Thresholds: Engineering and Literature East of the City1

Thresholds: Engineering and Literature East of the City1 Michael Hattaway Sir Walter Besant, he who ‘discovered’ the East End,2 reminds us that the area now known as Docklands was originally marshland – and there is nothing more liminal than a marsh. ‘Wapping’, he wrote, ‘was called Wapping in the Wose [Marsh] … Bermondsey was Bermond’s Island’. Names further west also recall the extent of the Thames before embankment: ‘Battersea was Batte’s Island … Chelsea was the Island of Chesel or Shingle; Westminster Abbey was built on the Isle of Thorns.’3 These names delivered an enduring challenge of reclamation. Living near marshes was dangerous, especially near a tidal river like the Thames: in 1573 Thomas Tusser had advised, ‘Marsh wall too slight, strength[en] now or good night’.4 Much later Dickens wrote of a London beleaguered by the ‘great marsh forces of Essex and Kent’.5 Out of such realities potent myths were forged. Like Venice, London immediately east of the Tower was totally man-made – but scarcely as an artefact. The air and water were fetid, the latter contaminated not only by the sewage that concentrated itself in more slow-flowing parts of the Thames to the east, but also by the skin trading, tan-pits, and glue-yards of Bermondsey. Yet, despite these disadvantages, and following the construction of the docks at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the area had been rapidly built up – with a conspicuous dearth of the parks and commons found in the other quarters of London. As in Venice, on land ‘nature’ was invisible. So too, according to Charles Mackay in 1840, were monumental edifices: What a contrast is there … in both the character and the appearance of the two sides of the river! The London side, high and well built, thickly studded with spires and public edifices, and resounding with all the noise of the operations of a various industry; the Southwark and Lambeth side, low and flat, and meanly built, with scarcely an edifice higher than a wool- shed or timber-yard, and a population with a squalid, dejected, and 1 This paper was delivered at the Londonicity 2011 Conference, and published (without illustrations) in The London Reader 1, ed. Phillip Drummond, (London, The London Symposium, 2012), 54-64. (ebook). 2 Peter John Keating, The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971, Chap. 6. 3 Sir Walter Besant, The History of London, London, Longmans Green & Co, 1893. p. 107. 4 T. Tusser, Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, London, 1573, f. 20v. 5 Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, 1865, chap. 12. 2 debauched look … The situation of Southwark upon the low swamp is, no doubt, one cause of the unhealthy appearance of the dwellers on the south side of the Thames; but the dissolute and rakish appearance of the lower orders among them must be otherwise accounted for. From a very early age, if the truth must be told, Southwark and Lambeth, and especially the former, were the great sinks and receptacles of all the vice and immorality of London. Down to the year 1328 Southwark had been independent of the jurisdiction of London – a sort of neutral ground which the law could not reach – and, in consequence, the abode of thieves and abandoned characters of every kind.’6 The riverside boroughs were notorious for their multiplicity of lodging houses, often foul and hyper-crowded, an index of a transitory population and also of unstable family structures. Besant claimed that there were ‘no monuments to recall the past’ – and no hotels for visitors.7 The Rev. Andrew Mearns, the author of The Bitter Cry of Outcast London recorded in 1883 that of the 4235 parishioners who lived only a few hundred yards beyond the Tower of London and St Catherine’s Dock, in the vicinity of Hawksmoor’s grandiloquent structure, St George in the East in Stepney, only 39 attended services there.8 Prostitution and drunkenness were a function of the area’s poverty and transitory living. This liminal or ‘neutral’ ground was a no-go area for religion, industry, and the law – even for family homes. As with ‘Nature’, ‘History’ was not clearly legible in ‘Outcast London’. It is my hypothesis that the riverside boroughs of the East End constituted a ‘waterland’, an alterity so distinctive that commentators wrote about them in the manner of anthropologists. (The surname ‘Waterland’ crops up occasionally in London from the end of the sixteenth century.9) One conspicuous example – here is Mayhew on coster-girls: ‘The notions of morality among these people agree strangely … with those of many savage tribes … They are a part of the Nomads of England, neither knowing nor caring for the enjoyments of home’.10 Perhaps the sense of the evil that obtained there was engendered by memories of origins. By the time Dickens was writing, the river had been banked and the marshes began only further to the east of London. It is significant that the demonic Dolge Orlick, the villain of Great Expectations, ‘lodged at a sluice- 6 Charles Mackay, The Thames and its Tributaries, 2 vols, London, R. Bentley, 1840, I, 18-19. 7 Cit. Paul Newland, The Cultural Construction of London’s East End, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2008. p. 97. 8 Rev. Andrew Mearns, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, London, James Clarke & Co., 1883, pp. 6-7. 9 http://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/Waterland 10 Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, ed. Victor Neuburg, London, Penguin Books, 1985, p. 43. 3 keeper’s out on the marshes’ (chap. 15). Later we read: ‘When we came near the churchyard … there started up, from the gate, or from the rushes, or from the ooze … Old Orlick.’ (Chap. 17) F.W. Pailthorpe, ‘Old Orlick Means Murder’, ca 1900 Earlier, in Oliver Twist, Bill Sykes had accidentally hanged himself in an outpost thieves’ ‘ken’ situated on Jacob’s Island, where the River Neckinger enters the Thames. George Cruikshank, Sikes’ Final Moments From another perspective, the water, infused with sewage, penetrates the land around the Island, and Sykes reverts to the element that spawned him. Jacob’s Island, ca 1840 4 These waters had long seemed an affront to civilisation itself – to Edward Gibbon, for example, who in 1764 quoted Tacitus on Britain as ‘a country of bogs and marshes’. Gibbon saw the ‘delivery of the land from its subjection to the sea’ as a triumph of science.11 Sixty years later, in 1825, Sir Marc Isambard Brunel took up the challenge and began building a tunnel under the Thames. This revolutionary venture, 444 yards long, was made possible by Brunel’s Thames Tunnel Shield, which excavated the earth in front of it as it went and cut its way through the river’s subsoil. The project was halted a number of times, but at least the shield held. These stoppages, however, placed a severe strain on the endeavour’s finances, and at one point the operation was halted for seven years and the tunnel bricked up. It is worth noting that at its lowest section construction took place a mere fourteen feet below the riverbed. The Tunnel Under the Thames, 1839 The Thames tunnel finally opened in 1843. In the first four months more than a million people passed through it. In 1869, after 26 years as a not very profitable foot tunnel, it was converted into a railway tunnel for the East London Railway. This became part of the Southern Railway in 1923 and then part of London Underground in 1948. (The East London Line was completely refurbished between 1995 and 1998 to stringent criteria laid down by English Heritage whose primary aim was to retain the tunnel’s original shape.) Another river monster, surely derived from Orlick, appears in Rachel Vinrace’s anxiety dreams in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out (1915). Before the action moves on board the ship based for South America, Woolf obliquely hints at the advent of the Thames Tunnel, no longer a triumph but rather a malign presence that infests a prelapsarian or pastoral vision: a boatman is found to row Mr and Mrs Ambrose to their ship: The open rowing-boat in which they sat bobbed and curtseyed across the line of traffic. In mid-stream the old man stayed his hands upon the oars, and as the water rushed past them, remarked that once he had taken 11 An Essay on the Study of Literature, 1764, pp. 84-5. 5 many passengers across, where now he took scarcely any. He seemed to recall an age when his boat, moored among rushes, carried delicate feet across to lawns at Rotherhithe.12 After her fellow passenger Richard Dalloway has forced a passionate kiss upon Rachel, she has an anxiety dream: … she was walking down a long tunnel, which grew so narrow by degrees that she could touch the damp bricks on either side. At length the tunnel opened and became a vault; she found herself trapped in it, bricks meeting her wherever she turned, alone with a little deformed man who squatted on the floor gibbering, with long nails. His face was pitted and l ike the face of an animal. The wall behind him oozed with damp, which collected into drops and slid down.’13 An elderly card-playing woman in a linked dream much later in the novel replaces the little man: She shut her eyes. When she opened them again several more hours had passed… The woman was still playing cards, only she sat now in a tunnel under a river, and the light stood in a little archway in the wall above her … Rachel again shut her eyes, and found herself walking through a tunnel under the Thames, where there were little deformed women sitting in archways playing cards, while the bricks of which the wall was made oozed with damp, which collected into drops and slid down the wall.’14 A man-made structure has been infected by the myth.

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