The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London by Judith Flanders

Author:Judith Flanders [Flanders, Judith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Social History
ISBN: 9781250040213
Google: 47x4g7IqQlgC
Amazon: 1250040213
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
Published: 2012-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

A City chophouse, fitted out with standard booth-style seating, or ‘boxes’, as they were known. The waiter looks anxious to serve: he was not an employee, but instead he paid the chophouse for his place, earning his living from tips.

Each day 500 or 600 customers might pass through each of these chophouses. The waiters were not paid a salary by the owners; rather, they paid the owner for their places, besides usually providing glasses and table linen, which they had to keep clean. Their tips, a standard penny per customer per meal, regardless of its cost, had to cover their weekly payments to the owners, the laundry of the table linen, and still provide their own upkeep.101 According to Robert Seymour, the illustrator, successful waiters survived by making the customer feel special. If a customer ordered boiled beef, the waiter would say quietly, ‘The beef won’t do for you, Sir…it’s bin in cut a hour.’ Most of the customers were repeat visitors, eating in the same chophouse every day, and they got to know ‘their’ waiter or, in some chophouses, waitress (called a lady waiter). In Bleak House, young Smallweed, anxious to present himself as a man about town, makes sure to address the waitress by name. Calculating the price of the meal for himself and his two friends, he adds to the bill another 3d for Polly the waitress: ‘Four veals and hams is three, and four potatoes is three and four, and one summer cabbage is three and six, and three marrows is four and six, and six breads is five, and three Cheshires is five and three, and four half-pints of half-and-half is six and three, and four small rums is eight and three, and three Pollys is eight and six.’102 Chophouses that attracted less reputable customers may have demanded payment before the food was served, at least late at night: in 1842 a police court heard the case of two men who ordered soup at an eating house near St Andrews, Holborn, at 12.40 on a Sunday morning, and refused to pay when the waiter brought it to them. Respectable clerks on small budgets considered their menus carefully. Dickens describes the prototypical poor clerk in the 1830s at his ‘usual dining-place’: after enquiring ‘What was up last?’ – that is, what has been most recently cooked, so he doesn’t get meat that has been sitting and steaming for hours – ‘he orders a small plate of roast beef, with greens, and half-a-pint of porter. He has a small plate to-day, because greens are a penny more than potatoes, and he had “two breads” yesterday, with the additional enormity of “a cheese” the day before.’

Given that the waiter paid for laundering the table linen, it is unsurprising that the reputation for cleanliness in chophouses was poor. Yates said that all ‘quaint old City chop-houses’ had ‘sanded floors, hard seats, and mustard blotched tablecloths’. Dickens baptized them more memorably in Great Expectations as ‘geographical’ chophouses, with their ‘maps

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