In London and the environs everything was dull and common-place, with the exception of Regent Street, where it was tacitly assumed the force of grandeur could no further go. There was no Thames Embankment, and only a collection of wharves and coal agencies, and tumble-down sheds, at all times—especially when the tide was out—hideous to contemplate. The old Houses of Parliament had been burnt down, and no costly palace had been erected on their site. The Law Courts in Westminster Hall were crowded and inconvenient. Where now Queen Victoria Street rears its stately head were narrow streets and mean buildings. Eating-houses were close and stuffy, and so were the inns, which now we call by the more dignified name of hotels.
As to the poor sixty years ago, society was indifferent alike as to the state of their souls or bodies. In Ratcliff Highway the sailor was robbed right and left. The common lodging-house was a den of thieves. The poor shirt-maker and needlewoman lived on starvation wages. Sanitary arrangements were unknown. There was no decency of any kind; the streets, or rather lanes, where the children played, with their open sewers, were nurseries of disease. Even in Bethnal Green, the Sanitary Commission found that while the mean age of death among the well-to-do residents was forty-four, that of the working-classes was twenty-two; and yet Bethnal Green with its open spaces was a garden of Eden compared with the lodging-houses in some of the streets off Drury Lane. Perhaps the most unfortunate classes in the London of that time were the poor chimney-sweeps—little children from four to eight years of age, the majority of them orphans, the rest bartered or sold by brutal parents. In order to do their work they had to move up and down by pressing every joint in their bodies against the hard and often broken surface of the chimneys; and to prevent their hands and knees from streaming with blood, the children were rubbed with brine before a fire to harden their flesh. They were liable to a frightful disorder—the chimneysweeper’s cancer, involving one of the most terrible forms of physical suffering. They began the day’s work at four, three, and even two in the morning; they were half suffocated by the hot sulphurous air in the flues; often they would stick in the chimneys and faint; and then if the usual remedy—straw lighted to bring them round—failed, they were often half killed, and sometimes killed outright, by the very means used to extricate them. They lived in low, ill-drained, ill-ventilated, and noxious rooms and cellars, and often slept upon the soot heaps. They remained unwashed for weeks, and on Sundays they were generally shut up together so that their neighbours might not see their miserable condition. Perhaps the worst part of London when I knew it was Field Lane, at the bottom of Holborn Hill, now happily improved off the face of the earth. It was known as “Jack Ketch’s Warren,” from the fact that the greater part of the persons hanged at Newgate came from the lanes and alleys in the vicinity. The disturbances that occurred in these low quarters were often so great that from forty to fifty constables armed with cutlasses were marched down, it being often impossible for officers to act in fewer numbers or disarmed. Some of the houses close beside the Fleet Ditch were fitted with dark closets, trapdoors, sliding panels, and other means of escape, while extensive basements served for the purpose of concealing goods; and in others there were furnaces used by coiners and stills for the production of excisable spirits. It was here that in 1843 the Ragged School movement in London commenced its wonderful and praiseworthy career.