Inspiring Older Readers
The Victorian City: Everyday Life In Dickens’ London by Judith Flanders
There seems to have been quite a lot written in recent years about London as a city and Victorian London in particular. Judith Flanders’ The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens’ London stands out for me because it’s a big (400+ pages), rumbustious, noisy and vivid account that can be read best in slices. This is social history at the street level and all the better for its lack of focus on the gentry and aristocracy which always seems to end up dominating books like this.
Using the works of Dickens as her inspiration and guide also gives the book an interesting anchor – she can always plunder the Dickens oeuvre to provide her with some graphic portraits – and that author’s feel for the life of the common people pervades the pages.
The Dickens connection means that she takes a few liberties with dates – Dickens was working before the ‘Victorian’ age really came to fruition and was dead thirty years before it ended but I was happy to allow her some licence in this. The truth is that it’s a book about London as a living, growing organism in its own right and quibbling over a few years hardly makes any real difference.
Early on in the book, one of the most startling things to try and get your head around is just how big London became and just how quickly that happened. As she points out, London in 1800 was:
‘double the size of Paris with one million inhabitants, living in 136,000 houses’.
But, by the end of the century it had doubled again in size. It’s hardly surprising therefore that the experience of being in a city that size was overwhelming in every way. And I think this is what Flanders captures so well – the sheer noise, smells and sights of what amounted to organised chaos.
There is a temptation to think that Dickens exaggerated the portraits he drew of London and its inhabitants but I think this work by Flanders really lays that suspicion to rest. He really didn’t need to overstate anything when what was there to be described was more than colourful enough.
The book is an almost endless source of astonishing anecdotes – especially if you have a scatological turn of mind. Cramming so many people into a limited geographical location and not having conquered the problems of transport, sewage, crime or housing is a recipe for the ghastly. For example, she tells the story of how the Fleet Ditch, which was also called the Black River of North London because it was little more than a sewer, burst its banks and flooded the underground tunnel alongside. The massive brick structure gave way and the foul water rushed across two and half miles of London uprooting in its wake scores of corpses stored in a mausoleum. It took ten days for the water to be stemmed and the bodies recovered.
I’ve already suggested that this book can be read in slices because Flanders helpfully divides the content into four parts – The City Wakes, Staying Alive, Enjoying Life, Sleeping and Awake – and this makes it easy to select those aspects of London life that most interest you. It’s not a book, I think, to read from cover to cover unless you are a really dedicated student of history.
You will enjoy dipping into this though; I can guarantee that and you’ll come out of it not only with a new perspective on Victorian London but a new set of opinions about Charles Dickens too.
Terry Potter
March 2018