The Victorianist

“…It is Not Nor Does it Pretend to be Anything Else than a Vicious Hotch-Potch of the Vilest Slang, a Mockery of all that is Decent and Virtuous…” Or: What Were Penny Dreadfuls?

2012-02-10T02:31:00.000-08:00

Everyone who has picked up a newspaper in the last twenty years will be familiar with the hardy perennial opinion that children are turned into thugs and killers by violent films and video games.

Whilst I don’t think that is true as a catch-all term, I can understand why people think that children may attempt to copy what they see on their various screens, but as a rule, my opinion is that watching a violent film does not make a child violent.

This story – which seems to be dusted off and rolled out every time someone under the age of sixteen slaps one of their friends – is not so new as to have only been thought of in the last two decades, though. The Victorians had similar concerns with certain literature having a negative effect on the nation’s youth.

Penny dreadfuls, penny bloods, penny awfuls, or penny numbers, as they were known, were shocking, violent short stories, usually about the antics of criminals such as highwaymen, grave-robbers and murderers, aimed at the barely literate lower classes of society. The publication of penny dreadfuls began in the 1830’s, when the success of Dickens’ ‘The Pickwick Papers’ demonstrated that books sold as serials – that is, sold in monthly installments – were more appealing to the greater populous, since the lower classes had not the time nor attention span to sit and read an entire novel, but could easily digest a whole book in short, ‘bite-size’ and dramatic chunks.

The penny dreadfuls were extremely cheap to produce, and being printed on the cheapest of pulp papers, could be sold at a price that the target audience could afford, and since they were sold as serials, once the reader had purchased the first installment, he would certainly have to purchase the rest to see how the story progressed.

The penny papers proved so addictive, that even those who could not afford it still purchased them by forming groups who would each put money in and buy a single paper to read between them.

Whilst the working classes devoured the ghoulish crime stories with relish, there were, of course, more upstanding members of society who frowned upon and dismissed the penny bloods as vulgar and coarse. One of their most vehement critics was the great James Greenwood, who wrote an article in St. Paul’s Magazine in 1873 condemning them and their affect on society’s youth. The article is below. As you read it, think of similar articles that have appeared in the present-day pres with regards to violent films and video games, and you will see that the problem of modern media corrupting the youth of today is not new at all;

"It would be an excellent and profitable arrangement if the London School Board were empowered not only to insist that all boys and girls of tender years shall be instructed in the art of reading, but also to root up and for ever banish from the paths of its pupils those dangerous weeds of literature that crop up in such rank luxuriance on every side to tempt them. Until this is done, it must always be heavy and uphill work with those whose laudable aim it is to promote education and popular enlightenment.

To teach a girl or boy how to read is not a very difficult task; the trouble is to guide them to a wholesome and profitable exercise of the acquirement. This, doubtless, would be hard enough, were our population of juveniles left to follow the dictates of their docile or rebellious natures; but this they are not suffered to do. At the very outset, as soon indeed as they have mastered words of two and three syllables, and by skipping the hard words are able somehow to stumble through a page in reading fashion, the enemy is at hand to enlist them in his service. And never was a poor recruit so dazzled and bewildered by the wily sergeant whose business it is to angle for, and hook men to serve as soldiers as is the foolish lad who is beset by the host of candidates of the Penny Awful tribe for his patronage.

There is Dick Turpin bestriding his fleet steed, and with a brace of magnificently mounted pistols stuck in his belt, beckoning him to an expedition of midnight marauding on the Queen’s highway; there is gentlemanly Claude Duval, with his gold-laced coat and elegantly curled periwig, who raises his three-cornered hat politely to the highly-flattered schoolboy and begs the pleasure of his company through six months or so - at the ridiculously small cost of a penny a week, that, he, the gallant captain, may initiate our young friend in the ways of bloodshed and villainy; there is sleek-cropped, bullet-headed Jack Sheppard, who steps boldly forth with his crowbar, offering to instruct the amazed youth in the ways of crime as illustrated by his own brilliant career, and to supply him with a few useful hints as to the best way of escaping from Newgate.

Besides these worthies there are the Robbers of the Heath, and the Knights of the Road, and the Skeleton Crew, and Wildfire Dick and Hell-fire Jack, and Dare-devil Tom, and Blueskin, and Cut-throat Ned, and twenty other choice spirits of an equally respectable type, one and all appealing to him, and wheedling and coaxing him to make himself acquainted with their delectable lives and adventures at the insignificant expense of one penny weekly.

It is not difficult to trace back the evil in question to its origin. At least a quarter of a century ago it occurred to some enterprising individual to reprint and issue in “penny weekly numbers” the matter contained in the “Newgate Calendar,” and the publication was financially a great success. This excited the cupidity of other speculators, in whose eyes money loses none of its value though ever so begrimed with nastiness, and they set their wits to work to produce printed weekly “pen’orths” that should be as savoury to the morbid tastes of the young and the ignorant as was the renowned Old Bailey Chronicle itself.

The task was by no means a difficult one when once was found the spirit to set about it. The Newgate Calendar was after all but a dry and legal record of the trials of rogues and murderers, for this or that particular offence, with at most, in addition, a brief sketch of the convicted one’s previous career, and a few observations on his most remarkable exploits. After all, there was really no romance in the thing; and what persons of limited education and intellect love in a book is romance. Here then was a grand field! What could be easier than to take the common-place Newgate raw material, and re-dip it in the most vivid scarlet, and weave into it the rainbow hues of fiction? What was there that “came out” at the trials of Jack Sheppard and Claude Duval and Mr. Richard Turpin and which the calendar readers so greedily devoured, compared with what might be made to “come out” concerning these same heroes when the professional romance-monger, with the victim’s skull for an inkstand, gore for ink, and the assassin's dagger for a pen, sat down to write their histories?

The great thing was to show what the Newgate Calendar had failed to show. It was all very well to demonstrate that at times there existed honour among thieves; the thing to do was to make it clear that stealing was an honourable business, and that all thieves were persons to be respected on account at least of the risks they ran and the perils they so daringly faced in the pursuit of their ordinary calling. Again, in recording the achievements of robbers of a superior grade, the Calendar gave but the merest glimpse of the glories of a highway villain’s existence, whereas, as was well known to the romancist of the Penny Awful school, the life of a person like Mr. Turpin or any other Knight of the Road is just one endless round of daring, dashing adventure, and of rollicking and roystering, or tender, blissful enjoyments of the fruits thereof. Likewise, according to the same authority, it was a well-known fact, and one that could not be too generally known, that rogues and robbers are the only “brave” that deserve the “fair,” and that no sweethearts are so true to each other, and enjoy such unalloyed felicity, as gentlemen of the stamp of Captain Firebrand (who wears lace truffles and affects a horror for the low operation of cutting a throat, but regards it as quite the gentlemanly and “professional” thing to send a bullet whizzing into a human skull ) and buxom, fascinating Molly Cutpurse.

But after all, if the unscrupulous hatchers of Penny Awfuls (this term is no invention of mine, but one conferred on the class of literature in question by the owners thereof ) had been content to stick to Newgate heroes and Knights of the Road, perhaps no very great harm would have been done. At all events, the nuisance must soon have died out. Popular interest in the British Highwayman has for many years been on the wane. There are no longer any mail coaches to rob, and the descendants of the rare old heroes of Bagshot and Hounslow have brought the profession into disgust and contempt by taking to the cowardly game of garroting. Every boy may read of the pitiful behaviour of these modern Knights of the Road when they are triced up, bare-backed, in the press-room at Newgate, and a stout prison warden makes a cat-o’-nine-tails whistle across their shoulders. How they squeal and wriggle and supplicate!

“Oh! Sir, kind sir! O-o-o-oh-h, pray spare me; I’ll never do it again!”

There is not the least spark of dash or bravado about this kind of thing, and the cleverest penman of the Penny Awful tribe would fail to excite feelings of emulation in the minds of his most devoted readers.

The Penny Awful trade, however, has not been brought to a standstill on this account. Cleverer men than those who paraded Dick Turpin and Claude Duval as model heroes have of late years come into the garbage market. Quick-witted, neat-handed fellows, who have studied the matter and made themselves acquainted with it at all points. It has been discovered by these sharp ones that the business has been unnecessarily restricted; that even supposing that there are still a goodly number of simpletons who take delight in the romance that hangs on those magic words, “Your money or your life,” there are still a much larger number who take no interest at all in gallows heroes, but who might easily be tempted to take to another kind of bait, provided it were judiciously adjusted on the hook.

As for instance, there were doubtless to be found in London and the large manufacturing towns of England, hundreds of boys out of whom constant drudgery and bad living had ground all that spirit of dare-devilism so essential to the enjoyment of the exploits of the heroes of the Turpin type, but who still possessed an appetite for vices of a sort that were milder and more easy of digestion. It was a task of no great difficulty when once the happy idea was conceived. All that was necessary was to show that the faculty for successfully defying law and order and the ordinations of virtue might be cultivated by boys as well as men, and that as rogues and rascals the same brilliant rewards attended the former as the latter. The result may be seen in the shop window of every cheap newsvendor in London - The Boy Thieves of London, The Life of a Fast Boy, The Boy Bandits, The Wild Boys of London, The Boy Detective, Charley Wag, The Lively Adventures of a Young Rascal, and I can’t say how many more.

This much is true of each and everyone, however - that it is not nor does it pretend to be anything else than a vicious hotch-potch of the vilest slang, a mockery of all that is decent and virtuous, an incentive to all that is mean, base, and immoral, and a certain guide to a prison or a reformatory if sedulously followed. If these precious weekly pen’orths do not openly advocate crime and robbery, they at least go so far as to make it appear that, although to obtain the means requisite to set up as a Fast Boy, or a Young Rascal, it is found necessary to make free with a master’s goods, or to force his till or run off with his cash-box, still the immense amount of frolic and awful jollity to be obtained at music halls, at dancing rooms, - where “young rascals” of the opposite sex may be met, - at theatres, and low gambling and drinking dens, if one has “only got the money,” fully compensates for any penalty a boy of the “fast” school may be called on to pay in the event of his petty larcenies being discovered.

“What’s the good o’ being honest?” is the moral sentiment that the Penny Awful author puts into the mouth of his hero, Joe the Ferret, in his delectable story “The Boy Thieves of the Slums.”

“What’s the good of being honest?” says Joe, who is presiding at a banquet consisting of the “richest meats,” and hot brandy and water;

“Where’s the pull? It is all canting and humbug. The honest cove is the one who slaves from morning till night for half a bellyfull of grub, and a ragged jacket and a pair of trotter cases (shoes), that don’t keep his toes out of the mud, and all that he may be called a good boy and have a “clear conscience” ’ (loud laughter and cries of “Hear, hear,” by the Weasel’s “pals”).

“I ain’t got no conscience, and I don’t want one. If I felt one a-growing in me I’d pisen the blessed thing” (more laughter).

“Ours is the game, my lads. Light come, light go. Plenty of tin, plenty of pleasure, plenty of sweethearts and that kind of fun, and all got by making a dip in a pocket, or sneaking a till. I’ll tell you what it is, my hearties,” continued the Weasel, raising his glass in his hand (on a finger of which there sparkled a valuable ring, part of the produce of the night’s work),

“I’ll tell you what it is, it’s quite as well that them curs and milksops, the ‘honest boys’ of London, do not know what a jolly, easy, devil-may-care life we lead compared with theirs, or we should have so many of ‘em takin’ to our line that it would be bad for the trade.”

It is not invariably, however, that the Penny Awful author indulges in such a barefaced enunciation of his principles. The old-fashioned method was to clap the representatives of all manner of vices before the reader, and boldly swear by them as jolly roystering blades whose manner of enjoying life was after all the best, despite the grim end. The modern way is to paint the picture not coarsely, but with skill and anatomical minuteness; to continue it page after page, and point out and linger over the most flagrant indecencies and immoral teachings of the pretty story, and then, in the brief interval of putting that picture aside and producing another, to “patter” (if I may be excused using an expression so shockingly vulgar) a few sentences concerning the unprofitableness of vice, and of honesty being the best policy. And having cut this irksome, though for obvious reasons necessary, part of the business as short as possible, the “author” again plunges the pen of nastiness into his inkpot, and proceeds with renewed vigour to execute the real work in hand.

Writing on this subject it is impossible for me to forget a vivid instance of the pernicious influence of literature of the Penny Awful kind as revealed by the victim himself. It was at a meeting of a society, the laudable aim of which is the rescue of juvenile criminals from the paths of vice, and there were present a considerable number of the lads themselves. In the course of the evening, as a test, I suppose of the amount of confidence reposed by the lads in their well-wishers and teachers, it was suggested that any one among them who had courage enough might rise in his place and give a brief account of his first theft, and what tempted him to it. It was some time before their was any response, although from the many wistful faces changing rapidly from red to white, and the general uneasiness manifested by the youths appealed to, and who were seated on forms in the middle of the hall, it was evident that many were of a great good mind to accept the invitation.

At last a lad of thirteen or so, whose good-conduct stripes told of how bravely he was raising himself out of the slough in which the Society had discovered him, rose, and burning red to his very ears, and speaking rapidly and with much stumbling and stammering - evidences one and all, in my opinion, of his speaking the truth - delivered himself as follows:-

“It’s a goodish many years ago now, more’n six I dessay, and I used to go to the ragged-school down by Hatton-garden. It was Tyburn Dick that did it, leastways the story what they call Tyburn Dick.

Well, my brother Bill was a bit older than me, and he used to have to stay at home and mind my young brother and sister, while father was out jobbing about at the docks and them places. We didn’t have no mother. Well, father he used to leave us as much grub as he could, and Bill used to have the sharin’ of it out. Bill couldn’t read a bit, but he knowed boys that could, and he used to hear ‘em reading about Knights of the Road, and Claude Duval, and Skeleton Crews, till I suppose his head got regler stuffed with it. He never had no money to buy a pen’orth when it came out, so he used to lay wait for me, carrying my young sister over his shoulder, when I came out of school at dinner time, and gammon me over to come along with him to a shop at the corner of Rosamond Street in Clerkenwell, where there used to be a whole lot of the penny numbers in the window.

They was all of a row, Wildfire Jack, the Boy Highwayman, Dick Turpin, and ever so many others - just the first page, don’t you know, and the picture. Well, I liked it too, and I used to go along o’ Bill and read to him all the reading on the front pages, and look at the pictures until - ‘specially on Mondays when there was altogether a new lot - Bill would get so worked up with the aggravatin’ little bits, which always left off where you wanted to turn over and see what was on the next leaf, that he was very nigh off his head about it.

He used to bribe me with his grub to go with him to Rosamond Street. He used to go there regler every mornin’ carryin’ my young sister, and if he found only one that was fresh, he’d be at the school coaxin’ and wigglin’ (inveigling or wheedling), and sometimes bringin’ me half his bread and butter, or the lump of cold pudden what was his share of the dinner. He got the little bits of the tales and the pictures so jumbled up together that it used to prey on him awful.

I was bad enough but Bill was forty times worse. He used to lay awake of nights talkin’ and wonderin’ and wonderin’ what was over leaf, and then he’d drop off and talk about it in his sleep. Well, one day he come to the school, and says he,

“Charley, there’s somethin’ real stunnin’ at the corner shop this mornin’. It’s Tyburn Dick, and they’ve got him in a cart under the gallows, and there’s Jack Ketch smoking his pipe, and a whole lot of the mob a rushing to rescue him wot’s going to be hung, and the soldiers are there beatin’ of ‘em back, and I’m blowed,” says Bill, “if I can tell how it will end. I should like to know,” says he. “Perhaps it tells you in the little bit of print at bottom; come along, Charley.”

Well, I wanted to know too, so we went, and there was the picture just as Bill said, but the print underneath didn’t throw no light on it - it was only just on the point of throwin’ a light on it, and of course we couldn’t turn over. I never saw Bill in such a way. He wasn’t a swearin’ boy, take him altogether, but this time he did let out, he was so savage at not being able to turn over. He was like a mad cove, and without any reason punched me about till I run away from him and went to school again. Well, although I didn’t expect it when I come out at half-past four, there was Bill again. His face looked so queer that I thought I was going to get some more punching, but it wasn’t that. He come up speakin’ quite kind, though there seemed something the matter with his voice, it was so shaky.

“Come on, Charley,” he said, “come on home quick. I’ve got it,” and opening his jacket, he showed it me - the penny number where the picture of the gallows was, tucked in atwixt the buttonings of his shirt.

“But how did you come by the penny?” I asked him.

“Come on home and read about Jack Ketch and that, and then I’ll tell you all about it.” Bill replied. So we went home; and I read out the penny number to him all through, and then he up and told me that he had nicked (stolen) a hammer off a second-hand tool stall in Leather Lane, and sold it for a penny at a rag-shop. That’s how the ice was broke. It seemed a mere nothing to nail a paltry pen’orth or so after reading of the wholesale robbery of jewels, and diamond necklaces, and that, that Tyburn Dick did every night of his life a’most. It was getting that whole pen’orth about him that showed us what a tremenjus chap he was. Next week it was my turn to get a penny to buy the number - we felt that we couldn’t do without it nohow; and finding the chance, I stole one of the metal inkstands at the school. That was the commencement of it; and so it went on and growed bigger; but it’s out and true, that for a good many weeks we only stole to buy the number just out of Tyburn Dick.”

A question likely to occur to the reader of these pages is - what sort of persons are these who are so ignoble and utterly lost to all feelings of shame that they can consent to make money by a means that is more detestable than that resorted to by the common gutter-raker or the common pickpocket ? How do such individuals comport themselves in society? Are they men well dressed and decently behaved, and have they any pretensions to respectability? The bookselling and publishing trade is a worthy trade: do the members of it generally recognise these base corruptors of the morals of little boys and girls? Or do they shun them and give them a wide berth when they are compelled to tread the same pavement with them?

My dear reader, I assure you that whether they are shunned or recognised by those who know them is not of the least moment to the blackguardly crew who pull the strings that keep the delusive puppets going. Well dressed they are - they can well afford to be so, for they make a deal of money, and in many cases keep fine houses and servants and send their children to boarding-school. They dine well in the city, and bluster, and swagger, and swear, and wear diamonds on their unsullied hands, and chains of gold adorn their manly bosoms. As for any idea of moral responsibility as regards those whose young souls and bodies they grind to make their bread, they have no more than had Simon Legree on his Red River slave plantation. They are labouring under no delusion as to the quality of the stuff they circulate. In their own choice language, it is “rot,” “rubbish,” “hog-wash,” but “what odds so long as it sells?”

They would laugh in your face were you so rash as to attempt to argue the matter with them. They would tell you that they “go in” for this kind of thing, not out of any respect or even liking they have for it, but simply because it is a good “dodge” for making money, and their only regret is that the law forbids them “spicing” their poison pages and serving them as hot and strong as they would like to. I speak from my own knowledge of these men, and am glad to make their real character known, in order to show how little injustice would be done if their nefarious trade were put a stop to with the utmost rigour of any law that might be brought to bear against them.

Again, it may be asked, who are the “authors,” the talented gentlemen who find it a labour of love to discourse week after week to a juvenile audience of the doings of lewd women and “fast” men, and of the delights of debauchery, and the exercise of low cunning, and the victimising of the innocent and unsuspecting? Ay, who are they? Few things would afford me greater satisfaction than to gather together a hundred thousand or so of those who waste their time and money in the purchase and perusal of Penny Awfuls, and exhibit to them the sort of man it is to whose hands is entrusted the preparation of the precious hashes. Before such an exhibition could take place however, for decency’s sake, I should be compelled to induce him to wash his face and shave his neglected muzzle; likewise I should probably have to find him a coat to wear, and very possibly a pair of shoes. His master, the Penny Awful proprietor, does not treat him at all liberally. To be sure he is not worthy of a great amount of consideration, being, as a rule, a dissipated, gin-soddened, poor wretch, who has been brought to his present degraded state by his own misdoings.

As for talent, he has none at all; never had; nothing more than a mere accidental literary twist in his wrist - just as one frequently sees a dog that is nothing but a cur, except for some unaccountable gift it has for catching rats, or doing tricks of conjuring. He works to order, does this obliging writer. Either he has lodgings in some dirty court close at hand, or he is stowed away in a dim, upstairs back room of the Penny Awful office, and there the proprietor visits him, and they have a pot of ale and pipes together - the one in his splendid attire, and the other in his tattered old coat and dirty shirt - and talk over the “next” number of Selina the Seduced; and very often there is heard violent language in that dim little den, the proprietor insisting on their being “more flavour” in the next batch of copy than the last, and the meek author beseeching a little respect for Lord Campbell and his Act.

But the noble owner of Selina generally has his way.

“Do as you like about it,” says he; “only bear this in mind. I know what goes down best with ‘em and what’s most relished, and if I don’t find that you warm up a bit in the next number, I’ll knock off half-a-crown, and make the tip for the week seventeen-and-six instead of a pound.”

- James Greenwood, St Paul’s Magazine, 1873.

In the kind of circles of society Greenwood would have moved in, the condemnation of penny papers was widespread, but not all literary figures were critics; in 1901 the great essayist G.K Chesterton wrote ‘A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls’

‘Varney the Vampire’, ‘The String of Pearls’ (AKA Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street ((No, he was never a real person))) and Reynolds’ ‘Mysteries of London’ were a few of the most popular penny titles.

Alfred Harmsworth, a well-meaning publisher, decided to go to war with the penny papers by releasing half-penny papers filled with moral tales. He thought that the cheaper price would encourage readers of the penny dreadfuls to abandon the corrupting tales of murder and crime and read his uplifting tales instead, but such was the influence and popularity of the stories of horror that after a short time, the half-penny-papers began to run similar garish stories in order to compete with the penny bloods.

I suspect that if we could glimpse a hundred years into the future we would discover that our descendants have some form of corrupting media they are vociferously claiming is damaging the youth of the day, but surely, indulging in the reading, watching, doing or playing of something frowned upon by moralists and / or adults is a mainstay of our culture, and every generation frowns upon something its offspring gets up to?

Those who today frown upon violent video games must have watched the occasional video nasty in the eighties, and their parents may have been involved somehow in the punk scene of the seventies, who would have been jeered at by their parents who lived through the swinging sixties, who would have been parented by people there for the birth of rock and roll, and the children of today will, no doubt, in fifteen years or so be raising a finger of complaint to some other movement or cult, thus proving that little has, and will, change in our society since the days of the Victorian moralists and their objections to penny dreadfuls.

“Pause, Young Man, Before you Marry an Irreligious Wife”: Or: Advice on Choosing a Partner in the 1850’s:

2012-02-02T23:08:00.000-08:00

Marriage advice for young men:

In the choice of a wife, excellence of moral and religious character must be the first great essential. – your own religious interests on Earth are deeply involved in marriage. What comfort, what piece of mind can the husband have, where there is inconstancy, irreligion and infidelity on part of the wife? Marry an irreligious woman, and you will have no domestic resource to flee to in the hour of religious need. There will be none to admonish you when you neglect your religious duties. An irreligious wife can not counsel you when you are under the influence of deep temptation, neither can she assist to resolve your doubts in cases of conscience. To all matters of religious experience the friend of your bosom will be a stranger and an alien. She cannot help you, she cannot understand you, she cannot sympathise with you.

1 Cor. ii. 14: “But the natural man receiveth not the things of the spirit of God; for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.”

Sad must be the condition of the husband whose griefs his spouse cannot relieve, and whose trials she cannot share. Many young men have great difficulty in maintaining their hold of religion and in discharging its duties even when single. How will that difficulty be increased if they marry irreligious wives! If now you find it hard work to keep the commands of your maker, if you now make such indifferent progress in religion, what will you do when united with one who has no religion, one who has never even sought it with success?

Women: Immoral

Religion is worth more than beauty, accomplishments and talent. “Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her. She will do him good, and not evil, all the days of her life. Many daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all.”

It frequently happens that an ungodly wife uses her husband’s profession of religion as the instrument of persecution. Unchristianising him for the least provocation, and often, without any cause whatsoever, she shakes his faith and harrows his heart. You may demur to this and say, although the female I should like to marry is not religious, she is mild and gentle, and therefore will not put a stumbling block in my path. The scriptures tell us that “the carnal mind in enmity against God.” You must either deny the Scripture doctrine, or grant that your quiet intended may one day turn upon you.

Pause, young man, before you marry an irreligious wife. Men have been more than conquerors through the blood of the Lamb, and gone home safe to heaven, although their wives did not serve God. But are you equal to such a task? Can you roll the stone of Sisyphus? Let your own unfaithfulness answer the question. Let your meager religious attainments answer it. Let the frequency with which you have gone astray from God, and brought yourself into condemnation, answer the question. You have no grace to spare. Be honest with yourself, and you will feel that, so far from needing one to hinder you in the way to heaven, you require one to assist you in your progress.

This earth is not the only world in which you will be religiously influenced by your marriage. Its results will make you happier among the spirits of just men made perfect, or more miserable in the unknown regions of the lost. The influences of marriage go beyond earth’s narrow confines, and cleave to the disembodied spirit throughout the mighty cycle of the eternal years. The wife on earth that best deserves the name of angel is she who

“Tries each art, reproves each dull delay, allures to brighter worlds, and leads the way.”

Good health is too important a matter to be overlooked in choosing a partner for life. – Health is next to piety in the scale of ascertained value of blessings. It is more than fortune. Fortunes have been wasted in vain to supply its lack of service. Continual sickness is a continual calamity.

- Leisure Hour, Thursday August 9, 1855

“A Texas Tale of Love and Mystery: Or: Book Review: The Herbalist’s Apprentice by Rosa Morgan Lockwood:

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Last year, for the first time, I decided to record a list of all the books I had read over the course of 2011. I have typed up the list below, and as you may observe, I do not waiver much from the Victorian stuff; all of it is either written by Victorians or set in Victorian England, and specifically the hub of the Empire; London.

Hard Times (Dickens)
A London Child of the 1870’s (M.V Hughes)
The Mesmerists Apprentice (Lee Jackson)
Dickens (Peter Ackroyd)
Paved With Gold (Augustus Mayhew)
True History of a Little Ragamuffin (James Greenwood)
To London Town (Arthur Morrison)
Diary of a Murder (Lee Jackson)
The Invention of Murder (Judith Flanders)
Death at the Priory (James Ruddick)
In the Year of the Jubilee (George Gissing)
The Newgate Jig (Ann Featherstone)
The Herbalists Apprentice (Rosa Morgan Lockwood)
Dr. Jekyll & Mr Hyde (Re-Read) (Stevenson)
The Body Snatcher (Stevenson)
Diary of a Nobody (George & Weedon Grossmith)
The World for a Shilling (Michael Leapman)

Then, in June last year I wrote a blog post about the Statue of Liberty, the famous landmark that stands in New York, having been given to the USA to celebrate their centennial by France. In the post I wrote that I always struggled to come to terms with America in the nineteenth century. I don’t know why, but I could never think of the USA in that era without thinking immediately of cowboys and Indians and towns full of saloons and pale riders. In a quest to correct me, Rosa – an author and blogger from America – contacted me and told me she had just finished writing a novel set in Texas in 1850, and would I like to read it to try and broaden my nineteenth century American horizon. I said I would very much like to read it, having never read anything set in ‘Victorian’ America before. I also agreed to write a review after I finished – something else I have never done before, and I doubt the nation’s entertainment critics will be fearing for their livelihoods just yet…

The book was ‘The Herbalist’s Apprentice’ and I was reliably informed that ‘Herbalist’ carried a silent ‘H’.

Within a week I received my signed copy, and looked at it with a kind of strange foreboding. What was I hoping for? I was hoping for a book with a good story, first and foremost, and secondly, I was hoping to ‘experience’ 1850’s

America

as best I could. So, having finished the book I was currently reading, I picked it up and began.

Predictably, I felt like I was in a foreign place, and for the first five or six pages was overcome with a strange feeling of homesickness. (Bizarrely, in my mind I was wondering how preparations were going in London for the Great Exhibition of 1851. Probably, I thought, to try and get the era into context, since the usual clues, such as slang or familiar buildings or streets were not present.) Speaking of slang, another strangeness that fueled my homesickness was the accents of the characters, some of whom, of course, in my mind spoke with a Texan twang. At first, these kept slipping, but after a chapter or so, my inner reading monologue was set firmly to ‘Texan’ for the characters that required it, and it came a little easier.

Onto the actual book then, and I best shed a little light on the story, here is the description from the back of the book:

At seventeen, Mia is bursting with questions about love and life, but none are more pressing than the lavender scented memories concerning her mother's mysterious death. Against her father's wishes, she secretly visits Mosswood, the palatial home of the nefarious Captain Biggs, where she becomes entangled in a web of deception.

Should Mia trust the captain's dashing son, Daniel, whose sincere and refined manners win her heart?

Or should she trust the rugged Frenchman, Henri, a Galveston Customs Officer, who is investigating the Biggs family, and whose seductive ways sweep her off her feet.

Desperate for help and guidance, Mia turns to the one person she can trust; Miss Emily, a freed mulatto slave who dispenses pearls of wisdom as adroitly as her herbal tinctures. Apprenticed to her in the art of healing, Mia begs her for the truth behind all the secrets.

When the past and it's mysteries are finally revealed, what dangerous steps will this impetuous young woman take to find justice?

I enjoyed the story, and the questions posed above are answered with great satisfaction in the final chapters as the story builds and comes to a head. The thing that came across to me most was the sense of sultry, dusty Texan heat, but this feeling was conveyed not by a flurry of adjectives, but concealed within paragraphs that subtly suggested that it was hot and dry and dusty. The atmosphere created was impressive, and certainly helped to set the sense of place for a luddite like me, who needed all the help he could get to be hoisted out of his nineteenth century London rut.

The novel covers an impressively wide range of topics, despite coming in at only 300 pages. Notable topics are racism, war, slavery, forbidden love, loss, class, history, industry, English upper-class pretentiousness and colonialism.

Reading ‘The Herbalists Apprentice’ was a new experience for me, but it’s not simply for that reason that I would recommend giving it a read, but because its an effectively atmospheric and immersive story, which sweeps its skirts gently along the warm and dusty roads of 1850’s Texas, until, before you know it, you find yourself in the centre of an intriguing mystery.

Rosa Morgan Lockwood blogs at http://thevictoriantimes.blogspot.com/ and can be found on Twitter @VictorianTime

D.O. Hill and Early Photography: Or: A Guest Post by Alison Bacon:

2012-01-20T02:46:00.000-08:00

Most people know that Fox Talbot invented photography. Not so many are aware that its first real flowering took place north of the border. Alison Bacon unravels the events that brought an artist into the frame at just the right moment.

The Scottish connection

In 1839 William Henry Fox Talbot found a way of capturing an image on light-sensitive paper and rendering it stable. The negative/positive process allowed any number of prints to be produced from a single ‘calotype’, and so modern photography was born.

With competitors snapping at his heels, Fox Talbot was quick to protect his invention with patents, but he entrusted the details to his close friend Sir David Brewster. Brewster, an eminent if irascible scientist (now best known for inventing the kaleidoscope) was at that time Principal of St. Andrews University.

St. Andrew's Cathedral & Rule's Tower

Brewster gathered around him a group of academics and townsmen, all interested in the new science of making images from light. One of these was John Adamson, a local doctor. John enlisted the help of his younger brother Robert, a talented engineer dogged by ill-health. After many false starts, the Adamson brothers managed to replicate Fox Talbot’s methods. When the inventor saw their results, he agreed not to extend his patents to Scotland and allowed Robert Adamson to set up a photography business in Edinburgh.

Enter the artist

In the spring of 1843, Edinburgh was galvanised by a crisis in the Church of Scotland over the right of congregations to appoint their own ministers. Earlier that year, appeals to the English parliament to uphold this right had finally failed, and Thomas Chalmers, the radical church leader, called on the General Assembly to assert the church’s independence from the state. On the 18th of May, only a week after Adamson’s arrival, Chalmers and some 450 ministers left the Assembly as it sat in Edinburgh and reconvened to form a new Free Church of Scotland. This Act of Disruption was followed five days later by the formal signing of a Deed of Demission. Among the many onlookers was David Octavius Hill.

Hill and Daughter

Hill was an established landscape artist who also held the position of Secretary to the newly formed Royal Scottish Academy. Like many others he was impressed by the moral courage of Chalmers and his followers. He offered to produce a commemorative painting, to include as many portraits as possible of the ministers who had signed the Deed. But his problem was one of time. To create portraits from life he needed to sketch the subjects, most of whom would leave Edinburgh within a few days.
Brewster was also present at the signing and learned of Hill’s intention. Seeing a perfect opportunity to promote Adamson’s work, he suggested Hill could eliminate the need for sketches by using calotypes instead and persuaded him to visit Adamson’s studio on Calton Hill. Despite Hill’s initial scepticism, Adamson’s demonstration of the new technique quickly won him over.

Hill and Adamson

Although twenty years his senior, Hill struck up an immediate friendship with Adamson and after a few weeks he and his daughter moved in to share the Rock House studio. Hill’s wife having died a few years earlier, the two men and a five year-old must have made an odd household in Victorian Edinburgh.

'Edinburgh Ale' (1843) Left to Right - Ballantyne, Bell & Hill

But Hill was a key figure in society. He saw that the calotype was much more than an artist’s short-cut and soon had Edinburgh ablaze with the notion of sitting for this new kind of portrait. The Demission painting was put on hold as writers, churchmen, actors and visiting dignitaries all rolled up to have a calotype taken.

The experience of sitting in bright sunlight for over a minute, as was then required, could be an ordeal, but Hill’s social and artistic skills produced results that were both pleasing and naturalistic. By July of 1843, Hill and Adamson prints were appearing in a gallery owned by Hill’s brother, and early the following year were exhibited at the RSA.

King Fisher

This dynamic and creative partnership lasted for four years and in that time Hill and Adamson captured around three thousand images taken not just in the studio but also around Edinburgh, St. Andrews and the fishing village of Newhaven. Some rate as significant works of art, others as social documents. Many are both. A large number can now de viewed online. (The images reproduced here are all from the National Galleries of Scotland Flickr photostream.)

The end of the affair

The partnership might have gone on to even greater achievements, but late in 1847 Adamson, still only twenty six, fell seriously ill. He went home to St. Andrews where he died in January 1848. By his own admission, Hill had never been interested in the technical side of the calotype. After Adamson’s death he failed to find another partner and withdrew to his original career as artist, teacher and administrator.

In the course of his public life, D.O. Hill experienced a series of deep personal losses, from the death of his wife Ann in 1841, to that of his ‘amiable friend’ Adamson and finally, in 1860, the loss of his beloved daughter Chattie. But in 1862 he finally married Amelia Paton, an artist, sculptor and family friend who supported him in his final years. With her help and encouragement he completed the Disruption painting begun almost twenty years earlier and in a touching anachronism included in it both himself and Robert Adamson, immediately recognisable as the man with the camera.

Hill's Memorial

Hill’s love affair with photography turned out to be short-lived, but his impact was immense. It could be argued that he lacked the technical know-how of a photographer, but it was his energy, vision and compositional skill that placed photography on the artistic and cultural stage. Any good history of photography will make reference to the Hill & Adamson story. Further links and references can be found here.

Alison Bacon graduated from St. Andrews University a lifetime ago. Since then she has been a librarian, an IT trainer and more recently a writer. Back in the seventies she had a mild flirtation with early photography. Her current obsession with D.O. Hill looks like being the real deal.

A huge thanks to Alison for this super post, writing about a subject I find fascinating, and that makes the Victorian period one of the best in history to study - photography.

“Like Painting the Forth Bridge…” Or: The Greatest Victorian Bridge, Finished at Last…For Now:

2012-01-13T02:42:00.000-08:00

Recently, on the 9^th December 2011, the perpetual painting job on the magnificent Forth Railway Bridge in Scotland was at last completed. here is an article from BBC News heralding the end of this task

Originally, a bridge designed by Sir Thomas Bouch was going to cross the Firth of Forth and connect Edinburgh to Fife, but the tragic disaster that befell one of Bouch’s earlier bridges, the Tay (read about that disaster here) meant that the project was suspended, and eventually taken away from him altogether after a public enquiry found that he had utterly mis-designed the tragic Tay Bridge.

The Forth Bridge project was given instead to civil engineers Sir John Fowler (who had worked on the metropolitan underground line in London) and Sir Benjamin Baker (who had transported Cleopatra’s Needle from Egypt to London), who designed the fantastic bridge that stands to this day.

The building and construction was carried out by Glasgow engineering company ‘Sir William Arrol & Co.’ and this project was groundbreaking in a number of ways;

Firstly, it was the first bridge in Britain to be made entirely of nothing but steel – a relatively unknown quantity when it came to bridges – If the Forth Bridge is compared to another bridge designed in the same decade – Tower Bridge in London, the immediate thing that is noted is that the Forth is a fairly sparse looking structure; there is nothing showy to it, is not dressed up with cladding, it is 100% function, 0% aesthetic, and in being so (in my opinion) becomes 100% both, and I can think of no Bridge in the country as industrially picturesque.

The Forth Under Construction

Secondly, when the bridge opened in March 1890, it was the longest single cantilever bridge in the world (though it was overtaken in 1917 by the Quebec Bridge) and was Britain’s first cantilever bridge, but these records were not made simply for the sake of it; as with the appearance of the bridge, they were purely functional.

Following the Tay disaster, public confidence in railway bridges was significantly damaged. The under-engineering of the Tay had given such structures a fearsome reputation, and to remedy this, Fowler and Baker knew that the Forth had to be the biggest and strongest bridge ever seen to restore confidence in railway bridges. The design they came up with was that of a cantilever. The strength of this design was demonstrated by co-designer Benjamin Baker at a lecture. The demonstration is shown in the picture below:

Behind the people is a photograph of the bridge, and in front of that, people act as a human version of the structure, to the same scale as the photograph of the bridge, so the men in the chairs on either side represent the vertical piers directly above them on the photograph, and the bricks next to them assume the role of the anchor piers at each end of the bridge.

The arms of the men in the chairs are supported by wooden beams held in their hands and butted against their chairs, and the tops of the two outermost ends of the beams are steadied by ropes attached to the anchor piers (or bricks) A little platform in the centre of the picture is suspended between the top ends of the wooden beams held by the inner hands of the two men.

This cantilever arrangement provided the perfect balance of forces, and supported the weight of the man sat upon the centre platform with ease. This human version of the bridge perfectly demonstrated that the bridge was well supported enough, and strong enough top cope with rail traffic.

During the building, which lasted from 1883 to 1890, five thousand men worked on the project (most of whom were foreigners) and during the seven-year build, fifty seven men died, the youngest being just sixteen years of age.

The Bridge, which was opened by the Prince of Wales upon its completion, was one of the great Victorian achievements. It was, however, quite high maintenance, and needed constant painting. In those days, and right up until forty or fifty years ago men without harnesses or safety equipment and with nothing but a flat cap on their heads climbed the steel structure with a tin of paint and a brush, coating the bridge with paint from one end to the other, and then turning around and going back again. As the article states, this task will not need to be done now for another twenty or so years due to the paint used, which sounds the death knell on the metaophor ‘like painting the Forth Bridge’ to describe a never-ending or thankless task…

The Child Doomed to a Doll-Less Existence Has an Injustice Inflicted on Her for Which no Other Education can Effectually Compensate: Or: The Importance of Giving Children Toys:

2012-01-06T02:10:00.000-08:00

In the evenings it is often my wont to pick up a periodical or a bit of Victorian journalism for a little light reading. An article can be read in around fifteen minutes and doesn’t require the same kind of commitment as a book, and so the other night I turned to my old friend James Greenwood for a little entertainment.

Whilst thumbing through ‘Mysteries of Modern London’ (1883) I came across an article I had not read before, and to my delight I found it pertinent to the last few months for a number of reasons;

Firstly, and most obviously, it speaks of Christmas, and toys, and we are in December, and, having done a bit of Christmas shopping myself recently, have seen the furore surrounding the seasons’ ‘must have toys and gadgets’. But also, and in ways I’m not sure how to describe, the article (for me, anyway) seemed to have some significance when read in context of both the summer riots that occurred in Britain, and also Britain’s place in Europe. Perhaps I saw things in the article that weren’t there, though, and I’d appreciate feedback and comments from anyone who sees what I saw.

On top of that, though, this is a fascinating article, which speaks to the importance of children having good toys to play with, that they may grow into rounded adults. (Perhaps this is the point that led me to think of the riots, and that perhaps the participants missed something whilst growing up.)

The article:

Poor Folly’s Playthings:

IT may at first thought appear an absurdity, but it is, nevertheless, profoundly true, that not least among the many good reasons why England should beware of being beguiled into a war with the rest of Europe is that one of the almost immediate results would be a toy famine in our land. Why it should be would not be easy to tell, but it is a fact that we are no more independent in the matter of toys than as regards our breadstuffs and our bacon, and the hundred other commodities that go towards the sum total of what are called the necessaries of existence. There are some - and they would most likely be the old bachelor portion of the community - who will say that it is ridiculous to speak of mere toys as bearing any relation even to our daily needs; but the only reply that can be made to all such observations is that it is a great pity that those who utter them do not know better.

A very little reflection should convince us that toys are almost as essential to our children's wholesome growth and well-being as the food they eat and the clothes they wear. The melancholy effects of a toy dearth would make themselves apparent in a very short time - ere our present race of small girls and boys became women and men. It is not a mere question of amusing the infant mind. Deprived of their doll and their doll's house, our little maidens would be shut out from influences that are who shall say how valuable in developing characteristics that in after life go so far towards making them inestimable wives and mothers? The waxen image with its pink shoes and flaxen curls is not a mere object to idolise. Were it so, it might be well spared. Children, girls especially, are shrewd observers, and the faculty of imitation is seldom wanting in them. Their treatment is always a more or less exaggerated repetition of their nursery personal experiences, and one, as a rule, finds the parent's or the nurse's method of child management reflected in Miss six years playing at being mother with a sawdust-stuffed baby. She takes an earnest and methodical delight in dressing and undressing it, and in making its bed in the tiny cot. With an expression of countenance indicative of her sense of the responsibility that rests with her, she attends to dolly's wardrobe, and so discovers in a practical manner the use of needles and cottons; in its behalf, she sets the Lilliputian house in order, and makes everything within it neat and tidy, so that even mamma, should she peep into it, could find no faults.

Many an adult might learn a useful lesson were he at times privileged to peep into dolldom when the presiding genius was at home with her waxen and wooden family gathered about her. It is good to be a furtive looker-on when the young dolls' housekeeper, overhauling the contents of the nursery litter cupboard, comes on an old favourite long discarded on account of its infirmities. Accident has deprived it perhaps of its nose, it has become prematurely bald, or a murderous assault by the terrier has incurably crippled both its legs; anyway it has been relegated to obscurity as being no longer presentable in respectable company. But now, as its mistress contemplates it so forlorn and neglected, so dusty and shabby, her old love returns for it in full force, and she bedews its battered visage with remorseful tears and makes humble confession of her penitence to it. Yes, that day at least she will have nothing to say to her new doll, who as yet is spick-and-span and innocent of flaw or defect; she gives herself entirely to the comfort and caressing of the legless one, dressing it in the richest array at her disposal and placing it in the position of honour. Nor does it invariably happen that the newly-fanned flame dies out as quickly as its warmth was rekindled. Often enough it proves that the old affection revived is constant ever after – during doll-hood that is to say – and that, however splendid may be the doll who appears as the reigning favourite, the invalided one is snugly bestowed in the toy box, the doll of dolls, after all is said and done.

The child doomed to a doll-less existence has an injustice inflicted on her for which no other education can effectually compensate, and the result of the unnatural deprivation would of course manifest itself more markedly if she were at the same time deprived of every other kind of plaything as well. Nor does a toyless boy afford a spectacle less to be pitied. Cut him off from bat and ball, from battledore and shuttlecock, from kite and rocking-horse, and from mimic fife and drum and peg-top and whipping-top, and what would life be worth to him? It would be of little use endeavouring to make it up to him by supplying him with an abundance of what are called educational toys - with boxes of wooden "bricks" that he may study the art of bridge-building and the principle of the key-stone, or with magnetic fish and hydrostatic and pneumatic implements and kaleidoscopes, or any other gilded pill of the make-believe plaything sort, by means of which a boy may be beguiled into acquiring a knowledge of scientific laws when he imagines he is simply amusing himself. On the specious plan alluded to they make soldiers in France. In that country miniature guns, swords, and cannons are looked on as almost the only playthings fit for a boy, and the result furnishes significant proof of how great is the influence of the toys of the child on the character and disposition of the man. Take away from an English boy his accustomed playthings and he would mope and be miserable. In sheer desperation he would be driven so constantly to his books that, ere he attained his teens, he would have become so terribly clever as to be a nuisance and an abhorrence to all who knew him: his heart would grow grey while yet his head bore the curly locks of youth, and there would be for him nothing in the world that was not sour to his taste as a green goose-berry.

There would be danger of this alarming state of affairs coming to pass in the event of England being "Boycotted" by other nations, including Germany, France, and Switzerland, from which countries nine-tenths of the toys placed in the hands of English children are derived. We have not the knack of cheap toy-making. It would be a gain to us if we had. It is not a sufficient reason that we do not give our attention to it; because the scanty pay the women and children toy-makers of Germany and Switzerland receive makes it more profitable to import toys than to invest capital for their home production. I don't know what the rate of pay of a German toy-maker may be, but if she earns less than our lucifer-box maker or our slop tailoress, it is a marvel how she keeps whole - hearted enough to stick to toy-making at all. There are thousands of poor souls, women and girls, residing in the back streets of London, whose average earnings do not exceed sixpence a-day, and such, if they could be taught to move their fingers at toy-making as nimbly as they are compelled to at the starving trades at which they at present find employment, the occupation would be far pleasanter, and might be made to pay as well, or better.

And this idea is the more worth consideration in view of the undoubted fact that year-by-year the custom of introducing toys at our domestic festivities grows more common. This is due, no doubt, in great part, to our adoption of the German Christmas tree; and it may perhaps be argued that, since we are indebted to Germany for the pretty idea of the tree, we should not begrudge that country the privilege of providing the fruit for it, especially as the crop she assures us is so abundant and unfailing. There is enough for all. Choice fruit, in shape of imitation horses and donkeys, so elaborately made and finished that they cost almost half as much as the living creatures of the common sort, and clockwork peacocks valued at a guinea and a-half and Noah's arks with every animal so true to nature that the price of the whole collection, with the ark to keep them in, is ten or twelve pounds; and farmyards, with sheep that bleat when you stroke their fleecy backs, and tin ponds for the ducks and geese to swim in. These high- class fruits of the Christmas-tree, for those who can afford to indulge in such luxuries, with hundreds of cases, each one as large almost as a two-roomed country cottage, and stuffed full with toys, cheap and common, are such as eventually find their way at Christmas and on New Year's Eve to the fancy shops and the countless toy-stalls that now, on such occasions, may be seen in every street market-place in the metropolis. Cheap and common though they may be, however, the toys of Poverty Market are neither slovenly in shape, nor coarse and vulgar in design. The only exceptions to the rule are those hideous wooden painted dolls, with eyes that invariably squint, and whose matchwood legs, hinged to their square trunks, stretch out with obstinate rigidity and break off short when any attempt is made to compose them. Where these monstrosities hail from, and how it happens that they still find a place in the English toy market is quite unaccountable, unless it is that there are still to be found amongst the more ignorant of the poorer classes, mothers whose reign over their children is a reign of terror, and part of whose system it is to scare a fractious child by thrusting one of these dreadful little bogies before its eyes. But in every other respect the improvement that has taken place in the manufacture of the cheapest kind of toys is as amazing as it is gratifying.

There was a time, and that not more than a quarter of a century since, when almost the only toy (excepting the squinting penny doll above mentioned) with which a poor man's child was acquainted was the famous "lamb," with its body of clay, cotton-wool for fleece, and five lucifer matches for its legs and tail. Nor was this curiosity of nature to be always obtained. People had to wait for the day when the old woman who appeared to hold a monopoly for their manufacture came round. It was lucky for the old soul that she did not live in these later times, or, with her ringing cry she might have found herself "put down" along with the muffin bell.

"If I'd as much money as I could tell, I'd never come crying young lambs to sell," piped up the old woman; and she did such a trade that it is by no means certain that the reason why she retired from the trade was not that one day she found time to tell over the money she had accumulated, and, finding she had enough, she gave over lamb-making, and that particular breed for which she was renowned became extinct.

You may buy a lamb for a penny still on any street market stall, and, with all respect for the memory, of the old woman, it is worth an entire flock of the ridiculous things she used to turn out at the price. You may buy every other kind of toy at an equally reasonable rate-a clockwork mouse for twopence, and a set of doll's tea-things for three- pence, either in china or artistically turned in wood. The ancient and ludicrous spotted hare with his body like a ninepin and his legs mere stumps, has retired in favour of an animal symmetrically shaped and finished; while the long established peg top has found a formidable rival in a self-acting spring spinner of handsome appearance, the price of which is only one penny. The very marbles are not what they were when I was a boy. There were only two sorts then, and they were known as "commoneys" and "stoneys." The first were brittle disappointments in baked clay, and as often as not shattered themselves and our hopes as well at the moment of victory. The others were more durable, but they were exceedingly expensive. You got no more than six or eight for a penny probably. But marbles are moulded in glass now - elegant little globes, curiously threaded and coloured with all the hues of the rainbow - and I saw them the other day in Brick Lane being sold at the rate of ten for a halfpenny, which, one way and another, is evidence of the eternal fitness of things. "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." There never was a time when our schoolboy Jacks, and Jills as well, were so hardly worked as now. They require, consequently, a more abundant supply of toys than formerly, and at a price fairly within their means, and lo! here they are.

In connection with the toy interest there have always been two of its features that I could never understand, nor was anyone I ever yet applied to able to give me any satisfactory information. In the first place, who are the unknown geniuses constantly racking their inventive faculties to produce some new whimsy penny plaything? and, secondly, by whom is it that the said latest inventions carried hot from the factory (wherever that may be) to the neighbourhood of the Royal Exchange, there to be retailed by a band of gutter speculators who seemingly are engaged exclusively in this line of business? As to the first question, it is quite certain that the novelties are not all the creation of one man's brain. Any one familiar with the neighbourhood of the Bank of England, the Exchange and Broad Street, with eyes to see and ears to listen, cannot have missed the fact that scarce a day passes without there being "something new in the hands of the penny toymen exhibited and bawled out to tempt those of the crowd that throng the pavement. The variety is endless. To-day it is a magic mousetrap, a marvellous microscope, or a dancing donkey; tomorrow, a Chinese puzzle of rings and links, a Japanese parasol, a squeaking Jack-in-the-box, a jumping frog, or a wonderful bird- whistle. It would occupy at least half a column to enumerate merely the names of these new wares and toy tricks, that sell by hundreds on a Monday, and are represented by something else on Wednesday, becoming at that time so stale and unprofitable that unsold stock represents so much wasted capital.

What is the system on which the novelties are produced? Are there anywhere in London speculative toy-makers, opulent men who have made much money at the game, and who daily are to be found at their handsome city chambers to give audience to needy inventors with something to sell? Do they wait in an ante-room and crowd on the stairs, there being so many of them, each one jealously hugging in the breast pocket of his shabby old coat the last offspring of his ingenuity in the shape of a comical "grandfather's clock," or a dancing clown, or a magic mirror, and passing one at a time into the great man's presence? One would like unobserved to be a witness of the proceedings. The encourager of genius lolling in his chair at his ease, and with gold-rimmed glasses bestriding his shrewd nose, condescendingly contemplating the "frolicsome donkey" the poor needy wretch of an inventor has brought for his inspection, and which he earnestly recommends as being sure to "take" with the public, while he jerks at the string and shows how by that means the animal cocks its ears and flings up its hind legs, to the dismay of the gay young lady who occupies the saddle. The patron shakes his head.

"Not so bad," says he, "but where's the profit to come from, selling 'em to the trade at fourpence-ha'penny a dozen, with all that precious lot of pasteboard and paint to find, to say nothing about the j'ints and the string. I'll say seven and six, if you like, for the notion, but I won't give another shilling."

And the inventor of the frolicsome donkey, with a sigh (he had asked fifteen shillings for the article), pockets the money, and retires to make way for a brother genius, who has belaboured his brains for a week past to bring to perfection a guttapercha mouse that squeaks when its tail is pinched.

I don't of course say that this is the sort of thing that really goes on; it merely occurs to my mind as being possible, because, unless the ingenious little articles one sees offered for sale cost next to nothing in their production, it would be impossible for the "trade" to maintain its briskness. It is brisk, undoubtedly, in the localities indicated - in Threadneedle Street, and in the neighbourhood of the Stock Exchange - which shows how much success in the most trifling businesses depends on an instinctive knowledge of the desires and weaknesses of our fellow creatures. As an ignorant and inexperienced person with the last invented jumping frog to dispose of, I should no more think of taking it to the Stock Exchange than to the top of the monument. What on earth should a "bull" or a "bear" know, or desire to know, about jumping frogs? or mice that squeak when their tales are pinched, or frolicsome donkeys? You would never dream they could take delight in such absurdities to see them when they are in the street conspiring iii pairs, or brooding solitary, and using their pencil point as a toothpick, lost to the world for the time in a field of figures. Fancy breaking in on such a man's cogitation by soliciting him to buy a Punch's squeaker. The idea is too ridiculous to be for a moment entertained. There appears to be one way of accounting for the mystery and only one.

There are mysteries of Mammon's acre, and this may be of them. Everyone is aware how terribly harassing to the mental powers are complicated calculations made offhand, and frequently against time, which has to be beaten by a neck-by half a head, if money is to be made by the speculation. It is possible-nay, probable - that, under extraordinary pressure, the brain even of a bull may become heated and disturbed and a bear be conscious of symptoms that make him feel uncomfortable. The proper and immediate thing, of course, is to resort to some means of tranquilising the nervous system. The simplest remedies are always the safest, and sometimes the most efficacious. Is it impossible, then, that an excited bull, feeling the fit coming on, may hurry to his chambers and bid his faithful clerk make haste and procure him some toy the contemplation of which shall amuse him, though only for a couple of minutes? He knows that if he can but laugh his congestion will be relieved, and he will be himself again. He therefore sends out into Broad-street for a frolicsome donkey, or a Punch's squeaker, communes with one or the other the secrecy of his chamber for a few minutes, and then emerges as cool and self-possessed a bull as ever pastured in a Devon meadow. If I have hit on a correct solution of the matter, the constant craving in the neighbourhood in question for novel toys is accounted for.

- James Greenwood, Mysteries of Modern London, 1883

There you have it, parents; by ignoring the incessant advertising and not getting your children the latest must-have gadgets that they desired this Christmas, you have actually destroyed their future. Now, one of those clay sheep sounds delightful…

The Cry of a City Clerk: Or: A Christmas Poem:

2011-12-31T02:32:00.000-08:00

I KNEW, I knew it would not last –

'Twas hard, 'twas hopeful, but 'tis past.

Ah! ever thus, from boyhood's hour,

I've seen my fondest hopes decay.

I never trusted Jack Frost's power,

But Jack Frost did my trust betray.

I never bought a pair of skates

On Friday – I am in the law –

But, ere l started, with my mates

On Saturday, 'twas sure to thaw!

Now, too – the prospect seemed divine –

They skated yesterday, I knew,

And now, just as I 'm going to dine,

The sun comes out, the skies grow blue,

Ere we at Wimbledon can meet,

Those horrid gaps! – that treacherous sludge!

I shall not get one skimmer fleet!

After my long and sloppy trudge.

No go! One more lost Saturday!

To skating's joys I'm still a stranger.

I sit and curse the melting ray,

In which my hopes all melt away –

It means soft ice, chill slop, and –

“Danger!!!”

Black and White: Or The Phantom Steed! Or: A Typical Ghost Story for Christmas, by a Witness of the Truth:

2011-12-23T07:40:00.000-08:00

I WAS walking in one of the slums in the neighbourhood of Oxford Street, some years ago, and always fond of horse-flesh (I had driven – as a boy – a bathing machine for my pleasure along the wild coastline of the great Congo Continent) was greatly attracted by a hack standing within the shafts of a cart belonging to a funeral furnisher. Like many of its class, the horse was jet black, with a long flowing tail and a mane to match. As I gazed upon the creature the driver came out of the shop (to which doleful establishment the equipage belonged) and drove slowly away. I felt forced to follow, and soon found myself outside a knacker's yard. Guessing the intention of the driver to treat his steed as only fit for canine food, I offered to purchase the seemingly doomed animal.

To my surprise, the man expressed his willingness to treat with me, and suggested that I might have the carcase at the rate of 4s 11¾d. a pound. Considering the price not excessive, I agreed, and, having weighed the horse at an automatic weighing machine, I handed over £100 in notes. Then the first strange thing happened. Before I could replace my pocket book in its receptable in my coat, the driver had absolutely vanished! I could not see him anywhere. I was the more annoyed at this, as I found that (by mistake) I had given him notes on the Bank of Elegance, which everyone knows are of less value than notes on the Bank of England. However, it was too late to search for the vendor, and I walked away as I could, leading by the bridle the steed I had so recently acquired.

It was now necessary to get quarters for the night, but I found, at that advanced hour, that many of the leading hotels were either full or unwilling to supply me with a bedroom and stable combined until the morning. I was refused firmly but civilly at the Grand, the Metropole, the Grosvenor, and the Pig and Whistle Tavern, South East Hackney. At the latter caravanserai, the night-porter (who was busying himself cleaning the pewter pots) suggested that I should go to Bath.

Adopting this idea, I mounted my steed (which answered, after a little practice, to the name of Cats'-meat), and took the Old Kent Road until I reached St. Albans. It was now morning, and the old abbey stood out in grand outline against the glorious scarlet of the setting sun. Entering an inn, I called for refreshment for man and beast, and, having authority for considering myself qualified to act as representative of both, consumed the double portion. Thinking about the whiskey I had just discussed, as I rode along, I came to a milestone, standing on its head, and a sign post in the last stage of hopeless intoxication. It was here that a police constable turned his lantern upon me with a pertinacity that apparently was calculated to challenge observation. Annoyed, but not altogether surprised, I declared my opinion that it was "all right," and fell asleep. When I awoke, I found that I had travelled some hundreds of miles, and, strange to say, my horse was as good as when it had started. From what I could gather from the signs on the road (I have been accustomed to Forestry from my earliest childhood), it seemed to me that, while I was slumbering, I must have passed Macclesfield, Ramsgate, Richmond (both in Surrey and in Yorkshire), and was now close to the weirdest spot in all phantom-populated Wiltshire – a place in its rugged desolation suggestive of the Boundless Prairies and BUFFALO BILL – Wild Westbury!

Greatly fatigued, I entered a second inn, and enjoyed a hearty meal, which was also a simple one. I am a liquidarian, and take no animal or vegetable food, and have not tasted fish for nearly a quarter of a century. When I wished to continue my journey to Bath, I found Cats'-meat so disinclined to move, that I thought the best thing to do in the interest of progress, was to carry him myself. He was very light – so light that I imagined the automatic weighing machine must have been out of order when I tested it. Almost in a trance I walked along, until, stumbling, I fell, and dropped Cats'-meat into a well. And then another strange thing happened. The horse with its jet-black tail and mane, emerged from the water as white as snow! Apparently annoyed at the treatment to which it had been accidentally subjected, it fled away, and I lost sight of it amongst the hills that overlook Wild Westbury.

And then the strangest thing of all happened, and has been happening ever since!

In clear weather, on the side of one of these hills, Cats'-meat, in the habit as he stood when he left the well on that fatal day, may be seen patiently waiting until the time shall arrive when he shall receive a coat of blacking, a companion steed to share with him his labours, and a hearse! I am not the only person who has seen him thus. The spectre (if it be a spectre) is known for miles around, and has been watched by thousands. Nay, more. On occasions of great rejoicing, when merry-making has been, the order of the day or night several Cats'-meats have appeared to the carousing watchers strangely blended together.

Speaking for myself, if I have seen one I have seen half a dozen – nay, more – with hills to match! And those who do not believe me can continue the journey I once commenced, and (after I have wished them a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year) proceed to Bath…
- Punch, Christmas 1890

Voces Populi: Or: A Christmas Romp from Punch:

2011-12-23T01:01:00.000-08:00

Whilst going through a few periodicals looking for something Christmassy to post over the next few days, I stumbled across a little Christmas folly from the Punch Christmas Number of 1890, and thought it may provide a little seasonal cheer:

SCENE - Mrs. CHIPPERFIELD's Drawing room, It is after the Christmas dinner, and the Gentlemen have not yet appeared, Mrs. C. is laboriously attempting to be gracious to her Brother's Fiancee, whose acquaintance she has made for the first time, and with whom she is disappointed. Married Sisters and Maiden Aunts confer in corners with a sleepy acidity.

First Married Sister (to Second). I felt quite sorry for FRED, to see him sitting there, looking – and no wonder – so ashamed of himself – but I always will say, and I always must say, CAROLINE, that if you and ROBERT had been firmer with him when he was younger, he would never have turned out so badly! Now there's my GEORGE – &c., &c.

Mrs. C. (to the Fiancee) Well, my dear, I don't approve of young men getting engaged until they have some prospects of being able to marry, and dear ALGY was always my favourite brother, and I've seen so much misery from long engagements. However, we must hope for the best, that's all!

A Maiden Aunt (to Second Ditto) Exactly what struck me, MARTHA. One waiter would have been quite sufficient, and if JAMES must be grand and give champagne, he might have given us a little more of it; I'm sure I'd little more than foam in my glass! And every plate as cold as a stone, and you and I the only people who were not considered worthy of silver forks, and the children encouraged to behave as they please, and JOSEPH PODMORE made such a fuss with, because he's well off – and not enough sweetbread to go the round. Ah, well, thank goodness, we needn't dine here for another year!

Mr. Chipperfield (at the door) Sorry to cut you short in your cigar, Uncle, and you LIMPETT; but fact is, being Christmas night, I thought we'd come up a little sooner and all have a bit of a romp...Well, EMILY, my dear, here we are, all of us – ready for anything in the way of a frolic – what's it to be? Forfeits, games, Puss in the Corner, something to cheer us all up, eh? Won't anyone make a suggestion? [General expression of gloomy blankness.

Algernon (to his Fiancee – whom he wants to see shine), ZEFFIE, you know no end of games – what's that one you played at home, with potatoes and a salt-spoon, you know?

Zeffie (blushing) No, please, ALGY! I don't know any games, indeed, I couldn't, really!

Mr. C. Uncle JOSEPH will get us going, I'm sure – what do you say, Uncle?

Uncle Joseph Well, I won't say "no" to a quiet rubber.

Mrs. C. But, you see, we can't all play in that, and there is a pack of cards in the house somewhere; but I know two of the aces are gone, and I don't think all the court cards were there the last time we played. Still, if you can manage with what is left, we might get up a game for you.

Uncle J. (grimly) Thank you, my dear, but, on the whole, I think I would almost rather romp –

Mr. C. Uncle JOSEPH votes for romping! What do you say to Dumb Crambo? Great fun – half of us go out, and come in on all fours, to rhyme to "cat," or "bat," or something – you can play that, LIMPET?

Mr. Limpett If I must find a rhyme to cat, I prefer, so soon after dinner, not to go on all fours for it, I confess.

Mr. C. Well, let's have something quieter, then – only do settle. Musical Chairs, eh?

Algy ZEFFIE will play the piano for you – she plays beautifully.

Zeffie.Not without notes, ALGY, and I forgot to bring my music with me. Shall we play "Consequences"? It's a very quiet game – you play it sitting down, with paper and pencil, you know!

Mr. Limpett (sardonically, and sotto voce). Ah, this is something like a rollick now. "Consequences,'' eh?

Algy (who has overheard – in a savage undertone), If that isn't good enough for you, suggest something better – or shut up! [Mr. L. prefers the latter alternative.

Mr. C. Now, then, have you given everybody a piece of paper, EMILY? CAROLINE, you're going to play – we can't leave you out of it.

Aunt Caroline No, JAMES, I'd rather look on, and see you all enjoying yourselves – I’ve no animal spirits now!

Mr. C. Oh, nonsense! Christmas time, you know. Let's be jolly while we can – give her a pencil, EMILY!

Aunt C. No, I can't, really. You must excuse me. I know I'm a wet blanket; but, when I think that I mayn't be with you another Christmas, we may most of us be dead by then, why – (sobs).

Fred (the Family Failure) That's right, Mater – trust you to see a humorous side to everything!

Another Aunt For shame, FRED! If you don't know who is responsible for your poor mother's low spirits, others do!

[The Family Failure collapses.

Mr. Limpett Well, as we've all got pencils; is there any reason why the revelry should not commence?

Mr. C. No – don't let's waste any more time. Miss ZEFFIE says she will write down on the top of her paper "Who met whom" (must be a Lady and Gentleman in the party, you know), then she folds it down, and passes it on to the next, who writes, "What he said to her" – the next, "What she said to him" – next, "What the consequences were," and the last, "What the world said." Capital game – first rate. Now, then!

[The whole party pass papers in silence from one to another, and scribble industriously with knitted brows.

Mr. C. Time's up, all of you. I'll read the first paper aloud. (Glances at it, and explodes.) He he! – this is really very funny, (Reads.) “Uncle JOSEPH met Aunt CAROLINE at the – ho-ho! – The Empire! He said to her; ’what are the wild waves saying?’ and she said to him, ‘It's time you were taken away!’ The consequences were that they both went and had their hair cut, and the world said they had always suspected there was something between them!"

Uncle J. I consider that a piece of confounded impertinence!

[Puffs.

Aunt C. It's not true. I never met JOSEPH at the Empire. I don't go to such places. I didn't think I should be insulted like this – (Weeps.) – on Christmas too!

Aunts' Chorus FRED aqain!

[They regard Family Failure indignantly

Mr. C. There, then, it was all fun – no harm meant. I'll read the next. "Mr. LIMPETT met Miss ZEFFIE in the Burlington Arcade. He said to her, ‘O, you little duck!' She said to him, ‘Fowls are cheap to-day! The consequences were that they never smiled again, and the world said, ‘What price hot potatoes?’ (Everybody looks depressed.) Hmm – not bad – but I think we'll play something else now.

[ZEFFIE perceives that ALGY is not pleased with her.

Tommy (To Uncle JOSEPH) Uncle, why didn't you carve at dinner?

Uncle J. Well, TOMMY, because the carving was done at a side table – and uncommon badly done, too. Why do you want to know?

Tommy Parpar thought you would carve, I know. He told Mummy she must ask you, because –

Mrs. C. (With a prophetic instinct.) Now, TOMMY, you mustn't tease your Uncle.. Come away, and tell your new Aunt ZEFFIE what you're going to do with your Christmas boxes.

Tommy. But mayn't I tell him what Parpar said, first?

Mrs. C. No, no; by and by – not now! [She averts the danger.

[Later; the Company are playing "Hide the Thimble;" i.e. someone has planted that article in a place so conspicuous that few would expect to find it there. As each person catches sight of it, he or she sits down. Uncle JOSEPH is still, to the general merriment, wandering about and getting angrier every moment.

Mr. C. That's it, Uncle, you're warm – you’re getting warm!

Uncle J. (Boiling over.) Warm, Sir? I am warm – and something more, I can tell you! [Sits down with a bump.

Mr. C. You haven't seen it! I'm sure you haven't seen it. Come now, Uncle!

Uncle J. Never mind whether I have or have not. Perhaps I don't want to see it, Sir!

The Children Then do you give it up? Do you want to be told? Why, it's staring you in the face all the time!

Uncle J. I don't care whether it's staring or not – I don't want to be told anything more about it.

The Children Then you're cheating, Uncle – you must go on walking till you do see it!

Uncle J. Oh, that's it, eh? Very well, then – I'll walk!

[Walks out, leaving the company paralysed Mrs. C. Run after him, TOMMY, and tell him – quick! [Exit TOMMY

Mr. C. (feebly) I think when Uncle JOSEPH does come back, we'd better try to think of some game he can't lose his temper at. Ah, here's TOMMY!

Tommy I told him – but he went all the same, and slammed the door. He said I was to go back and tell you that you would find he was cut up – and cut up rough, too!

Mrs. C. But what did you tell him?

Tommy. Why, only that Parpar asked him to come tonight because he was sure to cut up well. You said I might!

[Sensation; Prompt departure of TOMMY for bed; moralising by Aunts; a spirit of perfect candour prevails; names are called – also cabs; further hostilities postponed till next Christmas.

Happy Christmas everyone,

All the best for the season,

The Amateur Casual

Twitter’s Top Five Victorians: Or: A Straw Poll

2011-12-09T04:41:00.000-08:00

Last Monday I carried out a quick poll on Twitter in which I asked people;

Who are your top five favourite Victorians?

I was overwhelmed with the responses from everyone, and set about putting together a league table of Twitter’s favourite men and women of the age. As the league table took shape, I discovered that a top five was impossible, as many of the front-runners shared the same number of points, and so the top five became a top thirteen, but, John Stuart Mill shouldn’t feel too bad about sitting thirteenth, and should take heart that he is really joint-fifth with none other than Arthur Conan Doyle, Benjamin Disraeli, Joseph Bazalgette and the Great Prince Albert.

For reasons of suspense, I have assembled the league here in reverse order, starting with the people who received only one vote:

1 Vote:

Toulouse Lautrec (French Artist, below)

Josephine Butler (Feminist)

Alexander Milne (Entrepreneur & Philanthropist)

Lord Carnarvon (Aristocrat & Financier of Egyptian excavations)

Joseph Swan (Physicist & Chemist)

Bram Stoker (Author)

John Hanning Speke (Discovered the source of the Nile)

Kenneth MacLeay (Painter of Queen Victoria's "Highlanders of Scotland" portraits)

Harriet Martineau (Journalist & Writer)

James Clerk Maxwell (Scottish physicist & mathematician)

John Herschel (Astronomer & mathematician)

William Whewell (Scientist)

James Whistler (Artist)

Angela Burdett Coutts (Philanthropist - read more here)

John Bright (Politician, coined the phrase “England is the mother of all parliaments”)

Wilkie Collins (Author)

David Octavius Hill (Artist)

JW Waterhouse (Artist)

H.G. Wells (Author)

Mary Coleridge (Author & Poet)

Emily Dickinson (American poet)

Elizabeth Siddal (Rossetti’s partner & model for Pre-Raphaelite paintings)

William Wilberforce (Politician & Philanthropist)

John Everett Millais (Artist)

Dorothea Beale (Educational reformer & former principal of Cheltenham Ladies College)

Frances Buss (Headmistress & Pioneer of women’s education)

Christopher Anderson (Theologist)

Hugh Miller (Geologist)

Thomas Henry Huxley (Biologist & Darwin supporter)

Philip Henry Gosse (Naturalist)

Helena Blavatsky (Theosophist)

Henry Thomas Buckle (Historian & Author)

James Anthony Froude (Historian & Author)

Lord Acton (Politician & Author, below)

Edward A. Freeman (Historian)

Mendelssohn (German Composer)

Augustus Pugin (Architect)

Earl of Ellesmere (I’m guessing the 2nd Earl, Politician)

John Murray (Publisher)

Thomas Hardy (Author)

Edward Elgar (British Composer)

Edward Burne-Jones (Artist)

Sir Titus Salt (manufacturer, politician & philanthropist)

William Armstrong (Industrialist)

Octavia Hill (Social reformer)

Edwin Chadwick (Social reformer)

Charles Booth (Social researcher, below)

Thomas Edison (Inventor)

Mark Twain (Author)

Edgar Allan Poe (Author & Poet, read more here)

Mary Kingsley (Writer & Explorer)

Marianne North (Naturalist & Botanical Artist)

Isabella Bird (Explorer & Writer)

Amelia Edwards (Author & Egyptologist)

Mary Gaunt (Author)

Van Gogh (Artist)

Mary Cassatt (American Painter)

Marie Curie (Physicist & Radioactivity pioneer)

Harriet Beecher Stowe (American Author & Abolitionist)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Poet)

Polly Nichols (Whitechapel murder Victim)

Annie Chapman (Ditto)

Liz Stride (Ditto)

Catherine Eddowes (Ditto)

Mary Jane Kelly (Ditto)

Now the Victorians who received two votes:

2 Votes:

Oscar Wilde (Author & Poet)

Ellen Terry (Actress, read more here)

William Gladstone (Politician, below)

Isabella Beeton (Domestic Goddess)

Henri Giffard (Engineer)

Sir Richard Francis Burton (Geographer & Explorer)

Russell Wallace (Geographer, Explorer, Naturalist & Biologist)

Charles Babbage (Mathematician & Inventor, below)

7th Earl of Shaftesbury (Politician & Leader of Factory Reform)

Michael Faraday (Chemist & Physicist)

John Snow (Physician, read more here)

William Booth (Founder of Salvation Army)

Matthew Arnold (Poet & Schools Inspector)

Friedrech Engels (German Social Scientist & Joint Father of Marxism)

Elizabeth Gaskell (Author)

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (First woman to gain a medical qualification)

Anthony Trollope (Author)

C.L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll – Author)

Receiving three votes each were:

3 Votes:

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Artist)

Christina Rossetti (Poet, Sister of the Above)

Alfred Tennyson (Poet)

Nikola Tesla (Inventor, below)

Charlotte Bronte (Author)

Florence Nightingale (Nurse & Healthcare Reformer)

Now onto the difficult part, the top five (which is actually a top fourteen)

Joint Fifth: (Four votes each)

Joseph Bazalgette:

(1819 – 1891)

He may only be my second favourite engineer of the Victorian age, but his achievement is certainly second to none in my eyes. The design, science and mathematics behind London’s sewer system is, in my opinion, the work of a meticulous genius.

Bazalgette;s sewers and the gardens and embankments that came with them not only made London cleaner, safer and les of a health hazard, but also a more beautiful and aesthetically pleasing place.

Victoria and Albert embankments were both designed by him (to cover low-level sewers) as was the Chelsea embankment. If you need proof, look at a picture of Victoria Embankment, and then look at a picture of the site prior to its building.

Prince Albert:

(1819 – 1861)

Cited as the father of the modern monarchy, Albert was initially not liked by the British public who didn’t warm to the Queen’s foreign husband, but he soon began to turn the tide of opinion through the improvements he made to various areas of society. Soon after marrying Victoria, who was not as well educated as him, he began to help her with the governmental paperwork she had to do. It is also down to Albert that the monarch has no political preferences, as he deemed it right that the Royal Family should be ‘above’ politics. Albert did a great deal of campaigning for improvements to the educational system and reformed the university curriculum to incorporate more modern subjects, rather than traditional subjects such as maths and history. As well as this, he campaigned for better schooling for less well-off children, but, as a lover of the arts and sciences, his finest achievement was the Great Exhibition of 1851 which showcased the best and most ground-breaking art, industry, science and technology from all over the world. The exhibition was a massive success and ushered in an era of industrial and scientific change.

In December 1861, Albert Died at the age of 42. Queen Victoria famously mourned him for the rest of her life, withdrawing from public duties and unintentionally undoing some of Albert’s hard work in turning the monarchy into a popular institution.

Arthur Conan Doyle:

(1859 – 1930)

Author of the still-popular Sherlock Holmes novels, Doyle’s other achievements are often overshadowed by the great Baker Street detective.

I blogged about those in May, read it here: here

Mary Seacole:

(1805 – 1881)

She may have been overlooked by Florence Nightingale when she chose thirty-eight nurses to take to the Crimea, but Mary managed to receive one vote more than the vaunted Miss Nightingale in my poll, and secure a place in the top 5. This surprised me, because Florence Nightingale has been a popular figure since she died, and her popularity has remained steady, yet Mary Seacole was largely forgotten for almost a century, but in recent decades her achievements have brought her back into the limelight.

She is most famous for her work helping soldiers in the Crimean war, which, despite being turned down by Nightingale, she still attended, getting there herself by raising money for the journey.

During the war, Mary treated sick and wounded soldiers from both sides, often placing herself in danger to do so.

130 years after her death, there are plans to erect a memorial statue to Mary in the grounds of St Thomas’s church in London.

Benjamin Disraeli:

(1804 – 1881)

When I saw Disraeli come in the top five I was not hugely surprised, and I think his place here is a sign of how different politics is today, compared with the Victorian era. I know it is impossible, but if we were to travel over a century into the future, I wonder which of today’s politicians would appear in similar lists? Certainly I would suggest none since the end of Thatcher.

As well as being Prime Minister, Disraeli had many other interests outside of politics, including writing, and he was a successful author, having published seventeen works of fiction, and, not unlike Dickens, leaving an unfinished novel, ‘Falconet’ behind after his death.

His debut 1826 novel, ‘Vivian Grey’ was written anonymously, and is the story of the title character’s attempted progression into the world of politics. Disraeli apparently based the character of Vivien Grey on a former business partner – hence his anonymous authorship – but when his identity was discovered Disraeli was somewhat vilified by certain circles.

His first foray into politics was in 1837, when he was elected to represent Maidstone under the Peel government. He was ridiculed after making his first speech as an MP, when he spoke on Irish Elections, but predicted to his audience; “the time will come when you will hear me”.

He was not wrong. He became Prime Minister in 1868 at the age of 64 following the resignation of Lord Derby, though Disraeli only held the post for a matter of months before Gladstone’s liberals came to power. Disraeli would go on to have another term as Prime Minister, though, when, in 1874, with Disraeli aged 70, his conservative government defeated Gladstone’s liberal party in the election.

Disraeli’s second Prime Ministerial spell lasted six years, until 1880, when his great rival Gladstone once again took over as Prime Minister. Disraeli would not take the post again, dying in 1881 of bronchitis.

The long-running battle between Disraeli and Gladstone is probably one of the greatest and most interesting Parliamentary rivalries in history, and although Gladstone became PM a record four times and has many admirers still today, many people hold Disraeli in greater affection, as did Queen Victoria herself, who was known to favour Disraeli over Gladstone due to the older man’s charm and flattery.

His crowning achievement as Prime Minister was bringing India and the Suez Canal under control of Britain. (And receiving two votes more than Gladstone in this poll.)

John Stuart Mill:

(1806 – 1873)

I have to admit, Mill was someone I knew virtually nothing about prior to carrying out my poll, and so I was reasonably surprised to see his name in the top five. According to the eminent Wikipedia, John Stuart Mill was:

“…a British philosopher, economist and civil servant. An influential contributor to social theory, political theory, and political economy, his conception of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control.

He was a proponent of utilitarianism, an ethical theory developed by Jeremy Bentham. Hoping to remedy the problems found in an inductive approach to science, such as confirmation bias, he clearly set forth the premises of falsification as the key component in the scientific method. Mill was also a Member of Parliament and an important figure in liberal political philosophy.”

One of the best things about doing this poll has been carrying out snippets of research on some of the people mentioned that I knew little or nothing about, of which there were a couple. And so, after some enlightenment, we move onto the eminent peoples who proudly came....

Joint Fourth: (Five votes each)

Queen Victoria:

(1819 – 1901)

Figurehead of the greatest era ever known and Britain’s longest serving monarch ever, having been Queen for a little over sixty three and a half years from 1837 until her death in January 1901.

Read about the death of Victoria and the end of the Victorian era here

Karl Marx:

(1818 – 1883)

The co-father of Marxism (along with the earlier-mentioned Friedrech Engels) Karl Marx is most famed for the political manuscript; ‘The Communist Manifesto’ written with Engels in 1847.

Marx was a strong advocate of socialism, and the manifesto features his idea that the current (in 1847) capitalist society would eventually be replaced by socialism, and then eventually communism. Communism was a society with no states or governments, in which the whole world lives as a ‘commune’. There was to be no money, and therefore no buying or selling, but people would work for free for the common good of society, and anything they needed, such as food and shelter, would be provided for them for free.

With no governments or geographical or political boundaries, war would naturally cease.

Obviously Marx and Engels never saw this come to fruition, but ‘The Communist Manifesto’ is still a popular and relevant document today, and more widely read than when it was initially released.

Karl Marx also appeared in Peter Ackroyd’s excellent novel, ‘Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem’ which comes highly recommended.

William Morris:

(1834 – 1896)

Textile designer, artist, poet, writer, socialist, illustrator, medievalist, father of the modern fantasy novel and friend to the Pre-Raphaelites, Morris certainly deserves a place on the list.

Despite his clearly busy schedule, Morris is best known for his arts and crafts work, and particularly wallpaper, the patterns of which he printed using the ancient metho of carved wooden blocks rather than the more common rollers. It was at Marborough and Exeter College in Oxford that he met Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The three artists formed ‘The Brotherhood’ and, inspired and influenced by the writings of John Ruskin, the eminent art critic, created pieces of work based on medieval history, myths and rituals.
As well as his art, Morris wrote poetry, and published a collection entitled ‘The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems’ in 1858.

As ‘The Brotherhood’ expanded to include architect Phillip Webb, artist Ford Maddox Brown, mathematician Charles Faulkner, and engineer P.P Marshall, they formed ‘Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co.’ "Fine Art Workmen in Painting, Carving, Furniture and the Metals," in 1861, a furnishing and decorative arts manufacturer and retailer which created and sold medieval-inspired home-ware. They displayed their work at the 1862 Great Exhibition (read about the 1862 Exhibition here) and subsequently went on to huge success, changing the taste of the entore nation when it came to home décor. Their commissions included the Armoury and Tapestry Room in St. James's Palace and the Dining Room in the Victoria and Albert Museum

Isambard Kingdom Brunel:

(1806 – 1859)

One of my favourite Victorians and, in my opinion, the greatest engineering genius the world has, and will, ever see for his ship-building alone, but he also designed bridges, railway lines and tunnels.

When I’m asked what I would most like to do if I could step inside a time machine, my initial answer is always to go to the opening day of the 1851 Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace, but a close second would be to visit the Millwall docks in London in 1858 and see Brunel’s Great Eastern.

The Great Eastern was, at the time, the biggest ship the world had ever seen, and at a time when the world was making the transition from sail to steam, she was the most advanced, too.

The Great Eastern was designed for long-haul trips to Australia, where there was a gold-boom at the time, but with it being so far from Britain, to get there by ship required stopping to refuel with coal. Brunel’s idea was simple; make the ship big enough to carry the all the coal it needed on board to get to Australia without needing to stop. The audacity was typical of Brunel. In the end, though, when it came to the day of the launch, it all went wrong. The Great Eastern was SO big that it had to be launched into the Thames sideways as it was almost as long as the river was wide. Two separate launch ramps were constructed, one at each end of the ship, but the ramps were poorly constructed, and one sat lower than the other, causing the ship to turn lop-sided and get stuck.

Brunel’s first taste of a large engineering project came when he worked with his father, Marc Brunel, on the difficult Thames Tunnel project, which you can read more about here.

Brunel’s other notable engineering feats were the Clifton suspension bridge that crosses the River Avon which took over thirty years to complete, and the two groundbreaking ships the Great Western, the first steam powered ship to cross the Atlantic, and the Great Britain, the world’s first iron-hulled, screw-propeller-driven, steam-powered passenger liner.

On a disgracefully shallow point, he also looks ‘cool’.

Joint Third: (Seven votes each)

George Eliot:

(1819 – 1880)

Real name Mary Anne Evans – though not to be confused with Disraeli’s wife of the same name – George Eliot is the highest placed woman on the list. She changed her name to apparently avoid the period’s stereotype that women authors penned only wishy-washy or romantic novels, and so adopted a male-sounding name to ensure an unprejudiced reception to her work.

She wrote seven novels throughout her career, with ‘Middlemarch’ and ‘Silas Marner’ probably being her best-known work. Her books were set in rural England and explored feelings of social outcasts whose lack of proximity to the city, and possibly the industrial world, made them less relevant.

George Eliot grew up in the Midlands, but at the age of thirty-one moved to London where she both lived, and found employment with, John Chapman, the radical publisher who gave her a job as assistant editor of his left-wing journal ‘The Westminster Review’. Such a position was uncommon for a woman to hold at the time.

In her position she was able to meet fellow literary-minded people, including philosopher George Henry Lewes. Lewes was married with three children, but despite this, Eliot moved in which him and formed a relationship which caused somewhat of a scandal as, unlike many other literary figures of the time, they publicly admitted their affair, and did not keep it secret.

George Eliot died on 22^nd December 1880 at the age of sixty0one, and is buried in Highgate cemetery in London

Charles Darwin:

(1809 – 1882)

Darwin is probably one of the most important people on the list in terms of changing the way we think about the world, and despite that, he is one of the Victorians into whose life I have never really peeked. I know all about his ‘On the Origin of Species’, though, and can’t imagine what it must have been like to read – or hear – that theory for the first time.

The idea was initially planted in Darwin’s mind whilst he was on board HMS Beagle on a five-year scientific expedition. On the ship, Darwin read the book ‘Principles of Geology’ by geologist, lawyer and friend of Darwin, Charles Lyell. In the book, Lyell claimed that fossils were evidence of creatures that had lived thousands – or maybe even millions – of years ago.

This sparked a thought in Darwin’s mind, which was fuelled on the Galapagos Islands when he noted that each island was populated by finches, which were all slightly different from each other. The birds had evolved to live in their specific environments.

Upon returning to England in 1836, Darwin set to work on his theories. It was not until 1859 when Darwin published ‘On the origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection’ and caused a bit of a storm in doing so. The church in particular attacked the theories, being – as was almost the entire population – of the opinion that man had been made by God. Darwin’s theory placed man as simply an animal that had evolved over a long period of time to become the most successful animal on the planet. This revolutionary idea caused outrage, but it is testament to the genius of Darwin, and the strength of his research and work, that over time, his theory has supplanted that of the Church’s as the accepted origin of different species’ on the planet.

Second Place: (Eight votes)

John Ruskin:

(1819 – 1900)

A philanthropist, art critic and patron, Ruskin has already been mentioned in this list due to his influence on William Morris and ‘The Brotherhood’, but they were not the only ones to receive a helping hand from Ruskin.

The great romantic landscape painter JMW Turner was a relatively obscure artist until he met Ruskin, who revived Turner’s career with his 1843 book, ‘Modern painters I’ in which he championed his friend. He would go on to release a second volume, ‘Modern Painters II’ in 1846, in which he praised the Pre-Raphaelites.

In the 1850’s Ruskin became interested in politics and an advocate of socialism, and when he became a wealthy man following the death of his father in 1864, his socialist beliefs led him to give away much of the money, with the principle benefactors being the St Georges Guild, the Whitelands College and the John Ruskin School. The St Georges Guild had been founded by Ruskin himself in 1870, and he used the charity to put forward his ideas about a socialist society. Prior to his death in 1900 Ruskin had retired to the Lake District and become all but a recluse.

First Place: (Thirteen votes)

Charles Dickens:

(1812 – 1870)

No real surprise here, Dickens finished well clear of all the opposition, and rightly so, with next year being the bi-centenery of his birth, which I find a little strange. I wrote about his 199^th birthday earlier this year here but two hundred years seems like such a long time, and although he was born a quarter of a century before the Victorian era began, he is the quintessential Victorian, and for his birth to have been two hundred years ago brings into sharp focus the fact that the Victorian era slips further and further into the foggy, ever-darkening and murky past with every year that passes. In 1982, it was 81 years since the death of Queen Victoria, which put the event within living memory. There was a strong chance that that pensioner you bumped into on your way to the cinema to see E.T was a Victorian once, but that chance has now passed, and Victoria’s death gets ever further away – 111 years next year.

There is not a great deal to be said about Dickens, although I was thrilled that when I wrote about the train crash he was involved in, that a few people contacted me and said that they had no idea that it had ever happened, and so I was delighted to have opened up a tiny slice of Dickens’ life to people. You can read my article here if you so wish.

Just a few points about the poll, which was, of course, by no means definitive, and took place roughly between 1p.m on Monday 28^th November and finished at around 9a.m the following day. There were a few surprises in it, for me.

Firstly, the notable exceptions; people such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry Mayhew, George Gissing, Henry Irving, Marie Lloyd, Julia Margaret Cameron and others who didn’t appear when I felt sure they would. I have already written of Julia Margaret Cameron and Marie Lloyd, but I think Gissing is an interesting character, and I may honour him with an article all of his own soon, other nominees that achieved surprising results were Poe, who received only one vote, Christina Rossetti, who achieved the same number of votes as her brother Dante, and Ruskin, who I did not expect to be anywhere near the top of the list

The other surprising thing on the list was the number of females who appear; thirty two out of one-hundred-and-three Victorians nominated were women; a notable feat considering the challenges before them during the period.

I should also note that one of the people nominated did not make it onto the list, since they were fictional, but in the interest of fairness I shall mention here that Charles Pooter, of the Grossmith brothers’ comedic novel ‘Diary of a Nobody’ was also nominated.

Finally, a great big thank-you to everyone who Tweeted with nominations, opinions and kind words, it has been a fun post to write and I may conduct another poll very soon!

“Here Perhaps, I Ought to Interject a Word or two of Praise about Messrs. Brinsmead's Instruments; But I Will Not. They are of World-Wide Fame and Speak for Themselves…” Or: A Victorian Piano Maker:

2011-11-25T03:05:00.000-08:00

In November last year, I blogged about the London Gas works in 1895. The article, which you can read here if you wish) featured text from the 1895 piece of investigative journalism named ‘Industrial Explorings, by R. Andom.’ In this particular publication, the anonymous author jauntily capers around 1890’s London visiting various areas of industry, and describing the innermost workings of various businesses in the Metropolis.

As I said, in November I wrote about the London gas works, and at the bottom of the article I invited readers to choose an area of industry they may have an interest in from a list of business types included in the book if they wished, and I would post the article for them to read.

Almost a year later I received my first request by way of a comment beneath the article from miabia15, who said:

“I would like to know when the piano industry erupted in the Victorian England time period”

By way of an answer below the article, I responded as best I could:

“Upper, and in some cases middle class families almost always had a piano, as it was seen as a very ladylike activity to learn to play one, and mothers would teach their daughters, or a piano teacher would be employed.
As well as reading, painting and stitching and sewing, playing the piano was somewhat of a staple activity for ladies.
I'm not 100% sure when their sales boomed, but I'd hazard a guess at the 1840's and 1850's. Certainly by the end of the century almost every upper class house would have had a piano.
If you give me a couple of weeks I shall write up the post about piano manufacture, if you want to read it.”

But I knew this brief comment was not nearly definitive enough, and whilst I cannot pinpoint the exact time that the piano industry ‘erupted’ I was able to type up the article, so that readers, and miabia15, could have a virtual stroll around a busy Victorian piano makers.

Well, unfortunately, a few weeks late, the article is typed up and here. In addition, I have found a little further information to give the article a little background.

The Piano company in question is Brinsmead’s, and the founder, John Brinsmead established himself as a piano maker in London in 1836 after moving from his home in Devon. Twenty-five years later, in 1861, his sons John and Edgar joined the family business, and in 1870 Brinsmead’s became ‘Brinsmead & Sons’. The Brinsmead family business took out many piano patents, most of which were aimed at improving the frame of the piano, the soundboards, the bridges and bracings

In 1883 John Brinsmead became ‘Pianoforte Makers to HRH the Prince of Wales’ and this was henceforth written on the pianos that Brinsmead produced.

When they were at the peak of their productivity, the company were producing an amazing two thousand pianos a year, which is quite excellent going when the careful manufacturing process is considered.

In 1900 they became a Limited Company, and the First World War affected business dramatically. Workers at the factory went on strike, and production stopped completely until a compromise between owners and workers was reached, but by then, it was too late. In January 1920 Brinsmead & Sons went out of business.

Interestingly, our reporter sees a piano being repaired for popular funnyman, writer and actor George Grossmith whilst he is being shown around Brinsmead’s.

As a sidenote, the comic novel Grossmith wrote with his brother Weedon; ‘Diary of a Nobody’ is definitely a worthy read.

Anyway, onto the article:

"It is, generally speaking, best to start an enterprise with something big. I started with pianos, and took an overcoat, a pipe, a newspaper, and a threepenny ticket, and sallied forth on my travels. And, I venture to think, never was expedition more easily, expeditiously, and economically fitted out and despatched.

I went to Piano-Land, and I went there direct. If I had been Henry M. S--y I should have gone to a jam factory at Blackheath and struck across country and discovered Piano-Land for myself; but as the Midland Railway had already located the place, I resolved to leave them the kudos. Privately I don't think it is very much to their credit, though, of course, when they first found it, it may have been pretty and picturesque enough. I found it depressing and more than a trifle dirty, and worn down at the heel, so to speak.

It was dull and cold, and foggy, too, when I left Kentish Town Station in search of Grafton Road and promptly and immediately lost myself. In answer to my pathetic inquiries several kindly-disposed persons did stop and give me minute and precise information whereby I might travel to my destination; but they impart topographical information in a style of their own up Kentish Town way, and I hadn't the key. Instead of telling you, for instance, to take the first turning to the right, and the fourth to the left, and then keep straight on, they say:
“Grafton Road? Brinsmead's place? Why, that's where they makes pianos!”

You murmur your interest in the information, and signify that you have no vital objection thereto provided the work is carried on on sanitary principles.

"Want to go there?"

You casually observe that you would like to stroll in that direction if it is quite convenient. Can you be directed?

“Yus! Go straight along till you comes to Jones's the butcher's, then turn round by a row of red-bricked 'ouses, and you'll see the 'Cow and Mustard Pot' on the other side of the road, and just past that there's a turning, and there you are."

And you go on merrily, and find Jones's the butcher's, and the ‘Cow and Mustard Pot,’ and the red-bricked 'ouses, and fancy your travels are nearly ended. Getting a trifle uncertain, perhaps, you ask again.

"Grafton Road, sir? There ain't no Grafton Road about here! There's a Clifton Road."

My enterprise was saved from utter extinction at the outset by a dirty little boy who was playing with his "sucker" a leather and rather a messy plaything, which has a moral influence on the young, I am told, besides illustrating several well-known natural laws plainly for their intelligent comprehension.

I asked him what percentage of the wealth of the Indies would induce him to personally pilot me to Grafton Road. The boy was prompt at a deal; he said he thought "tuppence" would do it, and I closed on the bargain, and told him to lead on. Ten minutes later, I stood before the imposing blocks in which Messrs. Brinsmead and Sons carry on their manufacture. A gate within a gate admitted me, and I was in Piano-land, and a very wonderful and interesting land I found it. A land overflowing with glue and timber and tinkling harmony, colonised by its own people, shut in from the outside world by a high wall, and jealously guarded by massive gates, through which only the specially privileged pass.

I presented my credentials to Mr. Thomas Brinsmead, who came out to me, and he, courteously brief and pleasantly business like, handed me over to the charge of Mr. Hall, his foreman, under whose very able guidance I made my journey. It is the fashion to be personally conducted nowadays. Some really great explorers adopt it, so I felt no shame, albeit it was rather prosaic.

Mr. Hall would not make a bad journalist, so quick is he to grasp the explorer's wishes.

"Don't let us be technical," I said. "Let us walk round and spy out the land, so that I may perchance write a big book on the subject; and if we meet any spades about anywhere let us call them shovels, just simply plain shovels." And we were pleasantly chatty and descriptive thereafter; at least, Mr. Hall was. I had my reputation as an explorer to maintain, and I dared not unbend too far and become jocose, lest peradventure he discovered that I was a humorist, and not a real, bona-fide traveller at all.

There is only one feature that an outside view of the Grafton works permits you to retain, and that is the monumental piles of timber that are reared up everywhere, even on the roof-tops. Stacked with mathematical precision, each plank kept apart from its neighbour by short cross-ties, to allow the air to circulate freely in between; black with age and weather, and I should judge the weather to be pretty thick occasionally around Kentish Town, these planks, gathered in from all parts of the world, wait their turn to be converted into "Uprights" and "Grands."

A very lengthy wait it is, too. Four years, on an average, between the time of stacking and actual use, the last nine or twelve months under cover in a universal temperature of eighty degrees winter and summer are allowed to elapse to thoroughly and completely dry all trace of moisture out of the wood. Moisture causes trouble in pianos, and every care is taken to exclude it. Therein the instrument differs from some performers I have known, who have displayed a remarkable aptitude for moisture without thereby affecting their tone or touch, and have not limited the quantity either, though I have heard them grumble at the quality.

Thoroughness is strikingly in evidence all through the various departments, and presumably Messrs. Brinsmead hold that it is better to overdo a matter than to take chances. And undoubtedly they are right. I have known men who have gleefully speculated in instruments made in the Faderland, and have come to wish they hadn't. They have found but there, you know the story, I daresay. Anyway, it is not pleasant to have a thirty guinea piece of property that you designed for use as a piano develop such a guileless, open-hearted, frank disposition, that it feels impelled to open its casing and display its interior economy to the passers-by, just to show that there is no deception, and that it really does contain strings and fittings. Nor does the ambitious variety altogether please. I mean the sort that rebels at the comparatively simple and unobtrusive role of piano, and splinters itself up into wash-tubs and kitchen stools, with perhaps a little surplus material left over for a window-sash and a chicken-coop.

Here, perhaps, I ought to interject a word or two of praise about Messrs. Brinsmead's instruments; but I will not. They are of world-wide fame and speak for themselves, if you know how to play and can make them, and they haven't any ideas above their station like those I have alluded to.

From the wood-stacks which are the beginning of all things, as far as pianos are concerned I was conducted through a series of rooms where the treatment of the iron frames was in progress. Round about the walls, and in odd corners, these frames, rough and unfinished as they had come from the foundry, were piled, while the various operations which reduced them to a finished and ornamental condition were in full swing.

Here might be seen a number of men rubbing down, with infinite toil and patience, the rough ironwork by a sort of a "holy-stoning" process, while away off in a far corner a "hand" was viewing, with a look of conscious pride, a magnificent great plate destined for a "Grand,” that shone like burnished gold. I walked across to it and inspected it closer.

"Enamelled and baked," Mr. Hall remarked, briefly. And I understood that I might safely handle it without the colour coming off in the process.
In another building, vertical drills were at work on these same plates, boring out the holes for the pins. The plates slid along under the deft guidance of a mechanic rattle, whirr, scrunch, and the hole was bitten out as clean and easily as the cheese-taster's knife pierces a new importation of Cheddar.

In a big room adjoining, I came upon a real land of marvels. There was a clatter and hum of powerful machinery, a pleasant smell of fresh wood – and it is astonishing how fresh and scented some of these woods do strike the nostrils – and sawdust lying about by the sack-full, and floating round in clouds. I could have passed for a very respectable miller before I had been in the room ten minutes, that is, if any one could conceive a sort of fancy-dress miller with a tall hat and a note-book.

Talk about the little busy bee! Any specimen hive would have gone out of business in sheer envy and impotence could they have peeped in and seen that scene. Sawing in which operation, by the bye, both the fussy little "circulars" and their bigger and, if possible, more fussy prototypes, and the dignified and somewhat sinister-looking "band" saws are concerned with planing, moulding, and shaping were going on everywhere, and no pen can adequately give one's impressions on seeing a huge, roughened plank slid on to one of the massive steel beds of the planing-machines, and come through, smooth and glossy, and pared down to a standard thickness.

The point that most struck me, after I had travelled a little farther, was the slap-dash, easy-going, almost contemptuous way in which the various parts are turned out, in contrast with the precision and nicety displayed when it comes to fitting those parts together. To make the sections of a piano is easy if you know how; I felt that I could do it myself if I knew how; but I should despair of ever bringing the parts together to a harmonious, literally speaking whole. The Chinese puzzle is not a circumstance to it.

A very open sort of lift, which connects the various floors, took us to the top of the building, and the peaceful quiet, after the whirr and rattle below, was striking. On these upper floors, cases for "Grands," sounding-boards, and backs, with their exceptional construction of "Wrest Plank," by which no two strings pull on the same grain of the wood, are variously constructed, and important and interesting operations they all are.

The sounding-board, for instance, is made in sections, each section being matched to its fellow, and the whole glued together diagonally. The nicety with which it has to be proportioned in thickness, combined with the care necessary in adjusting the “bridge" over which the strings pass, renders it perhaps the most important of details that are all important.

Hard and beautifully white before they have received the preserving coats of varnish, these sounding-boards are marvels of constructive skill and ingenuity. We were standing against one that had just been fitted into a "Grand," while the process of construction was being explained to me, and Mr. Hall struck it – the board I mean, not the process – with his hand.
It sounded as deep and resonant as a big drum. I paid my tribute of admiration and walked forward, for I was afraid my stock of admiration tribute would give out under such frequent calls and leave me stranded. Vainly! The next call came a moment after, and a heavy draft it was.

Glue, which is a prominent feature in these works and a very harmless, inoffensive, and unobjectionable feature it is, too; quite contrary to any similar feature that I had hitherto encountered, and without that "smelly" peculiarity so noticeable in glues, plays a very important part in fitting pianos together. And for a successful gluing job there must be pressure and warmth. The warmth here, as elsewhere, is obtained from steam-heated cupboards. The pressure is given by a simple but ingenious method that quite took my fancy.

"Whatever are those things for?" I queried.

My guide laughed. "I thought that would interest you," he remarked. "It usually does. They are 'go-bars.'"

I overlooked this lapse into technicality for the sake of further information, and was rewarded for my forbearance.
These "go-bars" are lance-wood staves such as they used to fashion into bows for bold Robin Hood and other irresponsible persons who objected to taxes and convention. The parts to be glued together are fitted in position, and one end of the "go-bar" is placed upon them, the other finding a rest against a false roof a few feet above. A pressure amounting to tons, resulting from the attempt of the staves to straighten themselves again, can thus be brought to bear on the glued surface.

In making the cases for "Grands" – an operation I before alluded to – glue and pressure play a considerable part. The cases, whether of "concert" or "boudoir," are composed in layers glued together, these having been previously steamed and bent round into shape by huge clamps; and as every one is familiar with the completed article, a due pondering over this fact, with a little mental exercise, will enable its significance to be borne in upon one.

Hard as iron and rigid as steel they come out of the clamp-frame ready for the fitter's deft handiwork, and by no cutting, piecing, or contriving can a similar result be arrived at.
On every floor there are store-rooms containing the fittings that will be required, for a piano is not made as one generally understands the term; it is built up by many processes, and in many departments. The parts, as I before explained, are made wholesale, and are delivered in sets to the "fitting" shops.

Tinkling sounds were by this time to be heard from various quarters; not unmusical nor grating, as one might expect, but suggestive of harps being touched by unskilled hands. This pleased me, for it seemed in keeping with the place. Disjointed and jerky it perhaps was, and lacking in the grace and finish of a Beethoven sonata; but it was a suggestion of melody anyway.

Art and music run closely together, and they did so then, for with the ear-pleasing quality comes the gratification of the sight; and a Brinsmead piano can charm both senses. Panels delicately inlaid I could have sworn that they were hand-painted, and beautifully done at that, and veneers, polished and natural, constituted the elements that gratified my artistic sensibilities.

I was shown, somewhere or other about the building, these veneers, all cut and pieced together ready for use.

Sliced from warty burrs on trees growing in Persian forests, into thin strips that are as fine and as pliable as paper, albeit they are tough and workable, the patterns are matched with admirable dexterity. The sheets are then pasted together temporarily into panels. A glue bath gives them the consistency and pliability of a fine leather, and pressure suffices to face a panel or a moulding so neatly and accurately in pattern and join that detection is quite impossible.
"It is not cheapness; it is necessity." remarked Mr. Hall, as we viewed the process, and I, understanding him, forebore comment.

The method of veneering a moulding is particularly ingenious. A lengthy metal matrix receives the moulding with the facing downwards, the inevitable pressure is applied, and presto! You are gazing at a length of beautifully patterned walnut.

Somewhere up under the roof the frames are strung, and they are tuned and tuned and tuned, and still they go on tuning. They seem to have a liking for the job up at Grafton Road.

"Hello!" they say, "here's a piano. Let us tune it." And they do so as long as the instrument remains in sight. I believe the carriers have to take extra hands with them when they go to fetch a piano away, to head off any over-zealous tuner, while the remainder are getting it into the van.
You can't get away from notabilities. We were walking past a beautiful specimen of a concert-gran, that was lying on the stocks in a very incomplete state. It was being built, I was informed, to the order of Mr. George Grossmith. Several fine old instruments, though battered by storms and soaked by the salt waves, were pointed out to me, too, in my peregrinations. They had travelled to all parts of the world, and had come up there for rest and refresh repairs, I mean, from the saloons of the P&O Co.'s boats.

They looked as though they wanted it.

"That is a good bit of felt." Mr. Hall observed, as we passed into a small off-room, lined on one side with cupboards. He handed me a solid-looking square of material, white as snow – driven snow is the correct phrase, I believe – which might have been anything from a patent dog-biscuit to a bath-mat.

I felt it and agreed with him. Felt plays a considerable part in the interior economy of pianos. It is used in protecting, and "checking," and it covers the hammers, so that when they strike the wires they may make themselves but there, I will spare you such an obvious piece of gratuitous flippancy.

The woodwork of the hammers is first cut through, and then a length, containing I don't-know-how-many because I didn't ask, is wrapped round with the felt casing, which is glued on the inside. Now, if you look at one of these hammers you will observe that it is thickest at the top and fines away as it gets round towards the foot. This is done by hand, wholesale, by a kind of sand-papering process, which rubs away the superfluous material to the required standard, and then each covering is clinched on to the wood with a metal pin, the length is divided up into sections, and the hammer is ready, or rather a whole batch is ready, to be added to the general store.

And so it came to pass that I found myself on the ground-floor again, having travelled the length and breadth and the height of the firm's premises. I had passed by hundreds of pianos, in fact, I had come to look upon them as commonplace sort of articles, rather in the nature of litter, and I had witnessed the inmost details of their construction; and they are many and marvellous are these same details, for there are more parts in your piano – supposing that you have a piano – than you, with all your philosophy, dreamt of, John or Evelina, if it be a lady whom I address, unless you have an enlarged mind, and would set the number at six thousand odd in the first instance.

It is impossible to do justice to all these matters, and there are many points that I have forgotten, or been compelled, reluctantly enough, to forego. For instance, there is that of pinning for the strings, the tap, tap, tap, of ceaseless hammers driving in hundreds of steel pegs to guide the strings, with noise enough to wake all except the real, bona-fide defunct.
Then there are the operations of regulating and adjusting the action, pedalling, and polishing, to say nothing of the ingenious and economical devices by which such satisfactory results are obtained. One of these I must mention, it is so instructive an instance of economy of waste product. The exhaust steam from the engines, which is ordinarily blown off into the air to add to the miseries of countless thousands, is here carried through a system of pipes running on every floor, to boil the glue, warm plates and materials, and to make itself generally useful.

For what I have set down I will hold myself responsible; but that no aspiring amateur who had designed to make himself a piano in his spare time from my paper, wood would be a better material, may deem himself defrauded, I will give a brief resume of the process which I hope will meet the case. Here is the recipe.

First let the amateur get his material, and cut it, and plane it, and make it look pretty. Then he must make the back, and the sounding-board, and the casing, and stick them all together; tenpenny nails will answer and are cheapest; but glue and screws look better. After that put in the mechanism, add whatsoever seems necessary, polish and decorate, and present to the nearest deserving institution for the deaf and blind.
After a brush down, which I sorely needed, I parted from Mr. Hall, in a snug little office just within the gates, with a due acknowledgment of his kindness, that had rendered my first exploration so easy, interesting, and pleasant; and quitting Piano-Land with a sigh of regret, I made my way, unguided this time, to the railway-station, and got home in time for tea."

Interestingly, the premises visited for this article were in Kentish Town, but Brinsmead had over fifteen places of business around London at one point or another, with some being shops and showrooms, and others being workshops such as the one spoken of above.

What a treat it would have been to be able to have a stroll around a Victorian place of industry such as the one above, and the offer still stands, if anyone wishes to read about further industrial explorings, I’m happy to write about any of the below industries here:

· Tram
· Candle
· Paper
· Soap
· Mineral-Water
· Matches
· Rubber
· Wire

· Sweets

“We Have Trained 30 to 40 Women of Varying Nationalities Since 1912...Our Belief is, it is Character Not Colour that Counts.” Or: The Lost Midwifery Hospital of Annie McCall:

2011-11-04T00:03:00.000-07:00

It’s not uncommon today to see unmarried couples with children. Labour leader Ed Miliband and his wife Justine were only married this year, despite already having children. Less and less people today, in fact, are getting married than even thirty years ago, let alone a hundred and thirty years ago.

Last year, the Office for National Statistics released this graph showing the decline in marriages over the last three decades:

But in the nineteenth century, having children without being married was virtually unthinkable. If families were to discover that an unmarried female family member was pregnant, she could find herself cast into the streets, where the fork in the road led either to the workhouse or suicide.

But it wasn’t only unmarried pregnant women who faced danger. Even the morally virtuous woman who fell pregnant by her husband faced peril during childbirth, in an age of many technological and medical advancements, the standards of hygiene and healthcare we are used to today were still years away.

Women giving birth – which would be done at home – could expect the assistance of a midwife to guide them through the process, but if her family was restricted by their finances, the help would come from friends or family, either sisters, mothers or even grandmothers.

The Victorian era, therefore, was a difficult time to give birth. Aftercare only really existed if you were higher than working class, as a working class woman was expected to be back at her duties in the home – along with her new motherly duties – within a few days of having the baby.

The absence of a doctor during the birth meant that if woman did suffer some condition or trauma during the birth, it often went un-noticed, leaving the new mother to try and recover, completely unaware that she may have suffered permanent damage to her body. Often, this damage, or any condition it caused, made future childbirth quite dangerous to both mother and baby, but with contraception all but non existent, and virtually completely non-existent to the working classes, it was not unusual for families to have between five and ten children. If the mother was lucky, that is.

The plight of women of nineteenth century London during childbirth was recognized by one Dr Annie McCall.

Annie was born in Manchester in 1859 and even as a child she knew she wanted to go into medicine, and was encouraged and supported by her mother, who provided her with an excellent education.

Annie traveled across Europe, studying in Gottingen in Germany, Paris, Berne in Switzerland and Vienna, before arriving at the London School of Medicine for Women.

When she graduated from LSMW in 1885, she became one of the first women to qualify as a doctor, and set about providing the city with more qualified midwives by establishing a School of Midwifery at her home, 165, Clapham Road in Stockwell, London.

Four years later, in 1889 Annie, along with Marion Ritchie, founded the Clapham Maternity Hospital, at 41 – 43 Jeffry’s Road, Clapham, which provided excellent antenatal and postnatal clinics. This was also the first maternity hospital to be staffed entirely by women. Doctors, midwives, maternity nurses and also students were all female. This was important to patients in an era of modesty, when, if a male doctor was called to assist a woman in childbirth, he was not allowed to ‘look down there’.

An 'Intimate' Examination

The hospital took in all women who needed attention during childbirth, including poor women, and unmarried women. Suddenly for London’s ‘disgraced’ women, that fork in the road had become a trident.

They now had the option of receiving the best care in the city, from trained experts. Annie’s attention to detail was such that each patient received a manual;

‘What to do to have a Healthy Baby’

This manual contained all sorts of advice from the diet the pregnant woman should stick to prior to birth, to the kind of exercise she should be taking.

It wasn’t only the women of London that Annie and her team cared for. The hospital also trained women to go and work abroad. Speaking to the National Council of Women in 1933, Annie said;

“We have trained 30 to 40 women of varying nationalities since 1912, and are surprised to find we are the only hospital with practical experience on the subject. Our belief is, it is character not colour that counts.”

In terms of her practices in health and hygiene, it could be said that Annie was very much in the same mould as Florence Nightingale. She, too, was a pioneer of cleanliness within the hospital, and her high standards, not just in this, but in the care given to patients certainly worked.

In fifty years of maternity care, the hospital dealt with 52,993 women, only 85 of whom died. For the time, these success rates were excellent.

In 1915 the Hospital moved to a new building in Jeffreys Road, and was renamed the Annie McCall Maternity Hospital in 1936. In 1938 it was expanded when 39 Jeffreys Road was purchased, giving the hospital the capacity for fifty beds for in-patients.

In 1940, during the second world war, the hospital suffered severe bomb damage, which resulted in it being closed down. Annie retired in 1941 at the age of 82, but was still around to see her work continued in 1948, albeit on a smaller scale, when a house connected to the hospital provided three beds for patients, and the antenatal clinic services resumed. Due to a lack of space in the house, a district midwifery service was also utilized, in which midwives attended women in their own homes.

Annie in 1945

Annie’s hospital was taken over by the newly formed National Health Service in 1948, but Annie would miss all the rebuilding that would be carried out, as she died in 1949 aged 90, but her work would continue, as her hospital was rebuilt in the fifties, and by 1954 could boast 36 beds for patients – not quite the fifty it had at its disposal when the hospital was at its peak, but it was getting there.

After 81 years of excellent work and service to women, the Annie McCall Maternity Hospital closed in 1970. The old hospital was left empty by Lambeth Council for over twenty years, but now is the home of a local arts group, Stockwell Studios, who wish to stay in the building and see it preserved.

You can see if you can help, by visiting their website www.stockwellstudios.org.uk

Thanks to Veronika, of the website of London’s lost hospitals for pointing me in the direction of information regarding Annie McCall and her hospital. Click here to go to Veronika's site.

'The Victorianist' on Tumblr: Or: Victorian Street Photography and a Place to Find it:

2011-10-25T05:20:00.000-07:00

Many writers are blessed with such natural gifts of imagination that scenes and characters tumble from their minds and land upon their pages with ease.

Others can evoke a scene entirely from their own memories with great detail. When writing of a period in history, many writers are experts on the period in which their characters live, and as long as they can also imagine up a decent story, they have at their disposal the knowledge of their favourite period in their heads, meaning little research is required.

Then there is me.

Evoking a time or place is difficult when you have never been there, and that is where 'material' comes in handy. When writing of a Victorian character living in a slum, for example, it is quite possible that the living conditions of that character would have been far worse than I, or you – stuck in our materially wealthy world of benefits and health and safety – could ever imagine.

For the last couple of years I have been writing fiction set in the nineteenth century as a hobby, and the struggle at first was creating a realistic sense of place and setting. After a short time, I decided the best course of action was research; to see as many photographs as I could of Victorian streets, courts, alleys, roads, gardens and rookeries so I could familiarize myself with the world of my characters, whilst at the same time, learning about the Victorian town and city.

I trawled internet search engines and saved what I found, and was able to write with the confidence that my descriptions of streets were more accurate than they used to be.

Then, last month, I had an idea. Rather than keep all these photographs hidden on memory sticks, folders and emails, I should put them all in one place, with a brief description of where and when the picture was taken. Why not do this online? I thought. That way, others can look at, enjoy, maybe even learn from, the photographs, too.

So, I set up a Tumblr micro-blog.

No essays, no eminent Victorians, no nineteenth century events, no people, no Victorian organizations or movements, just photographs of Victorian cities, towns, villages, streets, courts, alleys, thoroughfares, parks and gardens.

If you like, you can have a look, please follow me, and by all means leave comments.

You can find my Tumblr site here or by clicking on the link just beneath my Twitter button.

“Picks, Spades, Fire-Irons, Musical Instruments, Cabmens' Whips, Umbrellas — Yes, Even a Tiny Pair of Child's Shoes — Everything.” Or: The Victorian Pawnbroking Trade.

2011-10-20T23:20:00.000-07:00

There was a lot of poverty in the nineteenth century, and people in the working classes could easily fall into a desperate cycle involving one of the most curious, and yet popular establishments of the Victorian city. For a struggling man or woman with a partner and / or children to keep, there was always one option open if some fast and relatively easy money was required to tide you over until payday – as long as you didn’t mind losing a possession for a short while – and in these cases, relief came by way of the pawnbroker.

Pawnbroker’s shops could be found in most poor districts of London and other major cities. The idea was that the person or family in want of cash would take one of their possessions to the pawnbrokers, and the pawnbroker himself would assess the article – whether it be a ring, a brooch, a watch, or, more likely in the cases of the poor, a pair of boots or a shawl – and give the owner a small amount of money for it, along with a ticket (a kind of receipt). When the owner had been paid – or found some money by another means – he could return to the pawnbroker with his ticket and buy his item back.

If the owner of the item did not return to ‘buy back’ his item, it became the legal property of the pawnbroker, depending on the item’s value. By law, an item pawned for fifty pence or less and not bought back in the time allowed would belong to the pawnbroker.

An item worth more than fifty pence which was not bought back in time would be sold to the public by the pawnbroker.

The pawnbrokers did a great trade, and made their money not only by selling the items back to their owners or the public, but they also charged a halfpenny for the pawn ticket, and could also charge interest, starting at a halfpenny per month on every 2s lent.

This means that if a man took an item into a pawnbroker and was given 2s for it, he would actually pay 2s and halfpence. (halfpence being the price of the ticket)

If he did not return for his item for twelve months, he then owed the pawnbroker a further sixpence (half a penny per month interest) and so would be paying 2s 6d, or half a crown.

I wont go into Victorian currency and money – it’s too confusing, but to give some idea of the amount of interest, sixpence was roughly enough money to feed a family of between four and six people. The pawnbroker worked in a similar way to today’s bank loans, what with the interest and such.

The Pawnbrokers were governed by certain restrictions set out by law to stop them ripping people off or taking advantage of people. These restrictions included:

- A Pawnbroker must not take in pawn any article from a person under the age of twelve, or intoxicated.

- Must not take in pawn any linen or apparel or unfinished goods or materials entrusted to wash, make up, etc.

- A new pawnbroker must produce a magistrate's certificate before he can receive a licence.

- The permit cannot be refused if the applicant gives sufficient evidence that he is a person of good character.

- The word "pawnbroker" must always be inscribed in large letters over the door of the shop.

I’ve found two articles – one from the year before the start of Victoria’s reign, and one from the year after, which give more details about the pawnbrokers, and how little they seem to have changed over the entire Victorian period.

The first is from Charles Dickens’ ‘Sketches by Boz’ from 1836:

The Pawnbrokers Shop

Of the numerous receptacles for misery and distress with which the streets of London unhappily abound, there are, perhaps, none which present such striking scenes as the pawnbrokers’ shops. The very nature and description of these places occasions their being but little known, except to the unfortunate beings whose profligacy or misfortune drives them to seek the temporary relief they offer. The subject may appear, at first sight, to be anything but an inviting one, but we venture on it nevertheless, in the hope that, as far as the limits of our present paper are concerned, it will present nothing to disgust even the most fastidious reader.

There are some pawnbrokers’ shops of a very superior description. There are grades in pawning as in everything else, and distinctions must be observed even in poverty. The aristocratic Spanish cloak and the plebeian calico shirt, the silver fork and the flat iron, the muslin cravat and the Belcher neckerchief, would but ill assort together; so, the better sort of pawnbroker calls himself a silver-smith, and decorates his shop with handsome trinkets and expensive jewellery, while the more humble money-lender boldly advertises his calling, and invites observation. It is with pawnbrokers’ shops of the latter class, that we have to do. We have selected one for our purpose, and will endeavour to describe it.

The pawnbroker’s shop is situated near Drury-Lane, at the corner of a court, which affords a side entrance for the accommodation of such customers as may be desirous of avoiding the observation of the passers-by, or the chance of recognition in the public street. It is a low, dirty-looking, dusty shop, the door of which stands always doubtfully, a little way open: half inviting, half repelling the hesitating visitor, who, if he be as yet uninitiated, examines one of the old garnet brooches in the window for a minute or two with affected eagerness, as if he contemplated making a purchase; and then looking cautiously round to ascertain that no one watches him, hastily slinks in: the door closing of itself after him, to just its former width.

The shop front and the window-frames bear evident marks of having been once painted; but, what the colour was originally, or at what date it was probably laid on, are at this remote period questions which may be asked, but cannot be answered. Tradition states that the transparency in the front door, which displays at night three red balls on a blue ground, once bore also, inscribed in graceful waves, the words ‘Money advanced on plate, jewels, wearing apparel, and every description of property,’ but a few illegible hieroglyphics are all that now remain to attest the fact.

The plate and jewels would seem to have disappeared, together with the announcement, for the articles of stock, which are displayed in some profusion in the window, do not include any very valuable luxuries of either kind. A few old china cups; some modern vases, adorned with paltry paintings of three Spanish cavaliers playing three Spanish guitars; or a party of boors carousing: each boor with one leg painfully elevated in the air, by way of expressing his perfect freedom and gaiety; several sets of chessmen, two or three flutes, a few fiddles, a round-eyed portrait staring in astonishment from a very dark ground; some gaudily-bound prayer-books and testaments, two rows of silver watches quite as clumsy and almost as large as Ferguson’s first; numerous old-fashioned table and tea spoons, displayed, fan-like, in half-dozens; strings of coral with great broad gilt snaps; cards of rings and brooches, fastened and labelled separately, like the insects in the British Museum; cheap silver penholders and snuff-boxes, with a masonic star, complete the jewellery department; while five or six beds in smeary clouded ticks, strings of blankets and sheets, silk and cotton handkerchiefs, and wearing apparel of every description, form the more useful, though even less ornamental, part, of the articles exposed for sale.

An extensive collection of planes, chisels, saws, and other carpenters’ tools, which have been pledged, and never redeemed, form the foreground of the picture; while the large frames full of ticketed bundles, which are dimly seen through the dirty casement up-stairs—the squalid neighbourhood—the adjoining houses, straggling, shrunken, and rotten, with one or two filthy, unwholesome-looking heads thrust out of every window, and old red pans and stunted plants exposed on the tottering parapets, to the manifest hazard of the heads of the passers-by—the noisy men loitering under the archway at the corner of the court, or about the gin-shop next door—and their wives patiently standing on the curb-stone, with large baskets of cheap vegetables slung round them for sale, are its immediate auxiliaries.

If the outside of the pawnbroker’s shop be calculated to attract the attention, or excite the interest, of the speculative pedestrian, its interior cannot fail to produce the same effect in an increased degree. The front door, which we have before noticed, opens into the common shop, which is the resort of all those customers whose habitual acquaintance with such scenes renders them indifferent to the observation of their companions in poverty. The side door opens into a small passage from which some half-dozen doors (which may be secured on the inside by bolts) open into a corresponding number of little dens, or closets, which face the counter. Here, the more timid or respectable portion of the crowd shroud themselves from the notice of the remainder, and patiently wait until the gentleman behind the counter, with the curly black hair, diamond ring, and double silver watch-guard, shall feel disposed to favour them with his notice—a consummation which depends considerably on the temper of the aforesaid gentleman for the time being.

At the present moment, this elegantly-attired individual is in the act of entering the duplicate he has just made out, in a thick book: a process from which he is diverted occasionally, by a conversation he is carrying on with another young man similarly employed at a little distance from him, whose allusions to ‘that last bottle of soda-water last night,’ and ‘how regularly round my hat he felt himself when the young ’ooman gave ’em in charge,’ would appear to refer to the consequences of some stolen joviality of the preceding evening. The customers generally, however, seem unable to participate in the amusement derivable from this source, for an old sallow-looking woman, who has been leaning with both arms on the counter with a small bundle before her, for half an hour previously, suddenly interrupts the conversation by addressing the jewelled shopman—

‘Now, Mr. Henry, do make haste, there’s a good soul, for my two grandchildren’s locked up at home, and I’m afeer’d of the fire.’ The shopman slightly raises his head, with an air of deep abstraction, and resumes his entry with as much deliberation as if he were engraving.

‘You’re in a hurry, Mrs. Tatham, this ev’nin’, an’t you?’ is the only notice he deigns to take, after the lapse of five minutes or so.

‘Yes, I am indeed, Mr. Henry; now, do serve me next, there’s a good creetur. I wouldn’t worry you, only it’s all along o’ them botherin’ children.’

‘What have you got here?’ inquires the shopman, unpinning the bundle—‘old concern, I suppose—pair o’ stays and a petticut. You must look up somethin’ else, old ’ooman; I can’t lend you anything more upon them; they’re completely worn out by this time, if it’s only by putting in, and taking out again, three times a week.’

‘Oh! you’re a rum un, you are,’ replies the old woman, laughing extremely, as in duty bound; ‘I wish I’d got the gift of the gab like you; see if I’d be up the spout so often then! No, no; it an’t the petticut; it’s a child’s frock and a beautiful silk ankecher, as belongs to my husband. He gave four shillin’ for it, the werry same blessed day as he broke his arm.’—

‘What do you want upon these?’ inquires Mr. Henry, slightly glancing at the articles, which in all probability are old acquaintances. ‘What do you want upon these?’—

‘Eighteenpence.’—

‘Lend you ninepence.’—

‘Oh, make it a shillin’; there’s a dear—do now?’—

‘Not another farden.’—

‘Well, I suppose I must take it.’ The duplicate is made out, one ticket pinned on the parcel, the other given to the old woman; the parcel is flung carelessly down into a corner, and some other customer prefers his claim to be served without further delay.

The choice falls on an unshaven, dirty, sottish-looking fellow, whose tarnished paper-cap, stuck negligently over one eye, communicates an additionally repulsive expression to his very uninviting countenance. He was enjoying a little relaxation from his sedentary pursuits a quarter of an hour ago, in kicking his wife up the court. He has come to redeem some tools:- probably to complete a job with, on account of which he has already received some money, if his inflamed countenance and drunken staggers may be taken as evidence of the fact. Having waited some little time, he makes his presence known by venting his ill-humour on a ragged urchin, who, being unable to bring his face on a level with the counter by any other process, has employed himself in climbing up, and then hooking himself on with his elbows—an uneasy perch, from which he has fallen at intervals, generally alighting on the toes of the person in his immediate vicinity. In the present case, the unfortunate little wretch has received a cuff which sends him reeling to this door; and the donor of the blow is immediately the object of general indignation.

‘What do you strike the boy for, you brute?’ exclaims a slipshod woman, with two flat irons in a little basket. ‘Do you think he’s your wife, you willin?’

‘Go and hang yourself!’ replies the gentleman addressed, with a drunken look of savage stupidity, aiming at the same time a blow at the woman which fortunately misses its object. ‘Go and hang yourself; and wait till I come and cut you down.’—

‘Cut you down,’ rejoins the woman, ‘I wish I had the cutting of you up, you wagabond! (loud.) Oh! you precious wagabond! (rather louder.) Where’s your wife, you willin? (louder still; women of this class are always sympathetic, and work themselves into a tremendous passion on the shortest notice.) Your poor dear wife as you uses worser nor a dog—strike a woman—you a man! (very shrill;) I wish I had you—I’d murder you, I would, if I died for it!’—

‘Now be civil,’ retorts the man fiercely.

‘Be civil, you wiper!’ ejaculates the woman contemptuously. ‘An’t it shocking?’ she continues, turning round, and appealing to an old woman who is peeping out of one of the little closets we have before described, and who has not the slightest objection to join in the attack, possessing, as she does, the comfortable conviction that she is bolted in. ‘Ain’t it shocking, ma’am? (Dreadful! says the old woman in a parenthesis, not exactly knowing what the question refers to.) He’s got a wife, ma’am, as takes in mangling, and is as ’dustrious and hard-working a young ’ooman as can be, (very fast) as lives in the back parlour of our ’ous, which my husband and me lives in the front one (with great rapidity)—and we hears him a beaten’ on her sometimes when he comes home drunk, the whole night through, and not only a beaten’ her, but beaten’ his own child too, to make her more miserable—ugh, you beast! and she, poor creater, won’t swear the peace agin him, nor do nothin’, because she likes the wretch arter all—worse luck!’ Here, as the woman has completely run herself out of breath, the pawnbroker himself, who has just appeared behind the counter in a gray dressing-gown, embraces the favourable opportunity of putting in a word:-

‘Now I won’t have none of this sort of thing on my premises!’ he interposes with an air of authority. ‘Mrs. Mackin, keep yourself to yourself, or you don’t get fourpence for a flat iron here; and Jinkins, you leave your ticket here till you’re sober, and send your wife for them two planes, for I won’t have you in my shop at no price; so make yourself scarce, before I make you scarcer.’

This eloquent address produces anything but the effect desired; the women rail in concert; the man hits about him in all directions, and is in the act of establishing an indisputable claim to gratuitous lodgings for the night, when the entrance of his wife, a wretched, worn-out woman, apparently in the last stage of consumption, whose face bears evident marks of recent ill-usage, and whose strength seems hardly equal to the burden—light enough, God knows!—of the thin, sickly child she carries in her arms, turns his cowardly rage in a safer direction.

‘Come home, dear,’ cries the miserable creature, in an imploring tone; ‘do come home, there’s a good fellow, and go to bed.’—

‘Go home yourself,’ rejoins the furious ruffian.

‘Do come home quietly,’ repeats the wife, bursting into tears.

‘Go home yourself,’ retorts the husband again, enforcing his argument by a blow which sends the poor creature flying out of the shop. Her ‘natural protector’ follows her up the court, alternately venting his rage in accelerating her progress, and in knocking the little scanty blue bonnet of the unfortunate child over its still more scanty and faded-looking face.

In the last box, which is situated in the darkest and most obscure corner of the shop, considerably removed from either of the gas-lights, are a young delicate girl of about twenty, and an elderly female, evidently her mother from the resemblance between them, who stand at some distance back, as if to avoid the observation even of the shopman. It is not their first visit to a pawnbroker’s shop, for they answer without a moment’s hesitation the usual questions, put in a rather respectful manner, and in a much lower tone than usual, of ‘What name shall I say?—Your own property, of course?—Where do you live?—Housekeeper or lodger?’ They bargain, too, for a higher loan than the shopman is at first inclined to offer, which a perfect stranger would be little disposed to do; and the elder female urges her daughter on, in scarcely audible whispers, to exert her utmost powers of persuasion to obtain an advance of the sum, and expatiate on the value of the articles they have brought to raise a present supply upon. They are a small gold chain and a ‘Forget me not’ ring: the girl’s property, for they are both too small for the mother; given her in better times; prized, perhaps, once, for the giver’s sake, but parted with now without a struggle; for want has hardened the mother, and her example has hardened the girl, and the prospect of receiving money, coupled with a recollection of the misery they have both endured from the want of it—the coldness of old friends—the stern refusal of some, and the still more galling compassion of others—appears to have obliterated the consciousness of self-humiliation, which the idea of their present situation would once have aroused.

In the next box, is a young female, whose attire, miserably poor, but extremely gaudy, wretchedly cold, but extravagantly fine, too plainly bespeaks her station. The rich satin gown with its faded trimmings, the worn-out thin shoes, and pink silk stockings, the summer bonnet in winter, and the sunken face, where a daub of rouge only serves as an index to the ravages of squandered health never to be regained, and lost happiness never to be restored, and where the practised smile is a wretched mockery of the misery of the heart, cannot be mistaken. There is something in the glimpse she has just caught of her young neighbour, and in the sight of the little trinkets she has offered in pawn, that seems to have awakened in this woman’s mind some slumbering recollection, and to have changed, for an instant, her whole demeanour. Her first hasty impulse was to bend forward as if to scan more minutely the appearance of her half-concealed companions; her next, on seeing them involuntarily shrink from her, to retreat to the back of the box, cover her face with her hands, and burst into tears.

There are strange chords in the human heart, which will lie dormant through years of depravity and wickedness, but which will vibrate at last to some slight circumstance apparently trivial in itself, but connected by some undefined and indistinct association, with past days that can never be recalled, and with bitter recollections from which the most degraded creature in existence cannot escape.

There has been another spectator, in the person of a woman in the common shop; the lowest of the low; dirty, unbonneted, flaunting, and slovenly. Her curiosity was at first attracted by the little she could see of the group; then her attention. The half-intoxicated leer changed to an expression of something like interest, and a feeling similar to that we have described, appeared for a moment, and only a moment, to extend itself even to her bosom.

Who shall say how soon these women may change places? The last has but two more stages—the hospital and the grave. How many females situated as her two companions are, and as she may have been once, have terminated the same wretched course, in the same wretched manner! One is already tracing her footsteps with frightful rapidity. How soon may the other follow her example! How many have done the same!

- Charles Dickens, Sketches By Boz, 1836

The second example, from 1902, is from George R. Sims’ ‘Living London’ Volume 2. The second of a three volume set of many aspects of London life, published between 1901 and 1903. The articles are written by many different people and edited by Sims.

The following article, entitled ‘Pawnbroking London’ is written by C.A Cuthbert Keeson, who, from what I can see, only published one book of his own; ‘History and Records of Queen Victoria's Rifles 1792-1922’

Back to pawnbroking:

‘Pawnbroking London’

LONG before the inhabitants of London were blessed with a County Council the at one time universal practice of attracting customers to a shop by means of a sign had fallen into almost complete disuse; but even in this twentieth century no enterprising pawnbroker would think of opening a shop without there hung over it, conspicuous from every point of view, "The Three Brass Balls," " The Swinging Dumplings," "The Sign of the Two to One."

It is the fashion in the trade to speak of these emblems as the insignia of the

old Lombard Merchants, and the arms of the Medici. What, however, do those three bright globes mean to thousands of people who walk the streets of London?

Some perhaps may pass them unnoticed, but to the poor — the working man who finds it difficult to properly apportion his weekly wage, the clerk out of a berth, the racing man who has had a spell of bad luck, to the small shopkeeper and the costermonger in want of ready money to replenish their stock, to the actor and actress not "in the bill"—they mean a great deal.

They mean food for the wife and children when cupboard and pocket are empty — a little money to keep things going till next payday; they mean to thousands shelter, warmth, and something to eat; and although many may consider the pawnbroker's shop an encouragement to improvidence and unthriftiness, every philanthropist who would abolish it admits that he would have to substitute some municipal or charitable pawnshop in its place.

It has been asserted that "to one in every two persons in London the pawnbroker has been in some period of his or her life a stern and unavoidable reality." This estimate may appear to be somewhat exaggerated, but investigations into the amount of business done in the pawnshops of London show that the statement is not very wide of the mark. Within a radius of ten miles from the Royal Exchange are 692 pawnbrokers shops. From figures obtained from a trustworthy source it appears that the average number of pledges taken in per month at each shop is 5000, making an aggregate for all the shops of 3,460,000, or 41,520,000 pledges per year, or rather more than six to each head of the population. In these figures pledges of more than £10 in amount are not taken into account, and a very large proportion of the London pawnbrokers do a big business of this kind.

Inquiries made at some seventeen shops in different parts of the Metropolis show that out of a million and a-quarter pledges extending over a period of twelve months 66,700 only were for amounts above ten shillings. In the trade these are known as "Auctions," having, if left unredeemed at the end of twelve months and seven days, to be disposed of at public auction. All pledges for sums under ten shillings at a like period become the absolute property of the pawnbroker.

In the seventeen shops referred to the average amount lent upon each pledge worked out at four shillings — 250,000 in all. Taking the total number of pledges made annually in London upon the same basis, viz. 41,520,000 at four shillings each, it will be seen that the pawnbrokers supply the "hard-ups" of London annually with the very large sum of £8,304,000.

There are few things in the ordinary way of life more calculated to unnerve a man than a first visit to the pawnshop. Hence most pawnbrokers, to put their customers as much at ease as possible, have their shops divided into separate compartments known as "the boxes," with the entrance up a side street, or rendered as inconspicuous as the character of the house will permit. For the better class customers the modern pawnbroker provides a comfortable "private office."

The nervous pledger, dreading he knows not what, surveys for some minutes the

contents of the window, and only after much hesitation and many false starts finds himself within the shop of that mysterious "Uncle" of whom his companions have talked so glibly. What his business was is known only to that "Uncle" and himself, and as he walks triumphantly down the street, relieved in mind and circumstance, he asks himself why he made all that fuss about so simple a matter. Yet it takes a good many visits before he feels quite at his ease.

The interview usually lasts less than a couple of minutes, and as a memorandum of it the obliging pawnbroker hands his customer a neat little square-shaped envelope containing a piece of paste board bearing upon its face a description of the article deposited and on the back an abridged version of the Pawnbrokers' Act.

Very differently does it pawner of stolen property, broker in what way his

aroused. He will tell you that he does not know.

"There is generally something," he says, "about the pawner's manner or in his replies to questions that sets the pawnbroker on his guard." He cannot define precisely what that "something" is, but he plies the would-be pledger with more pertinent queries, sets a junior hand to run over the "Police List," looks again at the article offered and at the offerer. Experience may not have made him infallible, but his daily dealings have made him wary. If the man is a "wrong 'un" the long delay makes him fidgety, and then "Uncle," confirmed in his suspicions, secretly sends for the man in blue.

Sometimes a thief will stay and try to brave the matter out, at others he makes a dash for liberty, frequently only to run into the arms of an officer waiting at the shop door.

If the article be not in the "Police List," or if the pawnbroker be not satisfied in his own mind that the goods have been dishonestly come by, he may decline the goods and let the man depart, for it is a dangerous thing to be too hasty in delivering anyone into custody.

Pawnbrokers know that if they take in a stolen article they will have to restore it to the owner, lose the money lent upon it, and attend the courts. That knowledge makes them cautious. Many magistrates and public officials contend that a considerable portion of the property stolen in the Metropolis finds its way into the hands of the pawnbrokers.

Every day reports appear in the papers in which stolen goods have been pawned, and there are a still larger number of cases which are not reported. Unquestionably quantities of stolen articles find their way to the pawnbroker, and it is generally a good thing for their owners when they do, for by means of that "automatic detective," the pawn-ticket, they are generally traced and restored.

A pawnbroker has to keep a pledge by him for twelve months and give a ticket, which many thieves seem to have a peculiar fondness for preserving. Stolen articles, however, form but an infinitesimal item in the forty one millions of pledges made yearly.

Statistics prepared for the House of Commons show that they fall far short of one per month for each of the 692 pawnbrokers in London.

To redeem a watch or an article of jewellery is an easy matter, and for even the nervous man it has usually no terrors. There are times, however, when the act of redemption is not so easy. Come with me to a busy working neighbourhood like Walworth, where pawnbrokers' shops abound and thousands of homes are dependent upon them. It is Saturday night, and the shop and stall keepers are doing a roaring trade. We turn down a side street, where the lamps do not burn so brightly, and meet a continuous procession of women hurrying away with bundles of all sorts and sizes. Some carry but one, others, assisted by children, have as many as half-a-dozen. They all come from that little door by the side of a pawnbroker's.

Standing in the background of the shop, we are confronted by a row of faces peering over the counter, the shop is one that, possibly for the convenience of so large a throng, dispenses with the boxes, and the customers all mingle together. It is a strangely animated scene, with nearly all the characters played by women. It is a rarity to see a man among them, though children are too many for our liking. Girls and even boys are there, all ready with their money, for they may redeem pledges, though the law forbids the pawnbroker to receive a pledge from anyone under the age of sixteen.

The women are mostly bare-armed, and look as though they had just come from the wash-tub. They betray no sense of shame if they feel it. They talk and gossip while waiting for their bundles, and are wonderfully polite to the perspiring assistants behind the counter. Though everybody is in a hurry there is little noise or unseemly jostling. An assistant seizes a battered tin bowl, and the front rank of pledgers toss their tickets therein. He then rapidly sorts them out, and gives .some to a boy, who darts away to the far end of the counter. The remainder he places in a canvas bag which we have noticed dangling at the end of a string at the back of the shop; he shakes the rope, and immediately the bag is whisked out of sight up the well of the lift used for conveying pledges from the shop to the warehouse above. In a minute it begins to rain bundles until the floor is thickly strewn with them.

In a conspicuous spot on the wall is a notice that no furniture or heavy goods will be delivered after 4 p.m. From that time the rapid delivery of bundles has been

proceeding; and so it goes on, hour after hour, Saturday after Saturday, year after year; every pledge produced systematically; no disputes, no haggling about change; unexamined bundles exchanged for money; money swept into a huge till; the whole accompanied with a running fire of bundles from the unseen regions above, hurled down what the pawnbroker calls the "well," but what is more familiarly known as the "spout" — that Spout up which so many things have mysteriously disappeared.

The year round there is an average of 2,000 bundles delivered each Saturday night from this shop, and if we chance that way on the following Monday and Tuesday we shall meet that same procession of women, though this time trooping towards that little side door. Occasionally a man comes on the same errand, shamefacedly trying to conceal his bundle beneath his coat. It is undoubtedly a sad scene for the moralist, but these people know no other way of living, have no place where their Sunday clothes will be safe, have no one but the pawnbroker to apply to when they feel the pinch of hunger. He is their banker and their safe-deposit, and although they know they pay dearly for it in the long run, they are thankful that they have him to turn to in their need.

They might easily be worse off, might have no other resource but to sell their sticks and clothes, or, what is as bad, take them to a "Dolly" or "Leaving" shop, so named after the "Black Doll," the conventional sign of the small brokers and rag shops, where articles that a pawnbroker will not receive may be "left" for a short term at high interest. Thanks to the provisions of the Pawnbrokers' Act, the police, so far as London is concerned, have stamped these latter pests out of existence.

The nature of a pawnbroker's business can, perhaps, be best estimated by a visit to his warehouse and an inspection of the heterogeneous collection of pledged articles. This differs, however, with the character of the shop. There are the chief pawnbrokers of London, who lend only on plate, jewellery, and property of the highest description. By the courtesy of Mr. Henry Arthur Attenborough, we were permitted to inspect the well-known premises of Messrs. George Attenborough and Son, at the junction of Chancery Lane with Fleet Street. As in most pawnbrokers', there are the boxes for the general pledger, and in addition there are two or three small offices for the reception of persons who wish to transact their business private.

All sorts and descriptions of men, and women too, come to Messrs. Attenborough. They have lent £7,000 upon a diamond necklet, a present from a royal personage to a celebrated member of the demi-monde, the said necklet being redeemed and deposited again time after time. The coronet of an Austrian nobleman remained in their custody for several years with a loan of £15,000 upon it. A savant pawned the fore-arm and hand of a mummy wearing a fine turquoise scarabaeus ring on one of the fingers. Upon the day of our visit we saw that an advance of 6d. had been made on a ring, and we were shown an application for a loan of £40,000 upon jewellery.

The seamy side of the picture is presented by the warehouse of the pawnbroker, whose chief business consists of pledges of "soft" goods. The whole house from basement to roof is built up in skeleton frames or "stacks" in which the pledges, each carefully done up in a wrapper, are neatly packed, the tickets to the front. On the first floor the weekly pledges are usually stored, that they may be ready at hand for Saturday night. There is one room devoted to the storage of furniture; in another are rows and rows of pictures, looking-glasses and overmantels. There are shelves for china and glass, ornaments and clocks; tools of every kind, sufficient to start many workshops. In odd corners we come across odd sights — sea boots and the huge boots of a sewerman; a bundle of sweeps' brooms, apparently not very long retired from active employment, picks, spades, fire-irons, musical instruments, cabmens' whips, umbrellas — yes, even a tiny pair of child's shoes — everything.

Of the thousands of pledges stored in a pawnbroker's warehouse the majority are redeemed, but there are many, variously estimated at from 20 to 33 per cent, of the whole, which remain unredeemed at the expiration of the twelve months and seven days' grace. These are known in the trade as "forfeits," and are disposed of in diverse ways. Forfeited pledges, upon which sums of less than 10s. have been advanced, become, as already stated, the pawnbroker's property. Some are placed in the sale stock; occasionally the whole bulk of two or three months' forfeits are sold to a dealer at a discount of 15 or 20 per cent off the price marked upon the tickets, the pawnbroker being anxious to get rid of them at almost any price. The remainder are sent to public auction.

Of the auctioneers who make a speciality of this business the rooms of Messrs. Debenham, Storr and Sons, King Street, Covent Garden, are, perhaps, best known to the public. On the first floor a sale of "fashionable jewellery," silver plate, watches, plated ware, etc., is proceeding. Suspended upon hooks at the far end of the room near the auctioneer's rostrum are watches too numerous to count. You may buy a bundle of them for little more than a sovereign. An irregular horseshoe of glass-topped cases, in which the more important lots are stored, form the boundary of an inner ring, into which the privileged and well-known buyers are alone allowed to enter; wooden desks or tables form the outer boundary for the smaller dealers and that peculiar class of people who haunt the auction-rooms — people who display an interest in every lot, yet have never been known to buy.

Simultaneously a miscellaneous sale of "sporting goods" is taking place on the

ground floor. People of quite a different type attend this sale: men of sporting

tendencies and horsey appearance take the place of the Jews, who form a large proportion of the buyers at the jewellery sales. Here are sportsmen's knives and bicycles, guns by the score, walking sticks, shooting boots, billiard cues and fishing rods, boxes of cigars, and bottles of champagne or burgundy; all things which no true sportsman should be without.

Incredible as it may seem to the uninitiated, there are thousands of persons in London alone who are making a comfortable living out of "Uncle" by buying or manufacturing and pledging goods. There are regular manufactories where clothing can be purchased at a price which the unwary pawnbroker will advance upon, and several pledges in the course of a day will bring a handsome profit.

Plate and jewellery are manufactured for the same purpose. Now it is a gold charm for the watch chain; again it is a silver cigarette box, the weight of which has been considerably increased by the insertion of a piece of base metal between the cedar wood lining and the silver exterior. Everything that the pawnbroker will lend money upon — that is to say everything that has any market value whatever — is manufactured for the sole purpose of deceiving him, while sometimes even the natural beauties of goods are artificially enhanced by the aid of scientific knowledge.

To please his clients, to be careful without giving offence, to prevent fraud, and to detain the guilty while trying to make a little for himself, is no light task. If "Uncle" does not give satisfaction all round it is scarcely to be wondered at. He does his best under difficult and often disagreeable circumstances, and those who are too prone to blame him for a mistake are generally quite ignorant of the nature and extent of his business.

- C.A Cuthbert Keeson, 1902

Pawn shops are still around now, but not in anything near the same density as in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Looking upon them and their customers as an outsider it can be easy to see them as somehow taking advantage of the poor who used them, especially when you read that a little pair of child’s shoes had been pawned, and can picture in your mind the little tot running about the streets barefoot so that the family could have a meal, or pay the rent – whatever the money was for.

But, if you try and see it from the point of view of the poor, it would be interesting to know how many lives were saved by the pawnbrokers. How many empty stomachs were filled by money given out by him for an old shawl or a broom? How many roofs were kept over little heads after he paid poor mothers for their petticoats?

Besides, if faced with the choice of either selling an item we owned for a little money or turning up at the gates of a workhouse, how many of us today would throw ourselves upon the mercy of the parish and spend our days separate from our loved ones and eating gruel in between working tirelessly for no reward?

"...And the Quiet, Unfrequented Glen Turned into a Lovely Garden.” Or: Saltburn-by-the-Sea: Victorian Seaside Town:

2011-10-13T23:35:00.000-07:00

Recently I traveled to a little town not too far from Middlesborough in order to attend a birthday party. My father was born in nearby Saltburn-by-the-Sea, and I’m sure I was taken there as a child by my Grandparents, who live in the little town I visited, but I can’t remember all that much other than a museum dedicated to smuggling (which Saltburn saw a lot of in the 1700’s).

I know that as a child my Grandmother also took me to Whitby, where Bram Stoker wrote ‘Dracula’ in 1897, and to York, the ancient town transformed by the railways in 1839. I was, at the age of twelve, also taken to Beamish open air museum – where the Victorian and Edwardian era’s prevail, and you can visit shops, farms and businesses preserved as they would have been in days gone by.

Was the seed of Victoriana planted in my young self during these visits? Who knows?

My most recent visit required a stay in a hotel, and in the foyer was a large display of brochures and pamphlets for various local attractions. The Sea-Life Centre, York Museum, Beamish, of course, but the one that most caught my eye was the brochure for Saltburn-by-the-Sea. I wondered what was there, in the seaside town where my father was born, so I picked it up and put it in my bag to read later.

Back at home the following day the brochure dropped out of my bag, and I thumbed through it. I discovered that the town of Saltburn-by-the-Sea was an almost entirely Victorian creation.

With that in mind, and also the fact that I have a link to the seaside town, I decided to write about it here, but, where to start?

I spoke with Laine of http://www.saltburnbysea.com which is a terrific website, crammed with photographs old and new, Victorian and Edwardian newspaper articles and a whole host of Saltburn related information, and I was allowed to use the website’s article on Victorian Saltburn, which saved me an awful lot of research and time.

The history of Saltburn is not that dissimilar to some other British coastal towns that grew up in the Victorian era. The belief that sea air was good for the constitution and would benefit those with ailments, lead to many Victorians taking their holidays on the coast. The world, of course, was much smaller then. A trip to, say, Spain, would take forever compared to the travel technology at our disposal today, and so places like Blackpool, Brighton, Eastbourne, Margate and – a favourite of Dickens – Broadstairs, capitalized. Entertainments were thrown up; parks, hotels, restaurants, bathing machines and piers and much more were all built to accommodate the seasonal influx of city-dwellers looking to ‘take the air’ by the sea.

The Founding of Saltburn-by-the-Sea

Before 1860 only ‘old’ Saltburn existed. Where Saltburn by the Sea was eventually to be developed, farms grew oats, beans, turnips, clover or lay fallow. The discovery and exploitation of iron ore in the mid 1800’s was to make the most dramatic change in the fortunes of the Saltburn area.

In the industrial history of the 19th century the Pease family held a foremost position. For several generations in succession the name of Pease retained great pre-eminence in the industrial world of the North. Great commercial ability combined with a strong gift of foresight and an indomitable enterprise characterised both Edward Pease and his immediate descendants.

The family held several firms. These included the firm of Joseph Pease & Partners, coal-owners. J. W. Pease & Co. dealt in ironstone and limestone, the banking business was carried on under the style of J & J. W. Pease, and the extensive woollen mills were carried on under the name of Henry Pease & Co. The head-quarters of all these firms was to be found in Northgate, Darlington, some thirty miles away.

The Pease family’s two most important undertakings were the coal mines in South Durham, and the ironstone mines in Cleveland. In the development of the Cleveland ironstone industry they took a leading part, and the first royalty taken in their name was dated in March 1852, from which time they stood at the forefront of Cleveland mine owners.

Henry Pease, the youngest son of Edward Pease, began his apprenticeship in a family tanning establishment in Darlington. In 1881, at the time of his death, there were still three woollen mills in Darlington belonging to the firm of Henry Pease & Co. In an article published in the 'London Society' in November 1881, Henry was described as having been;

'a man of such energy of character' that he was 'not likely to escape being caught by the railway fever which raged around him' and 'no sooner had he attained his majority than he ... entered heart and soul into the work of railway promotion.'

Henry Pease's name came to be connected with nearly all the lines of importance that were projected in the North of England, some of which were originated by him. From 1830-35 he was mentioned in the minute books of the S & D Railway as a troubleshooter, resolving technical difficulties. For over forty years he was unremitting in his attendance in the board room of one Railway Company or another, his latter years being engaged principally on behalf of the North Eastern Railway Company. It is, therefore, possible to state that perhaps no man of his time had a longer or more distinguished career as a railway director.

Henry Pease

Henry was associated with his brother, Joseph, in the founding of the Middlesbrough & Guisborough line, and was the lines first chairman. He also played an active role in the establishment of a line between Darlington and Barnard Castle and subsequently the South Durham and Lancashire Union Railway. After the establishment of the latter, several amalgamations were effected - at the suggestion of Henry Pease. The South Durham and Lancashire was amalgamated with the Stockton & Darlington, which, together with its tributary lines, was itself absorbed into the North Eastern system.

His wider influence was felt in a number of directions. As well as being a board member of Pease & Partners in their many enterprises, eventually becoming a senior partner of the firm, he also became an MP for South Durham between 1859 and 1865, and took an active part in the Sunday Closing Bill. He owned the building firm that erected the Darlington Iron Co. and owned the brickworks that provided the white firebricks used extensively on the first buildings erected in Saltburn by the Sea. He was chairman of the Stockton & Middlesbrough Water Company and the Weardale & Shildon Water Co. He also became the first Mayor of Darlington.

Henry Pease, like his father, was also a member of the Quaker Society of Friends and of the Peace Society. As a Quaker, he traveled to Russia in an attempt to stem the outbreak of war with England in 1853. As a member of the Peace Society, he visited the French Emperor, Napoleon III, in 1867. Henry also visited

America

for three months in 1856.

Mary Pease, writing in retrospect of her husband’s life, says that in 1859 Henry Pease was staying with his brother at Marske when one evening he returned late for dinner. He explained that he had walked to Saltburn, and that seated on the hillside he had seen, in a sort of prophetic vision, on the edge of the cliff before him, “a town arise and the quiet unfrequented glen turned into a lovely garden.”

The decision on developing Saltburn met with opposition from the S & D board - Mr George Morley of Guisborough stating that he thought it was 'a very bad speculation.' for having lived in the area he thought it 'a nasty bleak cold place, and the sand is horrid'. Opposition was also encountered from others who felt that Lord Zetland should promote the development of Redcar and Marske rather than Saltburn.

The Hoist

Whatever objections were raised, plans went ahead and, having secured the support of the railway company, Henry Pease formed the Saltburn Improvement Company in 1859. As Lord Zetland owned the land on the cliff top, the SIC approached him in 1860 offering to buy 10 acres of Penn Pasture, which formed part of Rifts Farm, whose farmhouse stood where the west side of Hilda Place is now. It was to be the first of 11 lots the company would buy over the next 16 years, totaling nearly 135 acres.

Whilst the offer of £120 per acre was being considered, Henry Pease and Thomas McNay visited Scarborough, ostensibly to inspect the towns sewage disposal system. During this visit Henry's attention was engaged by the pleasure grounds which were being developed there, and thus began his own personal passion for the development of similar grounds at Saltburn.

George Dickinson of Darlington was employed to lay out a plan of the town. The buildings had to have uniform roof lines, slate roofs, frontages of white firebricks (from the Pease’s own brickworks) and no fences.

Within twenty years the main form of the town had been created, including the Station Complex by 1862, Valley Gardens by 1861/62, Zetland Hotel by 1863 (reputed to be one of the world’s first purpose built railway hotels to have its own private platform), Wesleyan Chapel built by 1863, the Pier by 1869, and the Cliff Hoist was finished by 1870.

With the death of Henry Pease in 1881 the town’s driving force was lost and soon after, the Saltburn Improvement Company was disbanded.

Over the years no substantial new features were added to the resort and it became encapsulated in time as one of the finest early Victorian seaside towns surviving almost completely in its original form.

Many thanks to Laine of www.saltburnbysea.com – whom you can find on Twitter @Saltburnbysea – for letting me use the above article.

The Victorians certainly appeared to love the seaside, but, as ever, it is dangerous to generalize all Victorians as having a liking for the salty sea air and the sand in their boots. There were – and still are – two types of trip to the seaside; the day-trip, which is the kind I have mostly been on, and the ‘proper’ seaside holiday, which involves staying in a hotel on the coast for a week or two.

In his 1883 compendium of articles, ‘Odd People in Odd Places’, the great James Greenwood offers a distinction between the two:

“There are tens of thousands of their more fortunate fellow-creatures who have enjoyed the high privilege of visiting the domain of Neptune - of perambulating the shingly beach, and taking a header from a bathing-machine - of going fairly out to sea, probably in a shilling yacht, and braving the perils of sea-sickness - and all within the space of a dozen hours, four of which were consumed in the journey to and from London. They have, however, never enjoyed a longer holiday than eight hours by the seaside. They may be, and probably are, immensely gratified and delighted, but there is a mingling of sadness with their satisfaction.

It is, of course, very enjoyable, and a privilege to be grateful for, this single day at Margate or Brighton, but it is, at the same time, tremendously hard work, just as hard, indeed, as regards the preparation for the start, the early rising, the hurry-skurry of reaching the railway station, &c. as though the visit was to be of a fortnight's duration.

And if the eight hours' excursionist is of this opinion, with the day's delights before him, and while he is fresh and strong to bear fatigue, and his wife is in high spirits, and the children ready to clap their hands for joy, what must he think when the station bell reminds him that he has now reached the termination of his tether, and his holiday is at an end? His "eight hours" have expired, and the railway authorities, stern sticklers for the terms of contract, will start the return train within twenty minutes, and all those who are not there in time will be left behind.

It is at this point when the one day excursionist, who, as well as his wife, has an olive-branch or two with him, finds his fortitude suddenly collapse. With the youngest but one (his good lady, of course, carries the baby) bestriding his shoulder, he puts his best foot foremost from the beach to the town so as to be in good time at the station. He is hot and fagged, and his temper is not improved by the knowledge that the cherub to whom he is giving a "flying angel" is smearing his Sunday hat with the seaweed with which its little fists are full.

It is at such a time that the reflection comes home to him with fullest force - if he was possessed of means like other folk! He sees the enviable beings all about him. While he is pushing and elbowing with the crowd of his fellow-excursionists, with his back to the sea, the favourites of fortune, with perhaps a fair fortnight still before them, are sauntering beachward - not in a perspiration as he is, and with his face aglow and his neckerchief disarranged, but unruffled and tranquil, heeding that confounded bell no more than though it hung round the neck of a sheep on the adjoining downs, or was being swung by the town crier - with nothing on earth, or sea either for that matter, but pass the time in delightful idleness until dusk or bed-time, and then to retire to snowy sheets, and with the fragrant breath of the ocean sweetening the air of the bed-room, to be up again next morning bright and early, for a jolly ramble across the cliffs, or to take a pull in a little boat, and so get up a tremendous appetite for a breakfast, the staple of which is fish that, in a manner of speaking, has made but a single leap from the fishing-net into the fryingpan.

It is, I say, not very much to be wondered at should the individual, the space of whose seaside happiness is actually measured by mere hours, feel a pang of envy at the better luck of his fellow - mortals, and that he should silently register a vow that, if ever his time does come, he will make up for all his previous holiday shortcomings.”

"Voyages to the Moon, Haunted Shops and Human Flies" Or: R.W Paul and the Victorian Film Industry:

2011-10-06T23:34:00.000-07:00

Something that has always fascinated me about the Victorian era – and one of the many reasons why it is my favourite period of history – is that during mid nineteenth century we made our first tentative steps into so many areas of technology that we take for granted today. The telephone and the camera, for instance, were huge technological leaps when they first came about, but today, most people have an amalgamation of the two sitting in their pocket.

Forgetting the telephone, the camera is probably the technical breakthrough I thank the Victorians for the most, as it gives prying eyes like mine a wonderful opportunity to actually see Victorian people. We can see what they wore, the houses they lived in, the streets they walked down, and the people they worked with, and we can compare the Victorian world to our own. Queen Victoria was our first monarch to be photographed, which means, unlike predecessors such as Elizabeth I and Henry VIII (who had flattering portraits painted of themselves) we can actually see what she looked like in the flesh.

However, whilst Victorian photography is a joy, and something I could look at for hours, the good old Victorians also developed their photography theories and, towards the end of the century, started making films. These films, of course, were usually quite basic, and looking back now it’s easy to laugh at the hackneyed effects or the simplistic nature of them, but it must be remembered, these were the very first films to be made, and taken in that context, some are actually very impressive, none more so, in my opinion, than ‘The Haunted Curiosity Shop’ by Victorian film-making pioneer Robert W. Paul.

‘The Haunted Curiosity Shop’ was made in 1901 so it’s right on the verge of being Victorian. In the film, the owner of a shop is visited by all manner of ghastly apparitions, such as a floating skull and a ghostly woman separated from her bottom half.

A Still Image From 'The Haunted Curiosity Shop'

Robert Paul began his working life as a scientific instrument maker, working for Elliot Brothers in The Strand, London. Instrument makers were usually mathematical or scientific, and made things such as barometers and microscopes etc. At Elliot Brothers, Robert would learn basic technical skills that would be put into good use in his later life as a developer of filming equipment. He later set up Robert W. Paul Instrument Company in Hatton Garden, London, deciding he was capable enough to go it alone in the industry.

R.W Paul

His first introduction into the industry that would make him famous came when, in 1894 he was asked by two Greek businessmen to build copies of the Edison Kinetoscope. Presumably they wanted a cheaper version of Eadweard Muybridge and Thomas Edison’s original, which was handsome, if cumbersome contraption that used levers and cogs to pull a strip of film containing images – each slightly different to the last – to give the illusion of movement.

Robert initially refused this illegal business, but then discovered that, for some reason – probably by sheer mistake – Edison had not patented his Kinetoscope in Britain, and copying it, therefore, would be perfectly legal.

Muybridge's 'Child Bringing Bouquet to a Woman. Scroll up and down, you can see the movement.

Inspired, Robert went out and purchased one of Edison’s contraptions, and immediately set about dismantling it to see how it worked, before building his own version. This went well, and he managed to build a few, and even sold one to Georges Méliès, the famous French film-maker and former stage magician who pioneered many early forms of special effects in films, and whose most famous film, ‘Le Voyage dans la Lune’, released in 1902, contains that famous and much parodied scene of the man in the moon being hit in the eye with a space rocket.

Robert encountered a problem after he had sold a few Kinetoscopes to customers: the film that the machines used was only to be supplied to people who held a license for the official Edison machines, and therefore anybody who had purchased a machine from Robert could not obtain any films to show in them. This rendered Robert’s machine’s virtually useless – a little bit like buying a DVD player before DVD’s were invented.

Robert decided that the only course of action he could take was to produce his own films that could be watched on his machines, and in order to do that, he needed a camera on which to produce them.

Birt Acres

Birt Acres was a photography expert, and had made some preliminary designs for a moving-picture camera. In 1895, Robert and Birt began working together, and within a month they had produced a camera, and used it to make the film ‘Incident at Clovelly Cottage' – believed to be the first film ever to be made in Britain – which simply depicts Birt’s assistant, Henry Short, outside Birt’s home, Cleverly Cottage, in Barnet, London.

The camera, known as the Paul-Acres camera, was the first camera made in England. It used 35mm film which was compatible with the Kinetoscopes copies that Robert had made, and there was only one, final task left; he needed to make some films for his customers to watch…

At this short interlude, I have included a couple of Robert’s films to give an idea of what they were like. There’s more on Youtube, but I’ve chosen my favourites:

His first few films were relatively simple affairs, such as this, from 1896:

'Hyde Park Bicycling Scene' (1896)
The title is fairly self-explanatory. Anything that depicts every day Victorian life I find absolutely invaluable – this really is the closest thing there is to actually being there.

Robert began to work with the illusionist W.R Paul, and together they produced all manner of special effects in their films, such as these:

'An Extraordinary Cab Accident' (1903).
I think the special effect is great on this, and I’ve seen it used in plenty of modern films and soap operas. There is another ‘disaster movie’ a bit like this one called ‘The Train Crash’

'The Haunted Curiosity Shop' (1901).

This is probably my favourite. The still picture I showed earlier really cannot do the film justice. I’d have loved to have watched this in 1901 when it was released. It’s difficult to grasp what the feeling would have been like if you’d never seen anything like this before. I love the menacing music, too.

'Upside Down, or the Human Flies' (1899)

Another with very clever effects to give the illusion of people walking on the ceiling. You’ve probably seen this effect in modern films too, done in exactly the same way.

It’s incredible to think that the films above are between 108 and 115 years old, and still survive today. Of course, many of them don’t, such as ‘A Soldier’s Courtship’ produced in 1896, which is generally regarded as the first British narrative film ever made – that is, a film that was not factual, such as the Hyde Park bicycling scene above, or a documentary. Robert did make lots of factual films, and films of everyday life and some of his notable works in this vein include his 1896 film of the Epsom Derby, a film of Blackfriars Bridge, one of Brighton Beach, and, in my opinion, his best factual work, the filming of Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee in 1897:

Back to the story…

Not long after Robert and Birt had manufactured their camera and begun to make films with it, a difference of opinion led to them breaking off their partnership; Birt had decided to patent the camera in his own name; a move that angered Robert, since they had developed it together.

For the rest of their film careers, Robert Paul and Birt Acres were in competition with each other. They both made improvements to their cameras, films and techniques. Robert improved his camera, and also developed ‘The Theatrograph’ – a projector – that he demonstrated at Finsbury Technical College to great acclaim in 1896.

The Theatrograph

The Theatrograph was a great success, becoming the most popular projecting machine in Europe for a short time, and Robert was hired by businessmen all over London, looking to make a profit from his invention. He gave shows at all manner of venues, from theatres to music halls, showing his films. At Olympia in March of 1896 he became the first Englishman in the country to project motion pictures onto a screen for which people paid a fee of admission. Later that year, he was given a two-week booking at the Alhambra in Leicester Square in which to play films to paying audiences. This was such a success, that he remained there for two years.

Designing and building all of his equipment had cost Robert around a thousand pounds, but by the start of 1897, he had made a profit of twelve thousand pounds from his popular ventures.

The following year he began to spend some of these profits, building a film studio in Muswell Hill, North London, to cope with the huge demand for films for his Theatrograph. Muswell Hill was Britain’s first ever film studio. In the year it was built, over eighty short films were produced at the studio. With his colleagues Ernest Moy and Percy Bastie, Robert also started to manufacture supplies for the ever-growing film trade, and built their first camera in 1900. Muswell Hill was at the peak of its powers at the start of the twentieth century, producing its finest special effects and best films between 1900 and 1905.

In 1910, after contributing so much to the industry, Robert had grown tired of films, and closed Muswell Hill, destroying many of the negatives for his films in the process. He returned to his engineering career at the age of forty-one, but remained in it only for a further ten years, leaving in 1920.

Robert Paul died in 1943, aged seventy-four. Despite not having a long career in the film industry – only eleven years – his influence both on the screen and equipment used in the industry were truly great.

Sixty-two of Robert’s films can be purchased on the BFI website here, so you can turn all the lights off in the living room, dress up in a corset or bowler hat and pretend you’re at the Alhambra in 1896.

“Some Day English Capitalists Will Become Alive to the Immense Importance of European Petroleum” Or: The Birth of Our Reliance on Oil:

2011-09-29T22:48:00.000-07:00

With things the way they are in

Libya

at present drawing passionate cries from all corners of the country of ‘We’re only there for the oil!’ I thought this little article quite pertinent.

It demonstrates that we here in Britain have been craving oil from all over the globe for well over a century. You may read this article and think to yourself, ‘Oh, so this is when it all started.’

A New Motive Power:

Turning over the pages of some volumes of Punch of the time when John Leech contributed prodigiously to the gaiety of this nation, I came upon a number of jokes founded upon the alarming statement of Professor Stanley Jevons that within about a hundred years our coal supply, to which many have attributed the commercial supremacy of this fantastic little island, would come to an end. There were comic drawings of people wearing pieces of “black diamond” as ear-rings or breast-pins, and many funny ideas that did credit to the inexhaustible, genial humourist. Today it appears not unlikely that before the terms of Jevrons gloomy prophesy, coal will have ceased to be of great importance.

In the sixties the “black stone” of Mrs. Markham seemed the only substantial source of heat, light and power, and now its position is menaced, not only by electricity, to which it has already been forced to act as handmaiden, but also by another mineral product, the use of which is believed to date back to the building of the Tower of Babel, when “slime had they for mortar.” The ruins of Nineveh and Babylon tell us that the mortar owed its quality to partially evaporated petroleum; and it is from petroleum, still a puzzle to the geologist, that apparently will come the force, heat, and light of the future.

Petroleum is a name that does not perhaps appeal to the housewife, although she burns it under the name of kerosene in her lamps; so dead is she, as a rule, to inquiry that there are old ladies who to this day refer to refined mineral oils as “colza.” Yet, those whose business it is to consider the safety of the little heart that beats for the huge British Empire are deeply studying the mineral oil that has introduced to our language the picturesque phrase “to strike oil.” For the meaning of the phrase it is simplest to refer to “The Golden Butterfly,” where may be found the fortunes of the delightful American who entertained a collection of sham literary lions in virtue of the fact that he had found his back garden and land flowing, not with milk and honey, but with oil. However, I do not mean to speak of the American oil industry, which has been the chief factor in the establishment of those commercial “trusts” that have put the United States under a bondage of cruel monopolies such as this happy country has not known, even in the days when the Statute of Monopolies was passed for the protection of trade. After all, one is disposed to look upon American commerce rather as a matter of statistics that appeal to Giffen, than as the subject of an article that may posses human interest, and it is Europe that attracts the attention of a non-commercial writer who can find an interest in things bought and sold. What mind can resist the quaint contrast involved in the fact that nowadays a huge business is done in exporting from Baku, on the Caspian Sea, the “sacred fire” which has attracted for many centuries the Guebres – the Persian fire-worshippers – who came to Ateshga, the “place of fire” in the cult of their religion? It is curious, lamentable to think that the site of one of the old temples of the fire-worshippers is now occupied by large petroleum works.

But what, one may ask, of the services that petroleum renders beyond producing a luminant for lamps, which, if properly used, is of great brilliance and softness? In petroleum, as in coal and other cases, “the stone which the builders refused is become the head-stone of the corner”; the by-products are more important, or at least, more valuable in some aspects, than that which was the primary object. The petroleum, after distillation of the refined oils and naphtha, leaves a residuum which promises to be the motive power of the world since, weight for weight and measure for measure, it is vastly more efficient, far easier of storage, and more convenient to handle than coal. Possibly a great many people who speak about electric power, who talk of electric traction, hardly recognize the fact that at present the marvelous force in practice can only be used in secondary form. Electricity, in fact, is like steam, and will not generate itself; some other force is needed, and so steam and gas, far from losing their importance, have almost gained in the modern developments of the form of energy whose name is based upon the fact that pieces of paper will stick to rubbed amber.

The petroleum residuum, however, threatens to oust the gas engine and dethrone coal and become the paramount means of generating the force that is to drive our ships and locomotives and generate electricity, and moreover, be used for lighting in place of coal-gas; while it has already proved itself the chosen power for the auto-cars which ere the end of the century will monopolise our roads. The Admiralty is building a new cruiser, the Galatea, to run with oil fuel. As far back as 1894 one metropolitan gas company used nearly five hundred and twelve million feet of oil-gas; the Great Eastern Railway has been building huge tanks at Stratford; in the great French auto-car competition the oil-fuel car took the prize, running from Bordeaux to Paris without a stop at the rate of fifteen miles per hour. Neither cruiser nor railway locomotive needs such an efficient fuel as the auto-car, and the French trial showed the extraordinary value of oil fuel.

What, then, about the Jevons of the petroleum supply? Already the States have shown signs, not, indeed, of immediate exhaustion, but at least the need to tap the deeper and more expensive wells. Luckily, “Yurrup,” the continent that our transatlantic cousins deem played out, seems richer in mineral oils than the States. The production of Baku increases daily to the benefit of Russia and of the Tyne, where special transport steamers are built. Roumania and Galicia have colossal stores of mineral oil till now barely touched. One European well in 1886 actually wasted in one day more than the States produced in a year and is still busy, but not wastefully. It is a characteristic of the European oils that whilst at one time scorned in the market because the residuum then treated as waste was too high, they are at present becoming the more valuable, because, the waste has proved to be “the headstone of the corner.”

Some day English capitalists will become alive to the immense importance of European petroleum, and if they find it too large for a “corner,” will make it “the headstone” of an industry that will provide a fruitful investment for the idle millions buried in the back-gardens of England.

- Illustrated London News, May 9^th 1896

Still, at least Professor Stanley Jevons’ prediction did not come true, and we did not run out of coal in the 1990’s, but it will happen, and whereas the Victorians, at the time of writing the above article had a new, wonder-fuel of petroleum to look forward to using as the coal supplies ceased, we are still using that oil and petrol, and have nothing to replace it with when the earth’s crust has surrendered all of its resources to us.

We best get thinking fast as I doubt we will squeeze another hundred years out of coal and oil…

“The Lady in the Refreshment Room…Gave me a Cup of Tea, as if I were a Hyena and She my Cruel Keeper with a Strong Dislike to me.” Or: Railway Refreshment Rooms – a Guest post by David Turner.

2011-09-23T02:39:00.000-07:00

I know virtually nothing about trains. I know that in the middle of the nineteenth century train lines began to spring up all over Britain, feeding industry and all but making redundant our waterways as highways for business, trade and shipping. I know some things about the early days of the London Underground, but my strongest points on railway history is probably London’s Victorian termini – but that has more to do with the buildings than the railway industry.

Vast subjects such as the railways always seem to evade my grasp. The facts of the matters are like bars of wet soap; I have them one moment, and just when I think the fact is remembered and committed to memory, its gone.

This alone is enough to make me bow in admiration to today’s guest blogger, David Turner, of http://turniprail.blogspot.com/ who commands a grasp of all aspects of the world of the Victorian Railway which leaves me slightly awestruck.

David is certainly my kind of fellow, he is passionate about his subject, and as I have alluded, very knowledgeable, and so, with my blog lacking any information on the Victorian Railway’s, and with said railways being often synonymous with the greatness of Great Britain in the nineteenth century, as she pushed ever forward, there was only one place I wished to turn.

As a whole subject, the Victorian Railways would fill an entire website – if you wish to read about every aspect of them, I urge you to visit David’s blog – so something very specific was in order. Something that you don’t often think about when you cast your mind to railway history, over to David…

‘…our railway managers, having observed that nature thus abhors a vacuum, and that the doctrine of the plenum is, in England, generally accepted, have taken care to promote the good temper of their travellers by the establishment of those most characteristic railway institutions "refreshment rooms."’[1]

By the late-1840s the refreshment room was a regular feature of railway travel in Britain. However, the date of the first railway refreshment room is unknown. The candidates are either the Grand Junction Railway’s temporary terminus at Vauxhall in Birmingham in 1837, or the London and Birmingham Railway’s stations at the Rugby and Birmingham Curzon Street Stations in 1838.[2] After this, refreshment rooms appeared at most of the medium and large railway stations in the country, serving the thirsty and hungry passengers. Yet, these were highly complained about facilities.

Before the introduction of the buffet car refreshment rooms served a number of purposes. As the plethora of food stands at stations do today, early refreshment rooms provided passengers starting journeys or changing trains with food and drink. However, they also served the needs long-distance passengers, and many trains stopped at stations for this purpose. Thus, London and Birmingham Railway trains stopped for ten minutes at Wolverton.[3] On the East Coast route the trains stopped at York.[4]

Given the short time available, many complaints were about the rush that ensued when a full train of passengers disembarked. Sir Frances Head described the scene at Wolverton; ‘the confused crowd of passengers simultaneously liberated from the train hurry towards [the servers]...with a velocity exactly proportionate to their appetite. Considering that the row of young persons have among them all only seven hands, it is really astonishing how, in the space of a few minutes manage to extend and withdraw them so often.’[5] Yet, this rush was seemingly nothing compared to one encountered at Ipswich station in 1867. On the 27^th September and excursion train stopped at the station on its way to the Yarmouth races. Six-hundred individuals, described of as being of ‘the lowest class and betting men,’ immediately poured into the refreshment room. The counter, which was described of as being relatively bare, was quickly cleared of a cheese weighing 6lbs and some buns and biscuits. It was reported that ‘no coin was paid by these hungry pleasure seekers and an attempt was made by some to get over the counter.’ On the return journey, the train did not stop at Ipswich.[6] Lastly, at Normanton on the Midland Railway, passengers could, for the price of 2s 6d, enjoy a six course meal, provided they consumed it in 20 minutes.[7]

But as with all aspects of railway food, the quality was a prime issue. Dickens wrote in Mugby Junction in 1867 that ‘The pork and veal pies, with their bumps of delusive promise and their little cubes of gristle and bad fat; the scalding infusion, satirically called tea, the stale bath buns with their veneer of furniture polish; the sawdusty sandwiches, so frequently and energetically condemned.’[8] Anthony Trollope in 1869 also condemned the railway sandwich: ‘we are often told in our newspapers that England is disgraced by this and by that…but the real disgrace of England is the railway sandwich – that withered sepulchre, fair enough outside, but so meagre, poor and spiritless within.’[9] In cases where companies’ refreshment rooms were contracted out, abuse of the agreements was a serious issue. On the Great Western Railway at Swindon, S.Y Griffiths was the first holder of the refreshment room lease from 1844. Brunel commented in response to a letter complaining about the station’s coffee that, ‘I do not think you anything such as coffee in the place; I am certain I have never taste any.’[10]

Service quality was also an issue, and Dickens wrote of the service he had received at Peterborough in 1856: ‘The lady in the refreshment room…gave me a cup of tea, as if I were a hyena and she my cruel keeper with a strong dislike to me.’[11] This attitude was later satirised in Mugby Junction, where Dickens wrote of the service there which featured ‘the icy stare from the counter, the insolent ignoring of every customer's existence, which drives the hungry frantic all these are doomed.’[12] Of course, not all comments on the quality of service were as bad. Sir Francis Head painted an idyllic view of the Swindon refreshment room where the ‘youthful handmaidens’ worked efficiently and with a smile on their faces.[13]

However, overall, this example was a rare case of a refreshment room being commended, and, as has been shown, the majority comments in the press and literature were negative. Yet, it has to be remembered that people invariably do not remember their positive experiences as vividly, and this may have tainted the published view of the refreshment room. Furthermore, it should be noted that all the criticisms levelled at refreshment rooms quoted here occurred in the 1840s, 1850s and 1860s. Thus, this would suggest an improvement in their quality in the later railway industry and suggests an increasing professionalism in the services that the companies’ provided. If confirmed, it would mean that the literature and comment of one period of history conspired to give all railway refreshment rooms of the Victorian period a bad name. This, would only be reversed by more detailed study.

-------

[1] Williams, Frederick Smeeton, Our iron roads: their history, construction and administration, (London, 1888), p.264

[2] Biddle, George, ‘Refreshment Rooms,’ The Oxford Companion to British Railway History, (London, 1997), p.417

[3] Biddle, ‘Refreshment Rooms,’ p.417

[4] Richards, Jeffrey and MacKenzie, John M., The Railway Station: A Social History, (Oxford, 1988), p.291

[5] Head, Sir Francis, Stokers and Pokers, (1849 reprint, Newton Abbot, 1968) p86-87

[6] The Bury and Norwich Post, and Suffolk Herald, Tuesday, September 03, 1867; pg. 6; Issue 4445

[7] Biddle, ‘Refreshment Rooms,’ p.417

[8] All Year Round, December 1867, p.60

[9] Trollope, Anthony, He Knew He Was Right, (London, 1869), p.351

[10] Richards and MacKenzie, The Railway Station, p.292

[11] Simmons, Jack, The Victorian Railway, (London, 1991) p.354

[12] Dickens, Charles, Mugby Junction, (London, 1867) p.60

[13] Head, Stokers and Pokers, p86-87

Many thanks to David for this, and to Doug and Jayne too for contributing work to help me celebrate the first birthday of this blog, their kindness and willingness to donate their time and effort is much appreciated.

Addendum:

On the subject of guest blogging, having been kindly invited to contribute an article to the super and successful blog, The Virtual Victorian I am proud to say that my guest post, "Found Drowned: On Suicides of Prostitutes in the Thames" can now be seen there.

A full and hearty thanks once again to Doug, Jayne and David who contributed excellent articles to 'The Victorianist' and to the Virtual Victorian.

“Members Shall Discourage the Wanton Destruction of Birds, and Interest Themselves Generally in their Protection” Or: In the Name of Fashion: Feathers, Carnage and Protest in Victorian England: - a Guest post by Jayne Shrimpton

2011-09-16T03:00:00.000-07:00

In June I wrote about Victorian attitudes to animal rights, including vegetarianism and the birth of the NAVS (National Anti Vivisection Society) and the RSPCA (Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals)

Following this, I spoke with Jayne and was thrilled when she agreed to write a guest post for me on the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) and how it came about.

I knew Jayne had an extensive set of historical photographs, and I was thrilled when she decided to include some of them to accompany her article. The photos’ included in this post are probably the best on this blog anywhere.

Quite enough chatter from me, here is Jayne’s guest post:

Many dress history enthusiasts would agree that sumptuous feathers and plumes have helped to create some of the most visually stunning millinery, accessories and trimmings over the centuries. But beneath the glamorous paintings, fashion plates and photographs and carefully-preserved hats and costumes lurk cruelty and devastation – disturbing facts that reveal the dark side of fashion.

An obsession with feathers

Since the Middle Ages birds’ plumage has played a significant role in western dress. As early as the 12^th century feathers were used to embellish Venetian masks and by the 15^th century feathered trimmings were an established element of aristocratic dress, expressing wealth and status. Ostrich feathers were worn with jewels as hat decorations during the Tudor era and single ostrich feathers or plumes (clusters of feathers) remained fashionable over hundreds of years. Other feathers in vogue during the 17^th and 18^th centuries included osprey, heron, peacock and even vulture feathers, worn with a flourish in vast hats or ornamenting the exaggerated ‘macaroni’ wigs of the 1770s - described by the artist and writer, Mrs Delany, as ‘waving plumes, preposterous Babylonian heads towering to the sky’. By the later 18^th century, the fashion for feathers had extended lower down the social scale, leading to the near-extinction of wild ostriches.

In the 1820s and 1830s, ‘Romantic’ extravagance influenced fashion and as garments, headwear and other dress ornaments grew ever more exuberant and inventive, fur and feather accessories were much admired, from swansdown boas (‘tippets’) and enormous fur or feather muffs, to wide-brimmed hats trimmed with ostrich or marabout stork feathers. Ostrich plume headdresses were also a requisite of Court dress – a tradition that prevailed through the 18^th to 20^th centuries.

1820 Fashion plate from La Belle Assemblee showing Court dress and ostrich plumes.

Victorian novelties

As material wealth increased for the rising Victorian middle classes, so the pace of fashion accelerated and the desire for display and novelty became more pronounced. At the same time colonial expansion across the globe and the exploration of distant lands introduced new and ever more exotic commodities and natural specimens to European markets: these included previously unknown varieties of birds, fuelling the fashionable demand for feathers, wings and even entire birds to decorate hats and other articles of dress. To the plumage of numerous native British birds such as grebes, gulls, egrets, herons, finches, jays and pheasants – to name but a few - were now added a rich and vibrant assortment of feathers and body parts of exquisite and, in many cases, rare species of bird including the humming bird, lyrebird, bird of paradise, quetzal and scarlet tanager.

Fashion’s favourite

Early in the Victorian period feathers were used mainly for millinery: for example in the late 1830s and early 1840s the precious male bird of paradise plume was much admired for bonnet trimmings. By the late 1850s hats were returning to fashion - headwear that provided a solid base for decoration and heralded the era now recognised as the most destructive for the world’s bird population – the years broadly spanning 1860 until 1921. Neat hats of the 1860s were often trimmed with the tip of an ostrich feather or a bird’s wing, or were circled with feathers. Then during the 1870s, as fashions grew more elaborate again, there was a marked increase in the use of feathers (and fur) to decorate hats and other items of women’s dress. Feathers were incorporated into day and evening headdresses and hair ornaments and by mid-decade whole stuffed birds were appearing on headwear, mounted on wires and springs to convey an impression of ‘natural’ movement.

Carte de Visite, 1865

By this time feathers might also be incorporated into items of jewellery such as earrings and corsage (bodice) ornaments, while stylish muffs were often made entirely of feathers or stuffed with eiderdown. Fans also became ultra-fashionable during the 1870s and 1880s, trimmed with a light feather edging of marabout or formed entirely of natural or dyed feathers of different varieties, including cock, pheasant and pigeon feathers. Screen-type fans were also popular in the last quarter of the century: often these were adorned with a small stuffed bird such as a tiny iridescent humming bird.

Late Victorian feather fans

The most bizarre and - some would say – repulsive trends in late-Victorian millinery occurred in the 1880s. During the latter half of the decade hat crowns grew tall, offering a generous display area for not only entire birds, perched upright or posed with wings outstretched, but, in the most extreme examples, an extraordinary array of animal and organic matter, from stuffed mice and reptiles to leaves, twigs and grass – a contrived habitat in miniature on the head.

As ladies’ hats grew wider and increasingly plate-like during the 1890s, crowns and brims were literally heaped with complex arrangements of bows, flowers and plumage – so much so that it is difficult to find an image of a fashionable late-Victorian hat that doesn’t feature feathers, wings or a whole bird.

Hunting, shooting and taxidermy

The Victorian passion for birds and feathers and apparent lack of concern about wearing dead creatures on the person went hand in hand with the popular pastimes of hunting and shooting. Many birds whose plumage, heads and bodies ended up as fashionable women’s dress ornaments were unashamedly pursued by sportsmen, who thought nothing of targeting whole colonies of birds. The art of taxidermy had also been progressing since the mid-19^th century, reaching its commercial heyday in the 1880s and 1890s – a pursuit that not only complemented hunting and shooting, but was even recommended in contemporary publications as a genteel pastime for women.

Chapter Illustration for 'Taxidermy' by Urbino & Day, 1884

Slaughter and carnage

Feathers and birds for use in the fashion industry, especially for millinery, fetched high prices and hunters operated all over the world. Both Paris and London were important auction centres but London was the world’s principal feather mart, one London auction record alone listing more than one million heron and egret skins sold between 1897 and 1911. Ostriches were farmed commercially from the late-1880s in South Africa, marking the beginning of a lucrative world-wide industry and introducing more humane methods of obtaining the desirable feathers, although wild ostriches (which can’t fly) were still hunted in some countries, being pursued on horseback until they dropped from exhaustion, then shot or clubbed to death. Many other birds were the victims of shockingly inhumane actions and almost unbelievable cruelty: for example, the wings of living gulls were sometimes pulled off, leaving them to die in slow agony in the sea, while young kittiwakes (a small species of ocean-going gull), whose attractive markings were especially admired, suffered a similar fate - their wings hacked off while they were still in the nest. Other fledglings were left to fend for themselves after the parent birds were thoughtlessly killed.

Protest and early legislation

In some enlightened mid-Victorian circles there was growing concern about the wholesale destruction of native British birds for their skins and plumage, although motivation was primarily conservationist, rather than emotional, reflecting genuine fears for the future survival of certain species. Particularly worrying was the trade in ‘grebe fur’ - the skin and soft under-pelt of the breast feathers of the great crested grebe - commonly used as a fur substitute in ladies' clothing. Once the fashion for ‘grebe fur’ caught on, the superb head frill feathers of the adult grebes' breeding plumage also became highly desirable in the millinery trade. The feathers could only be taken by killing the birds and as a result the numbers of great crested grebes fell rapidly to the point where they became almost extinct in Britain and Ireland, by 1860.

A leading protestor was eminent ornithologist, Professor Alfred Newton, who campaigned especially for the protection of birds of prey and seabirds during the breeding season and was instrumental in seeing the first legislation passed in 1869 - the Sea Birds Preservation Act. This was designed to reduce the effects of shooting and egg collection during the breeding season and gave limited protection to many species including the auk, diver, eider duck, gannet, grebe, guillemot, gull, kittiwake, loon, oyster catcher, petrel, razorbill and tern. Other legislation followed, notably the Wild Birds Protection Act of 1880, but the disturbing trends continued, especially the wearing of ever more exotic feathers in ladies’ hats, which was alone responsible for the extermination of millions of egrets, birds of paradise and other rare species.

Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB)

In 1889 the embryonic Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) was formed as a pressure group campaigning against the use of bird skins and feathers in the millinery industry. First called The Plumage League, the organisation was founded by Emily Williamson (wife of the explorer and writer, Robert Wood Williamson) at her house in Didsbury, Manchester. The rules of the newly-formed Society were straightforward:

‘That Members shall discourage the wanton destruction of Birds, and interest themselves generally in their protection

That Lady-Members shall refrain from wearing the feathers of any bird not killed for purposes of food, the ostrich only excepted.’ (1889)

In 1891 the Didsbury group joined forces with Mrs Phillips and the ladies of the Fur and Feather League in Croydon to found the Society for the Protection of Birds. The new organisation began as it meant to continue, producing its first publications in the same year - two pamphlets and three leaflets, including W H Hudson’s ‘The Osprey, or Egrets and Aigrettes. Leaflet no 1:

Destruction of Ornamental Plumaged Birds’.

In its earliest days the Society consisted mainly of women and, ironically, some of its staunchest supporters were exactly the kinds of high-ranking society ladies who might have been expected to wear fashionable feathers, including the Duchess of Portland, who became the Society's first President, and the Ranee of Sarawak. A number of other influential Victorians, including Professor Newton, also lent their support to the cause of the SPB, which gained widespread publicity, leading to a rapid growth in membership and a widening of its aims.

In 1897 the Society acquired its first London offices at 326 High Holborn, with paid members of staff, and in 1898 moved to 3, Hanover Square, renting offices from the London Zoological Society. The growing influence of the SPB led Queen Victoria to confirm an Order in 1899 that certain military regiments should discontinue wearing osprey plumes. Finally, just 15 years after its foundation, the Society received a Royal Charter in 1904 from Edward VII, becoming the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

Hat, c. 1909 - 1912

The final ban

Despite the early success of the RSPB, the international trade in plumage continued to prosper. By 1898 the export of egret feathers from Venezuela had resulted in the killing of up to two and a half million birds, while over 41,000 humming bird skins from Central and South America were sold in London during 1911 alone. The Edwardian era produced some of the most lavish and decadent displays of feathers in dramatic hats and sinuous trailing boas, a fashionable trend that ensured the continuing endangerment of many bird species worldwide. In 1908 the Importation of Plumage (Prohibition) Bill was first introduced to Parliament: this prohibited the importation of the plumage of any bird (including skin or body of a bird with the plumage) into the United Kingdom, with the exception of the plumage of African ostriches and eider ducks. However the bill was not passed for another thirteen years, until 1921, and didn’t come into force until April 1922. By then the world had changed, fashion had moved on and ornate feathered hats and accessories were no longer in vogue.

Many thanks to Jayne for agreeing to do this, and for the amazing pictures she sent over to accompany her article.

If you like, you can catch Jayne every year at ‘Who Do You Think You Are, Live’ and you can visit her website at www.jayneshrimpton.com