Streetlife in Late Victorian London

The Constable and the Crowd

P. Andersson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137320902
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

Focusing on the everyday behaviour of people in the late-Victorian street, this extensive study provides an alternative history of the modern city, and sheds new light on the relationship between police constables and civilians. A wealth of source material is scrutinised to explore this public interaction in the capital.

1

Introduction

London!

There is a world of difference between an expression and the thing it expresses. But with something that is made up of almost nothing but expressions, such as the remnants of the past, our search for the latter becomes futile. Unless, that is, we distinguish between the consciously phrased expression and that which is expressed by the way, in passing, between the lines, and identify this as something close to the thing itself before it is focused on and put into words.

When the French feminist author Flora Tristan writes up her impressions on visiting ‘the monster city’ – London – in 1840, she finds it apt to make use of numerous exclamation marks. ‘What an immense city London is! That size, out of all proportion to the area and population of the British Isles, immediately calls to mind the oppression of India and the commercial superiority of England!’ And she has exclamation marks to spare:

But it is especially in the evening that one must see London! London glitters with the magic lights of millions of gas lamps! Its endless wide streets, its shops … the immense expanse of parks outlined by their beautiful curves, the handsome trees, the multitude of superb carriages drawn by magnificent horses – all these splendid things have an enchantment about them that captivates the judgment! And so there is no foreigner who is not fascinated upon entering the British metropolis.¹

‘Superb’, ‘magnificent’, ‘splendid’. She was not the only writer of her time who was given to superlatives in the face of cities. Writers who did not make London out to be a showcase for splendour and extravagance generally took it one step further and, in the spirit of fin de siècle ‘spleen’, stressed how the overbearing impressions of the city numbed the weary observer. Thomas Hardy in one of his early poems, written while he was still a city clerk in the 1870s, sees no escape for the poor flâneur ‘from the rut of Oxford Street into open ways; / And he goes along with head and eyes flagging forlorn, / Empty of interest in things, and wondering why he was born.’²

But this is not the whole story. At the same time, Hardy is writing letters to his sister in much more restrained terms. He complains about the rain and the pea-souper fog that makes it ‘almost pitch dark in the middle of the day’ and notes in passing, ‘I tried the Underground Railway one day – Everything is excellently arranged.’³ Suchlike descriptions of the routine of everyday life in Victorian London fill most available letters and diaries. Marion Sambourne, wife of the famous cartoonist Lynley Sambourne, listed activities in her diaries characterised by slowness and routine: ‘Polished two pieces of furniture, watered plants, looked out things for Roy [her son], cut out cloth for armchair’, she wrote in September 1891. Even when she goes out into the streets her reports are quite anaemic: ‘Called on Mrs Kemp, Mrs Christopher, Mrs Humphreys, all out. Had tea at Mrs Holmes, stayed some time. Called and had tea at Mrs Tuer’s and at Miss Hogarth’s, saw Mrs Andrews and girls there, sent carriage home & walked back.’⁴

These examples illustrate how a conveying of impressions and a narrative of actions disclose two different mindsets. Asked to state your opinion on something or other in your everyday life, you may start to reflect upon it consciously, in a way you have not done before, and even change your attitude to it. Asked to state what you do in your everyday life, you might not be as inclined to venture an opinion. Studies in cultural history often have the ambition to get at the unreflected experience, but tend to settle for the more readily available versions as written down in books or articles or diaries. The cultural history of the modern city is a case in point. Much of it refers to the reflected urban experience rather than the momentary practised experience of it. In fact, I would argue that our understanding of cities today has been shaped to a significant extent by reflections made on the modern city from a certain viewpoint and expressed in certain sources.

The people who did not reflect as explicitly and, most importantly, who never transferred their experiences into writing, have not been as pivotal in this act of shaping. They have been taken note of, of course, and their experiences have been studied, but not to the same extent, and seldom in relation to the more abstract notions of urbanism and modernity. This book is an attempt at contributing to change this, and it does so by focusing not on written reflections but on everyday practice and social behaviour. I believe we need to study and think about the way we act in and arrange our urban daily life so that we do not misunderstand it and demonise or dismiss it as irrelevant.⁵ It is important to examine our modern order of city life in its phase of conception. By going back a century we can extract what disappears, what emerges and what lives on in the development of urban behaviour. We divulge the stakes of the history of urban behaviour at a crucial time in its evolution.

At this time a few cities in Europe, mainly London, Paris, Berlin and Vienna, took the lead in the development of urbanisation and growth. All these cities had their special characteristics. Paris has been described as ‘the capital of modernity’ and identified with developments in urban planning and technological innovation as well as the anomie of the urban scene which created that most famous of nineteenth-century urban types – the flâneur. Berlin started growing fairly late in the century, but from about 1870 to 1920 it grew to become the world’s third largest city, at the same time nurturing an identity intimately close to its industrial development and, unlike the other cities, forgetful of its past. Vienna has been used to represent, in the words of Donald J. Olsen, ‘the triumph of art over reality’ through its highlighting of imperial splendour at the expense of its social fabric, but was simultaneously slow in introducing facilities such as modern transport and gas lighting.⁶

London, however, was at the forefront of the urban process, growing rapidly in the course of the nineteenth century. In 1801 its population was 1 million, in 1851 2.7 million and in 1871 3.9 million. It was the world’s largest city, and in that capacity it doubtlessly contained what made all the other cities special. To single out a city as characterised by this or that is a simplification, and so whatever reasons one might have for studying this city and not that are bound to be arbitrary, but I think it is possible to argue that the main reason why this book is about London is its size and the fact that it had been a great deal larger than its rivals for some time. For while Paris and Berlin were bursting and developing new living conditions, London was already boasting crowds, pollution and alienation.⁷ These were things that had been noted since at least the eighteenth century. And at the same time this was, in hindsight, the dawn of ‘the age of cities’. So the unique combination of the consequences of its size and the early start of its development makes London a good starting point for an investigation into the relationship between urbanism and human behaviour.

This book starts from the assumption that there is a difference between conscious expressions and statements made in passing, pertaining to something else, but that the latter can say just as much as the former, even if they are harder to get at. The latter relate actions, gestures and social conduct incidentally, while meaning to say something more important. By gathering together actions, such as those related on the following pages, we are able to write a new version of the history of the modern city. The life of the city is in the streets, and in the little incidents that happen when people rub shoulders in a limited arena, just as much as in the parlours and drawing rooms, where literate men and women set themselves down to write what they think the city is like.

The City as We (Think We) Know It

The purpose of this study is to redress what I perceive as an imbalance in the historiography of urban life. We live in an age when cities occupy our minds to a great degree, and when historians writing the history of the city are hardly a scarce commodity. In fact, an article on urban history in a Danish historical journal a few years ago stated that ‘there is no room for them all!’⁸ So what, exactly, do I think is lacking?

The history of ‘the modern city’, which has been added to for at least the last hundred years, has a few recurring themes. First, there is the adjective used to describe the great cities of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – modern. Some scholars have studied the emergence of cities in close connection with the emergence of modernity to the extent that the city has often been seen as an embodiment of modernity. Although this can hardly be denied in the technical or physical definition of modernity as representing new forms of communication, manufacturing and building technologies, modernity has also often stood for a mental or cultural shift. Writer Marshall Berman’s influential conception of modernity draws heavily on the understanding of ‘modern man’ as created by the urban nature of his life, making his senses sharpened, his spirit fragmented, his soul exhausted to the point where jaded indifference sets in. All this is a result of the bustle and chaos of the city, the impersonal nature of its hurried existence and the technological efficiency at its heart.⁹ Berman’s notions are in fact related to earlier theories introduced by sociologists at the turn of the twentieth century. Most noteworthy among these is Georg Simmel, who stated that the overdose of sensory impressions which people were subjected to in a large city created a ‘stimulus overload’ in urban dwellers, making them jaded and distanced.¹⁰

Second, and closely related to the theme of modernity, is the theme of ‘the city of strangers’. It can hardly be denied that people who encounter each other on a busy pavement in a big city are generally strangers to one another. Nonetheless, this condition has led many students of the city down a certain path of interpretation, seeing this distance as a sign of something bad, of a moral decay, alienation or degeneration.¹¹ The theme is especially prominent in the large quantity of research conducted on the flâneur, the detached urban wanderer, who crops up in many pieces of fiction from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The flâneur has often been allowed to transcend from literary studies into historical research, functioning as a symbol of the specifically urban way of life which turns the individual into a spectator rather than an actor, the anonymous consumer of mass culture.¹² The flâneur has been thoroughly probed since Walter Benjamin established it as an urban archetype in the 1920s, taking inspiration both from the poet Baudelaire and from Simmel. A later proponent of similar ideas is sociologist Richard Sennett, who uses the ‘city of strangers’ theme in proposing his tenet that modern city life is unsociable and impersonal, making people retreat into their private lives. This makes the private realm flourish, drawing attention to the individual psyche, while the public sphere is rendered lifeless and public interaction turns into superficial posturing.¹³

However, the main proponents of these two themes – Sennett and Berman, especially – while introducing influential theses, are quite limited in their empirical foundation. Berman’s essentially literary studies have often been used to indicate a more widespread urban culture, while Sennett aspires to general conclusions concerning history with a study of very limited sources which cover only fractions of the historical societies he writes about. Needless to say, of course, ‘modern man’ in these works is not a gender-neutral term. Virtually all of the people these writers refer to are men. Adjustments have been attempted, most notably in accentuating the female flâneur, or directing criticism towards the hegemonic stance of modernity in urban history, but, although these themes are not as frequently reproduced anymore, there has not really been a shift in focus away from the parts of urban society that laid the foundation for these themes, and so the relevance of the themes has never quite been questioned.¹⁴

The historiography of the Victorian city in recent years has been dominated by cultural historians focusing on the ‘image’ of the city or on representations of some phenomenon or other within the urban world. Prominent examples include Judith Walkowitz and Alan Mayne, both of whom use newspaper representations of salient Victorian topics – prostitution and slums, respectively – to demonstrate how Victorian social problems were to a large extent shaped by how they were imagined in the public sphere. The conception of urban space has been probed by Lynda Nead and Richard Dennis, innovative in moving the focus away from written sources towards the physical space of the city and pictorial representations of it, but still adhering to those imaginations most readily discernible through newspapers, literature and official documents. What Nead and Dennis do contribute is, among other things, a reconception of modernity, which is highly critical of its orthodox definition at the same time as they use the term to describe uneven social processes. For Nead, modernity is a process which is in constant interaction with the past, haunted by its ever present antitheses, constituting ‘no uncompromised newness, just a constant struggle with history’. Dennis, in a similar vein, wishes to tone down the rigidity of the language of modernity by making connections between the abstraction of the theory and concrete urban experience.¹⁵

The conclusions of these works are not erroneous, of course, but their degree of representativity for the urban experience in the late nineteenth century is something on which I would like to cast doubt. Narrowing one’s perspective to that of literary or artistic representations means defining away that vast majority of people who had no means for, or interests in, committing their words or perceptions to paper. Writing the cultural history of the city seems to mean writing the history of how a small minority viewed the city and ‘the other half’, which in actuality was an overwhelming majority and, at best, is gleaned from photographs or characters in the novels of Dickens and Gissing. It does not have to be like this, and when urban history takes a greater interest in the perspective of the people on the ground, grand narratives, such as that of modernity, may be adjusted, and their role significantly downplayed.

Attempts at such a history – an ‘urban history from below’ – have a choice of either proposing a conflicting narrative or presenting a more fragmentary view of history. Influential schools of research include those devoting attention to the relationships of urban communities, the non-élite cultures and leisure in nineteenth-century cities. An English historiography of ‘working-class neighbourhoods’ and their ‘urban village communities’ has emerged from the interests of social historians in the 1970s and 1980s. Moving away from depictions of class antagonisms and labour struggles, this trail has revolved around matters of gender relations and family life, contributing valuable insights into things like childrearing, public sociability and gossip. The underlying idea is that social and moral standards were upheld by the networks and mutual surveillance of neighbours.¹⁶ A related body of research on ‘workers’ culture’ in the big cities of Germany in the nineteenth century has likewise increasingly opposed notions that city life was shaped exclusively by political or economic factors, suggesting that poor urban dwellers developed their own vibrant culture in resistance to efforts of disciplining from authorities or commercial forces. This culture was diverse in that it could include multiple strategies for self-identification apart from class or politics (based, for instance, on occupation, age or religion), while containing, at the same time, elements that singled it out as a cohesive culture.¹⁷

Both these schools tend to point out historical continuities in the urbanisation processes of the nineteenth century, mainly consisting of ways of life that persisted despite the move from the country to the city, thereby constituting a counterpoise to the modernity thesis. However, a more overt spotlight on streetlife and interaction practices has mainl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Victorian London and Its Streets
• Chapter 3 Straddling the Public and Parochial Realms
• Chapter 4 Moving, Shoving and Standing Still
• Chapter 5 Managing Appearances
• Chapter 6 Managing Manners
• Chapter 7 Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index