Unlike many school leavers neither Nell or Kitty Jarvis of Camberwell in London had to worry about what to do next. For they were destined to join their father in the noble art of rat-catching. This necessary occupation attracted the attention of the journalist Henry Mayhew, who wrote extensively about rat-catchers in London Labour and the London Poor. He gave …
Fire at Raggett’s Hotel: Part Three
Tuesday the 27th of May dawns—the morning after the fire—and in the bright clear light the ruins of what had been Raggett’s Hotel are visible. Half of the front and a great part of the back have been destroyed. But there is some good news when Mr St George, who was feared dead, appears very much alive. The evening before …
Fire at Raggett’s Hotel: Part Two
The time is shortly after midnight on Tuesday the 27th of May 1845. Over the past few days Raggett’s Hotel in Dover Street has been filling up with wealthy guests as they arrive in London for the season, many of them invited to the Queen’s Drawing Room. One of the guests, Miss Elizabeth King, makes a terrible discovery in her bedroom. …
Fire at Raggett’s Hotel: Part One
A fatal fire at a luxury London hotel in 1845 was the subject of extensive newspaper coverage, and caused people to question the safety of public buildings and the efficacy of existing fire rescue services. Writing almost forty years later Georgiana Bloomfield, who was a witness to the fire, explained in her Reminiscences of Court and Diplomatic Life the impact …
Loddiges of Hackney, or, The Empress’s Tree Goes South
If you had been walking through the streets of what in 1854 was the village of Hackney on the 27th of July—a warm summer’s day—you would have witnessed a remarkable sight. A team of twenty horses were making their way, very slowly indeed, down Mare Street, heading south. They were harnessed to a massive carriage—effectively a sturdy platform on wheels of …
On the Paddington Dust Heaps, or, The Story of Henry Pearson
In volume 5 of Old and New London Edward Walford describes at length what was then the north-western suburb of Paddington. Time had wrought dramatic changes. When the Great Western Railway opened in 1840, the wide spaces of Paddington were still a patchwork of market and nursery gardens, and working men and working women lived in picturesque poverty in red-tiled …
Facing the Music: Mr Rawlins and the Organ Grinding Nuisance
Noise nuisance, it would appear, is not just a modern problem. The soundscape of Victorian London was shaped by clattering horse-drawn vehicles, bustling railway stations, yelling costermongers, barking stray dogs and incessant street music, all of which, and particularly the last, could drive Londoners like Mr Thomas James Rawlins to distraction. In 1861 Henry Mayhew estimated that there were approximately …
Queen Victoria’s Hairdresser: Nestor Tirard and the Crowning Glory
Recently a curious advertisement in The Morning Post dated the 1st of March 1879 caught my eye: Her Majesty’s Drawing Rooms Lessons in the correct court headdress as Approved at the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, given daily by Nestor Tirard, Coiffeur Fleuriste by special appointments To her Majesty the Queen H.R.H. the Princess of Wales H.I. and R.H. the Duchess of …
A Window in Whitechapel, or, The Sad Story of Eliza Wilmot
In the winter of 1848 a rather melancholy case came before the magistrate’s court in Worship Street in Shoreditch. Presiding over the court was Mr John Hammill. The complainant was a man by the name of Saunders. He was a dealer in furs, with premises in the Whitechapel Road in the East End. The defendant was one Eliza Wilmot, and …
William Weale, Brother Francis and the Bad Boy
The victim was scarified from ankle to thigh, with some deeper cuts marking his mottled flesh. One witness described his buttocks as resembling nothing so much as raw beef with blood streaming from it. The damage had been caused by a punishment beating of between thirteen to twenty strokes with a gutta percha rule two feet long. Before he collapsed …