Dickens, Reynolds, and Mayhew on Wellington Street

The Print Culture of a Victorian Street

Mary L. Shannon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317151142
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

A glance over the back pages of mid-nineteenth-century newspapers and periodicals published in London reveals that Wellington Street stands out among imprint addresses. Between 1843 and 1853, Household Words, Reynolds's Weekly Newspaper, the Examiner, Punch, the Athenaeum, the Spectator, the Morning Post, and the serial edition of London Labour and the London Poor, to name a few, were all published from this short street off the Strand. Mary L. Shannon identifies, for the first time, the close proximity of the offices of Charles Dickens, G.W.M. Reynolds, and Henry Mayhew, examining the ramifications for the individual authors and for nineteenth-century publishing. What are the implications of Charles Dickens, his arch-competitor the radical publisher G.W.M. Reynolds, and Henry Mayhew being such close neighbours? Given that London was capital of more than Britain alone, what connections does Wellington Street reveal between London print networks and the print culture and networks of the wider empire? How might the editors' experiences make us rethink the ways in which they and others addressed their anonymous readers as 'friends', as if they were part of their immediate social network? As Shannon shows, readers in the London of the 1840s and '50s, despite advances in literacy, print technology, and communications, were not simply an 'imagined community' of individuals who read in silent privacy, but active members of an imagined network that punctured the anonymity of the teeming city and even the empire.

Chapter 1
Morning: ‘The Smallness of the World’

Introducing the editors and writers of Wellington Street, and suggesting that when writers walk to work, they tend to look about them.

Certain groups and people are undoubtedly attracted to a certain locality, the topography of which is strangely analogous to their situation.

—Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography
(London: Vintage, 2001), 235. © Peter Ackroyd 2000

From 1850 onwards, Wellington Street was the frequent destination of Dickens’s morning commute. Garret Dumas, at one time amanuensis to Dickens, described Dickens’s morning routine:

Dickens would arrive at his office No. 16 Wellington Street at about eight o’clock and begin dictating. He would walk up and down the floor several times after delivering himself of a sentence or a paragraph. He was generally tired out by eleven o’clock and would then go to his club. Dickens had a very odd habit of combing his hair. He would go through the performance a hundred times a day, and, in fact, seemed never to tire of it. It was invariably the first thing he did on arriving at the office.¹

Dickens himself had a fascination with work routines: this description is reminiscent of Pip’s interest in Mr Jaggers’s habit of literally washing his hands of the working day.² This chapter reveals the locations of those who worked on Wellington Street, and reconstructs what editors like Dickens would have seen as they walked down the street in the morning. The ‘business of amusing the public’, as Phiz’s son called it, was an occupation which thrived on networks, and neatly illustrates what Forster called Dickens’s ‘favourite theory as to the smallness of the world’.³ Rosemary Ashton, Andrew King, Patrick Leary, Iain McCalman, and Joanne Shattock have all shown how print culture in this period was based upon collaboration and networks of acquaintances.⁴ However, what has been less considered is exactly where in London these networks were situated. This chapter argues that close geographical proximity meant that the famous names of mid-Victorian print culture were more than just aware of each other in print, through their letters, and through social occasions at each other’s homes. They would have seen each other in the street or seen each other’s premises when they visited their own, and would have been aware that friends, rivals, and ex-colleagues were working, or had worked, on publications with addresses which were within a few hundred yards of their own editorial addresses. In all, there were more than 20 newspapers, miscellanies, and periodicals which had their offices on the three sections of Wellington Street between 1843 and 1853, and 13 publishers or booksellers. Wellington Street did not create all these networks; many friendships and collaborations existed or occurred before their members had connections with Wellington Street. However, what Wellington Street shows us is that members of these networks, which collaborated and competed closely in print, shared the same experiences of the print economy on the same short street.

Rosa Salzberg, writing about the geography of print culture in early modern Venice, argues that

It is important to stress [the] clustering of purveyors of print for several reasons. From the customer’s point of view, it suggests that the presence of print […] was difficult to ignore, encountered whenever one passed through the central arteries of the city […] For the printers and print-sellers, the rather intimate, parochial context in which many of them lived and worked mirrored the close-knit nature of the industry from its early days. Their lives were complexly interwoven, held together by ties of kinship and marriage, neighbourhood and shared provenance, friendship and partnership.⁵

A similar point could be made about Wellington Street (South), North, and Upper in early to mid-nineteenth-century London, as this chapter will show. The editors of Wellington Street were poised at a tipping point between the vestiges of early modern and eighteenth-century London and the modernized city. What Gatrell describes as the ‘forgotten intimacy’ of eighteenth-century Covent Garden – ‘in which stellar talent and workaday street life and criminal life were closely compacted, where everyone knew each other and lived within minutes of each others’ lodgings, tenements, workshops, studios, coffee-houses and taverns’ – did not end as the century turned, or when Victoria came to the throne.⁶ As Lynda Nead has shown, ‘modernity’ is not a stable category or a period in history that can be demarcated as ‘uncompromised newness’, but a working-through of ‘uneven and unresolved processes of urbanization; it took the form of the improved street within a district of slums’.⁷ The kinds of social networks which Salzberg describes as sustaining early modern print culture can be found on Wellington Street.

In human geography, ‘agglomeration theory’ is used to explain why groups of people engaged in similar activities cluster together. Abler, Adams, and Gould, in Spatial Organization: The Geographer’s View of the World, argue that in what they call a ‘traditional agricultural society’, the dispersal of families over arable land was the best way of optimizing land use.⁸ However, once people started to urbanize and then industrialize, this changed, as ‘interaction potential increases with metropolitan size. […] Specialized units occupy different places within the metropolis, and their specific complementarities provide the potential for spatial interaction within the metropolis’.⁹ In other words, as the city gets bigger, trades tend to specialize in order to differentiate themselves, and then tend to cluster together according to their specializations. Because specialization occurs, one trade may need something very specific from another. This means they must interact. Therefore – before the widespread use of telephones and the Internet – the bigger the city, paradoxically, the more likely it was for citizens to communicate, interact, and interconnect. This points to the complexity of the processes of modernity; in fact, dislocation and dispersal (although on a different scale, and for different reasons) were just as much features of agricultural societies as they were of industrialization.¹⁰ The population of London may have risen between 1841 and 1851, but print entrepreneurs on Wellington Street relied upon face-to-face interaction within their networks.¹¹ At the same time, modern print technology allowed them to reach far-flung readers. The final section of this chapter will argue that the everyday working conditions of editors on Wellington Street led Dickens to address these imagined readers in the language of face-to-face networks in Household Words.

Editors on Wellington Street

In the middle of the nineteenth century, as now, the three sections of Wellington Street were situated just off the Strand, the traditional artery between the Court and the City. The Strand sits between Holborn and Covent Garden to the north, Pall Mall, Whitehall, and St. James’s to the west, Fleet Street and the City to the east, and the river Thames to the south. The editors and writers of the Strand area were surrounded by the theatres, the big newspaper offices, and the Inns of Court. They would have encountered playbills, law stationers, students from King’s College London (founded on the Strand in 1829), and lawyers. There was a large cluster of printers on Fleet Street and the streets and courts just off it, such as Bouverie Street, where Bradbury and Evans started their printing business in 1830.¹² This made it easier to share tools and expertise. At the eastern end of Fleet Street, the traditional centre of the book trade still operated around St. Paul’s Churchyard and Paternoster Row. Wellington Street was situated at the heart of London’s print culture. In other words, printed matter was everywhere.

The story of Wellington Street itself – its gradual evolution between 1834 and 1859 – is further evidence for a conception of modernity as comprising unstable, uneven processes. What we now call Wellington Street has had a troubled birth and a chequered history. The stretch of Westminster from the bottom of Bow Street to the start of Waterloo Bridge is now called Wellington Street above the Strand, and Lancaster Place below it. This is the latest in a series of renamings, renumberings, and even rebuildings. Bow Street, home of the infamous ‘Bow Street Runners’ and later the police station and police court, has always finished at Russell Street. The section from Russell Street downwards was called Charles Street, after Charles II, and since the eighteenth century it had a very dubious reputation (see Figure 1.1). Charles Street was in the middle of one of the city’s ancient Red Light districts, notorious for brothels and bathhouses.¹³ Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, a list of local prostitutes printed from 1760 to 1793, listed upwards of 200 names of popular girls, some of whom had lodgings on Charles Street.¹⁴ According to one memoir, ‘[Mother H’s] night-house […], the great rendezvous for gay city birds, […] extended from Bridges Street to Charles Street, now called Wellington Street’.¹⁵ Old Bailey records show that Charles Street was also a hotbed of petty crime; a legal clerk called William Chaffey had his watch stolen from him there twice in less than a minute.¹⁶ This is probably because Charles Street did not reach as far as the Strand, but finished at York Street. With no thoroughfare to the main road, it was a dark and disrep...