The equivalent of a dollar to a dollar-fifty a week in rent was sometimes a fifth of a worker’s salary, and when one of these Ebenezer Scrooge slumlords decided to raise the rent, sometimes a large family found itself homeless with nothing but a handbarrow to tote away all its worldly goods. A decade later Jack London went undercover in the East End to see for himself what it was like, and he related terrible stories of poverty and filth. He described an elderly woman found dead inside a room so infested with vermin that her clothing was “gray with insects.” She was skin and bones, covered with sores, her hair matted with “filth” and a “nest of vermin,” London wrote. In the East End, he reported, an attempt at cleanliness was a “howling farce,” and when rain fell it was “more like grease than water.”
This greasy rain fell in drips and drizzles in the East End most of Thursday, August 30th. Horse-drawn wagons and barrows splashed through the garbage-strewn muddy water of narrow, crowded streets, where flies droned in clouds and people scratched for the next penny. Most inhabitants of this wretched part of the Great Metropolis had never tasted real coffee, tea, or chocolate. Fruit or meat never touched their lips unless it was overripe or rotten. There was no such thing as a bookstore or a decent cafe. There were no hotels, at least not the sort that civilized people might visit. An Unfortunate could not get out of the weather and find a bit of food unless she could convince a man to take her in or give her small change so she could rent a bed for the night in a common lodging house called a doss-house.
“Doss” was slang for bed, and a typical doss-house was a hellish, decaying dwelling where men and women paid four or five pence to sleep in communal rooms filled with small iron bedsteads covered with gray blankets. Supposedly, linens were washed once a week. The casual poor, as the guests were called, sat around in crowded dormitories, smoking, mending, sometimes talking, joking if the lodger was still an optimist who believed life might get better, or telling a morose tale if the threadbare soul had been worn into a numb hopelessness. In the kitchen, men and women gathered to cook whatever they had been able to find or steal during the day. Drunks wandered in and held out palsied hands, grateful for a bone or scrap that might sail their way on the cruel winds of laughter as lodgers watched them grab and gnaw like animals. Children begged, and were beaten for getting too close to the fire.
Inside these inhuman establishments, one abided by strict, degrading rules posted on walls and enforced by the doorkeeper or warden. Misbehavior was rewarded by banishment to the mean streets, and early in the morning lodgers were herded out the door unless they paid in advance for another night. Doss-houses were usually owned by a better class of people who lived elsewhere and did not oversee their properties and may never even have seen them. For a little capital, one could own a piece of a poorhouse and have no idea – perhaps by choice – that his “Model Lodgings” investment was an abomination overseen by “keepers” who often used dishonest and abusive means to maintain control over the desperate residents.
Many of these doss-houses catered to the criminal element, including the Unfortunates who might, on a good night, have pennies for lodging. Perhaps the Unfortunate might persuade a client to take her to bed, which was certainly preferable to sex on the street when one was exhausted, drunk, and hungry. Another breed of lodger was the “gentleman slummer,” who, like thrill-seeking men of every era, would leave his respectable home and family to enter a forbidden world of low-life pub-hopping and music halls and cheap, anonymous sex. Some men from the better parts of the city became addicted to this secret entertainment, and Walter Sickert was one of them.
His best-known artistic leitmotif is an iron bedstead, and on it is a nude prostitute with a man aggressively leaning over her. Sometimes both the man and the nude woman are sitting, but the man is always clothed. It was Sickert’s habit to keep an iron bedstead in any studio he was using at the time, and on it he arranged many a model. Occasionally he posed himself on the bed with a wooden lay figure – mannikin – that supposedly had belonged to one of Sickert’s artistic idols, William Hogarth.