London: The Biography

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.