London: The Biography

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.