Christopher Crayon's Recollections / The Life and Times of the late James Ewing Ritchie as told by himself

by J. Ewing Ritchie

getting into service where they can live luxuriously and wear fine clothes. Disappointed in this respect, they become thieves and sharpers, and London being an immense wilderness, in which there is neither watch nor ward of any signification, nor any order or police, affords them lurking-places as well as prey.” The old Squire’s complaint is to be heard every day when we think or speak or write of the great metropolis.

The poor Squire writes bitterly of London life: “I start every hour from my sleep at the horrid noise of the watchmen calling the hour through every street, and thundering at every door.” “If I would drink water I must quaff the mawkish contents of an open aqueduct, exposed to all manner of defilement, or swallow that which comes from the Thames, impregnated with all the filth of London and Westminster. Human excrement is the least offensive part of the concrete, which is composed of all the drugs, minerals and poisons used in mechanics and manufactures, enriched with the putrefying carcases of beasts and men, and mixed with the scourings of all the washtubs, kennels, and common sewers within the bills of mortality.” The City churches and churchyards were in my time constant sources of disease, and the chapels were, where they had burying-grounds attached, equally bad. One need not remark in this connection

how much better off we are in our day. Again the Squire writes: “The bread I eat is a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum and bone ashes.” Here, again, we note gladly a change for the better. The vegetables taste of nothing but the dung-hills from whence they spring. The meat the Squire holds to be villainously bad, “and as for the pork, it is an abominable carnivorous animal fed with horseflesh and distillers’ grains, and the poultry is all rotten in consequence of fever, occasioned by the infamous practice of sewing up the guts, that they may be the sooner fattened in crops in consequence of this cruel restriction.” Then there is the butter, a tallowy, rancid mass, manufactured with candle grease and butcher’s stuff. Well, these enormities are permitted no longer, and that is a step gained. We have good water; the watchman is gone, and the policeman has taken his place; but London as I knew it was little better than it was in the Squire’s time. I fear in eggs we have not improved. The old Squire complains that they are imported from Scotland and France. We have, alas! for our fresh eggs to go a good deal further now. Milk, he tells us, was carried through the streets in open pails, exposed to foul rinsings discharged from doors and windows, and contaminated in many other ways too horrible to mention. No wonder the old Squire longed to get back to his old mansion

in Wales, where, at any rate, he could enjoy pure water, fresh eggs and real milk. It is hard to conceive how the abominations he describes could have been tolerated an hour. There was no Holborn Viaduct—nothing but a descent into a valley—always fatal to horses, and for many reasons trying to pedestrians. One of the sights of London which I sorely missed was the Surrey Gardens, with its fireworks and half-starved and very limited zoological collection. It has long been built over, but many is the happy summer evening I have spent there witnessing the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, or some other representation equally striking and realistic. In the City Road there were tea-gardens, and at Highbury Barn was a dancing establishment, more famous than those of the Eagle or White Conduit Fields, and all at times made the scene of political demonstrations and party triumphs. In this way also were much celebrated the London Tavern and Freemasons’ Hall. There was no attention paid to sanitation, and Lord Palmerston had not horrified all Scotland by telling the clergy who waited on him that it was not days of humiliation that the nation wanted, but a more intimate acquaintance with the virtues of soap and water. The clergy as a rule looked upon an outbreak of disease, not as an illustration of the evils of want and water and defective

drainage, but as a sign of the Divine disgust for and against a nation that had admitted Dissenters in Parliament, and emancipated the Roman Catholics. Perhaps the greatest abomination of all was the fearful custom which existed of burying the dead in the midst of the living. The custom died hard—churches and chapels made a lot of money in this way, careless of the fact that the sickly odours of the vault and the graveyard filled up the building where, on Sunday, men and women and children came to worship and pray. Yet London got more country air than it does now. The Thames was not a sewer, and it was all open fields from Camden Town to Hampstead Heath, and at the back of the Holloway Road, and such-like places. There was country everywhere. As a whole, the London of to-day is a far statelier city than the London of my earlier years. Everything was mean and dirty. I miss the twopenny postman, to whom I had always to entrust a lot of letters—when I came up from my village home—as thus the writers save a good sum of money on every letter. There were few omnibuses, and they were dear. Old hackney coaches abounded, and the cabs were few and far between, and very dirty as well, all of which have immensely improved of late. The cab in which I rode when I was set down by the coach at the White Horse, Fetter Lane, then a much-frequented

hotel of the highest respectability, was an awful affair, hooded and on two high wheels, while the driver was perched on a seat just outside. I was astonished—as well I might be—when I got to that journey’s end in safety.

In London and the environs everything was dull and common-place, with the exception of Regent Street, where it was tacitly assumed the force of grandeur could no further go. There was no Thames Embankment, and only a collection of wharves and coal agencies, and tumble-down sheds, at all times—especially when the tide was out—hideous to contemplate. The old Houses of Parliament had been burnt down, and no costly palace had been erected on their site. The Law Courts in Westminster Hall were crowded and inconvenient. Where now Queen Victoria Street rears its stately head were narrow streets and mean buildings. Eating-houses were close and stuffy, and so were the inns, which now we call by the more dignified name of hotels.

As to the poor sixty years ago, society was indifferent alike as to the state of their souls or bodies. In Ratcliff Highway the sailor was robbed right and left. The common lodging-house was a den of thieves. The poor shirt-maker and needlewoman lived on starvation wages. Sanitary arrangements were unknown. There was no decency of any kind; the streets,

or rather lanes, where the children played, with their open sewers, were nurseries of disease. Even in Bethnal Green, the Sanitary Commission found that while the mean age of death among the well-to-do residents was forty-four, that of the working-classes was twenty-two; and yet Bethnal Green with its open spaces was a garden of Eden compared with the lodging-houses in some of the streets off Drury Lane. Perhaps the most unfortunate classes in the London of that time were the poor chimney-sweeps—little children from four to eight years of age, the majority of them orphans, the rest bartered or sold by brutal parents. In order to do their work they had to move up and down by pressing every joint in their bodies against the hard and often broken surface of the chimneys; and to prevent their hands and knees from streaming with blood, the children were rubbed with brine before a fire to harden their flesh. They were liable to a frightful disorder—the chimneysweeper’s cancer, involving one of the most terrible forms of physical suffering. They began the day’s work at four, three, and even two in the morning; they were half suffocated by the hot sulphurous air in the flues; often they would stick in the chimneys and faint; and then if the usual remedy—straw lighted to bring them round—failed, they were often half killed, and sometimes killed outright, by the

very means used to extricate them. They lived in low, ill-drained, ill-ventilated, and noxious rooms and cellars, and often slept upon the soot heaps. They remained unwashed for weeks, and on Sundays they were generally shut up together so that their neighbours might not see their miserable condition. Perhaps the worst part of London when I knew it was Field Lane, at the bottom of Holborn Hill, now happily improved off the face of the earth. It was known as “Jack Ketch’s Warren,” from the fact that the greater part of the persons hanged at Newgate came from the lanes and alleys in the vicinity. The disturbances that occurred in these low quarters were often so great that from forty to fifty constables armed with cutlasses were marched down, it being often impossible for officers to act in fewer numbers or disarmed. Some of the houses close beside the Fleet Ditch were fitted with dark closets, trapdoors, sliding panels, and other means of escape, while extensive basements served for the purpose of concealing goods; and in others there were furnaces used by coiners and stills for the production of excisable spirits. It was here that in 1843 the Ragged School movement in London commenced its wonderful and praiseworthy career.