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] … 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 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 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.

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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.

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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 .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. For Rachel, London will always sit upon its mud.15 Marshes, with their miasmas and tempting will o'wisps, could be associated with not just with evil but also with licentiousness: Samuel Rowlands in 1612 told how a ‘whoring knave’ had caught the clap in Lambeth Marsh.16 Further downstream, Wilfred Owen wrote a monologue for a ghostly male lover (or alter ego?), on nightly leave from Purgatory, in his poem ‘Shadwell Stair’ of 1917:

I am the ghost of Shadwell Stair. Along the wharves by the water-house,

12 Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out, ed. Lorna Sage, Oxford, OUP, 1992, p. 8.

13 Woolf, p. 81.

14 Woolf, p. 386.

15 Woolf, p. 23.

16 Samuel Rowlands, ‘A Whoring Knave’, from The Knave of Hearts, London 1612, sig. C1r.

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And through the cavernous slaughter-house, I am the shadow that walks there.

Yet I have flesh both firm and cool, And eyes tumultuous as the gems Of moons and lamps in the full Thames When dusk sails wavering down the pool.

Shuddering the purple street-arc burns Where I watch always; from the banks Dolorously the shipping clanks And after me a strange tide turns.

I walk till the stars of London wane And dawn creeps up the Shadwell Stair. But when the crowing sirens blare I with another ghost am lain.

It may not be surprising that this object of a love that dared not speak its name is possessed of a body both monumentally and implacably attractive but also figures as a gothic spectre from hidden depths, the tumult of whose eyes suggests a terror that is also terrifying to any that see him. I want to suggest that this chronotope of waterland is a site for the prodigious, whether imagined or material. The area, once it had been banked and developed, was inevitably given over to trade on a huge scale. Its docks are physical manifestations of the volume of London’s imports and exports, registers of excess, thresholds where the produce from abroad is brought into the home country.

W. Daniell, ‘A view of the Proposed West India Docks and City Canal’, 1802

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The commemorative stone erected at the entrance to the West India Dock describes ‘an undertaking which under the favour of God, shall contribute stability, increase, and ornament to commerce.’ Paintings of the West India Docks when these were newly constructed gesture towards a sublime or heroical triumph of art over nature, the geometrical lines of the docks contrasting with the fluidity of clouds and water. These iconic structures stood cheek by jowl with the ‘rookeries’, the wretched habitations of those that lived there.

Augustus Pugin (architecture) and Thomas Rowlandson (figures), ‘West India Docks’, from Rudolph Ackermann's Microcosm of London, or, London in Miniature (1808-11)

Goods were imported, people were exported. In ‘Bound for the Great Salt Lake’, Dickens records a visit to Shadwell Basin and, by naming the area ‘Down by the Docks’, he not only registers the impact that the Docks had had but also contrasts their permanence with the fact that they were a threshold for a new life:

Behold me on my way to an Emigrant Ship, on a hot morning early in June. My road lies through that part of London generally known to the initiated as ‘Down by the Docks.’ Down by the Docks is home to a good many people – to too many, if I may judge from the overflow of local population in the streets Down by the Docks, is a region I would choose as my point of embarkation aboard ship if I were an emigrant. It would present my intention to me in such a sensible light; it would show me so many things to be run away from.

Down by the Docks, they eat the largest oysters and scatter the roughest oyster-shells … Down by the Docks, they consume the slimiest of shellfish, which seem to have been scraped off the copper bottoms of ships …Down by the Docks, they ‘board seamen’ at the eating-houses, the public-houses, the slop-shops, the coffee-shops, the tally-shops, all kinds of shops mentionable and unmentionable – board them, as it were, in the piratical sense, making them bleed terribly, and giving no quarter. Down by the Docks, the seamen roam in mid-street and mid-day, their pockets inside 8

out, and their heads no better. Down by the Docks, the daughters of wave- ruling Britannia also rove, clad in silken attire, with uncovered tresses streaming in the breeze …

Down by the Docks, scraping fiddles go in the public-houses all day long, and, shrill above their din and all the din, rises the screeching of innumerable parrots brought from foreign parts, who appear to be very much astonished by what they find on these native shores of ours. Possibly the parrots don't know, possibly they do, that Down by the Docks is the road to the Pacific Ocean, with its lovely islands, where the savage girls plait flowers, and the savage boys carve cocoa-nut shells … And possibly the parrots don't know … that the noble savage is a wearisome impostor wherever he is ...17

A wonderful juxtaposition of a demonised and material reality, built upon a bravura synecdoche, with an imagined paradise. Brunel’s prodigious tunnel all too obviously turned into a folly. It had been intended for wheeled transport, but the money was not available for the sloping ramps down to and up from the tunnel. It opened and stayed open for twenty-five years served by two vertical entrance cylinders the stairs of which could serve only pedestrians.

From ‘G.W.’s Transparencies of the Thames Tunnel’, 1830

In the tunnel below a kind of fair ran for years. It took two Americans, William Allen Drew18 and Nathaniel Hawthorne to demythologise it:

17 ‘Down by the Docks’, in The Uncommercial Traveller, Works, 34 vols, London, Chapman and Hall, 1867-8, xxix, 257-9.

18 William Allen Drew, Glimpses and Gatherings Augusta, Homan & Manley, 1852, pp. 244-7

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Yet there seem to be people who spend their lives here … All along the corridor …we see stalls or shops in little alcoves, kept principally by women; they were of a ripe age …and certainly robbed England of none of its very moderate supply of feminine loveliness by their deeper than tomb-like interment. As you approach … they assail you with hungry entreaties to buy some of their merchandise, holding forth views of the Tunnel put up in cases of Derbyshire spar … They offer you, besides, cheap jewellery, sunny topazes and resplendent emeralds for sixpence, and diamonds as big as the Kohinoor … together with a multifarious trumpery which has died out of the upper world to reappear in this Tartarean bazaar … The most capacious of the shops contains a dioramic exhibition of cities and scenes in the daylight world, with a dreary glimmer of gas among them all; so that they serve well enough to represent the dim, unsatisfactory remembrances that dead people might be supposed to retain from their past lives … I dwell the more upon these trifles … because, if these are nothing, then all this elaborate contrivance and mighty piece of work has been wrought in vain. The Englishman has burrowed under the bed of his great river … only to provide new sites for a few old women to sell cakes and ginger-beer! It has turned out a sublime piece of folly; and when the New Zealander of distant ages shall have moralized sufficiently among the ruins of , he will bethink himself that somewhere thereabout was the marvellous Tunnel, the very existence of which will seem to him as incredible as that of the hanging gardens of Babylon.’19

Thames Tunnel Annual Fancy Fair (1858)

19 Nathaniel Hawthorne, ‘Up the Thames’, Our Old Home, Boston, Ticknor and Fields, 1863, pp. 286-7.

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Docklands has always provided a set of conspicuous – and prodigious – markers. When the West India Docks were built- they proclaimed to the world Britain’s eminence in trade, serving the translation of colonisation into empire. Now the bank-owned towers of Canary Wharf dominate the area, and the docks have become marinas. Trade and manufacture have given way to money and ‘lifestyle’. (I am, however, a great admirer of the way Sir Norman Foster translated one of the West India Docks into the stainless-steel cathedral of Canary Wharf Underground Station.)

Sir Norman Foster, Canary Wharf Underground, 1999

This has happened even at Jacob’s Island where Bill Sykes met his horrific end. Thomas Beames, who in 1852 was fantasising that this Rookery might be destroyed by fire or earthquake, wrote ‘Some opulent speculator might appropriate the ground and on the foundations of the past rear some vast superstructure to the genius of Mammon.’20 Go down by the Island today and you will find that is precisely what has happened: the architects Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands have gentrified the area with three six-storey blocks of luxury apartments – surrounding a water- garden!

Jacob’s Island, 1994

20 Thomas Beames, The Rookeries of London, London: Thomas Bosworth, 1852, chap. 5.