London: The Biography

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?