SOURCE: Schwarzbach, F. S. “‘Terra Incognita’—An Image of the City in English Literature, 1820-1855.” Prose Studies 5, no. 1 (May 1982): 62-84.

[In the following essay, Schwarzbach offers an overview of the depiction of London's poor in both nonfiction exposés and novelistic accounts.]

The first half of the nineteenth century saw the transformation of England from an agrarian to an industrial, and from a rural to an urban society. During these fifty years, London's numbers grew from just over a million to nearly three million; in the 1820s alone, half a dozen large English cities increased their population by fifty per cent. This rapid and unprecedented change involved massive social dislocation: since cities were so unhealthy that the increase in the indigenous population was minimal, their growth was mainly the result of the migration of millions of persons from country to town. But also there was dislocation in another sense as society tried to understand the institutions, relations and places of the new England. The city was the locus principus of these changes, the centre of economic activity and of social development and also where the future shape of England was being determined and made manifest. If one were to come to understand the forces remaking England, one first must understand the city.

This was no small enterprise. For, as we shall see, the new cities and London were becoming environments literally and conceptually alien to the articulate and governing classes. Paradoxically, the more it was recognized that knowledge about the city was necessary, the more that knowledge seemed impossible to obtain. Nevertheless, attempts were made, and the city transformed into an object of study. This essay will investigate the ways in which writers and social critics in the early Victorian period went about doing this, by focussing upon an image of the city that appears frequently in their writings—the city as unknown land, “terra incognita.” Indeed, this became the dominant image of the city, one which continued in common use well after the middle of the century, and even into the next. By investigating this image we can move towards a deeper understanding of the Victorian experience of urbanization and its role in the contemporary literary imagination.

The point at which I will begin, however, is at the close of the eighteenth century, just before the image gained common currency, with a consideration of a pertinent remark about London made by Dr Johnson. This will make it easier to gauge how great a change did occur in the way people thought about, looked at, and wrote of the city in the years immediately afterwards.

I

Towards the end of his life, on 12 April 1783, Dr Johnson held forth with Boswell and another friend about the great metropolis. Boswell later wrote this account of the conversation:

He talked today a good deal of the wonderful extent and variety of London, and observed, that men of curious enquiry might see in it such modes of life as very few could even imagine. He in particular recommended to us to explore Wapping, which we resolved to do.¹

[Boswell's italics]

This remark, simple enough as it seems, might stand as a perfect example of common eighteenth-century attitudes toward the city. For Johnson, as for most of his contemporaries, it is axiomatic that the most natural and proper object of man's study is man. It is equally obvious that in London—unsurpassable in its “wonderful extent and variety”—the most diverse human types are to be found. Clearly, then, students of human nature will resort to the great city as a matter of course. That London contains “such modes of life as very few could even imagine” is for Johnson and his two auditors a highly interesting and wholly satisfactory state of affairs. Wapping in particular, then a poor waterfront district inhabited chiefly by dock hands, casual labourers, sailors of all nationalities and petty criminals, would be well worth exploring.

Indeed, some years later, after Johnson died, Boswell and his friend made the recommended journey. This is Boswell's report of it:

We accordingly carried our scheme in execution, in October, 1792; but whether from that uniformity which has in modern times in a great degree spread throughout every part of the Metropolis, or want of sufficient exertion, we were disappointed.²

The city, Boswell notes, has become too monotonous, its various districts too much alike—it is possible, of course, that he had become too lazy to explore it properly. What is noteworthy is his disappointment at the lack of variety in London life in the modern age. For Boswell, it has not interest enough; it has grown dull.

How great a contrast is provided by the following account of another journey of exploration in London, made some sixty years later. The voyager was Charles John Chetwynd Talbot, Viscount Ingestre (later 19th Earl of Shrewsbury), who in his early twenties wrote an account of his “discovery” of such modes of life in London as very few could even imagine; but he did so in a very different spirit from that in which Johnson made his recommendation, and in which Boswell took it up. What Ingestre found were unimaginable modes of life—in fact, at first he could hardly even believe the evidence of his eyes:

I have seen so many different people, and their ways of living, in London, that I hardly know how to describe them to you, or where to begin. It was perfectly wonderful to me where the great mass of the people came from.

… Now for an attempt to describe to you what I have seen. … The first place I went into was in Church-lane, a place so filthy that the stench is perfectly overpowering in the street itself; how much more so you can imagine on entering a small room, with about twenty-five or thirty people in it, most of them naked, and strangers to one another … squalid, naked children, crying for food, and men reeling about drunk, and women in the same state of beastly intoxication. I literally saw, in many of these places, the vermin crawling about in myriads. … [I]ndeed, they were really more like beasts than human creatures.³

Ingestre went on, describing in a similar manner more of what he had seen, all involving physical squalor and moral degradation. But he suspected that his readers would accuse him of exaggeration, when, in fact, probably he had not done full justice to these awful scenes. He advised anyone who doubted him to perform the same journey and gain ocular proof of his veracity.

The result of this journey through the city was obviously not disappointment, but horror and shock, and also in this case a thorough change of heart. Ingestre's explorations turned him into a social activist, and, already, as he wrote these remarks he was President of the new Society for Improving the Dwellings of the Working Class. His experience in London, unlike Boswell's, was at least not disappointingly dull.

It is worth emphasizing the pointed contrast between the attitudes towards the city and city life evident in Dr Johnson's remarks and in Ingestre's. Where Johnson had seen in the variety and extent of London cause for wonder, Ingestre saw cause for consternation, even terror. The diverse modes of life which Johnson had seen as a school for the study of human nature, Ingestre saw as horrifying examples of human extremity. To explore the city, for Johnson, had been to set out on a pleasant and instructive journey, not unlike a humble domestic version of the Continental Grand Tour; for Ingestre, to journey into the mazes and labyrinths of London was to enter a dark, uncharted region of danger and depravity. Ingestre had encountered the terra incognita of the modern city.

London, to be sure, like any great city, always had been a place of great contrasts. But the contrasts once were visible and expected: now they were hidden and unknown. A working man wrote:

A casual observer, walking through the principal streets of London … beholding everywhere the appearance of wealth in exhaustless abundance, might be led to imagine that all things were prosperous here. But let him go into the back streets and courts, and ascend, and descend to the homes of the operative, who supply the shops with all those things which decorate their windows, and there he will find pictures as dark as the others are brilliant.⁴

It was as if everywhere in London the elegant and attractive surface one saw was but a thin, deceptive veneer that only barely hid the seething, malignant and perhaps uncontrollable growths beneath. In even the most attractive neighbourhoods such awful contrasts lurked just out of sight:

The most aristocratic parishes … have a background of wretchedness, and are too often so many screens for misery which would shock the mind and make men avert their gaze, could they indeed see them as they really are. … Regent Street attracts the eye! Westminster, at once the seat of a palace and a plague spot; senators declaim, where sewers poison; theology holds her councils, where thieves learn their trade; and Europe's grandest hall is flanked by England's foulest grave-yard.⁵

Comparisons like this for centuries had been fodder for the homilist's platitudes: the contrasts between wealth and poverty and virtue and vice illustrated man's moral strengths and weaknesses, and the cautious student might profit from their study. Now, however, they revealed to the sensitive urban investigator the utter dislocation of the social structure in towns and cities, and symbolized the wide, perhaps unbridgeable gulf that separated the world of light from the terra incognita.

II

“Terra incognita”—the phrase and others like it occurred constantly in urban description throughout the first five decades of the nineteenth century. Dr Johnson's casual metaphor of exploration is revived in this image, but as an activity analogous to the exploration of the world's darkest, most dangerous regions—Africa, South America, the South Seas, or even the cold Arctic wastes. The image was familiar enough from travel literature, which was extremely popular throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From the early seventeenth century, the phrase, or just the simple abbreviation t.i., had been a standard mapmaker's tag, a shorthand abbreviation for those vast, uncharted regions as yet unpenetrated by voyages of exploration.⁶

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the formation of the African Association (1788) and the increasingly insistent agitation against the slave trade focussed public attention more exclusively upon the exploration of the African interior: works like Mungo Park's Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (1799), which went through eight editions by 1850, were immensely popular and generated considerable excitement about the exploration of these lands. What characterized all of these works was, in the first instance, what Park called the “passionate desire to examine into the productions of a country so little known.” The goal of discovery, then, was not only to find the place itself, but to examine the culture of its inhabitants. Park continues, in language which recalls Dr Johnson on London, that he was driven “to become experimentally acquainted with the modes of life, and character of the natives.”⁷ And what Park and the others did discover were strange modes of life indeed: native societies with alien, barbaric customs, prone to violence, savagery and moral depravity. It was as if the dark, mysterious and dangerous geography somehow produced the darker moral qualities in the inhabitants; in the words of one of Park's companions, there was a “moral geography”: “that physical geography gives rise to habits, which often determine national character, must be allowed by every person, who is a diligent observer of mankind.”⁸ The passion for physical discovery, and that for moral investigation, became as one. As a writer in the Quarterly Review wrote of a new work of African exploration in 1825:

The importance of the information procured by our enterprizing travellers is not merely confined to geographical discovery, in which, however, a vast blank has been filled up, and a great jumble and dislocation of names on our maps rectified,—it is equally, perhaps more, important in the view which it gives us of the state of society and the moral condition of large masses of people, congregated in the central parts of Africa, and shut out, as it were, from the rest of the world, on one side by a frightful desert, and on the other by a range of lofty mountains, inhabited by uncivilized beings, of whom little or nothing is yet known.⁹

It was the imagery and language of geographical exploration, and the attendant atmosphere of mystery, wonder and fear, that writers about the city appropriated to suggest the mixture of feelings that the labyrinthine inner city districts inspired in those who penetrated them. And yet, paradoxically—though to be sure some writers were aware of the paradox—this was a journey not outwards to some distant foreign place, but inwards to explore the city that the adventurers and their readers inhabited and walked through, perhaps, every day of their lives. And, it is worth noting, the inward journey was, like the outward, moral as well as physical, involving the discovery not only of strange territories but also of their strange and frightening inhabitants.

One of the earliest uses of the phrase terra incognita for the city is in De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, published first in the London Magazine, in September and October, 1821, and it is worth devoting some attention to De Quincey's use of the image. The opening section of the Confessions, entitled “Preliminary Essay,” is devoted mainly to an account of De Quincey's experiences in London at the age of seventeen during the winter of 1802-3, after he had run away from school and home the previous summer. Almost penniless, De Quincey spent many weeks in a state of near starvation, and slept either in the streets or in a rundown house occupied intermittently by a disreputable attorney. His only regular companions were a young servant girl in the lawyer's house and a fifteen year old prostitute named Ann, with whom he fell deeply (and apparently chastely) in love—neither of whom he saw again after that winter. Shortly afterwards, De Quincey was reconciled to his family and went off to Oxford. But in 1804, during a college vacation, he returned to London and there first took laudanum as a cure for toothache, upon the recommendation of a friend accidentally encountered in Oxford Street.

Once he had begun using opium, De Quincey writes, his dependence on the drug in the next few years was closely bound to his earlier experiences in the city. Usually he took it in London on Tuesday and Saturday nights to augment his enjoyment when he attended the opera, but also because Saturday nights were payday and the Sabbath eve, the most festive time for London's poor. In a trance he would wander the scenes of his own privations, but now in contrast he would be happy through vicarious participation in the joy and activity of ordinary working folk. Or, if times were hard, he would share their deprivations, and then console himself with opium. Some of these rambles, he concludes, went on for

great distances: for an opium-eater is too happy to observe the motion of time. And sometimes in my attempts to steer homewards, upon nautical principles, by fixing my eye on the pole-star, and seeking amphibiously for a north-west passage, instead of circumnavigating all the capes and headlands I had doubled in my outward voyage, I came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys, such enigmatical entries, and such sphinx's riddles of streets without thoroughfares, as must, I conceive, baffle the audacity of porters, and confound the intellects of hackney-coachmen. I could almost have believed at times, that I must be the first discoverer of some of these terrae incognitae, and doubted, whether they had yet been laid down in the modern charts of London.

De Quincey's use of language often is extravagant, and he allows the metaphor of discovery and voyage to elaborate itself in what may appear to be a playful manner. But the end of the passage is more problematic:

For all this, however, I paid a heavy price in distant years, when the human face tyrannized over my dreams, and the perplexities of my steps in London came back and haunted my sleep with the feeling of perplexities moral or intellectual, that brought confusion to the reason, or anguish and remorse to the conscience.¹⁰

What De Quincey had discovered in these unknown regions was in some sense an analogue of the complex emotional and psychological processes involved in his use of opium. Both the inner city and opium are unknown areas of experience to his middle-class readers, as at first they were to him. Both are associated for him with experiences of intense pleasure, on the one hand sharing the simple joys of the working poor on a Saturday evening, and on the other the exquisite delights of an opium trance. Moreover, both involve intense pain, on the one hand the recollection of his early privations in London, and on the other the drug induced nightmares in which he wandered the labyrinthine byways and alleys of the city haunted by a “human face” (which he later revealed, in the 1856 revision of Confessions, was that of Ann, the child-woman of the London streets).¹¹

Most importantly for De Quincey, both unknown regions involved experiences of terrifying human extremity: externally, amid the hidden squalor and degradation of London's poor in the labyrinthine back streets of the city; and internally, in the equally horrifying maze-like recesses of the human mind. It was as if the city streets were a physical manifestation of the psychological perplexities of his opium nightmares. For De Quincey, his discoveries in the uncharted, hidden depths of the mind were linked indissolubly to the uncharted terra incognita of London.

II

De Quincey's writing about London anticipates in striking ways the images and themes which became standard in urban description in the 1830s and 1840s. We can begin to appreciate this by reading several passages which employ the image of London as terra incognita: the first is from “Four Views of London,” an essay describing a day's tour of strange city neighbourhoods, which appeared anonymously in The New Monthly Magazine in 1833; the second from a remarkable piece by Thackeray, “Half-a-Crown's worth of Cheap Knowledge,” a content analysis of a dozen popular periodicals, published in Fraser's Magazine in 1838; and the last from a summary review of Dickens' first three books, published in the Quarterly Review in 1839.

One-half of London, as I have said, is so much of a terra incognita to many who have lived all their days in the other half of it, that I felt curious to see these unfortunate beings in their own quarter, and took the first leisure day I had to wander amongst them. I had not been in that neighbourhood for thirty years, and was not surprised to find that everything seemed as new to me as if I had dropt into an alien city, and among men and things new and strange. It was the season of one of our holiday festivals, and afforded me an opportunity to trace them to their haunts for such poor amusements and enjoyments as they could find time to take and pence to purchase. Nothing could be more melancholy: the wretched tea-garden, (or rather a place so called, where, at two-pence a head, hot water and crockery are supplied to such parties as bring their own tea, sugar, &c.,) with its soot-black grass-plat and a swing for the children, the public-house and its covered skittle-ground, were the alpha and the omega of their amusements. … One day, though a holiday, was not sufficient to make them forget all their privations and poverty. See them, again, straggling from church or chapel on the Sunday; cleanly rags are their raiment, and squalor still saddens their faces, which even ‘the light from heaven’ cannot brighten into cheerfulness. Enter their homes, or content yourself with merely looking at them or into them: wretchedness is there, and is the hard landlord of their hearths. If there is one portion of this metropolis which more than another requires a thorough investigation into the comforts and wants of its working classes, it is Spitalfields.

We can judge … here of the people in the great towns—a tremendous society moving around us, near and unknown to us—a vast mass of active, stirring life, in which the upper and middling classes, form an insignificant speck, and of which we (taking for granted that WE here applies to both writer and reader) are quite ignorant and uninformed. An English gentleman knows as much about the people of Lapland or California as he does of the aborigines of the Seven Dials or the natives of Wapping: or if he ever does venture to explore these unknown districts (as some daring spirits have)—to examine the customs, the amusements, and the social conditions of the inhabitants—he does so for an hour or two at midnight; taking the precaution of drunkenness before he makes the attempts, and moving stealthily among those dangerous and savage men, effectually disguised—in liquor. All the curiosities that such a traveller bring back from the terra incognita are, probably, a coat from which the pockets have been ingeniously separated, or a black eye, the parting gift of a native.

[The] nature and language … of a vast number of her Majesty's lower orders … excite a curiosity in the higher, their antipodes. Life in London, as revealed in the pages of Boz, opens a new world to the thousands bred and born in the same city, whose palaces overshadow their cellars—for one half of mankind lives without knowing how the other half dies; in fact, the regions about Saffron Hill are less known to our great world than the Oxford Tracts; the inhabitants are still less; they are as human, at least to all appearance, as are the Esquimaux or the Russians, and probably (though the Zoological Society will not vouch for it) endowed with souls.¹²

It is clear from these passages—typical of many describing the urban terra incognita—that the image was applied in a serious and deliberate manner. It was not used merely to suggest some rough equivalence between these journeys of exploration, or as a clever device to interest the reader: in all, there is the same striking quality of literalness in the comparisons between these urban slums and foreign lands.

Indeed, even before looking more closely at the use of the image one should note that there were similarities between the two groups of explorers, urban and foreign. The urban tended to be doctors and engineers; the geographical explorers military men; and among both groups there were some clerics. This is not strange, since the work of medical and religious men was by nature likely to bring them into contact with the poor, much as that of sailors and soldiers took them to foreign lands. But also these men were members of professions just emerging from a period of rather lax, semi-aristocratic dilettantism into one characterized by increased discipline and rigour. Within all these professions, there was a decreasing emphasis on birth and wealth as acceptable entrance qualifications, and stress instead upon intelligence and ability. Training procedures became more difficult and more lengthy, which encouraged the more serious-minded to enter them and winnowed out those without strong motivation. That motivation tended now to be altruistic and humanitarian, for rarely did practitioners receive great remuneration or public acclaim. On the contrary, their chosen careers involved considerable danger: like African explorers, urban explorers frequently risked their lives, if not from attack by hostile natives then from infectious fevers and other diseases. In their labours there is ample and impressive evidence of the Victorian devotion to duty, even to the point of self-sacrifice.¹³

The reports of the two types of explorers also present great similarities. One of the most notable features of the reports of visits to the inner city is the constant reminder that this is an account of an actual journey, a physical descent into uncharted regions. Writers usually assume the role of guide, figuratively taking the reader in hand and conveying him into this other world. Phrases like “the visitor will notice,” “the explorer finds,” “the reader sees,” and so on, serve not only to heighten drama but maintain the fiction that the reader is in the midst of a genuine experience of the unknown. For example, Thomas Beames, in The Rookeries of London, adds immediacy to his account by addressing the reader in the second person:

You cannot gain an idea of what The Rookery was without visiting these streets. … You seem to leave the day, and life, and habits of your fellow-creatures behind you … and you have scarce gone a hundred yards when you are in The Rookery. The change is marvellous.

The effect is sustained throughout the long passage: “you could scarcely have an idea … and you begin to fancy … you will tell us this must be exaggeration,” and so on.¹⁴

There were also physical similarities between the jungles and wastes of distant lands and the urban slums. There is in descriptions of both an emphasis upon the darkness and closeness of the environment; the filth and the stench present in the crude habitations of the natives; the foulness of the air; and the awful quality of the water. But beyond these points of contact, there were even more frightening parallels in the discoveries of the moral and physical state of the inhabitants.

Over and over again, the material and moral condition of the urban masses was found to be no better—sometimes even worse—than that of savages. “It is a fact,” stressed the Parliamentary Gazetteer of England and Wales in 1843, “that in St. Giles's, in the back streets of Drury-lane, around Westminster-abbey, in the parishes of Bethnal-green, Shoreditch, &c., … and in the similar neighbourhoods of great towns, a state of social civilization exists, as low in degree as is found in the far-off regions of Africa!” Anticipating disbelief the author continues: “This is no rhetorical flourish.”¹⁵ As the reader will have noted from the passages above, likening city dwellers to African natives was quite common in these works, as were comparisons to North American Indians, South American Indians, South Seas islanders, Laplanders, Russians, Eskimos and Australian aborigines. But, in the opinion of one expert on Manchester's social conditions, the plight of its inhabitants was far worse than that of the savages, for they were forced to experience “all the privations and precariousness of existence incident to savage life, but without the advantages of that hardy and robust constitution which confers on savage tribes their power of endurance.”¹⁶

Social conditions in the urban terra incognita were discovered to be similar to those of distant corners of the globe in another important particular, religion—or, to put it more accurately, in the lack of religion. One of the most important public groups supporting geographical exploration was the evangelical movement, whose members saw England as a standard-bearer in the struggle to bring Christianity to the heathen races. Urban explorers often had similar goals, and the groups sending missionaries to Africa shared membership lists and officers with those sending visitors into the slums. The work itself, in the cities or abroad, seemed somewhat interchangeable to clerics, as well: Pusey wrote to a fellow clergyman, “If I had no duties here, and had fluency, I would long ago have asked leave to preach in the alleys of London, where the Gospel is as unknown as in Thibet.”¹⁷

Indeed, from the early 1800s it was common knowledge that the number of churches in large towns was too small to serve their growing populations. From the passage of the Church Building Act in 1818 there were continual efforts both public and private to remedy the situation, but population always seemed to grow faster than new construction. The religious census of 1851 only confirmed what long had been suspected, that England's cities were seething with non-conformists and atheists. In a speech in 1845, Lord Ashley summarized the inevitable conclusions of any inquiry into religion in the cities:

[T]he population has widely outstripped the provision made for it, and thousands may be found in our highways and hedges, in our streets and alleys, in our courts and lanes, who are living in a state of practical heathenism—a heathenism as complete as if they were found in California or Timbuctoo.¹⁸

In fact, so irreligious were the urban poor that some thought comparisons of atheistical town dwellers to natives of foreign places more unfair to the savage than the Englishmen:

The savage, roaming through his native wilderness, bows down with reverence before the objects he has been taught to worship. … Thus far he is superior to that portion of the operative manufacturers which acknowledges no God.¹⁹

There were other motives than religious behind the effort to Christianize urban heathens, as there were behind missionary work overseas. It was obvious that religious instruction—especially of the young—could be an important instrument of social control. Supporters of a limited religious education, stressing the fundamental duties of a good Christian subject, argued that it would encourage sobriety and industriousness among the poorer classes, and so make them better, more productive workers. In addition, democratic and revolutionary principles were held to be incompatible with genuine religious belief, and to encourage the latter necessarily would diminish the former. In 1840, a reporter for the Manchester and Salford Town Missions explained:

Your Missionary cannot refrain from drawing a parallel here, between the period of the first French revolution, and that of the introduction of Owenism into this country. At the former period, when the noxious principles of infidelity were wafted o'er the British Channel from France, a counter-acting influence was presented in England, by the good providence of God, in the institution of sabbath schools; at the latter, when the pestilential and soul-destroying principles of Owenism, were spreading from city to city, and from town to town, a fitting antidote was found in the establishment of those heaven-born institutions, City and Town Missions.²⁰

Yet another promised benefit of religious schooling was a reduction in crime and civil disorder as the poor became less violent and more docile. The key concept here was “duty”; if, as one writer put it, rich and poor recognized their duties to each other.

The rich will thereby discover that there is much good soil among the poorer classes, which only requires proper draining and cultivation to produce fruits of the greatest utility to society; the poorer will learn to look upon their wealthier neighbours as instruments in the hands of God, to lead them to industry, to happiness and peace.²¹

As in the colonies of the expanding Empire, duty had two meanings: for the colonial elite and the rich, to lead and govern; for the native and the poor, to follow and be led.

The realization that England's urban poor were in a state not far removed from that of savagery also inevitably affected the philosophy and attitudes of those who pondered the difficulty of governing them. As early as the 1790s, Pitt's government had regarded the manufacturing towns of the Midlands and North as virtually hostile enclaves of a foreign power, and during the French wars a massive effort was begun to build garrisons for troops to police them. In the 1830s, Edwin Chadwick went so far as to suggest that it was necessary to treat the urban masses as if they were inhabitants of a distant colony:

A vast increase of population in some of the manufacturing districts is we submit to be regarded in respect of new arrangements in the same point of view as an actual increase of new territory. Much indeed of the Population in the manufacturing districts is not a native population brought up in the habits of obedience to the laws of that part of the empire in which they reside.²²

For this reason, there were urgent appeals made to reshape local government into more modern, centralized, efficient and effective form, much as there were calls to reform colonial government along the same lines. The establishment of Peel's Metropolitan Police in 1828 was one such action.

Another common but more disturbing comparison of English city-dwellers to the natives of foreign lands was to the Irish—more disturbing because the Irish were emigrating to England en masse and becoming part of the indigenous population. In their unreformed native sloth and indecency, they were a demoralizing influence upon the English poor. In 1832 James Kay explained the likely social effects of continued Irish migration:

Were such manners to prevail, the horrors of pauperism would accumulate. A debilitated race would be rapidly multiplied. Morality would afford no check to the increase of the population: crime and disease would be its only obstacles. … A dense mass, impotent alike of great moral or physical efforts, would accumulate. … They would drag on an unhappy existence, vibrating between the pangs of hunger and the delirium of dissipation.²³

This passage hints at another important feature of reports of urban exploration—the suggestion, often muted but sometimes explicit, that the natives of England's cities were not merely like another race but actually constituted another race.

It was in fact during the early decades of the nineteenth century becoming increasingly common to consider the existence of distinct human races as a proven scientific fact. Inevitably, however, the philosophy of race seemed to become racist philosophy, an effort to prove scientifically the superiority of white European peoples. The theoretical underpinnings of this belief developed from new research in the biological sciences, particularly in the classification of species, most of which was done in France from the 1780s through the 1840s. Buffon, the influential French naturalist, suggested that in certain environments (like the New World) animals and plants had degenerated from their original, higher forms. This could explain human variation, too: the original, pure white race had, in certain extreme climates like the tropics or the Asian tundra, deteriorated into the yellow and black races. Lamarck's theories about the inheritability of acquired characteristics served to buttress the argument. Baron Cuvier, another eminent French biologist, also maintained that the races were organized hierarchically—the white at the top, the yellow somewhat lower, and at the bottom, close to the animal primates, the black. Concurrently, the work of anthropologists, discovering “primitive” non-white peoples in areas of the globe just becoming known to Europeans, appeared to offer additional and irrefutable empirical evidence.

By the 1830s the theory of race was widely accepted in England and provided a ready-made vocabulary and conceptual framework for observations about the urban poor. For example, the Poor Law Report of 1834, one of the most widely circulated government blue books, instanced numerous cases which suggested that the English working classes had been transformed into a permanently demoralized and dangerous group. “The present race, which this illegal perversion of the poor Laws has created, are playing the game of cunning with the magistrates and overseers,” wrote one magistrate: “give them ten years, and they will convert it into the dreadful game of force.”²⁴ Other correspondents spoke of the inheritability of pauperism, noting as proof families in which three or more generations all had gone on the parish; others noted how a few paupers in a district would infect respectable people and demoralize an entire district, so that even the lower middle classes ended by demanding relief.

Peter Gaskell was well read in contemporary anthropology, and in his influential study, The Manufacturing Population of England (1833), attempted to make more scientific comparisons between urban factory workers and savage foreign tribes. The book is filled with casual remarks about similarities between factory operatives and primitive peoples, as when he observes that drunkenness among English workers is comparable to the North American Indians' love of alcohol, or that pregnant women who work in the mills continue their tasks almost to the hour of labour, quickly returning to work like Indian squaws after the birth. But Gaskell's arguments about the effects of factory work generally are more pointed. In chapter two, “Influence of Temperature and Manners upon Physical Development, & etc., and upon Morals,” he makes his most explicit case for the existence of a new race among the poorer classes. Drawing upon the work of researchers in the South Seas and Africa, he demonstrates that high temperatures and the promiscuous intermingling of children in factories act to stimulate the early onset of puberty. This in turn leads to unnatural sexual activity at an early age, which destroys the health and moral constitution of the mill children. Later in the book, commenting upon the physical condition of adult factory workers, he notes that they are developing the physical characteristics of African natives, e.g. broad noses, thick lips, overall ugliness, and short stature. In women, he remarks, early sexual activity stimulates the breasts to swell to large size and great sensitivity, but later at childbearing age makes them flaccid, insensitive and poor in milk.²⁵

Gaskell's speculations may seem extreme, but others suspected that the degeneration might reduce workers even below the state of the savage races to that of animals. Southwood Smith told Parliamentary investigators in 1844 that they need not visit the slums to see how the poor lived:

They have only to visit the Zoological Gardens, and to observe the state of society in that large room which is appropriate to a particular class of animals, where every want is relieved, and every appetite and passion gratified in full view of the community. In the filthy and crowded streets in our large towns and cities you see human faces retrograding, sinking down to the level of these brute tribes, and you find manners appropriate to the degradation.²⁶

Gaskell, for one, did not think such changes necessarily irreversible: former mill workers who had risen to the ranks of wealthy mill owners did not regain their physical stature, but sometimes their children did. But since Gaskell doubted whether the factory system would ever be reformed, such speculations were somewhat beside the point. Others took the permanent degeneration of the poor into another race as an established fact. Lord Ashley quoted a Manchester manufacturer who did not support factory legislation, but admitted that if the factory system continued in its present form the “county of Lancaster will speedily become a province of pigmies.”²⁷

Needless to say, such observations could have a double edge, and furnished ammunition for reformers as well as alarmists. Richard Oastler's campaign for factory legislation stressed the similar condition of black slaves in the West Indies and factory operatives in England. In fact, often it was claimed that slaves were in a superior condition because owners had strong economic incentives to keep their bodies in working condition by feeding and clothing them adequately, while wage slaves might starve and freeze. Yet, despite attempts to rouse those who were against slavery to sympathy for the manufacturing population at home, comparisons between the labouring classes and other races more often tended to stress only their mutual degeneration.

So prevalent were racist attitudes by mid-century that even sensitive and sympathetic observers endorsed them. For example, when Henry Mayhew was issuing his Morning Chronicle letters on the London poor in book form, he paid at least token obeisance to the prevailing wisdom by quoting an anthropological authority on race in his opening pages, who commented on the two races of mankind, the animalistic wanderers and the civilized settlers. (The poor, of course, belonged to the wandering tribes.) It is interesting that reviewers of the book generally failed to notice this addition to Mayhew's reports; even when they did it was not to take objection but to pick up the theme and elaborate it. So, according to one favourable report,

He has travelled through the unknown regions of our metropolis, and returned with full reports concerning the strange tribes of men which he may be said to have discovered. For, until his researches had taken place, who knew of the nomad races which daily carries on its predatory operations in the streets, and nightly disappears in quarters wholly unvisited by the portly citizens of the East as by perfumed whiskerandoes of the West End?²⁸

Elsewhere in his writing, Mayhew tends to fall into the same language, as, for example, when he writes of moving from the world of the skilled artisans in the West End to that of unskilled in the East: “it seems as if we were in a new land, and among another race.”²⁹

Mayhew, in these beliefs, is only typical of his generation's growing conviction that the poor were distant not only morally, economically and spiritually, but in their very physical nature. Theories that associated race and poverty were to remain an important feature of social thought and inquiry in England for the rest of the nineteenth century, a lasting if unfortunate testament to the power of the image of terra incognita to represent the city and its inhabitants.

IV

It will be obvious from the above discussion that the use of the image of terra incognita in writing about the city involved the assumption by authors that their audience was ignorant of the facts which they claimed to be revealing. Perhaps it may strike the modern reader that this “ignorance” is not all that unusual: we have become accustomed to a constant stream of journalistic exposés of horrifying and previously unknown social conditions, and we are familiar with the fact of public ignorance about them. But in the early decades of the nineteenth century this fact was considered noteworthy, and writers usually remarked upon it with shock and dismay.

At the outset, it should be admitted that the ignorance of Londoners about their own city was nothing short of legendary. A pocket guidebook published early in the century claimed that

its utility will be much felt by natives and perpetual residents, whose want of correct information relative to the wonderful city in which they reside, is proverbial. The inhabitants of London are, in general, so completely involved in the vortex of their own particular circle or business, that they remain in a state of total ignorance of all surrounding … objects.³⁰

A century earlier, Addison in a Spectator (No. 403, 12 June, 1712) went so far as to compare the different neighbourhoods of the city to so many distinct foreign nations:

When I consider this great City in its several Quarters and Divisions, I look upon it as an Aggregate of various Nations. … The Courts of two Countries do not so much differ from one another, as the Court and City in their peculiar ways of Life and Conversation. In short, the Inhabitants of St. JAMES's, notwithstanding they live under the same Laws, and speak the same Language, are a distinct People from those of CHEAPSIDE, who are likewise removed from those of the TEMPLE on the one side, and those of SMITHFIELD on the other, by several Climates and Degrees in their ways of Thinking and Conversing together.³¹

There is here a certain similarity to writing about the city in the nineteenth century, but it is only superficial. No doubt it is inevitable that in any city above a certain size, e.g. metropolitan London from the sixteenth century on, the very largeness of the place and the great numbers of its inhabitants will ensure that there is a degree of social isolation among its many districts and social and occupational groups. But when observers before 1800 commented upon this, generally they did so with little urgency; their tone almost invariably is one of moderate curiosity, and little more. Addison, for instance, makes his comment at the beginning of a paper, evidently thinking it a striking, eye-catching opening, but quickly moves on to the essay's main and unrelated topic. By contrast, after 1800, the tone of these observations becomes far more serious, typically betraying shock, horror and bewilderment. If the old clichés about city life are still used, they are given new intensity. The ancient maxim, that in London one half of the city knows nothing of how the other half lives, furnishes a good example: hackneyed though it was, it became near mid-century a central metaphor for dozens of works about the city, including Disraeli's Sybil, or the Two Nations (1845), Douglas Jerrold's St. Giles and St. James (1851), and the Rev. John Garwood's The Million-People City: or One Half of London Made Known to the Other Half (1853).

The massive social ignorance of readers was itself a frequent topic of discussion in works of social exploration. Commenting upon readers' lack of knowledge was a conventional gambit with which to open an essay, as Henry Mayhew did in a brief survey of urban slum housing, “Home is Home, Be It Never So Homely”:

‘But are there really such places?’ the innocent and sceptical Well-to-do will ask.

… [T]o convince you, Reader, of the fact, you shall, if you will, while you sit beside your snug sea-coal fire, in your cosy easy chair, make a short tour with me.³²

Other writers took the distress of the poor as proof in itself that their readers could not know how the poor lived. Hector Gavin explained, in his exhaustive sanitary survey of Bethnal Green, that this was one of the reasons he began his work:

I was actuated by the conviction that it was impossible to account for the profound indifference which prevails amongst a great part of the people generally … but by believing that they were ignorant as to the amount and extent of the ills which they endured. To believe that the middle and upper classes were fully cognisant that multitudes of their fellow-beings have their health injured, their lives sacrificed, their property squandered, their morals depraved, and the efforts to christianise them set at nought by the existence of certain well-defined agents, and yet to find them either making no effort to alleviate, or to remove these misfortunes, or with a stern heart denying their existence, would be to charge these classes with the most atrocious depravity, and the most cruel heartlessness and selfish abandonment.³³

One senses here both the sincerity and intensity of emotion: it is clear that Gavin, and many other writers, simply could not believe that, if what they were revealing in their works were widely known, the reading public would not have acted already to ameliorate these awful conditions.

Perhaps more persuasive evidence of the genuineness of widespread ignorance of the urban terra incognita are the many accounts of reactions by various readers to the revelations about it. In 1831, Charles Greville, as Secretary of the Privy Council, had access to reports from medical men about the cholera epidemic, a matter of increasing concern to the government. But it was not the disease so much as accounts of life among the urban poor that made Greville start:

Dr. Barry's first letter from Sunderland came yesterday. … He describes some cases he had visited, exhibiting scenes of misery and poverty far exceeding what one could have believed it possible to find in this country; but we who float on the surface of society know but little of the privations and suffering which pervade the mass.³⁴

At various times, certain documents seem to have had especially powerful effects on readers, and one finds in letters, diaries and memoirs scores of references to the revelations they contain. Dickens' Oliver Twist (though a work of fiction) was one such in the late 1830s; so too was Chadwick's Sanitary Report in the early '40s; and Mayhew's Morning Chronicle letters in the early '50s. Thackeray (himself often praised for similar work) wrote enthusiastically of Mayhew's work:

What a confession it is that we have almost all of us been obliged to make! … [T]hese wonders and terrors have been lying by your door and mine ever since we had a door of our own. We had but to go a hundred yards off and see for ourselves, but we never did … until some poet like HOOD wakes and sings that dreadful ‘Song of the Shirt;’ some prophet like CARLYLE rises up and denounces woe; some clear-sighted, energetic man like the writer of the Chronicle travels into the poor man's country for us, and comes back with his tale of terror and wonder.³⁵

Still more convincing evidence of the discovery of “the poor man's country” comes from accounts of actual visits to it, and the reactions of the visitors. In 1841 Lord Ashley, who already had acquired some fair knowledge of the social condition of the poor from his work in the 1830s on factory legislation, was taken on a tour of the East End of London. Despite his experience, he was astonished by what he saw. He wrote in his journal:

What a perambulation have I taken today with Dr. Southwood Smith! What scenes of filth, discomfort, disease! What scenes of moral and mental ill. Perambulated many parts of Whitechapel and Bethnal Green, to see, with my own eyes, the suffering and degradation which unwholesome residences inflict on the poorer classes. No pen nor paint-brush could describe the thing as it is. One whiff of Cowyard, Blue-Anchor, or Baker's Court, outweighs ten pages of letterpress.³⁶

The smell of places like Cowyard overpowered many: apparently, nausea and vomiting were common reactions. Even experienced urban explorers could find things to cause them to become ill. In 1843 Edwin Chadwick wrote to an associate about field-work in connection with the report on the Health of Towns:

My vacation had been absorbed in visiting with Mr. Smith and Dr. Playfair the worst of some of the worst towns. Dr. Playfair has been knocked up by it and has been seriously ill. … Sir Henry de la Beche was obliged at Bristol to stand up at the end of alleys and vomit while Dr. Playfair was investigating overflowing privies. Sir Henry was obliged to give it up.³⁷

Evidently, even long experience of such sights often was no proof against their power to shock.

Time and time again, in both private and public writing, one finds the heartfelt cry, “I could not have believed that such misery existed.”³⁸ How was it that the middle and upper classes had become so ignorant about the life and world of the urban poor? The answer is that by the middle decades of the century, social segregation in the cities had proceeded to the point where rich and poor literally did inhabit separate worlds: divisions between classes—economic, political, moral, linguistic and even topographical—were by this time deeply embedded in the very warp and woof of the social fabric. To borrow the phrase popularized by Disraeli, there were in England not one but “Two Nations.”

The causes of this great separation are, of course, quite familiar in their broad outline, and it will not be necessary to do more than mention them: in the economic sphere, industrialization and the associated transformation of society, what Carlyle dubbed the “cash nexus”; in the political, the ever-present fear of revolution after the events in France in 1789, and the domestic repression which followed; and in the social, the rise of modern classes and class relations. Less widely appreciated, however, are the particular ways in which these general developments affected the quotidian texture of urban life.

There was, in the first instance, a growing gap in the standard of living between the middle classes and the poor in London and other large towns. This period was one in which the middle classes were benefitting fully from the revolutionary expansion in production that accompanied technological and economic progress. Their houses became larger and more commodious; servants were cheap and plentiful; and many basic consumer goods fell in price as their quality improved. More important, dramatic improvements were made in health care, and for the middle classes maternal and infant mortality were falling while life expectancy was rising. But if this social group enjoyed the fruits of the industrial revolution, the urban poor were largely untouched by material prosperity. Indeed, many were affected adversely. The average urban working man or woman lived in a harsh, dangerous and violently insecure environment: even for those in steady employment (a small minority) the basic necessities of life—clean and salubrious housing, decent sanitation, medical care, adequate and unadulterated food, unpolluted water—could not be had at any price. This gap in itself was an important factor in middle-class ignorance about the life the poor led, as it became increasingly difficult for the privileged even to imagine a mode of existence so very different from their own: such conditions literally were inconceivable. For this reason, when revelations about the terra incognita did come, many felt they must be lies or exaggerations.

The moral life of the poor was also inconceivable. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries middle-class life had become centred on certain values and modes of conduct which stressed order, propriety, domestic fidelity, economic prudence and moral duty—the way of life which for us has become synonymous with the adjective “Victorian.” The keystone of this world view was the belief that the home was the seat of all social and personal values, and the family the fundamental social unit. But the urban poor, by and large, had no homes, no family life, and often no families in the legal sense. Sexual impropriety, overcrowding in single-room dwellings, proximity to sickness and death, drunkenness, irreligion, financial improvidence, casual violence—these were the features of everyday life in the slums. To the middle-class citizen this was profoundly disturbing: in every area of moral life the poor were deficient; their very moral existence seemed a violent negation of all the sacred tenets of ordinary social intercourse. It is hardly surprising that the urban poor should seem like inhabitants of another world.

Moreover, the separation between the classes increasingly was physical. This was a new and unprecedented development in urban society, for until the end of the eighteenth century London was barely socially segregated at all. Most neighbourhoods, indeed many individual houses, were mixed both economically and socially, combining workplace and domicile for residents of all classes, occupations and trades. By 1800, this integration had begun decisively to break down: as Donald J. Olsen writes, “The nineteenth century saw the systematic sorting-out of London into single-purpose, homogeneous, specialized neighbourhoods.”³⁹ For the first time, single-class residential developments were being built in the metropolis for groups other than the aristocracy, and in those built for the middle classes, no provision at all was made for working-class residents (excepting always servants who lived in). At the same time, the middle classes deserted the City proper and other central districts, which became predominantly commercial and/or industrial in character. The East End by mid-century was virtually a working-class city in its own right, a vast tract of slums and factories with half a million residents, almost all of them poor.

This residential and economic segregation proceeded simultaneously with the redevelopment of central London. All over the city broad new streets were cut, both to speed traffic into and out of the new middle-class suburbs, and to improve the character of the immediate area. One of the earliest and most important of these ventures was the creation of Regent Street immediately after the end of the French wars. It was built through some of the worst slums in the West End, but once completed one could ride along its wide expanse on an omnibus (introduced to London in 1828), or stroll under its colonnade without a hint of the awful poverty behind. This was intentional: while planning the project, the architect John Nash noted that “the whole Communication from Charing Cross to Oxford Street will be a boundary and complete separation between the Streets and Squares occupied by the Nobility and Gentry, and the narrow Streets and meaner Houses occupied by mechanics and the trading part of the community.”⁴⁰ This set a pattern for other street works, including, before 1855, Victoria Street, Cannon Street, Commercial Street, New Oxford Street and Farringdon Road. (Later, railway lines were sited similarly to create barriers between neighbourhoods, or to open arteries of communication through slums.)

These new streets and the fine buildings that lined them served to create safe, insulated corridors of transit between the suburbs and the central city: they effectively hid what lay just behind, the poor man's world of the dark, congested courts and lanes of London's slums. It was as if the very spatial stuff of the city had formed itself into a material correlative of the great barriers dividing the known urban world from the unknown—the terra incognita.⁴¹

V

Recently, several critics, Raymond Williams, Frank Kermode and J. G. A. Pocock chief among them, have written of the psychosocial dimension of literary activity, and the key role played in it by what they term (respectively) “structures of feeling,” “fictions,” and “paradigms.”⁴² They have stressed that among the most important functions of writing is the attempt to describe and make sense of experience, and the more important and problematic the nature of the experience, the more urgent becomes the effort to control it in and through language. Bearing this in mind, and bearing in mind also the rapid transformation of urban society in the early nineteenth century, it is easier to see why the image of the city as terra incognita gained such wide currency. The image, and all of the related and cognate images and motifs it suggested, were used so often because the image—in all of its complexity—described and helped to make sense of the perplexing and disturbing “discovery” of the inner city—in all of its complexity. The image helped control the experience, and then, in turn, modified the experience and attitudes toward it; this, in turn, modified the image and the way it was used; and so on, in a constantly changing, never still process which probably can never be fully analyzed.

Before considering further the significances of this image, however, a brief digression is necessary. In writing of the image of the city as terra incognita I have discussed and quoted from a number of texts written over approximately a thirty-year span of time. Doing so has afforded the advantage of suggesting how common the image was, but at the same time it has had the disadvantage of suggesting that this image was the only one used during this period. Of course, this is not so: in the first instance, the image of terra incognita persisted for a considerable period of time; and, throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, other ways of seeing the city, other modes of apprehension and expression, coexisted with that which lay behind the terra incognita. Some of these images of the city were positive, too, including traditional ones, like those of the city as a grand emporium or a great epitome (both exceedingly popular throughout the eighteenth century), and new coinages, like that of London as the world's capital, born of pride in the nation's, and of course London's, increasing dominance in world trade and international finance. But while such views of the city can be found throughout this period, it was the image of the city as unknown land which predominated. By the 1840s, a decade of profound social, economic and political crisis throughout England, this image surfaced everywhere in writing about the city; for the nation was gripped by fear and uncertainty about the condition of England, which was virtually the same problem as the condition of England's cities. Seen in this light, the image reflects more than is immediately apparent: it offers us insight into the way in which the articulate classes of early Victorian England looked at, experienced, thought about and conceived the larger social world they inhabited.

Now for the image itself. To begin, it is important to recall the central pre-condition for its use—the assumption that the audience is in a state of total ignorance about life in the inner city slums. If the general lines of the hypothesis I have advanced above are correct, then it is evident that what I have been calling middle class “ignorance” about the urban terra incognita really was a much more complicated phenomenon—or, more accurately, a spectrum of phenomena. Clearly, at one end of this spectrum was genuine ignorance. But it was ignorance born of increasingly widespread social segregation, which itself reflected the ideology of the powerful classes in early Victorian society, and which was, in so far as that ideology was expressed in social and political action, a necessary result of intentional activity. However genuinely unconscious and innocent that ignorance per se may have been, nevertheless it was structurally related to the fundamental assumptions and institutions of Victorian society as a whole. At the opposite end of the spectrum was surely something less than ignorance; here was wilful avoidance of the consequences of the knowledge of the inner city. There were those who knew or learned about the terra incognita but responded like Dickens' Mr Podsnap, waving it away with a sweep of the hand, thus erasing it from consciousness. Others blamed the poor themselves for the conditions of slum life: they were morally delinquent and so deserved what they got. Others, again, explained the slums in the Malthusian terms of political economy: they were necessary checks on the growth of population, and without them the poor would only breed faster, making life harder for their class in the long run.

Even so, these positions probably do not represent the responses of more than a small fraction of the upper and middle classes. The responses of most fell somewhere between, involving some actual ignorance, some self-deception, and some intentional avoidance—but also a deep-seated uncertainty about the political and social revolutionary potential of the urban masses. Moreover, these responses were reinforced by certain various widely held basic social assumptions about the moral depravity of the poor, the necessity of social segregation for its own sake, and the evils of any state intervention at the expense of what were seen as the all-important rights of property.

What is so remarkable about the image of terra incognita is that it could express and sustain all of these attitudes at once, conveying a different meaning to different readers, and to different needs of the same reader, without excluding any of the others. In the first instance, in so far as the image of terra incognita pictured the inner city as an unknown country, the image was an accurate reflection of the social ignorance of much of its audience. And in so far as the image pictured the urban masses as savage, uncivilized inhabitants of another country—even of another race—it also reflected accurately the material and social condition of a substantial portion of the city's inhabitants. At the same time, the image embodied an effort of distancing and avoidance: it suggested that these areas needed to be discovered, because heretofore no one had known of them, an assertion which at times was true, but also at times was nothing more than wish fulfilment to avoid admitting guilt at not having acted to ameliorate them. The image also tended to de-emphasize the social nature of the problems of the inner city: stressing analogies with geographical discoveries allowed the urban slums to appear as wholly natural rather than man-made phenomena. Furthermore, by concentrating upon the vast differences between middle-class readers and urban slum residents, the image could be used to point out the extremity of the social injustices under which they suffered, and so serve as a call for reform; but also it could serve to defuse collective guilt and underplay collective responsibility by saying, in effect, that the poor were not really fully human, and so did not need one's concern or assistance. In this manner, the image could be used to justify both social reform and social repression. And, lastly, it could give voice to many varieties of emotional response to these revelations: shock; outrage; disbelief; bewilderment; guilt; and fear—a fear which I think we can detect just below the surface in the oddly incongruous tone of flippant irony and nervous humour that appears so often in descriptions of the terra incognita.

In short, the image of the city as terra incognita was so pervasive and so powerful in early and mid-nineteenth-century writing about London and the other great towns of England because it so fully represented the social actualities of the early and mid-nineteenth-century city, and the strong yet often contradictory responses of middle-class writers and readers to those actualities. If the image today should seem extraordinarily complex and ambiguous, then that only testifies to the fullness with which it expressed the complex and ambivalent beliefs, fears, desires and reactions of a society to one of its most basic and urgent problems.

Notes

1. Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill and L. F. Powell (Oxford: Clarendon P., 1934), VI, 201.

2. Life of Johnson, VI, p. 201. The word “uniformity,” according to the O.E.D. [Oxford English Dictionary], did not in the eighteenth century have pejorative connotations; Boswell evidently anticipates its modern sense.

3. From “Letters to a Friend,” in Meliora, ed. Viscount Ingestre (London, 1852; reprinted Cass, 1971), pp. 160, 164.

4. Anonymous, “Memoirs of a Working Man”, in Meliora, p. 244.

5. Thomas Beames, The Rookeries of London (London, 1852, reprinted Cass, 1970), pp. 14, 18.

6. The O.E.D. cites a first usage in 1616 and another in 1630.

7. Park, Travels into the Interior Districts of Africa (London, 1799), p. 2.

8. Park, Travels, Appendix by Major Rennell, p. iv; original italics.

9. “African Discoveries,” Quarterly Review, 33 (1825), 518.

10. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, ed. Althea Hayter (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin, 1971), p. 81.

11. It is interesting that a number of crucial episodes in De Quincey's life all occurred in or near Oxford Street: keeping company with Ann; losing her; discovering opium; and wandering among the poor on Saturday nights. At this time, c. 1800, rapid commercial development in Oxford Street had just begun, and until the 1830s the streets immediately adjacent remained shabby and overcrowded slums.

12. New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, 38 (1833), 188-9; Stray Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, ed. Lewis Melville (Philadelphia: Jacobs, 1901), pp. 306-7; review attributed to Richard Ford (a writer on travel and foreign affairs), Quarterly Review, 64 (1839), 88-9.

13. Dr John Roberton wrote to Mrs Edwin Chadwick in 1845 of the work of dedicated medical men: “Often the family doctor mingles in the crowd of mill-people as they leave at night and greets them again in the early morning as they congregate to their toils. … [It] is a curious sight—the swarming streets at a quarter past five of a stormy winter morning. Who but this poor drudge sees it?” Quoted by R. A. Lewis, Edwin Chadwick and the Public Health Movement (London: Longmans, Green, 1952), p. 77n.

14. The Rookeries of London, pp. 30-1.

15. Quoted from Journal of Civilization, in Parliamentary Gazetteer of England and Wales (London, 1843), III, 213-4.

16. Dr R. Baron Howard, in Joseph Adshead, Distress in Manchester (London, 1842), p. 50.

17. Letter to D. S. Bovett, quoted by H. P. Liddon, Life of Edward Bouverie Pusey, (London: Longmans, Green, 1898), III, 32.

18. The Speeches of the Earl of Shaftesbury, K. G. (London, 1868), p. 191.

19. Peter Gaskell, The Manufacturing Population of England (London, 1833), p. 283.

20. Manchester and Salford Town Missions, Third Annual Report, 1840, quoted by Edward Toyle, ed., The Infidel Tradition from Paine to Bradlaugh (London and Toronto: Macmillan, 1976), p. 94.

21. Viscount Ingestre, Preface to Meliora, p. ix.

22. “Memorandum on police”, n.d., c. 1836, quoted by A. P. Donajgrodski, “‘Social Police’ and the Bureaucratic Elite,” in Donajgrodski, ed., Social Control in Nineteenth Century Britain (London: Croom Helm, 1977), p. 70.

23. Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes in England (London, 1832; reprinted Cass, 1970), p. 81.

24. The Poor Law Report of 1834, ed. S. G. and E. O. A. Checkland (Harmondsworth, Mddx.: Penguin, 1974), p. 219.

25. The Manufacturing Population of England, pp. 68-86, and passim.

26. P.P. 1844, First Report of the Commissioners for Inquiring into the State of Large Towns and Populous Districts, pp. 82-3.

27. The Speeches of the Earl of Shaftesbury, K. G., p. 113.

28. Eclectic Review, 94 (1851), 424-5.

29. London Labour and the London Poor (London, 1861; reprinted Cass, 1967), III, 233. For a thorough discussion of Mayhew and the question of race, see Gertrude Himmelfarb, “The Culture of Poverty,” in The Victorian City, ed. H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), II, 707-36; but see also Anne Humpherys, Travels in the Poor Man's Country (Athens, Ga.: U. of Georgia Press, 1979), pp. 71ff.

30. The Picture of London for 1802 (London, n.d.), pp. 3-4.

31. Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon P., 1964), II, 506.

32. Meliora, p. 264.

33. Sanitary Ramblings (London, 1848; reprinted Cass, 1971), p. 3.

34. The Greville Memoirs, ed. Henry Reeve (New York, 1875), p. 26.

35. “Waiting at the Station,” Punch, 18 (9 March, 1850), 93.

36. Edwin Hodder, Life of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury (London, 1886), I, 361.

37. S. E. Finer, The Life and Times of Sir Edwin Chadwick (London: Methuen, 1952), p. 234; Chadwick to Major Graham, n.d., 1843.

38. The Factory System Illustrated (London: Frank Cass, 1967; rpt. of 1842, 2nd ed.) p. 3.

39. The Growth of Victorian London (Harmondsworth, Mddx.: Penguin, 1979), p. 18; see also pp. 232-44.

40. Quoted by H. J. Dyos, “Urban Transformation: A Note on the Objects of Street Improvement in Regency and Early Victorian London,” International Review of Social History, 2 (1957), 261.

41. Engels noted this about Manchester in 1854: see The Condition of the Working Class in England (London: Panther, 1969), pp. 78-81, and also Steven Marcus, Engels, Manchester and the Working Class (New York: Random House, 1974), pp. 168-78.

42. For relevant discussions, see Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1977); Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York; Oxford U.P., 1967); and J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time (New York: Atheneum, 1973), pp. 3-41.