Fallen Grace - Mary Hooper [92]
For many, living conditions were pitiful, overcrowding was rife and starvation was just around the corner. A room in a tenement building could cost two shillings a week and this might be occupied by two or more families; those that couldn’t get into a bed at night having to find space on the floor. There was no sanitation or running water, the rooms stank and the mattresses were usually running with bedbugs, fleas and lice. If someone in the family died (an all too frequent occurrence), their body might be left lying in the same room with the living for several days until enough money had been collected to bury them.
The authorities strongly disapproved of the overcrowded houses and rookeries (mean tenements where the very poorest lived cheek by jowl with each other, as rooks nest together in tall trees), so the decrepit boarding houses in the worst slums were gradually demolished and new roads and railway lines cut through. This did not help the situation as far as the lodgers were concerned, however, since those displaced had no choice but to move along to the next road and lodge there, thus causing new overcrowding.
Workhouses were universally feared and hated, but were an effort to solve the problem of extreme poverty in London. Hundreds of charities were set up during the Victorian era with such names as The Association for Befriending Young Servants, The Industrial School and Home for Working Boys, The Home for Deserted Destitute Children and The House of Charity for Distressed Persons. More than two million pounds was spent annually by these organisations in trying to relieve poverty, though sadly they were merely scratching the surface, and very little difference was made to the lives of the truly poor.
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Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens was the most popular novelist of the Victorian period and is still so popular that his works have never gone out of print. The theme of social reform runs through his work and the publication of many of his books in magazines in serial form meant that he could adapt the story as he went along to suit the whims of the public. His characters are extremely memorable, so much so that they often take on a life of their own outside the books.
It is known that Dickens held a dim view of undertakers and the funeral trade, and it was he who coined the term ‘Dealers in Death’. He was not a supporter, either, of Prince Albert, and Peter Ackroyd says Dickens was not at all pleased when Albert’s sudden death meant that he had to postpone the six readings he was to give in Liverpool and return to London.
Dickens’s popular novel Great Expectations, with the thwarted and spiteful bride, Miss Havisham, was first published in serial form in the magazine All The Year Round up until August 1861, so I have drawn its publication out a little longer to fit my own story.
Oliver Twist, arguably Dickens’s most famous novel, is partly a criticism of the new Poor Laws and also an exposé of the treatment of orphans in London. Dickens selected the steps on London Bridge to be the setting of the brutal murder of Nancy, the girl who befriends Oliver, by Bill Sykes, the most evil character in the book. The steps immediately became a tourist attraction, and even nowadays on a walking tour of Southwark one will be told about ‘Nancy’s Steps’.
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Bibliography
Ackroyd, Peter, Dickens
Mandarin Paperbacks, 1991
Arnold, Catherine, Necropolis: London and Its Dead
Pocket Books, 2006
Clarke, John M., The Brookwood Necropolis Railway
The Oakwood Press, 2006
Curl, James Stevens, The Victorian Celebration of Death
Sutton Publishing, 2000
Dickens, Jnr, Charles, Dickens’s Dictionary of London, 1888: An Unconventional Handbook
Old House Books, 1993
Mayhew, Henry, London Labour and the London Poor (1851)
Penguin, 1985 edition
Picard,