The Victorians

THE

VICTORIANS

FROM EMPIRE AND INDUSTRY TO POVERTY AND FAMINE

THE

VICTORIANS

FROM EMPIRE AND INDUSTRY TO POVERTY AND FAMINE

JOHN D. WRIGHT

This digital edition published in 2024

Copyright © 2018 Amber Books Ltd

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ISBN: 978-1-83886-620-4

Project Editor: Michael Spilling

Designer: Zoë Mellors

Picture Researcher: Terry Forshaw

Contents

1. The City

2. Mind and Body

3. The People

4. Crime and Punishment

5. Empire

6. America

7. Gothic Lives

8. Science and Technology

Index

1

THE CITY

Mention of the Victorians will naturally call up thoughts of London. Vivid images of the city were captured by writers such as Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle, while newspapers added real criminal horror, covering Jack the Ripper and other murderers.

This ‘Bandits’ Roost’ in a New York slum was photographed by Jacob Riis in 1888.

LONDON WAS the home of comfortable Victorian families who supported morality and the best of British traditions. Those in the fine houses of the rising middle class, however, were acutely aware of the poverty, disease and crime festering in the background. This was often brought into their own houses by the unfortunate servants who laboured downstairs. Both rich and poor seemed resigned to inequality and to the immense human problems caused by the city’s rapid growth.

Victorian ‘progress’ was the surprising cause of these dreadful conditions. The Industrial Revolution, which had begun in Britain in about 1760, was in full force by the mid-nineteenth century as factories relied on more and larger machines for mass production. This job-destroying efficiency had already provoked the Luddites, redundant textile workers in Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire and Lancashire, who wrecked machinery between 1811 and 1813 and in later sporadic attacks, including in southern England. Many early leaders were tried and hanged or transported to the colonies.

Industries including textiles and ceramics lured workers from the fields to the cities. By 1851, Britain’s urban population was larger than its rural one. The rush from the land created overcrowded and filthy cities, where many ambitions died in slums and workhouses. The large numbers of skilled and unskilled workers kept wages down to barely subsistence level. The result was an increase in violent crime, robbery, prostitution, alcoholism and early death, often from unhealthy food and sickness.

An agitator of the destructive Luddites was depicted wearing women’s clothes in this political satire.

While London was the emblem of the Victorian age – after all, the queen reigned among its residents – these effects were equally felt in Britain’s industrial powerhouses, such as Birmingham and Manchester, as well as in the growing world cities. Although Victorians were eager for progress, they faced uncertainties in their daily lives, resulting in frustration and anxiety that often led to violence. This was not confined to Britain, as seen in the 1863 Draft Riots in New York City and the Paris Commune insurrection in 1871.

The ‘dark satanic mills’ of the industrial revolution condemned workers to a life of misery and hopelessness.

POVERTY

Victorians believed that the poor had caused their own situation, either through laziness and refusal to work or because they drank, gambled or wasted money. To some, there appeared to be a natural order in which superior people led decent, secure lives and inferior types were condemned to terrible poverty. A survey in 1886 found that one-third of London’s residents were poor. Some paid one penny to sleep in shelters provided in the city. One run by the Salvation Army in Blackfriars in the 1890s offered its only sleeping places in wooden boxes called ‘coffin beds’, on benches, or on the floor.

Poverty was also thought to be a crime that was morally wrong and one that should be punished with prison. Charles Dickens provided the best-known descriptions of London’s debtors’ prisons. His father John and his family had been sentenced to Marshalsea Prison in Southwark in 1824 over a £40 debt to a baker. Charles, then 12, had to quit school and work polishing shoes in a blacking factory to help his family. He wrote about these experiences in Little Dorrit, serialized from 1855 to 1857.

A cartoon published in Punch magazine in 1858 depicted death amid the sewage and pollution in the River Thames.

Dickens’ case was not unusual for Victorians: about 10,000 debtors were imprisoned each year. This could mean an indefinite stay until the money was repaid – not an easy task because prisoners were forced to pay for their rooms and meals. The Debtors’ Act was passed by Parliament in 1869 to stop imprisonment, but those who owed money could still be locked up if they had the necessary funds but refused to pay. By 1900, the prisons still contained 11,427 debtors.

One step above prison was the workhouse, where paupers could live under harsh controls and work to improve their moral character. The sick and elderly were also taken in, while many others were orphans, widows with young children, wives who had been deserted, and ‘fallen women’. The conditions were purposely unpleasant to discourage people from applying or extending their stay.

DIRTY LONDON

Life in the city was filthy. Streets were caked with mud and the droppings of horses and other animals, while the hazy air was choked with fog, smoke and soot. Cesspools in the basements of houses often became blocked and overran, adding to the general stench. When water closets became popular, the raw sewage was run into pipes built to transport rainwater into the Thames. This was to be cleaned as drinking water, but resulted in diseases such as cholera and typhoid. The river’s dreadful smell increased until the ‘Great Stink’ of 1858 occurred. Members of Parliament suffered so much that the curtains of the House of Commons were soaked in chloride of lime to try to block the stench. The effort proved unsuccessful, so the members passed a law to construct a new sewer system.

The Victorian age’s polluted cities greatly shortened a person’s lifespan, especially for the poor who were crowded into slums. In 1851, someone living in the small market town of Okehampton had a life expectancy of 57 years, compared to 26 for a resident of inner Liverpool. Home coal fires and factory fumes caused respiratory diseases and early deaths. Birmingham and Sheffield were more dangerous than London due to their intense coal burning for metal production.

LIFE IN A DEBTORS’ PRISON

INMATES IN DEBTORS’ prisons lived, strangely enough, in a type of community organization run by their own committees. Families could live there with the debtor, and children were born and raised in the prison. Debtors with more money than others were allowed better quarters closer to the prison master. They were allowed visitors who might provide funds so the inmates could pay for items at the prison shop and restaurant, and even spend time outside. The poorest, however, made do with the barest necessities in another wing, sharing rooms with others.

If inmates had little money, they would find debtors’ prison to be an overcrowded miserable existence.

THE TOOLEY STREET FIRE

Fire was a constant fear in Victorian cities, which were crowded with wooden buildings protected by inadequate fire brigades. Londoners were especially wary of the danger, mindful of the Great Fire of 1666 and the more recent memory of the Houses of Parliament burning down in 1834, three years before Victoria ascended the throne.

Another massive fire ravaged the city in 1861 and proved to be the largest since the Great Fire. It began on 22 June, a Saturday, at Cotton’s Wharf on Tooley Street, among warehouses stacked with combustible goods, including hemp, jute, cotton, oil, paint, tallow and saltpetre. Spontaneous combustion of hemp was thought to be the cause, while carelessness increased the blaze, the iron fire doors having been left open.

The ferocious Tooley Street fire shocked Londoners into providing a city-wide fire brigade to prevent future tragedies.

By evening, the inferno stretched from London Bridge to Custom House. Even the surface of the Thames was burning from materials that had spilled onto it, destroying several boats. Fourteen fire engines tried to fight the flames with a low amount of water; even a floating fire engine failed because of the low tide. More tragedy occurred when the fire superintendent, James Braidwood, was killed as a warehouse collapsed on him. ‘It made one very sad’, wrote Queen Victoria in her diary when told of his death. More than 30,000 Londoners gathered to watch the fire, enjoying refreshments sold by vendors and pubs that remained open throughout the night. The fire burned for two weeks and destroyed an estimated £2 million in goods and buildings.

The Tooley Street Fire led to an upgrading of London’s fire services. The small London Fire Engine Establishment (LFEE), run by 25 insurance companies, was replaced in 1866 by a public service, the Metropolitan Fire Brigade.

INCREASED MIGRATION

The overcrowding of cities and harsh economics led to unprecedented emigration, both to and from Britain. Many left for America, Australia and various colonies. The Irish formed the largest number, with an estimated two million escaping the potato famine of 1845–49 to seek a better life in the United States and also in England and Scotland. The UK’s growing industries also attracted migrants from Europe and more distant countries. One could walk London’s streets and soon encounter Japanese, Chinese, Indian and Arab people. Many Jews settled in the city’s East End, especially Spitalfields, and kept up their own language and traditions. They attracted sympathy at first after escaping the Russian pogroms and other persecutions, but the public attitude eventually turned against them. One leader of the anti-immigration movement, Arnold White, called the Jews ‘a danger menacing to national life’, and some members of Parliament unsuccessfully called for restrictions on general immigration.

OTHER GREAT FIRES

WOODEN BUILDINGS IN CITIES around the world in Victorian times were crowded on narrow streets and packed with people who had to fend for themselves during major fires that exceeded the skills and resources of early firemen.

Hamburg lost a third of the buildings in its old district in 1842 when a fire began in a cigar factory and burned from 5 to 8 May. It killed 51 people and destroyed 1700 homes. The fire was the first to shake the new international insurance business, with many British insurers taking enormous losses. Bucharest was devastated on 23 March 1847 by a fire that levelled one-third of the city and virtually all of the central business area. It was started by a teenage boy firing a gun into a loft of dry hay. Fifteen people were killed and 1850 buildings burned down, including 12 churches.

Chicago’s great fire of 1871 burned from 8 to 10 October and destroyed roughly one-third of the city. It left 300 dead, 90,000 homeless and destroyed 17,450 buildings, resulting in $200 million in damage. Tradition says the blaze was caused by Mrs Catherine O’Leary’s cow kicking over a lamp in a barn.

Hong Kong in 1878 suffered a great fire on Christmas night that destroyed several hectares of the city. Local photographers were selling pictures of the tragedy while the embers still smouldered. An English businessman, Edward Fisher, was accused of arson for insurance but was acquitted.

The fire’s terrible destruction of wooden buildings led to Chicago building the world’s first steel skyscrapers.

The potato famine of the 1840s drove millions of Irish to the United States to settle into equally desperate lives.

The most unpleasant migration out of Britain was enforced transportation. Those who broke the law – even for minor street crimes – might be shipped to overseas colonies for seven to 14 years, but often for the remainder of their lives. Even criminals due to be executed sometimes had their sentences reduced to transportation. The policy had begun in 1717, when convicts were sent to penal colonies in America. After that country’s independence, Australia became the main destination. The system was flawed, adding political prisoners such as Irish nationalists and increasing shipments to provide Australia with needed cheap labour. Victorians began to regret this and the idea of giving criminals a free voyage to a new, if rugged, life. The practice was abolished in 1868, after the transport of 158,702 convicts in around 80 years.

IRISH SLUMS IN NEW YORK

The Irish who fled poverty in the Victorian era did not find the ‘American Dream’ in New York City. They were packed into dismal tenements in the city’s Lower East Side, with nearly 300,000 occupying one square mile. One in four residents of Victorian New York was Irish. Sometimes five families would share one room in an apartment that had no toilet, bath or running water. This huddling together of humanity led rapidly to physical and moral decline, evident in epidemics and widespread drunkenness, crime and violence. Many Irish took part in the city’s 1863 Draft Riots, in which more than 100 African Americans were killed.

TAMMANY HALL

THOMAS JEFFERSON, author of American’s Declaration of Independence, observed his nation’s growing population and worried about people ‘piled high up on one another in the cities’. His prediction proved accurate by 1880, when the population of more than 50 million had created major cities. What he did not forecast was the enormous growth of city governments and corruption. Big-city political organizations could handle problems efficiently, but many members were keen to reward themselves and swap favours for patronage.

New York had one of the worst political machines in the Democratic Party’s executive committee, known as Tammany Hall. Under its notorious William ‘Boss’ Tweed, it corrupted local elections, bribed rival politicians, and even influenced state and national politics. Its members had no qualms about a little honest graft. One, George Washington Plunkitt, made large profits from tips about land selected for parks and other major projects. He snapped up the properties and sold them to the city for inflated prices.

Tammany Hall outlived the Victorian era, but erred in not supporting Democratic candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt in his successful 1932 presidential race. He reduced the machine’s power, aided by the new reformist mayor, Fiorello La Guardia.

American artist Thomas Nash depicted the Tweed ring where each member points blame at the next person.

New York’s Draft Riots were a working class protest against conscription to fight in the Civil War.

Outside was no better. As in London and other overcrowded industrial Victorian cities, New York’s streets were filled with animal and human waste, which promoted stench, disease and death. Children played in the filth next to dead horses and roaming pigs and drank contaminated milk sold by street vendors. About 25 per cent of the immigrant Irish children died.

Charles Dickens toured the Five Points area of Manhattan in 1842 accompanied by two policemen, because this was an Irish slum of utter poverty and degradation. In his American Notes for General Circulation published that year, he noted that ‘poverty, wretchedness and vice are rife’. He described the area’s narrow ways as ‘reeking everywhere with dirt and filth’. However, he was quick to compare these conditions with those of other Victorian cities. ‘Such lives as are led here,’ he wrote, ‘bear the same fruits here as elsewhere. The coarse and