London: The Biography

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.