London: The Biography

But there are other connotations here, which reach deep into the mystery of childhood in the city. The climbing boys were characteristically dressed in foil, gold leaf and ribbons just as were the children in the pageants of the medieval city; in that sense they came to represent once more holiness and innocence, in however vulgarised a fashion. Yet, banging the instruments of their trade along the thoroughfare, they also become lords of misrule for the day; thus their wildness is being emphasised, itself a threat to the city unless it were formalised and disciplined within ritual patterns. All these elements converge-playfulness, innocence, savagery-to create the child in the city.

Peter Earle, in A City Full of People, has noted that early eighteenth-century London “offered many enticements” for young people. In particular the city offered “the lure of bad company, gambling, drink, idleness, petty theft and ‘lewd women.’” So London children were, from the beginning, at a disadvantage. In the spirit-shops lurked “children, who drink with so much enjoyment that they find it difficult to walk on going away.” In the engravings of Hogarth, too, children are often characterised as malevolent or mischievous tokens of the city; their faces are puckered up in misery or derision, and they tend to mock or imitate the conduct and appearance of their elders. In the fourth plate of A Rake’s Progress a young boy can be seen sitting in the gutter; he is smoking a small pipe, and reading with attention a newspaper entitled The Farthing Post. The sign of White’s gambling house can be seen in the distance, down St. James’s Street, and in the foreground five other children are engaged with dice and cards. One boy is a bootblack who has literally lost his shirt; another is a seller of spirits, while a third is a newspaper vendor known as a “Mercury.” Of nineteenth-century street-boys, too, it was noticed that “gambling was a passion with them, indulged in without let or hindrance.” In the early decades of the twentieth century, also, quite young children were still being arrested for street-gambling in games such as “Buttons.” So for at least two centuries London children have been associated with, or identified by, gambling. And why should they not be gamblers, faced with the general uncertainty of life in the city? Another boy, away from the foreground in the Hogarth engraving, is stealing a handkerchief from the rake himself. Here in miniature is the image of the eighteenth-century London child, busily engaged in all the adult life and activity of the streets. Their features are also stamped with greed and acquisitiveness, like tutelary spirits of place. In the series of engravings, “Morning,” “Noon,” “Evening” and “Night,” children play a significant role. Some of them wear exactly the same clothes as their elders, so that they have all the appearance of dwarf-like or deformed citizens; others are ragged street urchins, fighting for food in the gutter or huddled together for warmth beneath wooden street stalls.

The ragged children of the streets have a vivid emblematic quality, therefore, but in the photographs of nineteenth-century London they become more recognisable and more sorrowful. These are no longer characters or caricatures, but somehow familiar human faces, soft or plaintive, sorrowful or bewildered. It has been suggested that the philanthropic instinct had changed by the end of the eighteenth century, towards a more benign dispensation, but the actual conditions of London had not altered. “The amount of crime, starvation and nakedness or misery of every sort in the metropolis,” Dickens told a journalist in the mid-nineteenth century, “surpasses all understanding.” It surpassed understanding because that starvation and misery affected the very youngest and most vulnerable. In 1839 almost half the funerals in London were of children under the age of ten, and it was a pretty conceit of early photographers to pose small children among the tombstones of the city graveyards; it represents the brutality of Victorian naïveté.

In another genre of photograph three little girls sit in the street, their feet in the gutter and their bodies upon the flat stone pavement; one girl looks round with surprise at the camera, but the most striking impression is of their dark and faded clothes. It is as if they were mimicking the dark and cracked stone all around them, so that they might become almost invisible. It is often forgotten how drab and dirty the Victorian capital was; the thoroughfares were always filled with litter, and there was a general air of grime and grease. As Dickens wrote: “How many, who, amidst this compound of sickening smells, these heaps of filth, these tumbling houses, with all their vile contents, animate and inanimate, slimily overflowing into the black road, would believe that they breathe this air?”