Street Life in Victorian London

Six years after Charles Dickens died (1876), the streets of London were ‘recorded’ by Adolphe Smith, who was a journalist, and John Thomson, who was a photographer. The result shocked the middle classes when they read the book “Street Life of London”. Luckily for us today, this book is still available. To us this is history but when the book was first published in 1876 — it really was how people lived every day of their lives. The book was firstly put into articles which were full of facts and which the black and white photographs only added to. The book is regarded as “a key work in the history of documentary photography”.

Adolphe Smith Headingly was born in 1846, half-French and a left-wing political writer. John Tomson was born in 1837 and was the eighth child of nine children. John learnt the principles of photography when he was apprenticed to a local optical and scientific instrument manufacturer (possibly James Mackay Bryson), as well as taking evening classes at the Watt Institution and School of Arts. John became a member of the Royal Scottish Society of Arts in 1861. After travelling the world (Singapore, China and Taiwan) documenting what he saw, John returned to England in 1872 and continued to lecture and publish his works. In 1876, John and Adolphe met again, (they had first met in 1866 at the Royal Geographical Society), and it was now that they worked together in their project “Street Life in London”.

The photographs were all in black and white which makes a person feel that they are actually “there”. One of the pictures is of a little girl searching among the drinking houses for her drunken parents, which is shocking for us today but was quite ‘normal’ back then. The little girl looks somewhere between the ages of five and seven.

In another picture, we see “the temperance sweep”. The man in the picture was thrown out of home (by his drunken father) when he was just ten years old. Struggling to find work (even at ten years old!), he secured permanent work as a chimney sweep, never touching a drop of liquor (which is quite understandable).

Today we take taxis for granted, but in the Victorian Era it was a fairly new ‘thing’ but a difficult job to get into. The chap photographed had to save up money inorder to buy the horse and hire the ‘cab’, as well as make sure that he could look after both. He first worked as a pot-boy in a public-house and moved on to being a conductor with the Metropolitan Tramway Company. After carefully saving for two years, he had enough money to buy a horse, hire a cab and obtain his licence. Thus started his career as a London Cabman. “At this point of his career he considered himself at liberty to indulge in the luxury of a wife, of whom he spoke in terms of high respect and affection”.

I had never heard of “London Nomades” until I researched this book. The photograph was taken on a piece of vacant land at Battersea, and it is of a friendly group gathered around the caravan of William Hampton. He never learnt to read and write but didn’t let it stop him in life, in fact, he didn’t ‘trust’ education. “Any chaps of my acquaintance what knows how to write and count proper aint much to be trusted at a bargain”. These nomads were London gipsies who attended fairs and markets, and who would sell cheap ornaments or useful wares from door to door. Their families went back generations.

We have all seen the black and white photographs of the “Flower Women”, selling their flowers in Covent Gardens. It is interesting how, in this part of the book, there is the sentence: “there seems to be something inexpressibly touching in the tendency of the poor to fall back on nature’s gifts when reduced to the last extremity”. The thought that Mother Earth can help the poor is a comforting thought. These flower sellers go back generations, and the point is made that when an old lady (who sold these flowers most of her life) died, a child had been taught to take her place. The life was a hard one, the women arriving before the break of day and working until the late afternoon, sometimes for a few shillings or a few pounds, depending on the weather.

Something we longer see today was the “Street Doctors”. These were street venders who ‘sold’ pills, potions and quack medicines to the poor for a few shillings. The dangerous thing about these ‘doctors’ was that very few of them had any medical training at all, and the ‘medicines’ were more likely to make the patient worse. However, they were a regular feature on the streets of Victorian London. The poor did not have money for a properly trained doctor and would be ‘desperate’ for help of any kind. Fortunately, the free hospitals and many charities that were set up especially to help the poor, as well as the new Laws in Parliament, put a stop to this kind of street seller.

“Halfpenny Ices” were the Victorian equivalent to our ice-cream vans today. The ice-cream was made around four o’clock in the morning and sold during the day by Italian Ice-cream sellers. There were none of the mechanical ice-cream makers (like we have today), so everything had to be done by hand. A favourite street seller for the children — both poor or rich.

“The London Boardman” sounds like a professional man sitting around a table having a board meeting with us today. In Victorian London, they were what we call today “Sandwhich Men”. These men walked the streets of London, with one board at the front and one board at the back, advertising ‘something’. The pay was anything from four to ten shillings a week, depending on the hours worked and the item / service being advertised. A simple enough job but one of the most ‘ugly’ jobs to do, because of the abuse these poor men would get (even from the rich ‘passing by’). The abuse and consistent jeering these men received makes us wonder why anybody would do this job, but for the poor — there was no choice!

Something we do not see on the streets of London today is “The Independent Shoe-Black”, or shoe-shiner. These were boys who literally cleaned shoes, in the streets, for a few shillings. Remember, the pavements were not cement, like we have today, and walking through London could be very ‘dirty’ in the rain, with the mud and dust covering your shoes, so this was not necessarily a ‘clean’ job, but one that the boys protected fiercely.

It was such a different world, the Victorian world, that today we would not ‘recognise’ that way of living. However, we must never forget that this is real history, fascinating to us today, but the only life that people knew back then.

“I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is” — Bram Stoker, Dracula.