London: The Biography полностью

Dickens, like Thackeray, is appalled by the noise of the mob, in particular “the shrillness of the cries and howls,” like that “feverish kind of jangling noise” which Thackeray heard. There were “screeching and laughing, and yelling in strong chorus of parodies on Negro melodies, with substitutions of “Mrs. Manning” for “Susannah” … faintings, whistlings, imitation of Punch, brutal jokes.” Another “Mrs. Manning,” in the crowd itself, “proclaimed that she had a knife about her and threatened to murder another woman so that she might step up to the gibbet after ‘her namesake.’” The fury and excitement of the mob, expressive of “general contamination and corruption,” fill Dickens’s account of the proceedings. He declared that “there are not many phases of London life that could surprise me.” But he was astonished and alarmed by this experience.

The crowd outside Newgate and Horsemonger Lane often jeered and hissed the executioner. That of Courvoisier and the Mannings was one Calcraft, who had previously earned his living by flogging boys in Newgate. The Mannings were his only victims in 1849, and his services were less and less frequently required. Between 1811 and 1832 there were approximately eighty executions a year but from 1847 to 1871 that figure was reduced to 1.48 per annum. William Calcraft was succeeded by William Marwood who perfected the “long drop” method. He once declared that “It would have been better for those I execute if they had preferred industry to idleness,” thus in a fatal thread connecting the exercise of his craft with Hogarth’s depiction of the hanging of the idle apprentice.

Marwood died of drink. His most recent and celebrated successor within this unique profession was Albert Pierrepoint who boasted that he could kill a man within twenty seconds. Pierrepoint’s ministrations, however, were performed in silence and secrecy. The last public hanging outside Newgate was held in 1868, and from that time forward hangings took place in an especially constructed shed or hut behind prison walls. Ruth Ellis was hanged within Holloway Prison in 1955; her execution, and that of eighteen-year-old Derek Bentley two years before, materially assisted the campaign for the abolition of capital punishment. The last execution in London took place in 1964, more than a hundred years after Thackeray prayed for God “to cleanse our land of blood.”

Yet here is another mystery of London: according to city superstition, to dream of the gallows is a prophecy of great good fortune. Money and blood still run together.

Voracious London

A detail from an aquatint by Rowlandson entitled “Revellers at Vauxhall”; the gardens of that area had been known for their gentility, but they eventually degenerated into a place of drunkenness and sexual licence.

CHAPTER 32

Into the Vortex

When in the early months of 1800 de Quincey travelled towards London in an open carriage he experienced a “suction so powerful, felt along radii so vast, and a consciousness, at the same time, that upon other radii still more vast, both by land and by sea, the same suction is operating.” The image here, from his essay “The Nation of London,” is of a “vast magnetic range” drawing all the forces of the world towards its centre. When he was within forty miles of London, “the dim presentiment of some vast capital reaches you obscurely, and like a misgiving.” An unknown, and unseen, area of energy has found him out and leads him onwards.

One characteristic phrase, “London conquers most who enter it,” is perhaps now a truism. There is a famous early nineteenth-century cartoon, which has been embellished and elaborated in a thousand different ways. Two men meet beside a London milestone. One, returning from the city, is bowed and broken down; the other, advancing upon him, full of animation and purposefulness, shakes his hand and asks him, “Is it paved with gold?”

“Long ago,” Walter Besant remarked in East London, “it was discovered that London devours her own children.” It seems as if great city families die out or disappear within a century; the principal names of the fifteenth century, Whittington and Chichele, had vanished by the sixteenth. The families of seventeenth-century London were no longer active in the eighteenth. That is why London must continue to exert a continual attractive energy, and pull in new people and new families to replenish the constant loss. On the road to London de Quincey had noted the “vast droves of cattle,” all with their heads directed towards the capital. But the city needs animal spirits as well as animals.