London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City by Drew D. Gray

Author:Drew D. Gray
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Published: 2011-05-06T16:02:00+00:00

The Whitechapel Casual Ward, for the temporary homeless, was situated in Thomas Street and in January 1888 it had beds for 44 men and 25 women who were fed on a very basic diet of bread, gruel and cheese for which they were expected to work at picking oakum, carrying coal and cleaning around the wards. Inmates could enter between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. depending on the season and were discharged at 6.30 a.m. if they were able. The fear of the `house' that was shared by many of the working class throughout the nineteenth century is sometimes hard to imagine from the perspective of those used to a state-funded benefit system. We need to remind ourselves that those who took refuge in the workhouse were not merely accepting poor food and hard labour. They were surrendering their freedom and sense of self: once inside the workhouse they wore workhouse clothes, obeyed workhouse rules and lost their rights to vote if they had them. Families entering the workhouse were separated: fathers on one side, mothers on another, children taken away, educated, fostered or apprenticed out if parents remained for any length of time. It is hard, even given the harshness of the mid-Victorian penal system, to imagine a worse fate than turning to a London parish for help in the late nineteenth century. Which in part explains the encampment at the foot of Nelson's Column.

THE `WEST END RIOTS' AND THE ROLE OF THE POLICE

The summer of 1887 was notably warm and rough sleeping must have seemed much more attractive than the confines of the workhouse. However, the gathering of so much human flotsam and jetsam in the very heart of the Empire was distressing for its wealthier inhabitants and problematic for the policing authorities, because of previous troubles in the square. In February of 1886 a rally called by the Fair Trade League, a protectionist organization that urged its supporters to resist the attempts of `the foreigner to rob you', provoked a counter demonstration by the recently formed Social Democratic Foundation (SDF).74 Led by the well-heeled anti-Semite Henry Mathers Hyndman, the SDF espoused a variation of Marx's revolutionary socialism and gained support from several notable radicals of the age (including William Morris, the future Labour MP William Lansbury and Marx's daughter, Eleanor).

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