Victorian People

WORKING PEOPLE

"The purely manufacturing parts of London lie between the city and the suburbs - a sort of
debateable land that is neither city nor suburb. Clerkenwell is the chief seat of the
watchmaking and jewellery trades; Spitalfields and Bethnal-green are the long-established
homes of the silk and velvet weavers; most of the cabinent-makeers and carvers are
located about St.Luke's, Old Street-road, and Aldersgate-street, these ironfounders and
anchor-smiths, together with the shipwrights, riggers, and boiler-makers, are to be found in
Millwall, and the Isle of Dogs; the sugar bakers and refiners, most of them, carry on their
businesses in the neighbourhoods of Whitechapel and Commercial-road; the tanners,
parchment makers, and skin dressers in Bermondsey; the potters and glass makers in
Lambeth; the tailors principally about Golden-square and Burlington-Gardens; the
working boot and shoemakers in and about Shoreditch, and also in the courts and narrow
streets near Drury-lane; the producers of plaster casts and images in Leather-lane,
Holborn, and the surrounding courts; the hatters principally in Southwark; the paper-
makers chiefly in Surrey, on the banks of the Wandle; the chemical manufacturers at
Stratford, on the banks of the Lea; the carriage builders in and about Long-acre; the boat-
builders at Lambeth and Chelsea the toymakers and doll-dressers at Hoxton, and the
brewers everywhere!

Amongst the non-manufacturing classes; authors, journalists, publishers etc., mostly
incline to the new suburbs; artists and engravers to Kensington and Camden-town;
musicians, singers, actors, and dancers to Old Brompton and Pentonville; physicians and
surgeons to Savile-row, Brook-street, and Finsbury; lawyers to Bedford-row, Guilford-
street and the "Inns of Court," printers to Fleet-street and the Strand; medical students to
Southwark; costermongers to Whitechapel, the New Cut, Lambeth, and Somers-town;
members of Parliament and diplomatists to Westminster and Belgravia "City men," such as
stockbrokers, merchants, and commercial agents, affect Tyburnia, Bayswater, Haverstock-
hill, Brixtron, and Clapham; commercial clerks seem fond of Islington, Highgate, Notting-
hill, Hackney, and Kingsland; bill discounters favour the Adelphi and the streets running
from the Strand to the river; professional thieves throng the small streets between
Walworth and the Old Kent-road; and "pretty horsebreakers" have taken up their abodes
in large numbers in the rural parts of Lower Brompton and the nice houses between Sloane-
street and the Horticultural Gardens at South Kensington.

A LONDON OF CONTRASTS

"One of the most extraordinary and rapid changes of condition is that experienced by the
traveller who journeys from the western to the eastern extremity of the metropolis in the
height of the brillian London season. He starts from South Kensington. He passes rows
and rows of palaces. The open windows are full of flowers. There is such store of perfume
in them that they are reckless, and besides making the rooms within delicious, scatter
largesse of rich scent to the passer-by; sun-blinds gaily striped are drawn down, but still
through the laced curtains glimpses may be seen of splended decoration in the interior of
the house; something may be observed, too, through the open door, for the servants have
discovered that it is of no use shutting it, the callers being so frequent; so they stand in
groups in the hall and on the threshold. The small broughams drawn by ponies, the
barouches in which ladies recline at their ease, and all sorts of other equipages, flash about
this wonderful neighbourhood with a swift precision which does equal credit to the hand
and the eye of the driver.

The diplomatist jogs by on a quiet ugly horse, which costs far less than the fiery animal
bestridden by the groom behind. The diplomatist sits very far back in his saddle, does not
rise in his stirrups, rides with a loose rein and a scat to match, and would certainly tumble
off if his horse were to shy. From the great high-mounted chariot with the armorial panels,
with the two footmen behind, and the inevitable old lady with a wig inside, to the buggy
drawn by a high-stepper and driven by a minor wit expectations, all is brilliant and
imposing. Even the Hansom cabs that frequent these regions have a brighter look than
other Hansom cabs, and affect tartan panels and varnish, after a singular and vainglorious
sort. Nor have we done with the different kinds of vehicles even yet, for, about this
neighbourhood, ladies will drive themselves in little basket carriages; while the curricle
and the fogy are not known. Is it a fashionable watering-place or a brilliant capital? Are
care, illness, sorrow, death, known in such a place?: Who are all these people, and how are
all these palaces maintained? Where do the inhabitant-where does the money-come from?

But the sun which brings out the perfumes of Belgravian flower vases, glances on the striped
awnings, twinkles on the silvered harness, casts bright gleams here, and broad and luminous
shadows there-this same sun has another neighbourhood other and dirtier work to do. In a
certain other region of this town it has to illuminate street and lanes so narrow and so
tortuous, that it is a wonder its straight beams can ever get to the ground. Of a certainty he
who passes swiftly from the one neighbourhood to the the other may fairly ask himself whether
he be still in the same world, instead of the same town.

Its dens of poverty and its sinks of iniquity, its horrible lanes and fever-haunted courts, its
squalid quarters - its close, unhealthy streets, and its dark, wretched bye-ways, its misery-
filled alleys and its sinful slums, where the gin-shop and the pawnbroker's stand side by side,
its Whitechapel and its St.Giles, where thieves and costermongers herd with debased women,
whose most familiar word is an oath, and children whose earliest education has been picked up
in the streets; and its hundreds of squalid lurking-places, known only to their wretched,
degraded inhabitants, and to city missionaries. Scripture-readers, parish doctors, hardly
worked clergymen, policemen, and a very few energetic philanthropists.

How terrible the change. The sights and sounds how cruelly different. The awnings here are
represented by some streaming scrap of rag drying at a window, or by the patched umbrella at
the street stall. The flowers are the morsel of vegetable cast out as too bad for even
Shoreditch nutriment. The carriages are costermongers' trucks, for music here are the cries
of suffering children, or curses and vituperation - with which the echoes are charged night and
day. Are these slouching, sulky distorted creatures, who lurk and lour along the sordid
thoroughfares, the same animals as the gallants of the other part of the town, the men of
upright carriage and free and open looks, cantering in Rotten-row, or lounging in faultless
clothes at the entrance to that luxurious place? Are the ladies who lie back in their open
carriages, as if their sofas were put upon wheels, or who rein with powerful curb their hardly
restrained horses, flesh and blood like to the masculine and bony hags who scream at their
children as they drag them from the gutter, and provoke their husbands to increased wrath as
they stagger from the public-houses? Yet it does not take an hour to get from the sight of
the first condition to the sight of the second. At one o'clock in the afternoon you may be
listening to pleasant and prosperous sounds, inhaling sweet odours, and seeing around you
only suggestions of wealth and happiness; and at two you may plant yourself before a rag and
bone shop, with a print in the window of Justice tightly bandaged, weighing a pound of dripping
in her scales, and giving the highest price for it compatible with a reasonable profit. In less
than one short hour, you can pass into the regions of intensest squalor, where every sense is
offended, just as in the other neighbourhood every one of the five senses was comforted and
pleased.

Extracts from Dickens Dictionary