Author: Heather Ryan

Regent’s Park

~ Heather Ryan

Regent’s Park is the home of the Lord Watergate. Gertrude Lorimer first goes to this location and makes the acquaintance of Watergate when she is called on for one of her first commissions: the photographing of the recently deceased Lady Watergate. As their title indicates, this was an area of wealth and high society. This can also be gleaned from the Charles Booth archive.

regentspark

The strip of color abutting the park is almost entirely yellow and red, indicators of middle- upper middle- and upper class homes. The Watergates at nearby Sussex Place certainly count among their numbers. But Lord Watergate is unique from the rest of the wealthy crowd by virtue of his interests.

Watergate is a man of science, particularly interested in biology and physiology. Though not passionate in his actions, he is, like Gertrude, passionate in his work. On page 85 Amy Levy describes Watergate’s home as “a name so well known in the scientific and literary world.” But the Lorimers “had, however, little personal acquaintance with distinguished people, and had never come across the learned and courteous peer in his social capacity.”

This would change by the end of the novel as Gertrude marries Lord Watergate and Regent’s Park becomes her home as well, adding the artistic world of photography to the “scientific” and the “literary.” While before the area surrounding Regent’s Park seems out of the Lorimers’ reach, their relationship with it changes from an austere house with a dead body to one of a home and family. It is here that Gertrude Lorimer gains the life that she was meant to live before her father passed away. She is married to a peer and living in a fashionable area but still seriously pursuing her interests in both photography and literature. Regent’s Park becomes the place where, to use the modern terminology, she can have it all.

Booth, Charles. “Baker Street Station.” Charles Booth Online Archive. Web. 17 Dec. 2015.

Levy, Amy. The Romance of a Shop. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2006. Print.

Gloucester Place

~ Heather Ryan

Gloucester Place is only mentioned once in the novel The Romance of a Shop. On page 75 the Lorimer sisters, Conny, and Mrs. Devonshire travel from their home in South Kensington to the future home and workshop of the girls on Upper Baker Street along Gloucester Place. This street connects the richer, more fashionable regions of London like Sussex place where Lord Watergate lives with the more working-middle-class area where the Lorimers settle.

As can be seen from the Charles Booth poverty map, Gloucester Place was surrounded by people of upper-middle, middle, lower middle, and working class. This was a major change for the Lorimers, accustomed to living around people solely from their upper-middle rank of society.

gloucesterplacecharlesbooth

Gloucester Place acts as an intermediary between the Lorimers old life of comfort and leisure and their new one of work and uncertainty. Walking along the street in the Victorian Era would be like walking through a chart of the socioeconomic levels of London. The sisters could physically see their economic situation changing, slipping down the rungs of society and class, as they walked between the houses on the street, showing drastically different ways of life. It is the road the connects the Lorimers’ old life with their new one.

 

Booth, Charles. “Baker Street Station.” Charles Booth Online Archive. Web. 15 Dec. 2015.

Levy, Amy. The Romance of a Shop. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2006. Print.

Swan Lane- The Man with the Twisted Lip

~ Heather Ryan

Upper Swandom Lane, or Swan Lane as it was actually known, is the location of the opium den in the Sherlock Holmes story, “The Man with the Twisted Lip” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It is from this den that Neville St. Clair supposedly disappears. It is the last place that his wife sees him and foul play is suspected by his family, the police, and Holmes. Eventually it is revealed that St. Clair was not missing at all, simply living his double life as a successful beggar from his base above the opium den.

In real life, Swan Lane is a street adjacent to London Bridge on the north side of the River Thames. As seen from the Victorian google map, the southern end of the lane juts against the river and is sometimes underwater at high tide. This becomes a plot point in the Holmes story as Mr. St. Clair throws his coat out the window and into the river when he hurriedly transforms into his beggar self. This action leads the police to believe that Neville St. Clair has met a terrible fate.

SwanLane

As can be seen from the Booth Poverty Map of the region, this street was one of the poorest in London. It is little wonder an upstanding citizen disguised as a beggar would make his base here as he would blend in so well with the surrounding socioeconomic environment. No one who knew St. Clair would ever think to look for him amongst the riffraff hanging around the docks.

SwanLakeCharlesBooth

Shown by the black marks on the map, Swan Lake was also a hotbed of criminal activity. It is little wonder then that Dr. Watson runs into Holmes investigating a crime on the street or, as Holmes notes, that it is so common for people to disappear from the very opium den in question.

Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Man with the Twisted Lip. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.

“Booth Poverty Map & Modern Map (Charles Booth Online Archive).” Booth Poverty Map & Modern Map (Charles Booth Online Archive). N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Oct. 2015.

Piccadilly Circus- “In Dull Brown”

~ Heather Ryan

Piccadilly Circus is an intersection in West London that connects Regent Street to other throughways of London. (Survey of London.) Most notably it joined Regent Street to Shaftesbury Avenue after the latters completion in 1886. After this, Piccadilly Circus lost its circular shape.

PicadillyCircus

As we can see from the Booth Archive, Piccadilly Circus in the late 1890s was a middle-class neighborhood with well-off inhabitants. Piccadillysocioeconomic

It is also where the heroine of the story “In Dull Brown” by Evelyn Sharp, Jean, gets off the omnibus and goes to work as a tutor for a wealthy family. This exemplifies the class different between Jean and her suitor, Tom Unwin. Tom may get off at this stop in the hopes of seeing her because he has no other demands on his time. But for Jean, the only time she will see Piccadilly is for her business. And even then she does not have all the time in the world to chat with Tom. She is constantly aware of the limit to her personal time. Piccadilly acts like a barrier between Jean and Tom. On one side of it she is a woman free to go about as she pleases, but on the other she is an worker who must always be aware of how she might be viewed by her employer. At one point Jean frets over the bad example she would be if her students saw her talking with a strange man she was never introduced with. While Piccadilly Circus may connect East and West London, what it means to Jean is a division between her and Tom.

 

Sharp, Evelyn. “In Dull Brown.” The Yellow Book 8 (January 1896): 181-200. The Yellow Nineties Online. Ed. Dennis Denisoff and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra. Ryerson University, 2012. Web. [Date of access]. http://1890s.ca/HTML.aspx?s=YBV8_sharp_dull.html

‘The rebuilding of Piccadilly Circus and the Regent Street Quadrant.’ Survey of London: Volumes 31 and 32, St James Westminster, Part 2. Ed. F H W Sheppard. London: London County Council, 1963. 85-100. British History Online. Web. 9 September 2015. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vols31-2/pt2/pp85-100.

“Booth Poverty Map & Modern Map (Charles Booth Online Archive).” Booth Poverty Map & Modern Map (Charles Booth Online Archive). N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Sept. 2015.

Policing London

~ Heather Ryan ~ 4 Comments

The anonymous article from Punch titled “The Modern Police Man” is an editorial describing the behavior of the ideal police officer. From this piece I can gather that the goal of the police force was to assist the community he was assigned to for his beat. He is expected to serve the people. One passage describes the simple tasks he might do to help stating, “he rings bells the first thing in the morning, runs to fetch the doctor, helps an early coffee-stall to unpack her cups and saucers, pulls down shutters, gives “lights” to young gentlemen staggering home.” Rather than being a presence to instill fear in the population, the modern police force of England was conceived to add a comforting and neighborly presence and in doing so stop crime before it has a chance to occur.

One of the ways he might achieve this is by befriending the working classes. Justice in England until the Victorian period was a pipe-dream for anyone not of the aristocracy whose members served as judge, jury, and counselor. But a regulated police force provided hope to the lower classes. The article says that the perfect officer “is affable to the footman, and smiles to the page, but suspects the butler, and calls the French maid proud.” He makes himself an ally to the lower servants and is wary of those with a higher status, giving wronged workers a chance to stand up for themselves.

More than that, he provided a comfort to the most vulnerable of the population, children. According to the article, “he is meek to lost children, and takes them to the station-house in the most fatherly manner.” The police were not there to harass the youth for simply being young. They were there to offer aid and guidance. More than anything else, a good relationship with the children of the area could result the safety of the community.

Jackson, Lee. “Dictionary of Victorian London – Victorian History – 19th Century London –Social History.” Dictionary of Victorian London – Victorian History – 19th Century London – Social History. Yale University Press, 3 Oct. 2014. Web. 26 Aug. 2015.<http://www.victorianlondon.org/index-2012.htm>

Intro post

~ Heather Ryan ~ 2 Comments

My name is Heather Ryan and I am a senior history major with minors in English and French. Over the years I have studied many different time periods and topics and Victorian London is one of my favorite. It is a very vibrant and diverse history encompassing dozens of different demographics. And the energy of the time period is hard to ignore. Right now I’m taking my senior seminar on the years from 1889-1929 of US history so it’s nice that I get to study the other side of the Atlantic for my English requirements.

I already had the advantage of being familiar with Victorian London but I had never thought that much about the impact of railroads on England. But reading Bruce Robinsons’ “London: A Modern Babylon” I realized the similar purpose that inexpensive public transportation served to Victorian London as cheap cars did to American cities in the 1950s. Both allowed for the working lower-middle class to move to the suburbs and commute to work. Not only did this allow workers to trade city congestion for a little more space and freedom, it kept them isolated from the truly impoverished, creating even more physical barriers between the classes. Cities like London and New York became places for the really, really rich and the really, really poor, leaving little room for anyone in between.

Robinson, Bruce. “London: ‘A Modern Babylon’” BBC News. BBC, 11 Feb. 2011. Web. 25 Aug. 2015.