The perils of drinking in Victorian taprooms

I thought I was done writing about Judith Flanders's The Victorian City, but I can't resist sharing the passage I just read. I'm going to quote at a bit greater length than usual because (as you'll see) both sides of the story of Victorian London's drinking establishments needs to be told:

Hints to Men About Town, published in 1840, warned that "as every Man about Town is liable to be placed in situations where it is almost impossible to escape perfectly sober," such a young man needed to learn how "to take his glass . . . without making a fool of himself." The author, who called himself "The Old Medical Student," advised young men to eat as well as drink, to stick to one type of wine, not to get rowdy, and, above all, "Do not be prevailed upon to sing" (which is surely good advice today too). This was followed by a section on what to do when a friend passed out from drink and how to cure a hangover. It was all very matter-of-fact.

Is a medical student really the person to trust on this topic? I've not known a lot of them, but those I did definitely included in their number some intemperate drinkers. (Also, this is sadly pre-Jeeves: the best advice for dealing with a hangover is, of course, to ring for his assistance.)

Then there's the distaff side:

The Servant Girl in London: Showing the Dangers to which Young Country Girls are Exposed was published in the same year, but could not be further away in tone, even though its author had similarly pragmatic views. Readers were instructed that many pubs were entirely respectable, having been established by servants of gentry, and in them one could expect to meet "some of the most pleasant company. . . . The conversation is often very instructive, and well expressed . . . about politics, the news of the day, parish intelligence, and the like." It was the taproom that was the danger: "Here collect the working men, male servants in and out of place, hackney-coachmen, omnibus cads, &c.," who "drink far more in proportion than those in the parlour . . . and frequently insult most grossly" the servant girls from local houses, the "wives of mechanics [artisans], poor tradesmen, and the broken-down gentlewoman who keeps a school." These blameless females, while waiting to collect the supper beer, were obliged meanwhile to mingle with "the washerwoman, the market-woman, the basket-woman, the gaudily-attired courtesan, the sad street-walker." This mixing, warned the author, was "highly dangerous," but it was the mixing he was warning about, not the drinking.

Choose your drinking companions wisely, lady lushes! (And choose your books wisely, too: go get The Victorian City! You won't regret it!)

Keep it under your hat

I wrote about the pleasures of Judith Flanders's The Victorian City on Monday, but I can't help returning to it today to share one more wonderful bit. It comes from the same chapter as Monday's passage about the piemen, and it's a mere footnote to a section about coffee houses and the ways people ate there--including bringing their own meat for the waiter to put on the fire and cook. Flanders quotes from one of Dickens's All the Year Round pieces, "Night Walks," wherein he tells of seeing a man at a Covent Garden coffee house in 1860 take "out of his hat a large cold meat pudding." To that Flanders appends the following footnote:

If Dickens is to be believed, men kept almost everything they owned in their hats. It is almost quicker to itemize those characters who did not use their hat as a handy man-bag. Those who did include: Mr Pickwick, who keeps his glove and handkerchief there when he goes skating; in Oliver Twist a hat is home to Mr Bumble's handkerchief; the Dodger brings hot rolls and ham for breakfast in his; his pickpocket colleague Toby Crackit puts a shawl in "my castor" ["castor" = beaver]; in Nicholas Nickleby, Newman Noggs, flustered, tries to fit a parcel "some two feet square" into his, as well as keeping at different times a letter there, "some halfpence" and a handkerchief, while the moneylender Arthur Gride keeps large wedding favours in his; in The Old Curiosity Shop, Kit's handkerchief is in his hat; in Martin Chuzzlewit, Montague Tigg keeps old letters, "crumpled documents and small pieces of what may be called the bark of broken cigars" in his, while the stagecoachman uses his to store his parcels for delivery; in Little Dorrit, Pancks, the moneylender's clerk, keeps his notebook and mathematical calculations there; and finally, in David Copperfield, David puts a bouquet for Dora "in my hat, to keep it fresh"--possibly the only fully middle-class person in Dickens's novels to use this caching spot. Much later in the century Shelock Holmes notices a bulge in Watson's hat, which indicates the has stashed his stethoscope there, but there are few other mentions in fiction. I suspect it was a standard location for a man's handkerchief, and for all the other items Dickens merely thought it was funny.

If that litany of silliness hasn't convinced you to buy Flanders's book, I don't know what will!

On the streets of the Victorian city

I recently discovered that, like many people, I had been led badly astray by my youth. But unlike most people in that situation, the discovery brought joy rather than sorrow (or decades of therapy).

Specifically, I thought I'd read all of Dickens except The Old Curiosity Shop (which I've avoided for years because of Little Nell, even as I've re-read the others)--but as I read Judith Flanders's wonderful The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens's London and kept encountering unfamiliar passages and characters from Oliver Twist, I realized that I actually had never read it. I'd instead checked it off the mental list twenty-plus years ago based on a jumbled recollection of having read an adaptation (think Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare) as a kid and then playing Oliver in Oliver! when I was thirteen. Oh, joy! My book bag for an upcoming London trip could be repacked--and Little Nell could live, insipidly, for another day!

That was far from the only joy I received from Flanders's book, however. I've long been a fan of her Inside the Victorian Home, which is exactly the sort of up-close, detail-and-anecdote-filled history I most enjoy, and this book takes that same approach to the streets of London.

At first I was worried that the conceit of the subtitle--that Dickens would be our guide--was merely a hook designed to capitalize on last year's Dickens bicentennial, and that Dickens would ultimately prove more window dressing (or even limitation) than central source. But oh, was I wrong: one of the great pleasures of Flanders's book is how much more she makes us appreciate Dickens's eye for detail, and how deftly she uses those details to help us understand the life Dickens was seeing around him. I can't count the number of times Flanders seizes on an expression or aside in one of Dickens's novels--the sort of descriptive texture that most readers would pass over, uncomprehending but untroubled, in the rush of Dickens's prose--and uses it to illustrate or explain some forgotten aspect of street life. Dickens, in Flanders's hands, is restored to his role of reporter and man on the street, never forgetting anything he sees his fellow Londoners do.

Perhaps my favorite example comes in the utterly fascinating chapter on street food, when Flanders gets to the piemen. Being a pieman, she explains, was not really profitable:

In the 1840s, the Corn Laws kept the price of flour high and, with it, the price of pies. To maintain their price at the expected penny, the piemen were forced to scrimp: their pies were made with cheap shortening, or had less filling, or poor-quality meat. Many of the legends of cats-meat, or worse, in pies spring from this period. In 1833, Sam Weller advises the horrified Mr Pickwick, "Wery good thing is weal pie, when you . . . is quite sure it ain't kittens," but in summer "fruits is in, cats is out."

Even the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1849 didn't help, as the piemen then found themselves competing with pie shops. So, Flanders explains, the piemen's customer base was reduced almost entirely to boys,

who worked in the streets, eating coffee-stall breakfasts, shellfish at lunch, hot eels or pea soup for dinner, perhaps with a potato, and a pie to fill in the gaps when they could afford it. What the boys loved about piemen was their method of charging. A pie cost a penny, but all piemen were willing to toss a coin for one: if the customer won, he got the pie free; if the pieman won, the pieman kept both pie and penny. Tossing for a pie was part of the language. Dickens used it regularly: in Pickwick Papers the stagecoach driver warns his passengers: "Take care o' the archvay, gen'lm'n. 'Heads,' as the pieman says.' In David Copperfield, little Miss Mowcher is like "a goblin pieman" as she tosses up the two half-crowns she is paid, as did Montague Tigg in Martin Chuzzlewith spinning a coin "in the air after the manner of a pieman."

See what I mean? I'm sure when I read those lines in Pickwick and the other novels, that I simply chalked them up as character-driven slang, with nary a though to the history they revealed.

The Victorian City is full of passages like that, ones that give you the feeling--brief and illusory though it might be--that you understand what it would have been like to walk down the streets of Victorian London. It's both a great book for the lover of London and a useful addition to the ever-growing Dickens bookshelf. (I should say: it's been available in the UK for more than a year, but the US edition isn't scheduled to be published until this summer.)

Servants

One of the most interesting characters in Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart (1938) is Matchett, the head servant who works for Anna and Thomas, in whose house Thomas's half-sister, Portia, lives (and, through her inability to recognize a cad when she meets one, begins to wreak havoc). Matchett is simultaneously a comforting mothering confessor figure for young Portia and a forbidding, judgmental watcher. She sees all and claims not to judge, but exchanges tend to move along lines like the following, which comes when Portia has just returned from a spring holiday at the seaside:

"You know, Matchett, I did enjoy myself."

Matchett gave another sideways look at the clock, as though admoninishing time to hurry for its own sake. Her air became more non-committal than ever; she appeared to be hypnotised by the speed of her knitting, and, at the same time, for her own private pleasure, to be humming an inaudible tune. After about a minute, she receipted Portia's remark with an upward jerk of the chin. But the remark had, by that time, already wilted in the below stairs dusk of this room--like, on the mantelpiece, the bunch of wild daffodils, some friend's present, thrust so sternly into a glass jar. These, too, must have been a gift that Matchett no more than suffered.

"You're glad, aren't you?" Portia more faintly said.

"The things you do ask. . . . "

Matchett's mix of passive aggression and raised eyebrows called to mind one of Virginia Woolf's pungent comments about servants, which I encountered in Alison Light's amazing Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury (2008):

Having one's affairs inspected by servants, Virginia wrote, was like "frying in greasy pans."

For anyone who wants to try to understand what it was like to be or to employ a servant, Light's book is indispensable. Her research is amazing, conjuring up the lives of people who, though they played crucial parts in the lives of the Woolfs, left few overt traces in the countless histories of the couple and their circle. In addition, she enables us to both see Woolf's blindness to the human actuality of her servants and to understand why she saw them, and understood her relationship with them, that way. The servants were not really to be thought about--fretted over, perhaps, with their snooping and stealing and moodiness--but not thought about. They were just there. The best servant, Light explains, "was a kind of absent presence." Bowen tells us, of Matchett,

No one knew that she slept, that she went to bed: at nights she just disappeared.

In the introduction to Mrs. Woolf and the Servants, Light writes,

Like other upper-middle-class girls, Virginia Stephen lived a cosseted existence, cared for by the servants. She'd been kept clean, fed and watered by them ever since the nursery. She woke to find the curtains drawn and jugs of water placed beside her wash-basin; her clothes--mended, laundered, brushed--were laid out for her; there was help on hand for buttoning boots or putting up her hair with the wretched pins. Of course no one in her circle shopped for food, let alone cooked an egg, or picked up their own clothes from the floor. For young ladies like Miss Stephen, servants were largely unremarkable, simply the backdrop to the greater and more interesting drama of growing up.

Even more telling--even jaw-dropping--is a moment Light describes from 1929:

By three o'clock the Woolfs were alone--a complete and utter novelty. It is worth emphasizing. They had never been alone before in their own home.

The Woolfs had at that point been married for seventeen years.

Which isn't to say that there wasn't pleasure (and power) in the servants' part as well. Bowen is convincing when she depicts Matchett's pride, masochistic though it may be, in her spring cleaning:

She had had her way like a fury. Tensed on the knitting needles (for she could not even relax without some expense of energy) her fingers were bleached and their skin puckered, like the skin of old apples, from unremitting immersion in hot water, soda, soap. Her nails were pallid, fibrous, their tips split. Light crept down the sooty rockery, through the bars of the window, to find no colour in Matchett: her dark blue dress blotted the light up. She looked built back into the half darkness behind her apron's harsh gaze. In her helmet of stern hair, a few new white threads shone--but behind the opaqueness of her features control permitted no sag of tiredness. There was more than control here: she wore the look of someone who has augustly fulfilled herself. Floor by floor over the basement towered her speckless house, and a reckoning consciousness of it showed like eyes through the eyelids she lowered over her knitting.

The amount of work that went into making that satisfaction, however, while Matchett's employers were blithely on holiday, is staggering:

The spring cleaning had been thorough. Each washed and polished object stood roundly in the unseeing air. The marbles glittered like white sugar; the ivory paint was smoother than ivory. Blue spirit had removed the winter film from the mirrors; now their jet-sharp reflections hurt the eye; they seemed to contain reality. The veneers of cabinets blazed with chestnut light. Upstairs and downstairs, everything smelt of polish; a clean soapy smell came out from behind books. And crisp from the laundry, the inner net curtains stirred over windows reluctantly left open to let in the April air with its faint surcharge of soot. Yes, already, with every breath that passed through the house, pollution was beginning.

That sooty pollution, as Judith Flanders explains in Inside the Victorian Home (2003), was inescapable:

Coal residue was omnipresent, both as dust as coal was carried to each fireplace, and then, after the fires were lit, as soot thrown out by the fire, blackening whatever it touched.

So every day the battle was waged anew. The spring cleaning may have been an extraordinary undertaking, but the everyday household routine itself is astonishing. Here, also from Flanders's fascinating book, is a passage from the 1860 diary of Hannah Cullwick, a maid of all work:

Opened the shutters & lighted the kitchen fire. Shook my sooty things in the dusthole & emptied the soot there. Swept & dusted the rooms & the hall. Laid the hearth & got breakfast up. Clean'd 2 pairs of boots. Made the beds & emptied the slops. Clean'd & wash'd the breakfast things up. Clean'd the plate; clean'd the knives & got the dinner things up. Clean'd away. Clean'd the kitchen up; unpac'd a hamper.

And on and on. Little of which, it seems, was appreciated. Flanders cites some of the then-standard guides to managing servants:

All this was regarded as normal, and not too much for one person. Indeed, Mrs. Beeton thought that "a bustling and active girl will always find time to do a little needlework for herself, if she lives with consistent and reasonable people. In the summer evenings she should manage to sit down for two or three hours, and for a short time in the afternoon in leisure days." Mrs. Warren agreed, adding that in her daily tasks, not too much equipment should be given to the maid-of-all-work, as any girl, no matter how much work she had to get through, "Should find time to wash three cloths in a day," for constant reuse. "Cre-fydd," the pseudonymous author of a housekeeping manual, conflated effort and result when she said that if every room was thoroughly turned out once a week, including washing the paintwork, beating the carpets, cleaning the windows, and brushing the walls and curtains, "the house is always clean, and with very little labour."

Simple as that! . . . until the next day, when it all had to begin again. "Now, you get off my table, there's a good girl," says Matchett to Portia,

"while I plug in the iron: I've got some pressing to do."

Portia said, in a hardly alive voice: "I thought you said you had finished everything."

"Finished? You show me one thing that is ever finished, let alone everything. No, I'll stop when they've got me screwed into my coffin, but that won't be because I've got anything finished."

An old girlfriend once explained that she liked washing dishes because they were "finite objects in an infinite task." I feel the same way as I stand at the sink--but there's a difference in doing it for yourself rather than for your masters, and in not having to go from the sink to the rugs to the floors to the fireplace . . . We can never be sure who or how we would have been had we lived in the past, what cruel blind spots we likely would have had. Trying to sympathetically imagine the world of Victorian and Edwardian servants makes me grateful for my small sink of few dishes, and glad that changes in culture, class relations, and technology have enabled me to be able to--and to expect to--do for myself in those areas.