London: The Biography

The beggars also learned the temperament of their fellow dwellers in the city. The rich and the middle class gave nothing at all, on the assumption that all beggars were impostors; this was of course the theme of official and quasi-official reports, which they willingly and gladly accepted. In a city beginning to be ruled by system, systematic prejudice also emerged. “If the power of reasoning were universally allotted to mankind,” wrote John Binny, the author of Thieves and Swindlers, “there would be a poor chance for the professional beggar.” The more affluent sort of tradesmen were also immune to appeal. But beggars were successful “amongst tradesmen of the middle class, and among the poor working people.” Their particular benefactors were the wives of working men, which corresponds to the testimony of others that the London poor were charitable to the poor whose need was greater than their own. It suggests also that, contrary to public opinion, not all beggars were impostors; there were some who summoned up fellow feeling.

By the end of the nineteenth century the beggars complained that their lives and careers were being threatened by the twin forces of the new police and the Mendicity Society, but there is no sure way of discovering whether their numbers were significantly diminished. Certainly contemporary statistics and descriptions would suggest that they were still “swarming,” to employ a favourite term, over the metropolis. Indeed it would be sensible to suggest that, the larger the population, the greater the number of beggars.

Memoirs of the early twentieth century do not report bands or troupes of beggars, but specific individuals who customarily made a pretence of selling matches or lozenges as a cover for begging. They were required to own a “hawker’s licence,” which cost five shillings a year, and then they selected their “patch.” One, on the corner of the West End Lane and Finchley Road, used to wind up a gramophone; another used to wander along Corbyn Road with a single box of matches; there was an organ-grinder called “Shorty” who used to “work” Whitechapel and the Commercial Road; there was Mr. Matthewman who used to sit outside Finchley Road Underground Station with a “pedlar’s pack” and a tin mug. These are all stray cases, but they impart the flavour of London begging between the wars. The author of London’s Underworld, Thomas Holmes, remarks: “it is all so pitiful, it is too much for me, for sometimes I feel that I am living with them, tramping with them, sleeping with them, eating with them; I become as one of them.” It is the sensation of vertigo, of being drawn to the edge of the precipice in order to throw oneself down. How easy it must be to become one of them, and willingly to go under. This is the other possibility which the city affords. It offers freedom from ordinary cares, and all the evidence suggests that many beggars actually enjoyed their liberty to wander and to watch the world.

The sellers of bootlaces and matches have gone and in their place, in the twenty-first century, have come “the homeless” who sleep in doorways; they carry their blankets with them as a token of their status. Some of them have all the characteristics of their predecessors; they are slow-witted, or drunken, or in some other way disabled from leading an “ordinary” existence. Others are shrewd and quick-witted, and not unwilling to practise the old arts of shamming. But such cases, perhaps, form the minority. Others find that they are genuinely unable to cope with the demands of the city; they fear the world too much, or find it difficult to acquire friends and form relationships. What will the world of London seem to them then? It becomes a place which the dispossessed and homeless of all ages have experienced: a maze of suspicion, aggression and small insults.

The vagrants have always had to accommodate themselves to the hardness and incuriosity of Londoners. In his poem “The Approach to St. Paul’s” James Thomson is jostled by anxious crowds whose

heart and brain

Were so absorbed in dreams of Mammon-gain

That they could spare no time to look upon-

To look upon what? Those who had fallen along the way. It happens “only in so large a place as London,” Samuel Johnson suggests, “where people are not known.”