were single mothers. The numbers are telling: 192 men to 1,808 women. Martin concluded that men were stronger than women, with more resources. Occasionally employers kept women on through illegitimate pregnancies, but we cannot estimate how many there might have been. Above all, a woman was likely to be thrown into a state of advanced or abject poverty by the burden of children for whom she received no support.
Martin’s Mendicity Studies
are one of the few to make transparent how large the poor female population was.

In addition, the new theories of Thomas Malthus and Jeremy Bentham were alarming Londoners. Contrary to what they had always thought was a declining population, Malthus told them that soon there wouldn’t be enough food to feed the burgeoning poor. Bentham’s utilitarianism promoted the greatest good for the greatest number.
Quasi-charitable bodies
were formed in the early nineteenth century, such as the Society for the Suppression of Mendicity, in 1818. The Duke of York was the Patron, the Duke of Northumberland the President, and the officers included four marquesses, eight earls and Matthew Martin. Its philosophy was concerned with the economics of poverty and sifting the ‘deserving poor’ from the ‘vagrants’, much in the same way as we now have the political touchstones of ‘hard-working families’ and ‘benefit scroungers’.

For the first three decades of the nineteenth century, it was increasingly apparent that something must change. In 1832, a Royal Commission determined that the old system was outdated and not up to the task in hand. In 1834, the Poor Law Amendment Act ushered in a new era. The workhouses became something to be feared: they were to be run on the cheapest terms; food was of poor quality and in short
measure; rules were draconian. Miserable and scanty, there was little of charity about them. The old workhouses, designed as a temporary prop to support the lowest classes and thus the city itself, had a humanity to them. In the same way that the 1832 Reform Act enfranchised London’s new middle classes, the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act further disenfranchised her poor. Poverty became a numbers game.

Much of the debate surrounding poverty centred on public funds. Public money was historically associated with the parishes, and used on a local level. Urban improvements such as street lighting and paving were initially funded by householders on a street-by-street basis, further adding to the variety of London’s landscape. As the city grew, it became clear that it needed infrastructure. But where to find the money?

The generation of public funds, and how to spend them, was a puzzle. The story of Westminster Bridge is an example of just how confused the government had become: in the late 1730s, they held a series of lotteries to build the bridge.

London Bridge connected the City to Surrey in the south, but Westminster had no crossing of its own besides ‘
the ancient Horse-ferry
between Westminster and Lambeth’. The need for a bridge was pressing, and an Act was passed, as noted in
The London Gazette
, ‘for building a bridge cross the River Thames, from the New Palace Yard in the City of Westminster, to the opposite Shore in the county of Surrey’. Plans were called for and, in 1736, put out to tender amongst the engineering community. But money for construction was the real sticking point.
Around half the money
was raised by a series of five lotteries, one of which offered as first prize the largest known surviving piece of English silver, the Jernegan cistern.

Henry Jernegan came from a family of Catholic gentry and started out as a banker. He acquired Littleton Pointz Meynell as a client. Meynell was a gambler. His wins were mammoth, his losses likewise. When he was winning, Jernegan made attempts to divert his client’s capital into works of art in solid silver. This helped Jernegan mitigate his
losses through commission, and made sure his client had money in commodities. In 1730, Jernegan and Meynell decided to create the biggest wine cistern ever. The cistern holds sixty gallons and is formed from over a quarter of a ton of silver. A piece of silver weighing more than a quarter of a ton takes time to make, and when it was finished, so was Meynell. Jernegan was stuck with an enormous white elephant.

The government was still short of money for the building of Westminster Bridge. Jernegan petitioned Parliament, where he explained that he had ‘
designed and made a silver cistern
, acknowledged to excel anything of the kind hitherto attempted, but that four years later, the cistern remained on his hands notwithstanding his best attempts to dispose of it to foreign princes’. In desperation, he offered the cistern as first prize in a lottery in aid of funds for the bridge. In exchange, he would take a cut of the ticket sales in an attempt to recoup some of his losses. A Dorset farmer won first prize but, there being little call for a rococo silver bathtub in Dorset, he sold it. By the following year, it was in Russia in the collection of Regent Anna Leopoldovna. Perhaps Jernegan’s error was in trying to dispose of it to foreign princes, rather than to a princess. It remains in the Hermitage Museum, the largest extant piece of antique solid silver in the world.

The lottery over, the government put in the rest of the money to ensure that Westminster Bridge would become a reality. The maze of narrow slum alleys around the southern end of King Street was cleared to make way for the road to the bridge, and it finally opened on 18 November 1750. It was hailed as ‘
a very great ornament to our metropolis, and will be looked on with pleasure or envy by all foreigners. The surprising echo in the arches, brings much company with French horns to entertain themselves under it in summer.’ Alcoves over each pier were designed to offer shelter in bad weather, but pessimists feared they ‘might be used by robbers and cut-throats who, if it were not for the special guard of 12 watchmen and the high balustrades, might set on unwary travellers and push their bodies into the river
’.

Bodies in the river were a continual concern, and the addition of the high balustrades ‘
was to prevent the suicide
to which the English have so strong a propensity, particularly in the gloomy month of November’. Despite the balustrades, Westminster Bridge claimed its
fair share of suicides, most of them nameless and seen only as a tumble of clothing and a brief impact with the water, then recovered later somewhere downriver. One London visitor who narrowly avoided meeting a watery end on Westminster Bridge one gloomy November night is not usually famed for his melancholy temperament.

Giacomo Casanova had arrived in London in 1763 with plans to start his own lottery and to see his illegitimate daughter, who lived in Soho Square. He took a house on Pall Mall and a mistress before he became infatuated with the young courtesan Anne Marie Charpillon. La Charpillon was most particular about her customers and determinedly had a headache whenever Casanova called.
On one visit
, however, he found her beneath her hairdresser and promptly smashed the place up. He returned to Pall Mall, pulled on his greatcoat, filled the pockets with a large quantity of lead shot and walked towards the river. He remembered walking slowly because of the immense weight he was carrying in his pockets. Standing on the bridge and summoning his courage, he was interrupted in his thoughts by young Welbore Ellis. Welbore was twenty-eight, and a cheerful soul. He remarked that Casanova looked glum and offered to take him for a drink and something to eat. Casanova refused and said he wanted to walk, so Welbore walked with him, in the end guiding him to a tavern where he paid a young woman to strip naked and dance the hornpipe to amuse him. Welbore’s intervention probably saved Casanova’s life; he didn’t return to Westminster Bridge. Instead, he bought a parrot and taught it to say, ‘
Mademoiselle Charpillon
is more of a whore even than her mother,’ before leaving it at the Royal Exchange to impart this knowledge to passers-by.

Westminster Hall dates from the latter part of the eleventh century, and ‘
was formerly made use of
by the kings, &c., for feasting, and as a room to relieve the poor’.
Its ‘
length is two hundred and seventy feet; the breadth seventy-four’. The remarkable roof dates from the reign of Richard II and is ‘most curiously constructed, and of a fine species of
gothic
’. In the late fifteenth century, the Court of the King’s Bench made its home there, along with trinket shops and the bookstalls run by Westminster School. Outside was a sundial inscribed:
Be Gone About Your Business
. ‘
It is said
the dial-maker sent his lad to ask for the inscription, but an irascible old bencher ordered him away with “Be gone about your business!” Thus the lad told his master this was the desired inscription.’ Later, coffee sheds grouped around the North Door, and in a building nearby Mr Waghorn’s coffee house became a popular destination.
Waghorn’s had
a large balcony overlooking ‘the House of Peers’, which was packed on days of holidays and processions. In the gatehouse of Westminster Hall was a small prison, one of many secure places dotted around London where people could be confined.

The dangers and injustices of eighteenth-century prison life are apparent in the case of Mary Ferril, an inmate of the gatehouse, in 1720.
She accused fellow prisoners
Edward Wooldridge and John Nichols, of St Margaret’s Westminster, of raping her. In court she testified, ‘At about two a Clock in the Morning … they both forced her … one stood at the Door while the other lay with her.’ That Wooldridge and Nichols had both had sex with Mary was not disputed, since both men ‘as soon as they were up the next Morning, bragg’d that they had lain with the little Woman above Stairs’. That it had been a demeaning and possibly abusive encounter for Mary was not in question, but the court heard she was in the gatehouse for beating her mother and verbally abusing a Justice of the Peace, and that she had worked as a prostitute when she and her husband hit hard times. One witness ‘said that she was a Fool of a Woman that could not take a Stroke without telling her Husband … The Jury considering the whole Matter, Acquitted them.’

Although being violent, abusive and a part-time prostitute had not helped Mary’s case, a key failing was that the incident had taken place in her cell in the prison. Most successful rape prosecutions in London during the eighteenth century involved abduction. Unlawful detention had been a preoccupation of English identity since Magna Carta. The later evolution of habeas corpus is one of the central tenets of the legal system. John Locke continued this theme when he asserted the freedom of each man or woman to ‘own’ their own body.
Infringements upon personal physical freedom were taken seriously by the law, making abduction a grave offence. In the muddled complications of many rape accusations, it was a concrete fact.

In the 1757 trial
of Daniel Lackey for the rape of Christian Streeter, the fact that she went with him willingly from the Hercules Tavern near Westminster Bridge to his lodgings in Ryder Street, in St James’s, was vital to his acquittal. In 1797, when 37-year-old John Briant was tried for the rape of fourteen-year-old milkmaid Jane Bell on a summer’s evening in Green Park, the physical manner in which he stopped her crying out and forced her away from the cows into a secluded ‘hollow’ was dwelt on as much as the rape itself. They were discovered by unemployed housemaid Sarah Scott, who berated Briant for a ‘rascal’ and said that he should avail himself of a willing prostitute rather than ‘a child’. She ‘laid hold of him; I collared the man’ and it was through her intervention that Briant was brought to trial. Despite Briant’s previous good character, and the many witnesses who appeared for him in court, Scott’s evidence along with Jane Bell’s clear testimony of how she was abducted and subsequently raped were enough to secure a guilty verdict. Briant was sentenced to death.