London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City (23 page)

In the period between 1851 and 1881 population density in the capital had grown from 7.72 persons per house to 7.85. Now while this in itself was not a dramatic rise it is much more interesting to note that in Bethnal Green and St George's in the East the rises had been steeper (from 6.78 to 7.65 in the former and from 7.87 to 8.16 in the latter).26 Arguably the situation was worse than this. Census takers were reliant on the honesty `of those who stood most to gain by underestimating the numbers of occupants' of buildings.27 Thus, tenants, fearing eviction under sanitary guidelines, and landlords, worried about being prosecuted or stung with increased rates, gave false information and counts were carried out during the day when many householders were out. We need, therefore, to think of reports of overcrowding in London as an understatement of the reality.

As slum clearance took place and evictions ensued, the occupants were often caught unprepared - perhaps unwilling - to face the reality of their situation. The commission was told that even when the very poor were given notice `they never seem to appreciate the fact that their homes are about to be destroyed until the workmen come to pull the roof from over their heads' 21 In some ways it was the poorest inhabitants that found it easiest to relocate. When the notorious lodging houses of Flower and Dean Street (one of the first targets of Richard Cross' act29) were demolished to make way for more respectable artisan model dwellings in the late 1880s, their occupants decamped to Dorset (known locally as `Dorset') Street and White's Row, across Commercial Road. In turn they ousted the weaker elements who had lived there previously, and the cycle of evictions and upheaval continued.30

There are other ways to view the attempts to clean up the East End in the late 1800s. Slum areas were viewed as breeding grounds for crime and immorality as well as diseases such as cholera. Removing the `nests of disease and crime'31 by pulling down swathes of decrepit homes would help open up the dark courts of the East End to the view of the police, sanitary inspectors and reformers, and undermine the criminal networks that infested them. As The Times put it: `as we cut nicks through our woods and roads through our forests, so it should be our policy to divide these thick jungles of crime and misery'.32 The same philosophy underpinned the efforts of Baron Haussmann as he drove 135 km of new boulevards and thoroughfares through the streets of Napoleon III's Paris, with similar consequences for poorer Parisians.

ENTERING THE ABYSS: HOUSING CONDITIONS IN THE EAST END

So ran a popular musical number that reflected both the reality of housing in the district and the coping methods of the inhabitants. In Hanbury Street, the site of Annie Chapman's murder, overcrowding was rife. At number 85 there were nine occupied rooms each of which were home, on average, to seven people. The rector of Spitalfields told the 1884 royal commission that `in several of these rooms there are adult sons and daughters sleeping together on the floor. In no room in that house is there more than one bedstead' 34 The single toilet was filthy and residents preferred to use their own chamber pots but these would often remain in the room for long periods before being emptied. This was not the worst of houses; indeed Hanbury Street was `in the better part' of the parish and its occupants were `all respectable people'.35 The Bitter Cry of Outcast London had warned its readers of the consequences of such overcrowding: `That people condemned to exist under such conditions take to drink and fall into sin is surely a matter for little surprise, he wrote.36 He also warned his readers that `the family of an honest working man [was] compelled to take refuge in a thieves' kitchen ... the houses where they live their rooms are frequently side by side, and continual contact with the very worst of those who have come out of our gaols is a matter of necessity' So, the housing crisis of the 1880s, in the eyes of Mearns and others, forced the poor to live side by side with other `deviant' types.37

This underlying fear, that the `respectable' members of the working class could be infected by the so-called `residuum, was a very real one for late Victorian society. Thus, some of the slum clearance schemes of the previous 30 years had been intended to remove notorious rookeries and dens of criminality and vice such as the Old Nichol at the northern end of Brick Lane and other streets around Spitalfields Market .3' The royal commission tended to confirm Mearns' analysis and Lord Salisbury accepted the need for further housing reforms declaring that `the more our prosperity increases the more there is the danger that unless remedial measures are taken, the evils of overcrowding will also increase"'

The state of the poor was a worry for many middle-class Victorians who must have viewed the conditions they lived in with rising astonishment. After all, their own lives, in comfortable homes where intimacy was bounded by restrictive social rules that governed the behaviour of adults and children alike, were a long way from those of the working classes. The settled, secure and spacious villas and town houses of the middle classes contrasted sharply with the cramped and Spartan dwellings of the poor. The children of the middle class enjoyed a classical education at school or from governors while the children of the streets attended board schools only sporadically. Many working-class families moved house frequently, `like fish in a river' as Charles Booth observed.40 People moved when times were hard and rent difficult to find, often at night to avoid the landlord or his collectors. The musical hall song `My old man, made popular by Marie Lloyd, describes the migratory nature of some working-class lives.

The wealthier classes misunderstood this behaviour as `shiftless' and `transitory': they worried about the numbers of children running wild in the streets and avoiding the education that was considered to be so essential for the future of nation and Empire (as Octavia Hill had noted, to instill good behaviour and `industriousness'). It was hard to attend to school without a stable home environment and many children's education must have suffered as a result. Indeed it is hard to read anything written from a middle-class perspective about the lives of the poor in this period without hearing the shock and horror they contained. The notion of a society divided along very different class lines is evident in numerous letters, pamphlets and sermons. Despite the legions of `slummers' and missionaries, the lack of understanding of working-class culture is staggering: this truly was another country, a different race or even species - the well-trodden discourse of `darkest England' reveals as much about middle-class Victorian attitudes as it does about working-class lives.

The readership of The Times may well have been shocked to read the report of one London Board school inspector, T. Marchant Williams, in February and March 1884. In the central districts of London including the notoriously overcrowded area of St Giles, Williams calculated that some 24 per cent of families lived in one room only; a further 43 per cent had two rooms while just 33 per cent enjoyed the relative luxury of three rooms.42 As Anna Davin has shown, Williams' findings echoed those of Charles Booth in East London in 1891 and 1901.43 Living in one or two or even three rooms meant little privacy for anyone. A family of eight might occupy two beds, or three if a truckle bed could be stowed away during the day under one of the others and if the budget stretched that far. In some homes multiple beds were unheard of; in others the very poor slept on rags or old clothes on the floor. Rooms had to serve as bedrooms, living rooms and workrooms and if any attempt was going to be made to keep them clean (and despite the concerns of the well-to-do middle classes most working-class wives tried to keep up standards of respectability) then houses had to be vacated during the day. There might be several explanations for the crowded street scenes captured by late century photographers but the need to find space to work was certainly one. When modern readers worry about allowing their children out to play we might reflect that our ancestors had little choice.

Anna Davin cautions us against assuming that the overcrowded conditions within which many London families existed in the 1880s necessarily degraded those that experienced them. Stories of families sleeping two, three or four to a bed; of sisters and brothers sharing limited space; of children running amok in the streets - all these can provoke visions of neglect, incest and hardship. However, this is to accept too readily the fears and warnings of contemporary social investigators, COS visitors and Board school investigators: all of whom reflected middle-class concerns about the poor and their offspring. Both Davin and Jerry White (in his study of the Rothschild Buildings)," drawing upon a range of first-hand accounts, describe a world of community support, of neighbours happy to share what meagre food and goods they had with those less fortunate than themselves - hopeful that when it came to their own time of need others would reciprocate. Davin shows us, as Helen Bosanquet discovered, that the backbone of this self-supporting society was its matriarchs: the women of the East End battled poverty, sickness, dirt and their husbands to keep body and soul (and, crucially, family) together.

The evidence suggests that where contemporary middle-class observers saw danger the working class saw companionship, warmth and shared troubles in their overcrowded homes. We might assume that no one could enjoy sharing a bed with siblings or other relatives but clearly this is erroneous: many missed the warmth and security it brought, as this example shows: `We slept two, three in a bed like nothing. We never had a hot water bottle or extra blankets - we didn't need it. You all warmed another' one resident of the Rothschild remembered.45 Arthur Harding, who grew up in the notoriously criminal Nichol estate at one end of Brick Lane, also recalled his early life with fondness rather than horror.46 `Community' is a word laden with meaning and imbued with a sense of a longlost past. In our `broken' twenty-first century society the need to cling to notions of a `golden age' surfaces frequently, regardless of whether such a `golden age' ever existed.47

Jerry White's wonderful micro-history of an East End tenement in the late Victorian and Edwardian period shows that, even though many had little themselves, they were often prepared to share it with their neighbours.4R This sharing of resources included food and drink, shelter and companionship, and extended beyond family ties and could even result in the suspension of feuds and disputes when times or circumstances were particularly hard.49 Children were looked after when parents fell sick and could not provide; families clubbed together to find rent for those behind with theirs (and on at least one occasion they prevented an eviction from the Rothschild model dwellings); refugees fleeing persecution in the Russian empire were accommodated until they could find their own digs or were able to move on to America or elsewhere.

The Rothschild was an almost entirely Jewish community, even if it contained a variety of ethnicities: Russian, Lithuanian, German, Polish, `Dutch' (or English) immigrants all lived there. Did this cultural closeness ensure a sense of community or was the shared experience of poverty as important in establishing a feeling of unity? The community that White describes (from the oral testimonies he has gathered) suggests that common cause and shared identities were equally important. The residents of the Rothschild Buildings knew what it was like to survive on very little and how to do so while retaining one's self-respect and dignity. Those that fell below this level of respectability would have been unlikely to find a flat in such a block. The tiny minority of tenants who turned to crime or prostitution, or who sought relief in a bottle, or were guilty of excessive violence or abuse, were probably excluded from this community. The drudgery of everyday life in the East End is very apparent, with the burden of domestic chores falling heaviest on the women. In model dwellings such as the Rothschild Buildings, strict rules ensured that landings and stairs were scrubbed and kept tidy; prying neighbours enforced cleanliness in individual flats and rooms. One historian has described them as part of a middle-class attempt to `civilize and pacify the urban poor'50 However, not everyone could either afford, or meet the required standards, to live in one of the many model dwellings that sprang up in the second half of the nineteenth century. For many poorer Eastenders shelter or home meant a room in a lodging (or `doss') house or, below that, recourse to the detested workhouse casual ward.