Judith Flanders Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London
The grime and squalor of Victorian London is far from a rarely-covered subject. Novels, films, TV documentaries and non-fiction books there are aplenty, detailing the long and painful process by which it was realised that urbanisation and industrialisation had to be controlled and ameliorated if poor-people's lives weren't to be nasty and short. Charles Dickens was no small contributor to this growing awareness and this book draws on his writing and characters to add flavour to this book's author's already-pungent observations of the details of London life during the 19th century. You'll be dining out on what you learn here for months. Like did you know that the waiters in chop houses paid the restaurant' owners to work there? They had to live off the tips they received and even had to keep the linen clean themselves. And that Queen Victoria was more-often-than-not an unpopular monarch, especially when she disappeared for decades in mourning for Albert. This book teems with such memorable detail, dealing with topics like travel, eating out, the sewers, entertainment and street life. It'll leave you fascinated and disgusted in equal measure, and really glad to not have lived in London back then.



 

Stephen Halliday The Great Stink of London
Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the cleansing of Victorian London
It was the Great Stink of 1858, when the steamy summer temperatures brought home to Members of Parliament - even behind the closed windows of the Houses of Parliament - the fragrant consequences of the sewage of two million Londoners being pumped straight into the Thames. It fell to Joseph Bazalgette to come up with something to replace the old pipes and shift the shit somewhere else. This he did so well that his system of sewers, pumping stations and treatment works still forms the basis of London's network. The book tells a good story somewhat repetitively, and could have done with some harsher editing. Bazalgette's importance to the layout and history of London is undeniable - the Victoria, Albert and Chelsea Embankments weren't built solely for traffic, there's plenty flowing underneath too. These embankments narrowed the Thames, and made some prime riverside properties, like Somerset House and the lovely lost Adelphi, into road-side properties. This book tells the story well enough, but leaves the way open for something terser and more gripping.
Now there's a novel by Clare Clark set in the sewers, as another Crimea-traumatised character (see also Anne Perry) uncovers corruption and is accused of murder.

Lee Jackson Dirty Old London: The Victorian Fight Against Filth
And further to my comments on the ubiquity of Victorian filth, mentioned in my review of the Judith Flanders book, here's a book comprehensively concentrated on that very subject, after reading which you may feel you've got the subject under your belt, as it were. Aside from the big three - the Stink, the sewers and the slums - the author has chapters on new topics like the provision of public baths and lavatories. Mr Jackson is London's leading Victorianist and provider of the best books and the finest website - victorianlondon.org - so he knows whereof he speaks. There is a repetitiveness to the reasons why these necessary, and to us basic, public health measures took so long to get implemented. They all revolve around those with money and power doing all they can to keep their grip on both, and to blame the poor themselves for their lives of squalor and suffering which were, in fact, largely the result of said greed. It's heartening how much better things are now, but these attitudes sadly persist.

Lee Jackson Dickensland
The novels of Charles Dickens and, to an even greater extent, the films made of them now do most of the heavy lifting in our visualising of Victorian London. And it has been so since soon after Dickens's death it seems. From early on certain sites and even sort-of theme parks helped create a certain idea of Old London that still persists. Lee Jackson traces and analyses examples of this, from the creation of The Old Curiosity Shop through fetes and fairs to the film versions of Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol, with and without Muppets. There is a problem defining the concept of authenticity when dealing with fictional places and characters, of course, but the author covers this ground sensibly, comprehensively and entertainingly.

Liza Picard Victorian London The Life of a City 1840-1870
This one has chapters dedicated to separate aspects, beginning with smells and taking us through streets, buildings, the classes, food, clothes, health, amusements, etc. It's all here, and the author writes with clarity and wit. The topics are not surprising, but there is much still to learn. For example, the Matchgirls' strike is an often-covered event, but here I learned that the noxious chemicals that caused ‘phossy jaw’, a form of bone cancer from which many of the girls suffered, were present on the matchsticks that could be struck on any surface, but not the safety matches that had to be struck on the matchbox. Also that these chemicals did their work because the girl's teeth were so decayed. The last two chapters deal with religion and death. I didn't realise how utterly the Church of England unwelcomed people of the lower-classes, hence their resorting to non-conformist congregations.
 

Fiona Rule The Worst Street in London
The street is Dorset Street, much renamed later in an attempt to lay its ghosts. It didn't survive long after the advent of the Welfare State and is now under the widened streets around Spitalfields Market. This book covers many, mostly grim, aspects of life around and on the street. It's a tale of decline, crime, alcoholism, prostitution, the waves of immigrants and the occasional murder. The story centres on the lives and careers of the slum landlords, taking in Jack Sheppard, Jack the Ripper, Marie Lloyd and even Kay Kendall. It's a familiar narrative of crime, squalor and want, but readable and informative and mostly calm and unsensational. Amongst the things I learnt was the fact that the body of Mary Kelly, the ripper's final victim, was initially kept in the mortuary of Shoreditch Church before being taken, through crowds initially, to be buried in St Patrick's Cemetery in Leytonstone, as she was a Catholic.


Andrew Saint London 1870-1914: A City at its Zenith
This one is refreshingly light on the squalor and crime and tends towards the architectural, although it's more about social trends and usage than it is architraves and cornices. With a chapter devoted to each decade we investigate the developments that changed and made London during this period. The coming of council housing, electricity, cheaper travel, public libraries, the musical hall and the LCC are amongst the topics covered, along with the buildings that were inspired. A refreshingly perspective results.

Sarah Wise The Blackest Streets:The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum
One thing about my immersing myself in Victorian filth so intensively, in February 2023, to feed my genealogical obsession with my 19th-century forebears, is that common themes. This book concentrates on life in the Old Nichol, the slum of slums, between Shoreditch Church and Brick Lane. The death rates within its confines where almost double those of the area of Bethnal Green, within which it festered, and Bethnal Green was itself one of the worst areas of London for death and squalor. As has become a familiar refrain from the books of Lee Jackson and Judith Flanders above most of the 19th century was spent, as awareness and anger grew, with the passing of laws which proved next to useless in the face of vested interests and the toothless vestry system of government. The slum landlords, who made far more from the powerless poor who where crammed into these jerry-built tenements than the comfortable and demanding residents in more prosperous areas, were happy to rake in the profits whilst doing nothing. Most were either wealthy knobs or vestry committee members. Slum clearance had to happen, even if this meant that in the medium term the situation was worsened by those who lost their homes having to cram into a diminishing number of slums before replacement accommodation was built, usually by charitable institutions like the Peabody Trust. The vestry system was finally swept away by the creation of the London County Council in 1888, around 5o years after the governance of most of the other major cities in the country has been so centralised. So the Old Nichol rookery itself wasn't demolished until the 1890s, replaced by the circular new Boundary Estate, named for the area being on the border of Bethnal Green and Shoreditch. But as this then became populated by what the Victorians defined as 'the deserving poor' only 11 Old Nichol residents were amongst the 5,100 housed in the new estate. In later chapters the author deals (quite roughly) with the books that the Old Nichol engendered - Arthur Harding's life story East End Underworld and the novel Child of the Jago by Arthur Morrison being only the most famous.

The former Howard de Walden Nurses' Home,
built 1899, in Marylebone, now a hotel.