London: The Biography

Géricault’s engraving entitled “Pity the Sorrows of a Poor Old Man” emphasises the isolation and misery of the London outcasts; the companionship of a dog continues to be a token of the wandering life in the city.

CHAPTER 64. They Are Always with ’Us

Mrs. Ambrose understood that after all it is the ordinary thing to be poor, and that London is the city of innumerable poor people”: this sentence from Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out expresses a great truth about the nineteenth century in which she was born.

The poor have always been part of the texture of the city. They are like the stones or the bricks, because London has risen from them; their mute suffering has no limits. In the medieval city the old, the crippled, the deformed and the mad were the first poor; those who could not work, and thus had no real or secure place in the social fabric, became the outcast. By the sixteenth century there were poor sections of the city such as East Smithfield, St. Katherine by the Tower and the Mint in Southwark; it could be said that by some instinctive process the poor clustered together, or it might be concluded that parts of the city harboured them. They were hawkers or pedlars or criers or chimney-sweeps, but they belong to that underclass which Defoe described as “The Miserable, that really pinch and suffer want.”

In eighteenth-century accounts we read of squalid courts and miserable houses, of “dirty neglected children” and “slipshod women,” of “dirty, naked, unfurnished” rooms and of men who stayed within them because their “clothes had become too ragged to submit to daylight scrutiny.” Those who lacked even this primitive accommodation slept in empty or abandoned houses; they sheltered in “bulks” or in doorways. In London Life in the Eighteenth Century M. Dorothy George estimated that by that century’s end there were in London “above twenty thousand miserable individuals of various classes, who rise up every morning without knowing how … they are to be supported during the passing day, or where in many instances they are to lodge on the succeeding night.” This has been plausibly related to “the general uncertainty of life and trade characteristic of the period.” So we may say that the underlying nature of London is most visible, or most sharply manifested, in the lives and appearance of its poorest inhabitants. Other city dwellers, rendered fearful, shunned the poor. The very presence of the poor increased the morbid nervousness and restlessness of all Londoners. We see the shape of the city from the shadow that it casts.

That shadow can be traced within the contours of Charles Booth’s “poverty map” of 1889 where blocks of black and dark blue, denoting the “Lowest class. Vicious, semi-criminal” and the “Very poor, casual. Chronic want,” creep among the red and gold bars of the affluent. A larger-scale map outlining the districts of the poor identified poverty in 134 areas “each of about 30,000 inhabitants”; here the dark blue areas cluster around the banks of the Thames but elsewhere there is a pattern of concentric rings “with the most uniform poverty at the centre.” They were London-born and London-bred, in Paddington and in Pimlico, in Whitechapel and in Wapping, in Battersea and Bermondsey.

Travellers noticed impoverishment everywhere and commented how degrading and degraded were the London poor, quite different from their counterparts in Rome or Berlin or Paris. In 1872 Hippolyte Taine remarked that he recalled “the lanes which open off Oxford Street, stifling alleys thick with human effluvia, troops of pale children crouching on filthy staircases; the street benches at London Bridge where all night whole families huddle close, heads hanging, shaking with cold … abject, miserable poverty.” In a city based upon money and power, those who are moneyless and powerless are peculiarly oppressed. In London, of all cities, they are literally degraded, stripped of all human decency by the operations of a city that has no other purpose except greed. That is why the poor were “abject” in the streets of nineteenth-century London and, as the city increased in power and magnitude, so did the numbers of the poor increase.

They represented almost a city within the city, and such a large aggregate of human misery could not be ignored. John Hollingshead’s Ragged London, published in 1861, suggested that one-third of the urban population lived “in unwholesome layers, one over the other, in old houses and confined rooms” which themselves were to be found in “filthy, ill constructed, courts and alleys.” The atmosphere of disgust and menace here is only barely suppressed. In London, Mrs. Cook concluded in Highways and Byways of London (1902) “misery is strangely prolific,” which suggests that the fear of the poor derived from the fact that they were likely to multiply indefinitely. She was speaking of the Borough: there poverty and misery seemed to have grown to such an extent that Southwark was overcome by it, but she could have been referring to a hundred other parts of the city. The places of the poor were “pestilential,” according to the author of The Bitter Cry of Outcast London in 1883, thus confirming the fear that this kind of abject poverty and degradation was, in the conditions of London, somehow contagious; the futility and the despair might spread throughout the rookeries, where “tens of thousands are crowded together amidst horrors.”

It is as if the streets themselves engendered these huddled masses. A newspaper report of 1862 named “Nichols Street, New Nichols Street, Half Nichols Street, Turville Street, comprising within the same area numerous blind courts and alleys.” Here the litany of street names itself is meant to conjure up degeneration, where the “outward moral degradation is at once apparent to any one who passes that way.” So the houses and lanes themselves are guilty of “moral degradation.” Does the city reflect its inhabitants, or do its inhabitants mimic the conditions of the city? Dwellers and dwelling places become inexact metaphors for one another, as in this passage from Jack London’s The People of the Abyss (1903): “Everything is helpless, hopeless, unrelieved and dirty … The people themselves are dirty, while any attempt at cleanliness becomes howling farce, when it is not pitiful and tragic … The father returning from work asks his child in the street where her mother is: and back the answer comes, ‘In the buildings.’” Observers were generally agreed that the life of the poor had reached such a level of hopelessness and squalor that “a new race has sprung up” and, further, that “it is now hereditary to a very considerable extent.” If Victorian London was itself so changed as to have become a new city, here was the new population with which it was filled.

This was the urban phenomenon which Engels diagnosed, and which he watched closely. In St. Giles, “the extent to which these filthy passages are fallen into decay beggars all description … the walls are crumbling, the door posts and window frames are loose and rotten.” Marx lived a few yards away in Soho. So the condition of the mid-nineteenth-century city directly inspired the founders of communism; it might be said that their creed issued out of the slums of London, and those Victorian observers who believed that some great or alarming new reality would emerge from the pervasive presence of the poor were not wholly wrong. The London poor did indeed generate a new race or class, but in countries and civilisations far distant.

In Long Acre, Engels noticed, the children are “sickly” and “half-starved.” He conceded that the worst forms of poverty were not visited upon all “London workers,” but “every working man without exception may well suffer a similar fate through no fault of his own.” This was one of the most tenacious visions of poverty as a palpable threat, this the despair that the city could breed, precisely because the conditions of London itself were enough to drive people into the slums. The uncertainty of employment, for example, was one of the most pressing reasons why people “broke” (to use an early nineteenth-century word) and were reduced to beggary. A cold winter meant that dockers and building workers were thrown out of work or, in the phrase of the period, “turned off.” To turn someone off-in an age when all the talk was of energy and of electricity, this was the ultimate dehumanising and degrading force.

Areas where the poor lived were also “turned off.” The city had grown so large that they could be concealed in its depths. Engels quotes one clergyman who declared that “I never witnessed such thorough prostration of the poor as I have seen since I have been in Bethnal Green,” but who reiterated that this area was quite unknown to, and unvisited by, other Londoners. In other quarters of the city “about as little was known … of this destitute parish as the wilds of Australia or the islands of the South Seas.” The image of the wilderness once more emerges, but now with connotations of darkness and impenetrability.

Here again was another monstrous feature of the great metropolis, where rich and poor could live side by side without noticing each other’s existence. Engels quotes from an editorial in The Times of 12 October 1843, which suggested that “within the most courtly precincts of the richest city of GOD’s earth, there may be found, night after night, winter after winter … FAMINE, FILTH AND DISEASE.” From this vantage Engels looked at the whole society of London, and concluded that it was not sane or whole. “The more that Londoners are packed into a tiny space, the more repulsive and disgraceful becomes the brutal indifference with which they ignore their neighbours and selfishly concentrate upon their private affairs.”

So London has created a new phase in human existence itself; its poverty has in a real sense impoverished all who, in the mad pursuit of getting and spending, have created a human society of “component atoms.” A new race was therefore being created not only in the tenements of St. Giles but over the whole face of London where “the vast majority … have had to let so many of their potential creative faculties lie dormant, stunted and unused.” Engels suggests that this is the real poverty within the city, which only a revolution could extirpate.

Nineteenth-century London, then, created the first characteristically urban society on the face of the earth. What now we take for granted-“they rush past each other as if they had nothing in common”-was then greeted with distaste. For anyone who marvelled at the greatness and vastness of the Victorian city, there were others who were disturbed and horrified. Here, in the streets of London, real “social conflict, the war of all against all,” actually existed. It was a harbinger of the future world, a cancer that would not only spread throughout England but eventually cover the great globe itself.

One of the great studies of poverty in late nineteenth-century London was, and remains, Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London (1903); it ran to seventeen volumes, and went through three editions. Like the city that it was examining, it was on the largest possible scale. A monumental work, it is filled with suggestive details and suffused by a curious pity. It is in fact the vision of London lives which renders Booth’s work so significant. “The last occupant of the back room was a widower, scavenger to Board of Works, a man who would not believe in hell or heaven … At No. 7 lives a car-man in broken-down health. He fell off his cart and being run over broke his leg. On the floor above is a very poor old lady living on charity, but a happy soul expectant of heaven.” In the neighbourhood lived a man who was “a notorious Atheist, one who holds forth on behalf of his creed under railway arches, saying that if there be a God he must be a monster to permit such misery as exists. This man suffers from heart disease, and the doctor tells him that some day in his excitement he will drop down dead.” These are the permanent inhabitants of London. “On the ground floor live Mr. and Mrs. Meek. Meek is a hatter and was engaged in dyeing children’s hats in a portable boiler. A cheery little man … At the back lives Mrs. Helmot, whose husband, formerly an optician, is now at Hanwell suffering from suicidal melancholia.” All the variety of human experience is revealed here; the cheerful hat-maker and the suicidal optician are more suggestive than any characters in nineteenth-century urban fiction.

It is as if the city had become a sort of desert island, upon which its occupants picked their way. But there was another life which, against all the odds, kept on breaking through. “How the poor live,” a nurse told Booth, “when they are helpless remains a mystery, save for their great kindness to each other, even to those who are strangers. This is the great explanation.” A Nonconformist preacher also told him that “It is only the poor that really give. They know exactly the wants of one another and give when needed.” A Roman Catholic priest informed him, “To each other their goodness is wonderful.” Here is another reality lying concealed beneath all the descriptions of filth and squalor. The intimate experience of shared suffering did not necessarily injure the spirits of the very poor. The conditions of urban life could lead to despair, and drunkenness, and death, but there was at least the possibility of another form of human expression in kindness and generosity to those trapped within the same harsh and noisome reality.

Booth ends his account with a memorable paragraph: “The dry bones that lie scattered over the long valley that we have traversed together lie before my reader. May some great soul, master of a subtler and nobler alchemy than mine, disentangle the confused issues, reconcile the apparent contradictions in aim, melt and commingle the various influences for good into one divine uniformity of effort and make these dry bones live, so that the streets of our Jerusalem may sing with joy.” It is an astonishing revelation. Charles Booth more than any other man understood the horror and the misery of nineteenth-century London, yet he invoked the image of a joyful Jerusalem to conclude his discourse.

By the time he had completed his labours, which took eighteen years, Booth recognised that the very worst conditions had been alleviated, but only the very worst. Many of the slums had been removed, some of their erstwhile inhabitants moving to “model dwellings” or to the newly established council houses on council estates. Improved sanitation, and a more general concern with urban hygiene, also affected the lot of the poor in marginal ways. But where would the city be without its poor?

A survey conducted in the late 1920s, the New Survey of London Life and Labour, calculated that 8.7 per cent of Londoners were still living in poverty; the same figure, however, has been re-estimated in other contexts as 5 percent and 21 per cent. This illustrates the problems in any discussion of poverty-levels of deprivation are relative, but relative to what? The depression of the 1930s, for example, led to the creation of what were then known as “the new poor,” and another survey in 1934 reported that 10 per cent of London families lived beneath the “poverty line.” There was no famine, but there was malnutrition; there were fewer rags, but still a plethora of ragged clothes. The first decades of the twentieth century were marked by hunger marches and marches of the unemployed, the effects of which were mitigated by the introduction of unemployment benefit and more enlightened use of the Poor Laws.

Yet poverty never leaves London. It merely changes its form and appearance. In a recent survey into “measures of deprivation,” the highest counts were in Southwark, Lambeth, Hackney and Tower Hamlets (formerly Bethnal Green and Stepney); these are precisely the areas where the poor of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries congregated. So there is a continuity of need or distress, clustering around significant localities. Asian children now play in Old Nichol Street and Turville Street, and the area is curiously silent after its raucous and terrible life as the “Jago,” the area of Shoreditch immortalised in Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago (1896). Poverty has now become less noisy, and noisome, than in any of its previous incarnations but it is present nonetheless, an intrinsic and instinctive part of the city. Were there no poor, then there would be no rich. Like the women who accompanied eighteenth-century armies, dependent and defenceless, so do the poor accompany London on its progress. It created the poor; it needed the poor, not least for the purpose of cheap or casual labour; now they have become the shadows which follow it everywhere.

CHAPTER 65. Can You Spare a Little Something?

The most visible manifestations of poverty came to London in the form of mendicants and beggars. They were arguing with each other at the end of the fourteenth century. “John Dray in his own person denied the charge, and said that on the day and in the place mentioned he and the said Ralph were sitting together and begging, when John Stowe, a monk of Westminster came by and gave them a penny in common. Ralph received the penny, but would not give Dray his share. A quarrel arose and Ralph assaulted him with a stick.” Such a scene could have occurred centuries before, or centuries after. Where else could a beggar find a better plot than London itself, filled with people and according to legend replete with money? There were religious mendicants, or hermits, mumbling in stone alcoves beside the principal gates of the city; there were lame beggars on street corners; there were prison beggars, calling out for alms from the gratings which held them; there were old women begging outside churches; there were children begging in the street. In the early twenty-first century some of the principal thoroughfares are lined with beggars, young and old; some lie huddled in doorways, wrapped in blankets, and stare up with imploring faces with the customary cry, “Spare any change?” The older of them tend to be drunken vagrants, existing altogether out of time; which is as much to say that they uncannily resemble their counterparts in previous ages of London’s history.

Sir Thomas More recalled the crowds of beggars who swarmed around the gates of the monasteries of London, and in the late medieval city it was common practice for servants of great houses and institutions to gather up the broken bread and meat of a public feast in order to distribute them to the supplicants begging for dole outside the doors. In one of his English works More wrote: “I se somtyme my selfe so many poore folke at Westmynster at the dolys … that my self for the preace of them haue ben fayn to ryde another waye.” But though he would have preferred to ride in another direction, avoiding the press and the smell of them, he alighted and spoke to one of them. When More praised the generosity of the Westminster monks, he drew the retort that it was no thanks to them, since their lands had been given to them by good princes. The beggars were desperate, but not destitute of resentment or a certain type of moral clarity; the position of a beggar in London is that of a supplicant but through the ages it has always been compounded by bitterness or anger at the condition to which he or she has been reduced. Citizens gave them money out of embarrassment as much as pity.

There were already “shamming” beggars, who counterfeited deformity or sickness, but it was not yet a trade of shame. Some of their names have come down to us from the twelfth century, among them George a Greene, Robert the Devil and William Longbeard. Reputed to be the king of London beggars, in the reign of Henry II William Longbeard sought sanctuary in St. Mary le Bow after causing disturbances in Cheapside. Eventually he was smoked out by the officers of the court, but he was one of those early outcasts whose dispossession was a mark of pride. They were people wedded to poverty and isolation, who therefore became symbols of unaccommodated humankind. “Doe we not all come into the Worlde like arrant Beggars without a rag upon us?” Thomas Dekker wrote in the early seventeenth century. “Doe we not all go out of the Worlde like Beggars, saving an old sheete to cover us? And shall we not all walke up and downe in the Worlde like Beggars, with an old Blankett pinned about?” If God made humankind in His own image, then what curious broken-down divinity did these men and women display? This was the superstitious awe which the beggars provoked in those who passed them.

In the sixteenth century first emerged “brotherhoods” of beggars, who went by such names as the Roaring Boys, the Bonaventoes, the Quarters and the Bravadoes. They collected in Whitefriars and Moorditch and Hoxton, the field of Lincoln’s Inn and the porch of St. Bartholomew the Great; the last two locations are still used by vagrants today. All of them smoked pipes, as an emblem of their status, and were well known for their violence and their drunkenness. In Coplande’s Hye Way to the Spitel Hous (1531), he depicts beggars dolefully singing along the approach to St. Paul’s from the east, and reports one beggar asking him to “make this farthyng worth a half-penny, for the fyve joyes of our blessed lady.” Thomas Harman published accounts of London beggars in pamphlet form, emphasising their more sensational attributes and exploits. Of one Richard Horwood, a Londoner, he writes: “Well nigh eighty years old, he will bite a sixpenny nail assunder with his teeth, and a bawdy drunkard to boot.” In the spring of 1545 Henry VIII issued a proclamation against vagrants and beggars who haunted “the Bancke, and such like naughtie places”; they were to be whipped, or burned, or imprisoned upon a diet of bread and water. But nothing could stop their coming. The pace of enclosures in the countryside left many unemployed and homeless, and the return of soldiers from foreign wars increased that turbulent element. To these were added the native unemployed or unemployable, “maisterless men” as they were called, to denote very firmly the fact that they were not part of the social fabric established upon hierarchy. In 1569 some thousands of “maisterless men” were imprisoned, and in the same year the citizens manned their gates in order to prevent the entry of any groups of beggars; all the barges from Gravesend, and other likely points of departure, were searched. From this period may date the doggerel

Hark hark the dogges do bark

The Beggars are coming to Town!

In a city of wealth, the insurrection of the poor is that which is most feared. In 1581 Elizabeth I was riding by Aldersgate Bars towards the fields of Islington when she was surrounded by a group of sturdy beggars “which gave the queen much disturbance.” That evening the Recorder, Fleetwood, scoured the fields and arrested seventy-four of them. Eight years later a band of five hundred beggars threatened to sack Bartholomew Fair; at the same time they held their own fair, Durrest Fair, where stolen goods were sold.

By 1600, it was estimated that there were 12,000 beggars inhabiting the city: a large group of disaffected people who alternately cajoled or threatened the other citizens. One method of assault was the “whining chorus,” complete with wooden clappers and doleful songs such as

One small piece of money-

Among us all poor wretches-

Blind and lame!

For His sake that gave all!

Pitiful Worship!

One little doit!

Their technique depended upon their terrible appearance and their whining words.

Yet the city can harbour many forms and many disguises. In the middle of the seventeenth century Thomas Harman observed one vagrant, Genings, who begged about the Temple. He described how “his body lay out bare, a filthy foul cloth he wear on his head, being cut for the purpose, having but a narrow place to put out his face … having his face from the eyes downward, all smeared with blood, as though he had new fallen, and had been tormented with his painful pangs, his jerkin being all bewrayed with dirt and mire … surely the sight was monstrous and terrible.” Harman, suspicious of his manner, hired two boys to watch and follow him; they discovered that after his day’s work at the Temple he would return to the fields behind Clement’s Inn where he “renewed his stains from a bladder of sheep’s blood and daubed fresh mud over his legs and arms.” Apprehended by the parish watch, he was found to have a large sum of money on his person; he was forcibly washed and “seen to be a handsome stalwart with a yellow beard and astonishingly fair skin.” His genius for disguise served him well, in a city enthralled to spectacle and enamoured by appearances; how else could he make his mark upon the swiftly passing scene without being theatrical to the highest degree?

There emerged beggars who posed as madmen, otherwise known as “lurkers on the Abram sham.” They would stand on street corners, showing the mark of Bedlam-ER-upon their arms. “Master, good worship, bestow your reward on a poore man that hath lyen in Bedlam without Bishopsgate three years, four moneths, and nine days. Bestow one piece of your small silver towards his fees, which he is indebted there.” They would stick pins and nails into their flesh as a symbol of their lunacy; they would roar imprecations, or speak madly of themselves as “poor Tom.” Characteristically they wore the same garment-a jerkin with hanging sleeves-with their hair tangled in knots; they carried with them a stick of ash-wood, with a piece of bacon tied to the end of it. This in turn suggests that their mad medley became something of a theatrical routine, and that their presence on the London streets became an integral part of its scenery of suffering. Yet mingled with them also were the genuinely mad.

It has been supposed that the beggars’ brotherhoods of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were quite formal affairs with their own rites of initiation, ceremonies and rules of procedure. Each beggar was given a nickname on joining their fellowship-Great Bull, Madam Wapapace, Hye Shreve and so on-and recited a list of beggar commandments. These included such admonitions as “Thou shalt share all winnings” and “Thou shalt not divulge the secret of the canting tongue.” This tongue was not in fact unknown to Londoners, who incorporated some of its terms into Cockney, but it was unique nevertheless. It was composed of various tags and terms from other languages-Welsh, Irish, Dutch, Cockney and Latin among them- so it was in one sense an international argot. In “canting speech” “pannass” was bread and “patrico” a priest, “solomon” an altar and “prat” a buttock. “Chete” was variously applied to different things, so “crashing chetes” were teeth, “grunting chetes” were pigs and “lullaby chetes” were children. Life itself, it might be said, was a chete. The canting tongue was “said to have been invented somewhere about 1530 and its originator to have been hanged.”

In all the pamphlets and books of beggars, certain key individuals emerge as types or emblems of beggary. There was London Meg of Westminster who in the early seventeenth century became barmaid of the Eagle Inn, and was very soon notorious as a receiver of stolen goods and “protector of stray vagabonds.” She was the first of the “Roaring Girls,” one of a number of roistering and redoubtable females who walked a fine line between vagabondage, thievery and thuggery. She was “of quick capacitie, and pleasant disposition, of a liberall heart, and such a one as would be sodainely angry, and soone pleased.” She liked nothing better than at night to dress as a man, and wander through the streets of London in search of adventure; she became one of those pure urban types who are filled with the excitement and spirit of the city. The fact of her cross-dressing serves only to emphasise the crude theatricality of her exploits, in a crude and theatrical setting. In her life, however, the emphasis clearly shifts from beggary to criminality. The historians of the subject, led astray by contemporary pamphleteers, often fail to distinguish between vagrants and villains, thus compounding the original misperceptions which labelled every beggar a potential criminal.

The fact that not all beggars were villains, however, is suggested by the available records of the parish registers. “To a poore woman and her children, almost starved … For a shroude for Hunter’s child, the blind beggar man … given to a poore wretch, name forgot … to Mr. Hibb’s daughter, with childe, and likely to starve … to William Burneth in a sellar in Ragged Staff-yard, being poore and verie sicke.” On a statistical, as well as a personal, level the poverty and beggary of London “reached crisis proportions” in the 1690s. So the beggars filled the streets. It was no longer a question of “brotherhoods,” with sanctuaries in Cold Harbour or Southwark or White Friars, but something altogether more basic and desperate. A seventeenth-century report, A Discourse of Trade, noted that the poor were “in a most sad and wretched condition, some famished for want of bread, others starved with cold and nakedness.”

It has been suggested that the industrial expansion of the eighteenth century materially helped to lessen the number of beggars; more specifically, in the latter part of the century, changes in parish systems and the diminution of gin-drinking after the 1750s are supposed to have thinned their numbers. But there is no real evidence of this. There was simply a change in the nature of beggary itself. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the characteristic pattern was of beggars forming crowds, or groups, or settlements. In their place emerged the solitary or individual beggar, of which one fictional example was Moll Flanders. “I dress’d myself like a Beggar Woman, in the coarsest and most despicable Rags I could get, and I walk’d about peering, and peeping into every Door and Window I came near.” But Moll learns the lesson which is imparted in time to every beggar, that “this was a Dress that every body was shy, and afraid of; and I thought every body look’d at me, as if they were afraid I should come near them, least I should take something from them, or afraid to come near me, least they should get something from me.” What should they get from her? Abuse? Spittle? Or, more likely, disease? Beggars were the representatives of the city’s depths and the city’s dirt.

So although in the early nineteenth century there were still reports of bands or gangs of beggars roaming within the metropolis, particularly after the ending of the Napoleonic Wars, the general focus of interpretation was upon the individual figure. It is a strange reversal of the dominant mood, when “classes” were emerging from the heterogeneity of eighteenth-century London and when the whole emphasis came to rest upon the “systems” of the city; yet this process itself rendered the individual beggar more isolated and in a literal sense déclassé.

In 1817 J.T. Smith published Vagabondiana: or, Anecdotes of Mendicant Wanderers through the streets of London; with Portraits of the most Remarkable drawn from the life, which emphasised the postures and expressions of the blind and the crippled. One example is that of “A Legless Jewish Mendicant of Petticoat Lane,” in which an aged patriarch with a battered hat sits in a kind of wooden cart upon wheels. Behind him is a wall with a graffito of a grinning man, or skeleton. A hundred years before, the hordes of vagrants would have defied individual representation.

Four years later the French painter Théodore Géricault depicted two scenes of poverty and beggary on the streets; it was the year after he had exhibited The Raft of the Medusa in the Egyptian Hall off Piccadilly, and all the tenderness of his nature found expression in Pity the Sorrows of a Poor Old Man whose Trembling Limbs have Born him to Your Door and A Paraleytic Woman. In the first of them the helpless old man leans against a wall; he is accompanied by a dog, with an old twisted rope for a lead. The dog, the “bufe” in beggars’ cant, has always been the companion of the London outcast; its presence not only suggests a wandering life, but also marks a type of friendlessness and isolation. The dog is the beggar’s only companion in this world of need; it has connotations, too, of blindness and general affliction. In Géricault’s second sketch a young mother and child look back at the paralysed old woman, with a gaze both of pity and of apprehension. Once more her solitude is being emphasised, quite different from the solidarity and conviviality of the “beggar brotherhoods.” There is another aspect of this isolation, in the sense that no one wishes to come too close. The fear of contagion proves too strong; it is not just the contagion of disease, however, but that of fear and anxiety. What if I were to become like you?

The records of nineteenth-century street-life are filled with memories and recollections of these phantoms. “Perhaps some of my readers,” Mayhew once wrote, “may remember having noticed a wretched-looking youth who hung over the words “I AM STARVING” chalked on the footway on the Surrey side of Waterloo Bridge. He lay huddled in a heap, and appeared half-dead with cold and want, his shirtless neck and shoulders being visible through the rents in his thin jean jacket; shoe or stocking he did not wear.” The author of Highways and Byways of London recalled an old man who had a particular corner along Oxford Street-“feeble, pitiful, wizened, who carried an empty black bag, and stretched it out to me appealingly. The contents, if any, of the black bag I never discovered; but I often gave him a penny, simply because he was so unutterably pathetic. He is gone now, and his place knows him no more. But he always haunts my dreams.” There was a crippled beggar who always sat under the picture gallery in Trafalgar Square, his “frail body propped on a padded crutch” and his “lean long fingers fluttering the keys of an old accordion.”

Joanna Schopenhauer, the mother of the philosopher, published her account of London in 1816, and left her description of one remarkable beggar who was supposed to be the sister of Mrs. Siddons the actress. She had been brought low by misfortune, and perhaps madness, but was always greeted with a curious reverence on the streets of London where she preferred “to live on the charity of strangers. We often saw this curious apparition. She always wore a black silk hat, which left her face and features clearly visible, a green woollen dress, a large snow-white apron and a kerchief also white.” She was supported by two crutches, and never begged or asked for anything, yet still those who passed her felt “obliged, even driven, to give her something.” She was a native of the streets, a tutelary presence to which offerings had to be made.

Charles Lamb wrote an essay in the 1820s, entitled “A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis,” which remarked upon one of those sporadic and inconclusive attempts by the civic authorities to “clear the streets”; there have through the centuries been proclamations and policies, but the beggars always return. Lamb in elegiac mood, however, anticipated their passing. “The mendicants of this great city were so many of her sights, her lions. I can no more spare them than I could the cries of London. No corner of the street is complete without them. They are as indispensable as the ballad-singer, and in their picturesque attire as ornamental as the signs of old London.” The beggar somehow embodies the city, perhaps because he or she is an eternal type; like the games and songs of children, endlessly recurrent. As Lamb suggests, the beggar “is the only man in the universe who is not obliged to study appearances. The ups and downs of the world concern him no longer.” Beyond the fleeting appearances of the world he represents unchanging identity. So beggars became “the standing morals, emblems, mementoes, dial-mottos, the spital sermons, the books for children, the salutary checks and pauses to the high and rushing tide of greasy citizenry-look upon that poor and broken bankrupt there.” The example of the bankrupt is apposite; in a city devoted to the pursuit of money there is a dignity to be derived from complete impoverishment, and in his rags the beggar was a standing reproach to those intent upon “appearances.”

By the mid-century, when all forms of urban existence were under intense scrutiny, the beggar became the object of research and record. The growth of social control and system in mid-Victorian London, for example, covered the phenomenon of beggary. A “Mendicity Society” was established in Red Lion Square, where all the beggars of the metropolis were classified and described. Charles Dickens was in many respects a generous benefactor to the poor, but he was never slow to “report” an apparently shamming beggar, or begging-letter writer, to the society.

Charles Babbage, the inventor of the Analytic Engine and “father of the computer” as well as the author of Tables of Logarithms, made a systematic study of London beggars. He records that, walking home “from the hot rooms of an evening party” he was often followed “through a drizzling rain” by “a half-clad miserable female, with an infant in her arms and sometimes accompanied by another just able to walk” begging for a little charity. He asked for details of their circumstances, and discovered that they lied to him. He was once introduced, in a dense fog, to “a pale emaciated man” who in the words of the owner of a common lodging house “has tasted nothing during the last two days but water from the pump on the opposite side of the street.” Babbage gave him some clothes and a little money, and the young man said that he was about to accept a situation “of steward in a small West Indiaman.” But again he was lying. “He had been living riotously at some public-house in another quarter, and had been continually drunk.” So Charles Babbage brought him before the magistrates. He was remanded for a week, duly lectured and discharged.

What are we to make of these examples of London beggars? They were the outcasts of the city, first seen in drizzling rain or dense fog like exhalations of the lead and stone. They lived upon the margins of existence and, in all cases, seemed doomed to an early death. The stages of emaciation and drunkenness, in the young man, followed quickly upon one another. They were persistent cheats and liars because they had no connection with the ordered and comfortable society which Babbage represented; their reality was so precarious that they had nothing left to lose. They were living in a different state of human existence. Only London could harbour them.

One fear behind these attempts at survey and statistic was that which touched upon the most primitive impulse. What if the beggars were multiplying out of control? “The crop,” one late nineteenth-century writer put it, “has kept pace with the increase of the population.” That was the great fear, the engendering of a species clinging so closely to London that it could not be distinguished or removed from it. It was also feared that the changes in urban society would reproduce themselves in the nature of beggary itself, so that, as Blanchard Jerrold put it, “the cheat has developed, the vagrant has become a systematic traveller, the beggar has a hundred stories … which the rascal of old could not employ.” There were “disaster beggars,” for example, which included “shipwrecked mariners, blown up miners, burnt out tradesmen, and lucifer droppers.” The unfortunate mariner “is familiar to the London public in connection with rudely executed paintings representing either a ship wreck, or more commonly the destruction of a boat by a whale in the North Seas. This painting they spread upon the pavement, fixing it at the corners, if the day be windy, with stones.” There were generally two men in attendance, and in most cases one of them had lost an arm or a leg. Curiously enough, the nineteenth-century handbooks on beggary are very much like their sixteenth-century counterparts; there is the same emphasis upon the dramatic ability of the beggar, together with the repertoire of his or her favourite tricks and dodges. It is almost as if a separate race had indeed perpetuated itself.

Like any native population they had their particular beats or districts, and were identified by such. There were the “Pye street beggars” and the “St. Giles beggars” while individuals did their own particular “runs.” “I always keep on this side of Tottenham Court Road,” a blind beggar confided to an investigator in the 1850s. “I never go over the road; my dog knows that. I am going down there. That’s Chenies-street. Oh, I know where I am; next turning to the right is Alfred-street, the next to the left is Francis-street, and when I get to the end of that the dog will stop.” So London can be mapped out through routes of supplication.

The beggars also learned the temperament of their fellow dwellers in the city. The rich and the middle class gave nothing at all, on the assumption that all beggars were impostors; this was of course the theme of official and quasi-official reports, which they willingly and gladly accepted. In a city beginning to be ruled by system, systematic prejudice also emerged. “If the power of reasoning were universally allotted to mankind,” wrote John Binny, the author of Thieves and Swindlers, “there would be a poor chance for the professional beggar.” The more affluent sort of tradesmen were also immune to appeal. But beggars were successful “amongst tradesmen of the middle class, and among the poor working people.” Their particular benefactors were the wives of working men, which corresponds to the testimony of others that the London poor were charitable to the poor whose need was greater than their own. It suggests also that, contrary to public opinion, not all beggars were impostors; there were some who summoned up fellow feeling.

By the end of the nineteenth century the beggars complained that their lives and careers were being threatened by the twin forces of the new police and the Mendicity Society, but there is no sure way of discovering whether their numbers were significantly diminished. Certainly contemporary statistics and descriptions would suggest that they were still “swarming,” to employ a favourite term, over the metropolis. Indeed it would be sensible to suggest that, the larger the population, the greater the number of beggars.

Memoirs of the early twentieth century do not report bands or troupes of beggars, but specific individuals who customarily made a pretence of selling matches or lozenges as a cover for begging. They were required to own a “hawker’s licence,” which cost five shillings a year, and then they selected their “patch.” One, on the corner of the West End Lane and Finchley Road, used to wind up a gramophone; another used to wander along Corbyn Road with a single box of matches; there was an organ-grinder called “Shorty” who used to “work” Whitechapel and the Commercial Road; there was Mr. Matthewman who used to sit outside Finchley Road Underground Station with a “pedlar’s pack” and a tin mug. These are all stray cases, but they impart the flavour of London begging between the wars. The author of London’s Underworld, Thomas Holmes, remarks: “it is all so pitiful, it is too much for me, for sometimes I feel that I am living with them, tramping with them, sleeping with them, eating with them; I become as one of them.” It is the sensation of vertigo, of being drawn to the edge of the precipice in order to throw oneself down. How easy it must be to become one of them, and willingly to go under. This is the other possibility which the city affords. It offers freedom from ordinary cares, and all the evidence suggests that many beggars actually enjoyed their liberty to wander and to watch the world.

The sellers of bootlaces and matches have gone and in their place, in the twenty-first century, have come “the homeless” who sleep in doorways; they carry their blankets with them as a token of their status. Some of them have all the characteristics of their predecessors; they are slow-witted, or drunken, or in some other way disabled from leading an “ordinary” existence. Others are shrewd and quick-witted, and not unwilling to practise the old arts of shamming. But such cases, perhaps, form the minority. Others find that they are genuinely unable to cope with the demands of the city; they fear the world too much, or find it difficult to acquire friends and form relationships. What will the world of London seem to them then? It becomes a place which the dispossessed and homeless of all ages have experienced: a maze of suspicion, aggression and small insults.

The vagrants have always had to accommodate themselves to the hardness and incuriosity of Londoners. In his poem “The Approach to St. Paul’s” James Thomson is jostled by anxious crowds whose

heart and brain

Were so absorbed in dreams of Mammon-gain

That they could spare no time to look upon-

To look upon what? Those who had fallen along the way. It happens “only in so large a place as London,” Samuel Johnson suggests, “where people are not known.”

This unseen world exists still in the early twenty-first century, although it has changed its outward form. The close-packed tenements of Stepney have gone, but the high-rise estates have taken their place. The “hereditary casuals” have been replaced by those seeking “benefit.” The shelters of London have become the homes of the dispossessed, marked by what Honor Marshall describes in Twilight London as “mental disorder, family disruption, in particular the broken marriage; chronic ill health, recidivism, prostitution, alcoholism.” In Wellclose Square there was a mission designed to harbour “the people nobody wants,” the rejected and the discarded who would otherwise simply fade into the streets. They fade because nobody sees them. There are certain busy places of London, like the forecourt of Charing Cross Station, where lines of people queue for soup from a Salvation Army mobile canteen; but for the crowds hurrying past them, it is as if they were not there at all. A beggar can lie immobile among happy crowds of people drinking outside a pub, unacknowledged and unregarded. In turn these dispossessed people gradually lose all contact with the external world; and in London it is easier to go under than in any other part of the country. A recent survey of a night shelter in central London, reported in No Way Home by S. Randall, revealed that “four fifths of young people … were from outside London and most were recent arrivals”; the city is, as ever, voracious. A quarter had been “in care,” half had already “slept rough,” and nearly three-quarters “did not know where they were going next.” They were characteristically in ill health, with inadequate clothing and no money. This night shelter was at Centre-point, beside the site of the old rookery of St. Giles where previous migrants to London had lived in rags.

CHAPTER 66. They Outvoted Me

London drives some of its citizens mad. A psychiatric survey in the 1970s revealed that cases of depressive illness were three times higher in the East End than in the rest of the country. Schizophrenia was also a common condition.

As early as the fourteenth century the hospital of St. Mary of Bethlem had begun to care for those sick in mind. “Pore naked Bedlam, Tom’s a-cold.” “God Almighty bless thy five wits-Tom’s a-cold!” Their cries might also have been heard in St. Mary, Barking, “a hospital for priests and inhabitants of London, both male and female, who were inflicted with insanity.” Yet it is through Bethlem that London has always been associated with insanity. Thomas More asked if the city itself were not a great madhouse, with all its afflicted and distracted, so that Bethlem became the epitome or little world of London. In 1403 the records suggest that there were nine inmates supervised by a master, a porter and his wife, as well as a number of servants. But the number of patients steadily increased. In the Chronicles of London, dated 1450, there is a reference to “A Church of Our Lady that is named Bedlam. And in that place be found many men that be fallen out of their wit. And full honestly they be kept in that place; and some be restored unto their wit and health again. And some be abiding therein forever, for they be fallen so much out of themselves that is incurable to man.”

Some were allowed to leave the “madman’s pound,” as it was known, in order to wander the streets as mendicants; a tin badge on the left arm signified their status, and they were variously known as “God’s minstrels” or “anticks.” There was dread and superstition, as well as pity, surrounding them; in the streets of the city they might be regarded as tokens of the city’s madness. They were wandering spirits-sometimes abject and sometimes prophetic, sometimes melancholy and sometimes denunciatory-calling attention to the naked human condition in a city that prided itself upon its artifice and civilisation.

Early sixteenth-century maps show “Bedlame Gate” beside the highway of Bishopsgate. You opened this gate and walked into a courtyard with a number of small stone buildings; here was a church and a garden. There were thirty-one of the insane crowded into a space designed for twenty-four, where “the cryings, screechings, roarings, brawlings, shaking of chains, swearings, frettings, chafings are so many, so hideous, so great; that they are more able to drive a man that hath his wits rather out of them.” The usual treatment was the whip and the chain. In an inventory are mentioned “six chains with locks and keys belonging to them, four pairs of iron manacles, five other chains of iron, and two pairs of stocks.” Thomas More writes in that century of a man who had “ben put uppe in bedelem, and afterward by betyinge and correccyon gathered hys remembraunce to hym,” so it can be assumed that punishment or “correction” was considered efficacious. You had to be brave to be mad.

By the early seventeenth century Bedlam had become the only hospital used for the incarceration of “lunaticks.” The preponderance of them were “vagrants, apprentices and servants, with a sprinking of scholars and gentlemen. Of the fifteen vagrants, eleven were women.” There were many wandering the streets of London who might be deemed mad, and could be thrown into the compter for the night, but they generally remained at liberty. The large proportion of female vagrants among the inmates of Bedlam, approximately one in three, also throws a suggestive light on the life of the London streets.

One inmate was Lady Eleanor Davis who was confined in the winter of 1636 for proclaiming herself a prophet; she was kept in the steward’s house, rather than in the ordinary ward, but she later complained that Bedlam itself was “like hell-such were the blasphemies and the noisome scenes.” It was “the house of such restless cursing,” and she complained that the steward and his wife abused her when they were “very farre gone in drincke.” So Bedlam represented an intensification of the worst aspects of London life. That is why, in the early years of the seventeenth century, it was put on stage. In a number of dramas the madhouse became the scene of violence and intrigue, where the inmates act

Such antic and such pretty lunacies,

That spite of sorrow they will make you smile.

These lines are from Thomas Dekker’s play of 1604, The Honest Whore, which was the first to include scenes within Bedlam itself.

The fact that London contained the only madhouse in the country was in itself suggestive to dramatists. In Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi madness is associated with various urban professions, such as that of a tailor “crazed i’ the brain with the study of new fashions,” intimating once more that life in the city can render you insane. It is the most important point of contact between London and lunacy. There was another important association manifested in John Fletcher’s The Pilgrim of 1621, where the drama is concerned with the mental stability of the keepers rather than the patients. If the custodians and gaolers are mad, then so is the society that bestowed their status and responsibilities upon them.

The old madhouse was, by the middle of the seventeenth century, in such a squalid and ruinous condition that it had become a civic scandal. So in 1673 it was decided that a great modern building, situated in Moorfields, would take its place. Designed upon the model of the Tuileries Palace, and decorated with gardens and columns, it took three years to complete. Above its entry gate the sculptor, Cibber, created two bald-headed and semi-naked figures called “Raving Madness” and “Melancholy Madness”; they became one of the great sights of London, rivalling the fame of those earlier guardians of the city Gog and Magog. From this time forward Bethlem Hospital acquired its true renown; visitors, foreign travellers and writers flocked to its apartments in order to see the mad confined within them. It was of great importance to the city, and to the civic authorities, that lunacy should be seen to be managed and restrained. It was part of the great movement of “reason” after the Great Fire and the plague, when the city itself had become the scene of madness and unreason on an enormous scale. Daniel Defoe had narrated the events of 1665 when so many citizens were “raving and distracted, and oftentime laying violent hands upon themselves, throwing themselves out of their windows, shooting themselves, mothers murdering their own children in their lunacy-some dying of mere grief as a passion, and some of mere fright and surprise without any infection at all, others frightened into despair and melancholy madness.” Londoners had a propensity for mania; perhaps that was the condition for their very existence in the city.

Yet, as if to point the moral that lunacy is undignified and absurd, the inmates were on display like so many wild beasts in a zoo; they were ravening creatures that had to be manacled or tied. There were two galleries, one above the other; on each floor a corridor ran along a line of cells, with an iron gate in the middle to divide the males from females. Outside it seemed to be a palace; inside, it closely resembled a prison. The price of admission was a penny and it has been reported that the “distempered fancies of the miserable patients most unaccountably provoked mirth and loud laughter in the unthinking auditors; and the many hideous roarings, and wild motions of others, seemed equally entertaining to them. Nay so shamefully inhuman were some … as to provoke the patients into rage to make them sport.” This “familiar letter” from Samuel Richardson provides a mid-eighteenth century picture of desolation which is fully documented by other sources.

One other commentator, on witnessing these scenes, remarked “that the maddest people in this kingdom are not in but out of Bedlam.” Here was the most curious thing: the building in Moorfields provoked irrational behaviour in its visitors as well as in its inmates, the whole scene of “wild motions” (which can be deemed to be sexual) and “hideous roarings” creating an unimaginable confusion of types and roles. Prostitutes used to linger in the galleries, looking for custom, on the principle that lustfulness might be excited by the antics of the mad. It was suggested, only half seriously, that another asylum be built to house those who came to mock and make sport of the insane. So it might seem that the contagion of madness spread from Moorfields across the whole city.

Thus, in the literature of the period, “Bedlam” becomes a potent metaphor for all the evils of London. In Pope’s verses it casts its shadow over Grub Street, where poverty and lack of accomplishment have driven many mad. Traherne wrote that

The World’s one Bedlam, or a greater Cave

Of Mad-men, that do alwaies rave.

John Locke compared temporary madness to being lost in the streets of a strange city, a suggestive analogy which was taken up by many observers of London. In Smollett’s Humphry Clinker, for example, Matt Bramble remarks of Londoners that “All is tumult and hurry; one would imagine that they were impelled by some disorder of the brain, that will not suffer them to be at rest … How can I help supposing they are actually possessed by a spirit, more absurd and pernicious than anything we meet within the precincts of Bedlam?” So the building at Moorfields rears over a city which is infected with the same disorder. The citizens of London live in a state of unnatural energy and uproar; they live in foul houses with no light or air; they are driven by the whip of business and money-making; they are surrounded by all the images of lust and violence. They are living in Bedlam.

By the end of the eighteenth century Bethlem Hospital had acquired its own patina of decay and desolation. In 1799 a commission described it as “dreary, low and melancholy” as if the material fabric had been infected by the melancholy madness of its inhabitants. The neighbourhood was itself suffused with dreariness; the hospital was “surrounded by squalid houses” as well as a number of shops dealing in old furniture. So in 1807 it was agreed that the institution should move across the river to Southwark. The third Bedlam in London’s history rose within appropriate surroundings, since Southwark had always been the nursery of prisons and other institutions.

The new building was as grand as its predecessor, with a portico decorated with Ionic columns and surmounted by a great dome. Yet the conditions of the interior were as sparse as before, as if once again the whole purpose of the building was a theatrical display designed to depict the triumph over lunacy in London. The two sculpted giants of madness, known popularly as “the brainless brothers,” were kept in the vestibule.

Methods of treatment remained severe, and were largely dependent on mechanical restraint; one patient lay in chains for fourteen years. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that a more “enlightened” policy was developed; after two inquiries had been severely critical of the hospital regime, a “moral medical” treatment was instituted with the patients being given jobs or occupations as well as medical therapy with drugs such as chloral and digitalis.

It was a world within a world. Its water came from an artesian well within the grounds, so that the patients remained free of the cholera and dysentery which raged around them. And there was a monthly ball, where the patients danced with one another; many observers commented on this moving and somewhat bizarre occasion. Yet still the persistent question about madness remained. Charles Dickens walked past the hospital one night, and was moved to reflect: “Are not all of us outside of this hospital, who dream, more or less in the condition of those inside it every night of our lives?”

The rate of insanity in London had tripled by the middle of the nineteenth century, and other institutions for the mentally ill were established; those of Hanwell and Colney Hatch were perhaps the best known. Bethlem moved to the country, near Beckenham, in 1930, but by that time the capital was well stocked with asylums. These in turn have become known as mental health units or “trusts,” where patients are “service users.”

In more recent years, too, the mentally ill have been released on medication “into the community.” On the streets of London it is not uncommon to see passers-by talking rapidly to themselves and sometimes gesticulating wildly. On most main thoroughfares you will see a lone figure huddled in a posture of despair, or staring vacantly. Occasionally a stranger will shout at, or offer violence to, others. There was once a famous saying of London life,

Go thy way! Let me go mine

to which may be added,

I to rage, and you to dine.