The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London Read Online Free PDF Page B

a number of display advertising vehicles (see pp. 246–7), a bus, hackney coaches, donkey carts, and a cat’s-meat man (who sold horsemeat for household pets from a handcart), whose dogs got caught up in the chaos. All was in an uproar until a policeman came along, who ‘very quietly took the pony by the head, and drew pony, gig, and gentleman high and dry upon the side-walk. He then caused our omnibus to advance to the left, and made room for a clamorous drayman to pass’, who did so with a glare at the bus and a shake of his whip. Dickens was dubious about such actions, maintaining that policemen rarely did anything except add to the confusion, ‘rush[ing] about, and seiz[ing] hold of horses’ bridles, and back[ing] them into shop-windows’.
    Worse than these situations were the locks caused by accidents, usually a fallen horse. Max Schlesinger watched the combined efforts of two policemen, ‘a posse of idle cabmen and sporting amateurs, and a couple of raggedurchins’ needed to get one horse back on its feet. Frequently the fallen horse was beyond help, and licensed slaughterhouses kept carts ready to dash out, deliver the coup de grâce and remove the animal’s body. People, too, were often badly injured, or killed, in these locks and on the streets more generally: between three and four deaths a week was average. More commonly, though, Schlesinger observed, ‘Some madcap of a boy attempts the perilous passage from one side of the street to the other; he jumps over carts, creeps under the bellies of horses, and, in spite of the manifold dangers...gains the opposite pavements.’ It took a foreigner to notice this, for hundreds of boys earned their livings by spending hours every day actually in the streets: the crossing-sweepers.
    One of Dickens’ most compelling characters is Jo, the crossing-sweeper in Bleak House , who lives in a fictional slum called Tom-all-Alone’s, which has been variously sited. An accompanying illustration shows the Wren church of St Andrew’s, Holborn (destroyed in 1941 in the Blitz); but there are suggestions in the novel itself that it might be located in the slum behind Drury Lane, or even in St Giles. These seem to be more likely, as Jo eats his breakfast on the steps of the nearby Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts 26 before taking up his post at his crossing ‘among the mud and wheels, the horses, whips, and umbrellas’.
    Jo and his kind were necessary. In the rain even a major artery ‘resembled a by-street in Venice, with a canal of mud...flowing through it. And as often as [the crossing-sweeper] swept a passage, the bulwarks of mud rolled slowly over it again until they met.’ The crossing-sweepers were performing an essential service, confining the mud to the sides of the roads, clearing away the dung, the refuse and the licky mac, making a central route for people to cross. All day, every day, this was the task of the old, the infirm and the young, all coatless, hatless and barefoot. Most busy corners had a regular sweeper, who held his position as of right; he was known by sight and even by name to many who passed daily, as the mysterious Nemo in Bleak House knows Jo. Residents relied on their sweeper to run errands and do small chores, and in turn gave him cast-off clothes or food. 27 There were also morning-sweepers who stood at the dirtiest sections of the main roads, sometimes half a dozen or more over a mile, to sweep for the benefit of the rows of clerks walking into work, enabling them to arrive at their offices with clean boots and trousers. By ten o’clock the morning-sweepers had dispersed, going to other jobs. Sweepers were often approved by the police, either outright – sometimes sweepers checked at the local stations before they took up a pitch – or if the local beat-constable saw a sweeper was honest and helpful, he made sure that he kept his pitch, seeing off rivals for a good corner. Some large companies paid a boy or