Baedeker's London : The 1800s.
In Essen in the 1830s, Karl Baedeker saw a golden opportunity for his modest family printing business. As transport around Europe improved and people travelled more, they would value pocketbooks crammed with information on the practicalities and sights. It wasn't long before his name became synonymous with these tourist guides, which have survived competition and are still produced by his descendants today.
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| Karl Baedeker |
I have three original London Baedekers: the 2nd edition from 1879, when his son ran the company and Imperial Britain was in its pomp, the 14th from 1911 in the Edwardian era, when it was in relative decline and on the descent into WW1, and the 18th from 192,3 when it was in post-trauma recovery. From time to time I have flicked through them, usually in search of something specific, usually to see how London changed over time, but also in search of entertaining sepia-tinged trivia.
In this post, I will cover the 1879 (2nd) edition, with the other two to come later. I am hoping that you will want more than just a summary of Baedeker's buckets of facts, and am conscious that each Baedeker is 'of its time' and can have no external perspective on it. I am also conscious of the disadvantage that, especially for this first post, photography was still in its infancy. This limits the supporting imagery, a problem amplified by companies like Alamy hoovering up and copyrighting old images.
If you want to get a fuller flavour of the 'lived experience' of the era, I suggest you read 'Diary of a Nobody by Weedon Grossmith, a novel on the entertainingly mundane life of the London clerk Charles Pooter. You can get a free ebook or PDF copy here: Link
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| The 1879 Guide |
The Guide starts with the necessities. It is in English, so I am unsure who they saw as the audience. Americans? Multilingual Europeans? Citizens of the Empire? Whoever it was, you didn't need a passport or Visa to visit the UK in those days. But you did need money, and to complicate it, Imperial Britain scoffed at the fad for decimalisation, so the bewildered tourist was faced with denominations and sub-denominations of bronze pennies, silver shillings, crowns, gold pounds and sovereigns together with an increasing use of banknotes for larger sums. To add to the confusion, prices were often quoted in Guineas, a coin which had actually disappeared from circulation decades earlier.
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| Victorian Coinage |
Exchange rates were clearly key for tourists, and these reflected the different economic realities of the time. Thanks to the Gold Standard (gold being a more reliable store of value than the promises of Central Banks), the rates held steady at £1=$5. The numerous European currencies also generally held firm.
Baedeker was alive to the possibility that you might be unintentionally parted from your money and suggested that travellers keep their main funds in 'letters of credit', noted the serial numbers of banknotes, and keep the various coins in different pockets.
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| 'Beware of Pickpockets'. |
For Americans setting forth in 1879, the Atlantic crossing was served by a number of shipping companies with famous names like Cunard and White Star. The voyage to Liverpool took around ten days. For around £20, you got a comfortable cabin, while those of us who now turn right on boarding the aircraft got a similarly cramped and unsanitary ride in ‘steerage’ for under half that.
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| Steerage |
There were lots of crossings from Europe. One of the few remaining is Dover – Calais, which took about 100 mins, followed by a train into London taking 120 mins. Nowadays, the boat takes 100 mins and the train 120 mins. So much for progress. But the train had some advantages. If your ship actually docked in London, you relied on small boats to get you onto dry land. If you didn’t use one of the liveried watermen, the pricing was, to put it politely, unregulated.
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| Oceanic : White Star Line: 1871 |
Once in London you needed to find accommodation and vittals. There was plenty of choice, especially away from the May-July social ‘season’. If you wanted to reside and dine in style, a budget of £2 a day might suffice. If, on the other hand, your aim was doss and a basic dinner, or the Victorian equivalent ofAirbnb, you would be comfortable on £1 a day. Anything less, you are below Baedeker's radar. By way of comparison, a bank clerk in the City might be earning £150 p.a. and a senior professional, £500 p.a., labouring classes much less.
| The Ridler Hotel appears in the Guide |
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| A 'comfortable' room |
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| Doss, no Dinner |
Food-wise, the ‘viands’ and fish in London were reckoned generally good, but the guide scoffs at the veggies and puddings in comparison with those found in Europe. Again, some things don’t change. What was the issue? Was it our turnips or our cooks that were not up to scratch?
A critical feature, in my view, was that twice as many pubs served half as many people. Heaven! Plenty of seats. So Baedeker reports that Londoners downed 360 million pints of the fine mild, bitter porter and the odd lager beers every year, alongside some of the 550 million oysters consumed. But, consciously European, sniffs that the wine was always expensive and often bad.
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| London Pub 1880s |
The remedy was to try and gain entry to a Gentleman's Club, and it listed 45 of the most important. Some of these had 2000+ members and all of them charged for entrance and practised some form of exclusivity. So good luck with that!
Venturing out into the City, what impressions would you get? Reading between the lines of the Guide, my guess is that you would be pleasantly surprised to recognise, within the chaotic layout, many of the grand buildings, sights and parks you can see today. For instance, the West End theatres often date back to this period.
But you might be more concerned about wandering the dank alleys and wretched streets between them. London was the world’s largest ant heap with 4m+ inhabitants in around 120sq miles. Few areas were free of overcrowding and squalor. The crowding also partly explains the far greater proportion of the road frontages occupied by traders and shops.
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| The Side Street |
Some negative features were probably overlooked by the Guide because they were common in cities everywhere and taken for granted. The noise of metal-clad carriage wheels on cobble streets must have been deafening in places, even though many were covered in straw to deaden the racket. And while the Guide reports the 6.5 million tons of fuel coal brought to the city by ‘1000 collier boats’ and railways, it doesn’t mention the smogs or the black soot which still cloaked buildings in my childhood!
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| 'Black' Buckingham Palace 1890 |
In a place with an undeveloped sewage system, central food markets and streets used by horses and sometimes drove animals, the smells as much as the sights might impinge on the senses. The Thames is polluted now, but it was far worse then. Baedeker puts a positive spin on this, marvelling at Bazalgette’s ‘Interceptive Main Drainage’ sewer and plans to rid London of the ‘solid parts of the sewage’ which formed ‘thick deposits at the bottom of the river’.
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| The Great Stink |
For an active day breathing in the fetid air, Baedeker points to horse racing, cricket, athletics or hunting with hounds in Surrey. For the evening, you had a choice of theatres, concerts and music halls, even roller skating. Tussauds was there, Gilbert and Sullivan Operettas were popular, HMS Pinafore appeared on stage in the previous year, and until comparatively recently you could 'enjoy' the Minstrels.
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| HMS Pinafore |
Shows that sadly didn't survive include less formal shows like Mr & Mrs German Reed’s Dramatic and Musical Entertainment and Maskelyne & Cooke’s legendary conjuring performances at the Egyptian Hall. (The legend included the story that Maskelyne cut off his own head on stage and made it float around the hall).
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| The Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly |
Where Baedeker gives you context, it is empirical, so we are asked to believe that there are 528,794 buildings in London. Who counted? And he gives the reader plenty of scope (with apologies to Kipling) to ‘fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run’ with a lengthy routine around the ‘grand and historic buildings’. As a tour, this would bore me to tears; there is so much more to a City than its buildings. But he does recommend the Lord Mayor's show as "an ancient and picturesque, though useless custom" and gives a shout-out for the "Sweeps Day May Gambols" and Jack-in-the-Green'. What have we lost there!
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| The Lord Mayor's Show |
We tend to use Guidebooks today to augment hard details gleaned online. They major on contextual information and general puffery, usually with a limited menu of specific recommendations. Baedeker tried to provide that hard detail in a pocketbook, so the format is understandable, but it is bloodless. The details of London’s buildings, attractions and facilities do not collectively impart the character or 'feel' of the place.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Empire, the unrelentingly well-tailored Stanley Baker and Jack Hawkins, with an eye on the 1964 film rights, fought off the Zulus at Rorke's Drift, and, outrageously, the first women students were accepted by Oxford University. Is nothing sacred?
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| The Thin Red Line |
In the next section, Baedecker takes you into the 20th century. Link