A large format, 284-page coffee-table book most notable for its many contemporary illustrations (all in black and white).
This is not an academic book – it is a popular social history or review of the cultural life of London over the period between Oscar Wilde’s first arrival in London – having graduated from Oxford, in 1879 – to May 1897 when he was released from Pentonville prison and took the night train to Dieppe, never to return. Twenty years, quite a long time, a generation.
The introduction is a collection of clichés and stereotypes about the period, telling us the end of the nineteenth century was a time of immense social, economic, technological and cultural change etc – not only more people but more technological inventions (photography, electric lighting, telegraph, telephone, early motor car), more newspapers, journals and magazines, publishing more facts and figures and stories and photographs and illustrations than ever before, intellectual ferment Darwin, Arts and Crafts, the peak of Empire, Victoria’s jubilees etc etc – the kind of thing you read in absolutely every introduction to the period and quickly becomes over-familiar.
But when you get into the chapters on specific topics these get quite interesting on a whole range of topics, from the electrification of the first streets, public buildings and theatres to details about football, rugby and cricket, the rise of bicycling, various forms of religion and so on, all accompanied by jolly contemporary illustrations. A notable feature is extended quotes from interesting sources such as Wilde’s trial, police reports, WT Stead’s articles, T.S. Eliot’s obituary of Marie Lloyd and so on. These are interesting tasters, incentivising the reader to go searching for fuller texts online…
By way of a ‘review’ I thought it would be fun to give a brief summary and one image from each chapter.
1. Art and Life
Rapid expansion. The Underground. More train lines led to huge expansion of new suburbs.
From Pentonville Road looking west evening, 1884 by John O’Connor © Museum of London
Aestheticism already existed (Rossetti, Swinburne) but Wilde set out to make himself its apostle, peacock feathers and sunflowers. Mocked in Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta Patience. Wilde’s lecture tour of America accompanying a tour of the opera.
Wilde lived with the painter Frank Miles who moved to an Aesthetic house at 1 Tite Street, where Wilde was later to move, in 1884 after he married Constance Lloyd (neighbours to James Whistler and John Singer Sergeant). They had the place redesigned by Edward Godwin. The interior decoration described by his son Vyvyan. The salon his wife, Constance, established.
Three or four page discussion of the overlap between Aestheticism and the Arts and Crafts movement, with its serious commitment to improving the surroundings and lives of the population with beautiful architecture, furnishings etc. Ruskin and Morris’s serious political commitment, and Wilde’s take on it in his essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism.
2. Lilies and Sunflowers
The Arts and Crafts Movement, William Morris, Burne-Jones. The Kelmscott Press. The vegetal style i.e. the sinuous line based on lilies which spread across Europe in Art Nouveau, the Jugendstil etc (p.41). The fashion for Japanisme.
Ruskin thought ornament was the basis of architecture. Morris thought ornament was the basis of civilised society (p.32). This explains why Arts and Crafts interiors, wallpaper and furniture were so heavy, cluttered and dark.
Acanthus wallpaper by William Morris
Libertys. The Kelmscott Press. Ruskin and Morris were populist, Whistler and Wilde were elitists. The Ruskin versus Whistler libel trial. The fashion for Japanoiserie. The rise and rise of home decoration and furnishing in lots of new magazines. Wilde’s American lecture which explains the two types of beauty epitomised y the sunflower and the lily (p.41).
The PRB artists: Burne-Jones, Millais, Waterhouse. Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations for the Yellow Book and Wilde’s play, Salome. Beardsley’s self presentation was every bit as calculating and immaculate as Wilde’s but in a different mode.
Aubrey Beardsley photographed by Frederick Hollyer (Victoria and Albert Museum)
3. The Call of the Stage
In October 1881 Richard D’Oyly Carte opened the New Savoy Theatre on the Strand, the first building in London to be lit by electricity, specifically 1,200 electric arc lamps and 715 stage lamps. D’Oyly Carte had already produced:
- Trial by Jury (1875)
- The Sorcerer (1877)
- HMS Pinafore (1878)
- The Pirates of Penzance (1879)
- Patience or Bunthorne’s Bride (1881)
- Iolanthe (1882)
- Princess Ida (1884)
- The Mikado (1885)
- Ruddigore; or, The Witch’s Curse (1887)
- The Yeomen of the Guard (1888)
- The Gondoliers (1889)
- Utopia, Limited (1893)
- The Grand Duke (1896)
Leading actors of the later 1870s and 1880s Henry Irving and Ellen Terry who appeared together in an 1885 Hamlet.
Ellen Terry
Playwrights before Wilde, namely Arthur Wing Pinero, author of ‘The Second Mrs Tanqueray’ (1892) the latest of umpteen ‘Woman with a Past’ stories (the premise used by Wilde in, for example, ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’).
Mrs Patrick Campbell
Mrs Patrick Campbell is from the next generation of actresses, starting her career in ‘The Second Mrs Tanqueray’. She kept up a spirited correspondence with the young new playwright George Bernard Shaw, whose first production was ‘Widowers Houses’ (1892). Notes on Wilde’s run of four social comedies:
- Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892)
- A Woman of No Importance (1893)
- An Ideal Husband
- The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
The influence of Henrik Ibsen, his various translators and adapters. Popular theatre, Sadlers Wells, pantomime and penny gaffs.
4. Readers and Writers
The proliferation of outlets for the reading public; bookshops, kiosks, railway shops; newspapers, magazines from The Labour Prophet to The Yellow Book. The yellow press (‘newspapers that use eye-catching headlines and sensationalized exaggerations’). Proliferation of literary magazines (p.83) but also pulp, penny dreadfuls, shilling shockers.
Magazine seller at Ludgate Circus
Tennyson (d.1892)’s anxiety about progress and materialism. Robert Browning (d.1889)’s dramatic monologues, mostly from history. New kid on the block Rudyard Kipling’s poems and stories. Inevitably the authors quote from his poem The White Man’s Burden, about empire, everyone always does.
Meanwhile…Socialism! The Socialist League of Hammersmith. The Fabians, Beatrice and Sidney Webb. 1886 riots in the West End.
New science inspired Robert Louis Stephenson (d. 1894) but also, with huge impact, H.G. Wells. Both of them and many other authors were associated with the new mystique of cities – fogs, mysteries, doppelgangers. The well-known story about American publisher J. M. Stoddart inviting Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle for dinner and commissioning the second Sherlock Holmes novel and The Picture of Dorian Gray which triggers quotes from reviews of Dorian, particularly the famous one by Charles Whibley which accused it of immorality (p.94).
One literary feature of the fin-de-siecle was the Rhymers Club meeting at the Cheshire Cheese pub in the Strand, including Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Francis Thompson, Richard Le Gallienne, Arthur Symons with Wilde attending meetings that were held in private homes.
Wilde’s death in 1900 coincided with the date W.B. Yeats thinks the whole fin-de-siecle thing evaporated. As he wrote in the introduction to his (quirky) Oxford Book of Modern Verse.
Then in 1900 everybody got down off his stilts; henceforth nobody drank absinthe with his black coffee; nobody went mad; nobody committed suicide; nobody joined the Catholic church; or if they did I have forgotten.
5. London’s Growth
‘It was a turbulent time.’ New buildings and boulevards. Electric lighting spread quickly. Creation of the Embankment and ongoing extension of the Underground. Regent Street. Trafalgar Square. Horses and carts and hansom cabs. Traffic jams on the Strand.
Regent Street Quadrant at Night by Francis Forster (Museum of London)
The pong of horse poo. Drinking troughs. Crossing sweepers. Thick fogs.
Horse bus outside the Shard Arms on Peckham Park Road, circa 1895
Accents of different parts of London which is the basis for Shaw’s play ‘Pygmalion’. Crooked property developers and ramshackle tenements. The fourth Earl of Bedford’s Covent Garden development of the 1630s became a model or sorts. The financial motivation for all those tall narrow Georgian houses facing squares (p.113).
The army of domestic servants. In Wilde’s day London houses as many as a million and a quarter domestic servants. Many, maybe most female servants were subjected to sexual harassment. If they were caught or got pregnant they were fired without a reference. This forced most into a life of prostitution, hence the vast numbers in London.
The Season began as a method of getting marriageable young daughters up from their country estates to find husbands at a packed series of parties and public events. By Wilde’s time it was also a market for industrialists and financiers and men with money to acquire a pedigree by marrying into aristocratic families. By Wilde’s time there was a growing influx of American heiresses looking for posh husbands, a type he mocks in essays and in the character of Hester Worsley in ‘A Woman of No Importance’ (1893).
The vast army of dressmakers and seamstresses who supported these well-dressed women during the Season, as many as 20,000. Middle class consumption, more shops, more manufactured goods. The new big department stores: Harrods, Whiteleys. Huge new restaurants and grill rooms.
6. …and London’s Shame
The poverty of the East End and other slum quarters. Workers slaved long hours in the ‘stink industries’ like soap, rubber, tar, glue, fertiliser made from blood and matches. Sweatshops which were, in fact, freezing cold in winter.
Fore Street, Lambeth
Dr Barnardo’s Home for Working and Destitute Lads. Wilde was notoriously dismissive of charity which he thought applied sticking plasters to a system which needed to be completely overthrown. At least that’s what he said in the Soul of Man Under Socialism.
Vast armies of prostitutes, dolly mops (promiscuous servant girls) including the boy renters Wilde frequented. Conscription to the army during the Boer War (1899 to 1902) not only revealed the wretched physical state of working class men but that a large percentage had sexually transmitted infections (20% of the army, more in the Navy).
The armies of the poor were continually replenished by immigrants, notably Jews from East Europe who suffered periodic antisemitic riots when times were hard, but also Chinese and lascars. Nine pages about the Jack the Ripper murders 1888 to 1891 i.e. as Wilde wrote his best essays and Dorian Gray (pages 130 to 139).
New architecture. The later Victorians rebelled against the straitlaced classicism of Georgian architecture and exploded in a plethora of wild styles, including all manner of Gothic covered with decoration and ornament e.g. St Pancras station by Gilbert George Scott. Plus the Law Courts, Piccadilly Circus,
The suburbs were built partly for political goals. Lord Shaftsbury said ‘If the working man has his own house. I have no fear of revolution’. And hence an 1883 Cheap Trains Act forcing the railway companies to offer cheap fares for those commuting in and out of the centre. Developers packed suburban terraces so that architectural critics complained about their sameyness. Certainly the case in South London where I live and you can cycle through Streatham, Tooting and on down to Morden seeing the same type of 1900s terraced houses in street after street.
The Golden Age of the London Pub with plenty of gilt and mirrors. Somehow this segues into testimony from the Oscar Wilde trial from one of the many young men Wilde paid to have sex with.
7. The Lower Classes
The population grew from 3,215,000 in 1870 to 4,211,000 in 1890, from two sources: immigration from the countryside; immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe. the long recession 1873 to 1893 led to unemployment as did cheaper better imports coming from America then Germany.
‘The Bitter Cry Of Outcast London: An Inquiry Into The Condition Of The Abject Poor’ by Andrew Mearns (1883). ‘In Darkest England and the Way Out’ by William Booth (1890). The Salvation Army.
Victorian street kids
Life expectancy in the country 51, in London 28. Armies of rough sleepers. Long quote of Beatrice Webb’s eye witness account of a steamer arriving carrying refugee Jews from the East. The great hero Dr Barnardo. Phos girls who lacked jaws or fingers, eaten away by phosphorus as they made matches.
The work of Henry Labouchère, MP, social reformer, best known for his campaign to stamp out ‘vice’ which led to the Labouchère Amendment (Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885) which for the first time criminalised ‘gross indecency’ meaning any type of male homosexual activity in Britain and was the law Wilde was convicted under.
1888 article in the Fortnightly Review detailing the unfair conditions domestic servants labour under.
8. Religion, Spirits and Hosanna
Religious belief declined steadily through the second half of the nineteenth century. Some posh people defected to the Roman Catholic church (as Wilde did on his deathbed). But allegiance to the Church of England slowly steadily declined. Wilde has several comic churchmen, notably the Reverend Canon Chasuble in The Importance of Being Earnest.
My sermon on the meaning of the manna in the wilderness can be adapted to almost any occasion, joyful, or, as in the present case, distressing. [All sigh.] I have preached it at harvest celebrations, christenings, confirmations, on days of humiliation and festal days. The last time I delivered it was in the Cathedral, as a charity sermon on behalf of the Society for the Prevention of Discontent among the Upper Orders. The Bishop, who was present, was much struck by some of the analogies I drew.
The central importance of Darwinism (On The Origin of Species 1859, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1871). In fact Darwinism was mostly known through various popularisations of it the most damaging of which was Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism which preached that the weak in society deserve to go under.
Upper and middle class dimwits were taken in by Theosophy, spiritualism and so on (as Wilde’s wife, Constance, was). Occultism, mesmerism, seances, clairvoyancy.
Charles Bradlaugh’s defiant refusal, as an atheist, to take the oath of allegiance when he was elected MP. Controversy around Sabbatarianism i.e. whether shops or anything could open on a Sunday. Bradlaugh helped organise the National Sunday League.
9. The Sounds of London
Music high and low. Gilbert and Sullivan. Religious music by Villiers Stanford and Herbert Parry. The astonishing popularity of the oratorio as a form, ‘the dull centre’ of Victorian music. The widespread popularity of choral societies around the country. George Bernard Shaw’s very funny mockery of all this English earnestness. Henry Wood’s Promenade Concerts began in 1895, the year of Wilde’s conviction.
Serious music had to be imported from abroad, Italy, France and especially Germany. The cult of Wagner among aesthetes and students.
Truer to English culture was the music hall, first one opened in 1852 by 1860 there were 250 in London. I’ve always admired Kipling for immediately grasping, on arriving in London, that music hall was the true voice of the capital and basing his Barrack Room Ballads (1890) on them. The authors give an extended quote from an 1891 article in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine describing the different kinds of music hall in London and their audiences and content (pages 186 to 192).
Stars of music hall such as Marie Lloyd and Harry Champion. The fashion for ‘coon’ songs sung by minstrel troupes.
Quote from T.S. Eliot’s obituary of Lloyd:
The working-man who went to the music-hall and saw Marie Lloyd and joined in the chorus was himself performing part of the work of acting; he was engaged in that collaboration of the audience with the artist which is necessary in all art and most obviously in dramatic art. He will now go to the cinema, where his mind is lulled by continuous senseless music and continuous action too rapid for the brain to act upon, and he will receive, without giving, in that same listless apathy with which the middle and upper classes regard any entertainment of the nature of art. He will also have lost some of his interest in life.
Which carries on with some prophetic words:
Perhaps this will be the only solution. In a most interesting essay in the recent volume of Essays on the Depopulation of Melanesia the great psychologist W.H.R. Rivers adduces evidence which has led him to believe that the natives of that unfortunate archipelago are dying out principally for the reason that the “Civilization” forced upon them has deprived them of all interest in life. They are dying from pure boredom. When every theatre has been replaced by 100 cinemas, When every musical instrument has been replaced by 100 gramophones, when every horse has been replaced by 100 cheap motor cars, when electrical ingenuity has made it possible for every child to hear its bed-time stories through a wireless receiver attached to both ears, when applied science has done everything possible with the materials on this earth to make life as interesting as possible, it will not be surprising if the population of the entire civilized world rapidly follows the fate of the Melanesians.
Others lamented the crudity and vulgarity of the music hall and preferred the imagined purity of folk song, such as Herbert Parry at the inauguration of the Folk Song Society in 1898.
10. Virtues of Sport
The English upper and middle classes worshipped sport. The public schools put more onus on sporting prowess than intelligence as the history of the British Army indicates. Football. Cricket. The MCC founded 1787. The Football Association founded 1863. Rugby left The Football Association in 1863 and, in 1895, split between rugby union and rugby league. The first lawn tennis championship was held at Wimbledon in 1881.
The authors do not hesitate to quote Vitaï Lampada by Sir Henry Newbolt as absolutely everybody writing a book like this has to. It was written in 1892, the year Wilde’s first play was produced.
Bicycling became a craze in the 1890s. In a sense it was a middle class equivalent of the aristocratic habit of riding horses. The bicycle had an impact on women’s liberation because women could, quite simply, travel further and associate with more people, friends and young men.
1890s cycling women
Cycling became involved in the movement for women to wear more rational i.e. practical and flexible clothing. Wilde wrote articles about more sensible clothing for women and his wife became very involved in the movement.
The modern Olympic games were established by Baron de Coubertin in 1896.
Mountain climbing: Judge Alfred Wallis who sentenced Wilde to two years hard labour was the author of one of the best mountaineering books of the nineteenth century, Wandering Among The High Alps.
Boxing was still illegal and notoriously corrupt. The Marquess of Queensberry’s rules had been drafted as long ago as the 1860s but were only really accepted in the 1890s.
Horse racing was the sport of kings, for owners, but had a large working class following among the gambling classes. In 1874 there were 130 race courses in Britain; a decade later there were half that number, all bigger and more professional.
Rise of the sporting press and specialist journals devoted to each sport and activity. And in the 1890s the first ever filming of sporting events took place…
11. Jumbo and Sundry Diversions
Freak shows, peep shows, theatrographs, dancing bears, Astley’s Theatre at the south end of Westminster Bridge. The story of Jumbo the popular trained elephant who was sold to the American showman P.T. Barnum in 1882 but refused to leave. The story of Jumbo gets nearly as much space as Jack the Ripper and maybe rightly so.
Pubs. Londoners liked drinking, many till they became fighting drunk. Hence the Temperance Movement with its pamphlets and sermons. These emphasised grisly stories of wife beating and child abuse caused by drunkenness.
Drug addition: cocaine and the opium dens of the East End docks. Detailed description of a visit to an opium den by George Augustus Sala.
At the opposite end of the social scale, the world of gentlemen’s clubs such as the Carlton, the reform, the Garrick, the Marlborough, the Guards, the Army and Navy, and the Albemarle which Wilde was a member of. Comic account of election to a club, again by Sala.
Dancing as described in The Diary of a Nobody in 1889. Magic and magicians. Street corner Houdinis.
Public trials. The Darwinian zoologist brought a prosecution against American medium Henry Slade (1876). Whistler sued Ruskin for libel in 1877. Several adultery cases in which the Prince of Wales was scandalously compelled to appear. the 1889 prosecution of a male brothel keeper in Cleveland Street (p.259). The two trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895.
12. Juliets of a Night
Pornography and prostitution. This chapter opens with photographs of nude underage girls which, if I tried to search them online let alone included in this review, would, I think, get me arrested.
The cult of ‘the little girl’, most notoriously associated with Lewis Carroll.
The authors quote Arthur Symons, Rossetti and Wilde justifying sex with prostitutes. Visitors to London could buy guides listing locations for strip tease, prostitutes, rooms to rent, ‘introducing houses’, brothels and so on. It was a major industry.
The same territory covered in immense detail in Ronald Pearsall’s huge study ‘The Worm in the Bud’ (1969) which has lots about Victorian orgies, prostitution and fetishism. The authors give a lengthy quote explaining the situation by General Booth, founder of the Salvation Army. Excerpt from a police report of officers trying to round up prostitutes, especially children.
Commentators in politics and the Church warned that young women were corrupted by their reading hence the importance of jumping on all immoral reading matter such as the novels of Thomas Hardy or the Oscar Wilde. This was twaddle then as it is now: what propels women into prostitution is poverty, desperation and drugs, or violent coercion.
It was the famous series of articles in the Pall Mall Gazette of 1885 by William Thomas Stead titled ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ that led to the raising of the age of consent from 13 to 16 under The Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 (the same act which included the Labouchère Amendment). The authors give an extended quote.
Surprisingly the European centre of child prostitution was Brussels.
Many stolen, kidnapped or betrayed English girls of 12 to 15 years were sold to Brussels brothels. (p.248)
Sometimes history just doesn’t bear thinking about. Anyway – the London Society for the Protection of Young Females founded in 1853. Quotes from evidence given to an 1881 House of Lords enquiry on the subject. Beatrice Webb’s experience going undercover among the poor.
All this segues into descriptions of the two Wilde trials with full-page illustrations from the Illustrated Police News.
Oscar Wilde’s arrest and trial from Illustrated Police News (1895)
13.Epilogue
The three-page epilogue is in the form of a summary of the debate between Tennyson and the Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone. In 1886 Tennyson published a poem, Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, in which he claimed, in the manner of all depressed aristocrats, that the country had gone to the dogs.
Gladstone took exception to this and wrote an article for the magazine Nineteenth Century magazine in which he set out to refute every one of Tennyson’s charges, point by point, and asserting that in very measurable way – economic, social and moral, life expectancy, working hours, support for the unemployed and so on – society was vastly superior, improved and advanced to what it had been in their youths i.e. the 1830s. A choice of temperaments. An interesting conclusion to a fact-packed but popular and entertaining book.
Books & Boots 