Charles Dickens Victorian Christmas in London: Then & Now
It is a commonplace that the present Government has it in mind to take the country back to the 1950s, pre the 1956 Suez debacle that signalled the start of the public slide for British imperial power obviously. How successful they have been can be debated, but there is also a sense that, pace Mrs Thatcher’s Victorian Values, another agenda is to return to the highpoint of early to mid- Victorian capitalism in the 1850s and 1860s.
It is difficult to get away from the reality of what has been created since 2010 in the name of a more flexible labour market, of the kind that was first trialled in the 1830s.
It is not just food banks, for which numbers of people actually in work have to rely at some point.
The more difficult parallels are the casualization of labour and the winter night shelters. It is hard to think of two things that better characterise Victorian London in the winter months.
In the Victorian summer many worked in agriculture (limited numbers now do). When the weather turned colder, and Raph Samuel’s masterful essay Comers and Goers documents this very carefully, many turned to the City and London, the Great Wen, in particular.
They came first of all to look for warm places to sleep. These were often railway arches or the nooks and crannies of large buildings that can still be found in central London but the night shelters were opened during November depending on the weather. Secondly they came to try and find casual work. If they could not there were soup kitchens to stave off starvation for most.
Winter night shelters are still very much a feature of London in winter 2014 though the numbers using them will certainly be many fewer than in Victorian times.
In fact the Christmas period was the best of the winter season for those seeking casual employment even 150 years ago. It was after the festivities had ended in January and February that things started to get really tough.
London in December by the 1860s had started to become a significant place of Christmas activity and commerce and the more so as the Victorian era wore on.
As those with money spent it and enjoyed themselves, those without money could at least earn a little by helping the process along.
As Samuel notes the development of Christmas as a ‘spending season’ provided for street sales of novelties and holly and mistletoe. He argues that London in December was a ‘paradise of odd jobs’ whether helping scene shift in pantomimes or haul seasonal post.
However in a sense Dickens’ Scrooge and his clerk who was expected to work at Christmas were atypical of the period. The job had long hours, low pay and poor conditions but it was a regular job.
By contrast much mid-Victorian labour was irregular or casual- certainly if it lacked any skilled element- and the parallel with our own times is growing stronger by the year.
As Samuel noted ‘Christmas was the winter harvest for the wandering tribes. When it was over things changed for the worse. January and February were bad months for the working man’.
Of course the idea of the 1945 welfare state was to remove this uncertain hand to mouth existence dependent on the weather and on finding some kind of job tramping from place to place.
And now, it is back.
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