A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain: Chapter 2

Though her realm saw a vast increase in wealth during the course of her reign, with the already-comfortable becoming better off and social mobility greater than it had ever been – the middle class quintupled in size – this still left many millions who were impoverished, barely able to earn a living or destitute.

When large building projects, such as the creation of Victoria Street in Westminster or Holborn Viaduct, were undertaken, scores of homes were demolished – without any attempt at rehousing their occupants – and thousands left to crowd into tenements elsewhere.

There was a genuine desire, in an age that saw itself as enlightened and progressive, to better the lot of the destitute.

Though these may strike modern observers as having a barrack-like austerity, they were a very considerable step forward in urban planning, and the original buildings – estates can be seen near Covent Garden and Westminster Abbey, among other places – are still doing duty today.

It was possible – and commonplace – to sit out a severe winter in the workhouse, and this was done by men such as builders’ labourers whose outdoor work was seasonal.

As regards their past history, the inmates are as promiscuous an assemblage as it were possible to get together.

The conscience of the Victorian middle and upper classes was often pricked by Punch and other periodicals that published drawings of exhausted milliners collapsed over their sewing as they worked through the night.

However deplorable this may be from a moral point of view, it is worth remembering that such an activity gave them a certain independence.

They are rough, boisterous, outspoken, warm-hearted, honest working girls.

Middle-class books and periodicals – Punch is, as ever, an invaluable reflection of this – lament their propensity to pilfer, to break ornaments, to dawdle on errands...

Contemporaries were horrified by the observation of the commentator Charles Booth that a third of the British population lived in want, and in 1890 the seminal study In Darkest England by his near-namesake William Booth coined the phrase ‘the Submerged Tenth’ to describe the estimated 3 million people who were ‘living in such conditions of misery and destitution, vice and crime, as put them outside the limits of civilised society’.

Because many of them had no prospects of useful employment, numbers of them were trained as shoe-blacks and deployed in the streets as a smartly uniformed, distinctive body.

Though this probably occurred less frequently than the newspapers implied, it still represented a notably vicious outbreak of premeditated crime, and for a time brought fear to the comfortably off.

The Victorians were as afraid of crime as any people before or since. One reason for their preoccupation was – as we have found in our own age – that better communications mean more incidents are reported.

Serious crime was no better or worse than was to be expected among a crowded and expanding population that experienced both frequent recessions and the temptations of flaunted wealth.