“What’s it all about, then?” Teddy Burke asked.
“Personal matter,” the man replied, and slipped away into the crowd.
Chapter 08
The Holy Land
Between 1801 and 1851, London tripled in size. With a population of two and a half million, it was by far the largest city in the world, and every foreign observer was astonished at its dimensions. Nathaniel Hawthorne was speechless; Henry James was fascinated and appalled at its “horrible numerosity”; Dostoevsky found it “as vast as an ocean… a Biblical sight, some prophecy out of the Apocalypse being fulfilled before your very eyes.”
And yet London continued to grow. At the mid-century, four thousand new dwellings were under construction at any one time, and the city was literally exploding outward. Already, the now familiar pattern of expansion was termed “the flight to the suburbs.” Outlying areas that at the turn of the century had been villages and hamlets— Marylebone, Islington, Camden, St. John’s Wood, and Bethnal Green— were thoroughly built up, and the newly affluent middle classes were deserting the central city for these areas, where the air was better, the noise less bothersome, and the atmosphere in general more pleasant and “countrified.”
Of course, some older sections of London retained a character of great elegance and wealth, but these were often cheek to jowl with the most dismal and shocking slums. The proximity of great riches and profound squalor also impressed foreign observers, particularly since the slums, or rookeries, were refuges and breeding places for “the criminal class.” There were sections of London where a thief might rob a mansion and literally cross a street to disappear into a tangled maze of alleyways and dilapidated buildings crammed with humanity and so dangerous that even an armed policeman did not dare pursue the culprit.
The genesis of slums was poorly understood at the time; indeed, the very term “slums” did not become widely accepted until 1890. But in a vague way the now familiar pattern was recognized: a region of the city would be cut off from circulation by newly constructed thoroughfares that bypassed it; businesses would depart; disagreeable industries would move in, creating local noise and air pollution and further reducing the attractiveness of the area; ultimately, no one with the means to live elsewhere would choose to reside in such a place, and the region would become decrepit, badly maintained, and overpopulated by the lowest classes.
Then, as now, these slums existed in part because they were profitable for landlords. A lodging house of eight rooms might take on a hundred boarders, each paying a shilling or two a week to live in “hugger-mugger promiscuity,” sleeping with as many as twenty members of the same or opposite sex in the same room. (Perhaps the most bizarre example of lodgings of the period was the famous waterfront sailors’ “penny hangs.” Here a drunken seaman slept the night for a penny, draping himself across chest-high ropes, and hanging like clothes on a line.)
While some proprietors of lodging houses, or netherskens, lived in the area— and often accepted stolen goods in lieu of rent— many owners were substantial citizens, landlords in absentia who employed a tough deputy to collect the rents and keep some semblance of order.
During this period there were several notorious rookeries, at Seven Dials, Rosemary Lane, Jacob’s Island, and Ratcliffe Highway, but none was more famous than the six acres in central London that comprised the rookery of St. Giles, called “the Holy Land.” Located near the theatre district of Leicester Square, the prostitute center of the Haymarket, and the fashionable shops of Regent Street, the St. Giles rookery was strategically located for any criminal who wanted to “go to ground.”
Contemporary accounts describe the Holy Land as “a dense mass of houses so old they only seem not to fall, through which narrow and tortuous lanes curve and wind. There is no privacy here, and whoever ventures in this region finds the streets— by courtesy so called— thronged with loiterers, and sees, through half-glazed windows, rooms crowded to suffocation.” There are references to “the stagnant gutters… the filth choking up dark passages… the walls of bleached soot, and doors falling from their hinges… and children swarming everywhere, relieving themselves as they please.”