London: The Biography

If they lived, the poor children were lodged in the parish workhouses. These were essentially primitive factories where, from seven in the morning until six in the evening, the little inmates were set to work spinning wool or flax and knitting stockings; an hour a day was spent upon the rudiments of learning, and another hour for “dinner and play.” These workhouses were generally filthy and overcrowded places. That in the parish of St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, for example, was “obliged to put thirty nine children into three beds.” It combined the aspects of both factory and prison, thus confirming its identity as a peculiarly urban institution; many of the children infected one another with “disorders” and contagious diseases, and were then despatched to hospitals. The quartet of London confinement-workhouse, factory, prison and hospital-is complete.

Children were confined precisely because, in their natural and liberated state, they were considered to be wild. They were still “half-naked or in tattered rags, cursing and swearing at one another … rolling in the dirt and kennels, or pilfering on the wharfs and keys.” These were the “ill natured cattal” with which “our prisons are daily filled and under the weight of which Tyburn does so often groan.” Very few social observers chose to discuss whether the conditions of London itself brutalised or dehumanised these small children; the reality was too overwhelming, and too palpable, to elicit any cogent analysis beyond the imagery of bestiality and savagery. Once the vagrant children had been trained to labour in the parish workhouse, for example, they are “as much distinguished from what they were before as is a tamed from a wild beast.” But that imagery can be applied elsewhere in the commercial jungle of London. “The master may be a tiger in cruelty, he may beat, abuse, strip naked, starve or do what he will to the poor innocent lad, few people take much notice, and the officers who put him out the least of anybody.” The reference here is to the “parish child” being sold off as an apprentice; although that condition has been immortalised in Oliver Twist in 1837, the cruelties and hardships associated with this trade in children have a particular eighteenth-century emphasis.

Consider the plight of chimney-sweeps, apprentices known as “climbing boys.” They were usually attached to their masters at the age of seven or eight, although it was also common for drunken or impoverished parents to sell children as young as four years old for twenty or thirty shillings. Small size was important, because the flues of London houses were characteristically narrow and twisted so that they became easily choked with soot or otherwise constricted. The young climbing boy was prodded or pushed into these tiny spaces; fearful or recalcitrant children were pricked with pins or scorched with fire, to make them climb more readily. Some died of suffocation, while many suffered a more lingering death from cancer of the scrotum known as “sooty warts.” Others grew deformed. A social reformer described a typical climbing boy at the close of his short career. “He is now twelve years of age, a cripple on crutches, hardly three feet seven inches in stature … His hair felt like a hog’s bristle, and his head like a warm cinder … He repeats the Lord’s prayer.” These children, blackened by the soot and refuse of the city, were rarely, if ever, washed. They were coated in London’s colours, an express symbol of the most abject condition to which it could reduce its young. A familiar sight, they wandered about, shouting out in their piping voices “to sweep for the soot, oh!” It was known as “calling the streets.”

In the harsh condition of London, however, they were rarely the objects of compassion. Instead, they were condemned as thieves, part-time beggars and “the greatest nursery for Tyburn of any trade in England.” Yet in one of those astonishing displays of theatrical ritual, of which the city was always capable, once a year they were allowed to celebrate. On the first of May, they were painted white with meal and hair-powder and as “lilly-whites,” to use the contemporaneous expression, they flocked through the streets where they called “weep weep.” They also banged their brushes and climbing tools as they paraded through the city. In this reversal we recognise both the hardness and gaiety of London: they had very little to celebrate in their unhappy lives, yet they were allowed to play, and become children again, for one day of the year.