The Fields Beneath (18 page)

If the people who sweated to cut slate and deal and make brass and ironwear, usually far from London, were the new industrialised proletariat, those who made sure that the system worked were the new middle class, and there were relatively more of these in London than in any other large city. Their grandfathers and fathers had been smallholders or country tradesmen, but they themselves were part of a new, vast army of white-collar workers, and their expectations and modes of life had altered accordingly. The ‘decent clerk', whose father had been perhaps a corn-dealer content with wooden chairs and a sanded floor, beautified his own stucco-fronted nest in Camden, Kentish Town or Islington with padded upholstery, chenille tablecloths and engravings of uplifting scenes. The extraordinarily cluttered and over-furnished look of the average Victorian parlour, by modern standards, was simply a natural response to the unprecedented number of consumer goods which, through mass-production, then came on the market for the first time. The housewife whose ancestors had used the same few iron or copper pots all their lives and left them in their wills to their descendants, now used and discarded worn-out tin pans almost as housewives do today. Or, more likely, she sat in state in her heavily-garnished parlour while in the basement kitchen the pans were burnt or dented by a succession of very young, very ignorant servant-girls.

For the keeping of servants – or
a
servant – by people of no great means or education themselves was yet another symptom of the real if unequal wealth of the age. No other European country at that time could afford to keep so many middle- and even lower-middle-class women in virtual idleness for the greater part of their lives. The French housewife even at quite a high social level did her own cooking, the German
hausfrau
remained very much that even where other help was kept. But the English housewife sat and practised being a lady, while English standards of cookery and domestic economy descended to the level for which they were long notorious. In London and the suburbs, in 1851, there were 115,000 females between the ages of fifteen and twenty, of whom almost 40,000 were in domestic service. The sheer number of houses that were built with basement kitchens even in relatively modest areas are themselves testimony to the ubiquitousness of servant-keeping. Such a plan makes no sort of sense unless the basement is envisaged as a habitat for a separate race of people. In the smaller houses that were actually built for working-class habitation, the kitchen, with wash-house-scullery beyond, is traditionally at the back of the ground floor, the front being reserved for the little used ‘best room'. Yet nineteenth-century census records show that even houses of this type quite commonly housed a living-in skivvy. Did she sleep under the kitchen table, perhaps?

The commuting clerk who, by the end of the century, had become
the
archetypal denizen of the suburbs, was already a feature of places like Kentish Town by the mid-century. But it is a moot point what percentage of ordinary clerks – office workers, in modern terms, but all male – actually commuted before the 1860s. We have seen that from the late eighteenth century people living in Kentish Town availed themselves of the long-distance stage-coaches, which conveniently stopped there, simply to go to and from London. By the early part of the nineteenth century these were supplemented by many short-stage coaches run primarily
for
just such a public. Although they still looked like the traditional stage-coaches, they were the fore-runner of the omnibus. By the 1820s Kentish Town, which was peculiarly well-provided in this respect, benefited from seven coaches making between them a total of fifty journeys a day in and out of the City or West End – more than Islington and far more than remote and countryfied Hampstead. But the coaches were the two-horse variety, carrying only four to six passengers inside and seven at most on top, so this can hardly be regarded as a form of mass travel. In any case the single fare to town had risen to between 1
s
. 6
d
. and 2
s
. (it varied with the price of corn and indeed the whims of the owners), clearly a rate far beyond the means of the more ordinary sort of clerk, let alone the working man.

The omnibus proper, with no room for baggage but rather more for passengers was introduced after several false starts
c.
1830, when the coaching era was in any case coming to its end with the introduction of railways. The standard omnibus fare was 6
d
., still a not-inconsiderable sum, but it seems to be, nevertheless, from this era that the image of the commuting clerk dates. Periodicals of the time commented on it, as a new mass phenomenon: ‘… decent clerks, fagged and harmless and going home to their tea … six and twenty sweating citizens, jammed, crammed and squeezed into each other like so many peas in a pod' (
New Monthly Magazine,
1833). Another ‘Observer' of the same decade, quoted by Barker and Robbins in their
A History of London Transport,
analysed the situation in greater detail:

In other words, although an ‘immense number' by the standards of previous, less commercialised and bureaucratised generations, these omnibus users were still exclusively people above a certain level in society; the humblest of them were living at a near £3-a-week level, which was much above the wages of the ordinary run-of-the-mill clerk toiling over ledgers for long hours in his detachable collar and cuffs. Bob Crachitt, it will be remembered, had only 15
s
. a week on which to keep his family, and it is made clear by Dickens that he did not take the bus but walked – or occasionally ran – all the way from Camden Town to the City and back again at night, a total of about six miles a day. Obviously, even if most employers were not as mean as Scrooge, there must have been many others like Bob Crachitt.

But as omnibuses became more numerous and took more passengers, fares gradually went down to 2
d
. or 3
d
. Certainly there was a general belief in the mid-century that the horse omnibuses had been responsible for the development of many of what later generations would regard as the ‘inner suburbs' – Clapham, Brixton, Hammersmith, Kentish Town, Islington, Holloway, Highbury. It was even stated in evidence laid before the Committee on Metropolitan Turnpikes that ‘builders and parties in the district raised money to get the omnibuses up there'. A similar growth pattern took place further out in the late part of the century, when housing followed the railways after the introduction of cheap workmen's tickets.

Nevertheless the importance of the commuter, in Kentish Town and all the other places like it in the mid-nineteenth century, should not be over-rated. Most omnibus users, after all, represented several other persons, usually unemployed, sitting at home. In addition, it is clear from Census records that the new suburbs had plenty of those people ‘with limited independent means of living, such as legacies or life-rent, or small amounts of property' who only occasionally needed to go anywhere at all. If your standards were not too high, it was relatively far easier to amass enough private income to live on then than it is now. Many people must have simply existed, doing nothing very much since that was what a ‘genteel' life implied, taking to piety, laudanum, charitable works or the reading of three-volume novels according to taste, perpetually and thankfully aware of the vast gulf between themselves and the classes below them.

By the mid-century an
average
working man's wage in London was about 21
s
. a week, which means that very many industrious and respectable members of the working class must have received less. In consequence, the working classes either walked long distances to work – as their agricultural forbears had often done before them – or lived near to it, which in practice usually meant closer to the centre of London than the middle classes now cared to live. From this dates the beginning of the ‘decayed inner ring', which is still with us, merely displacing itself a little further out each time some energetic municipality attempts to deal with it. In St Pancras parish, areas like Somers Town, which quickly became rather poor, and Agar Town, which could never have been intended to be anything else, were part of this pattern.

At the beginning of the 1840s, when the Southampton family were maturing their plans for west Kentish Town, in the one-time manor of Tottenhall, the ground landlord of part of the old manor of St Pancras decided to do likewise. This was Councillor Agar, who lived in a turretted house slightly north of St Pancras church standing approximately where St Pancras Manor House had once stood, and is remembered now in Agar Grove. J. F. King, who depicted Mr Agar's house (‘Elm Lodge') on his ‘Panorama', described him as a hospitable man: indeed the picture shows a tea-party in process upon the lawns of the estate, but it was for bad landlordism that the name Agar later became a by-word.

The streets that were laid out south-east of Elm Lodge adjoining Somers Town and the new Euston railway terminus, had not even pretensions towards middle-class aspirations, being without drainage, paving or lighting, and this development effectively sealed the fate of the southern end of St Pancras parish, so long blighted, which from then on was fit for nothing but a takeover by the railway. Indeed Agar Town only existed for about twenty years, before being swept away for the construction of St Pancras Station and goods yards in the 1860s. But in its brief time it became famous, or rather infamous: Charles Dickens published a piece on it in
All the Year Round
, calling it ‘A Suburban Connemara' – a title which gives one a clue to the nature of immigrant life in London in those years. A little later (1861) another popular writer, Hollinshead, the author of
Ragged London
, wrote of the six or seven thousand people in Agar Town, crammed into just a few streets

There was nothing new in such places: large parts of mediaeval and even seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cities were very much like this. It was a rural kind of squalor, abounding in chickens and donkeys: as Hollinshead himself said, ‘here is Dorsetshire itself under our very walls.' It only seemed shocking by the new standards of the rising middle classes. But just as the image of suburban respectability – privet, net, stucco etc. – jelled in the nineteenth century and has remained petrified ever since, so the image of the slum then assumed the definitive form which it still has today, in people's minds if no longer in reality. In the words of
Punch
(1845), the slum had by then become the place of ‘awful little by-lanes of two-storied tenements, where patent mangles are to let, where the street is encumbered by oyster shells and black puddles, and little children playing in them … Grim looking Methodist chapels, schools, churches and asylums innumerable.'

It is interesting to note that here places of worship and charity are no longer seen as objects for congratulation in a neighbourhood, as they had been in Bennett's day, but as signs of poverty. The portents for Kentish Town, by this reckoning, were not good.

Essentially, slum areas were those in which the inhabitants lived cheek by jowl with the industrial enterprises in which they worked, which by their nature were often smelly or noisy or both. It must have been partly a genuine objection to noise and smell which drove the middle classes to seek the new dormitory area further out, but it was also a matter of hardening lines of class demarcation. Unlike their immediate ancestors, ‘gentlemen' in the nineteenth century did not live over the workshop, did not soil their hands, did not even contaminate their vision by
seeing
the means of production to which they owed their comfortable position in life. The late eighteenth-century ‘master's house' standing right next to its factory in stern pride, as the Wedgwood mansion did at Etruria, had given way to a carefully segregated existence. The mediaeval cottager who hung around at the back door of Bruges's mansion hoping for the leftovers from the feast may have lived a very different life from that of his social superiors, but they inhabited the same landscape. ‘Hovels' stood quite near to fine houses, farmyard smells might bother both impartially, often the same well supplied everyone. But the mid-nineteenth-century inhabitant of one of the new suburbs, with his paved roads, his piped water, and water closet linked – after about 1850 – to one of the new main drains, might have been living in a different country from the inhabitant of one of the slum-pockets nearby. Agar Town, with its open street drains, fringing the banks of a canal by then scummy and smelly with industrial effluent, became notorious for its knackers yards, bone boiling, manure making, soap manufacturing, refuse collecting – all the trades which expanding London needed but would rather not recognise. Attempts by people like Dickens and Hollinshead to describe such districts to their genteel public were partly, no doubt, a sign of awakening conscience but they were also a sign of the apartheid that had grown up during the century between rich and poor, to the extent that the former
needed
to have the lives of the latter indicated to them – the ‘glimpses into another world' situation.