London: The Biography

Charles Babbage, the inventor of the Analytic Engine and “father of the computer” as well as the author of Tables of Logarithms, made a systematic study of London beggars. He records that, walking home “from the hot rooms of an evening party” he was often followed “through a drizzling rain” by “a half-clad miserable female, with an infant in her arms and sometimes accompanied by another just able to walk” begging for a little charity. He asked for details of their circumstances, and discovered that they lied to him. He was once introduced, in a dense fog, to “a pale emaciated man” who in the words of the owner of a common lodging house “has tasted nothing during the last two days but water from the pump on the opposite side of the street.” Babbage gave him some clothes and a little money, and the young man said that he was about to accept a situation “of steward in a small West Indiaman.” But again he was lying. “He had been living riotously at some public-house in another quarter, and had been continually drunk.” So Charles Babbage brought him before the magistrates. He was remanded for a week, duly lectured and discharged.

What are we to make of these examples of London beggars? They were the outcasts of the city, first seen in drizzling rain or dense fog like exhalations of the lead and stone. They lived upon the margins of existence and, in all cases, seemed doomed to an early death. The stages of emaciation and drunkenness, in the young man, followed quickly upon one another. They were persistent cheats and liars because they had no connection with the ordered and comfortable society which Babbage represented; their reality was so precarious that they had nothing left to lose. They were living in a different state of human existence. Only London could harbour them.

One fear behind these attempts at survey and statistic was that which touched upon the most primitive impulse. What if the beggars were multiplying out of control? “The crop,” one late nineteenth-century writer put it, “has kept pace with the increase of the population.” That was the great fear, the engendering of a species clinging so closely to London that it could not be distinguished or removed from it. It was also feared that the changes in urban society would reproduce themselves in the nature of beggary itself, so that, as Blanchard Jerrold put it, “the cheat has developed, the vagrant has become a systematic traveller, the beggar has a hundred stories … which the rascal of old could not employ.” There were “disaster beggars,” for example, which included “shipwrecked mariners, blown up miners, burnt out tradesmen, and lucifer droppers.” The unfortunate mariner “is familiar to the London public in connection with rudely executed paintings representing either a ship wreck, or more commonly the destruction of a boat by a whale in the North Seas. This painting they spread upon the pavement, fixing it at the corners, if the day be windy, with stones.” There were generally two men in attendance, and in most cases one of them had lost an arm or a leg. Curiously enough, the nineteenth-century handbooks on beggary are very much like their sixteenth-century counterparts; there is the same emphasis upon the dramatic ability of the beggar, together with the repertoire of his or her favourite tricks and dodges. It is almost as if a separate race had indeed perpetuated itself.

Like any native population they had their particular beats or districts, and were identified by such. There were the “Pye street beggars” and the “St. Giles beggars” while individuals did their own particular “runs.” “I always keep on this side of Tottenham Court Road,” a blind beggar confided to an investigator in the 1850s. “I never go over the road; my dog knows that. I am going down there. That’s Chenies-street. Oh, I know where I am; next turning to the right is Alfred-street, the next to the left is Francis-street, and when I get to the end of that the dog will stop.” So London can be mapped out through routes of supplication.