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. Starting in his native Germany 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 |
He wasn’t the first to do this, there were vacuum cleaners before there were hoovers. They are less like the guidebooks we use today and more like directories or almanacs. 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 1923 when it was in post-trauma recovery. From time to time I have flicked through them, usually in search of something specific, but decided to dive deeper in search of entertaining sepia-tinged trivia and to see how they depict the changes in London over time. I certainly found some of both, but what struck me most were the omissions, and one in particular.
In this post I will cover the 1879 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. So I have some asides and recommended a not-at-all serious book that gives you a bit more of the flavour of each period. One advantage of the age of the material is that these can be freely obtained from Project Gutenberg. A disadvantage, especially for this first post, is that photography was still in its infancy. This limits the supporting imagery, a problem amplified by companies like Alamy hoovering up and copyrighting old images.
1879 : Victorian London : The 2nd Edition
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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, no passport or Visa was needed in the UK in those days, but money was, and because Imperial Britain scoffed at this funny foreign decimalisation craze, the poor punters ended up with denominations and sub-denominations of bronze pennies, silver shillings and crowns and gold pounds or sovereigns together with an increasing use of banknotes for larger sums. They also had to deal with pricing in Guineas, a remembered gold coin that had actually disappeared from circulation decades earlier.
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| Victorian Coinage |
Exchange rates were clearly key for tourists and these reflected the 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 of your unwittingly being parted from your money and suggested that travellers keep their main funds in 'letters of credit', note 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 and if you didn’t use one of the liveried watermen the pricing was, to put it politely, unregulated. The Guide is equally politely unimpressed.
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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’ and rates varied if you wanted, for instance, a suite or a private sitting room. But generally if you want to reside and dine in style, a budget of £2 a day might suffice. If on the other your aim was doss and dinner or the Victorian equivalent of an Air B&B, 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 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, but it is puzzling. Should we blame out turnips or our cooks?
A critical feature in my view was twice as many pubs served half as many people. Joy' less struggling to get served or find a seat! So Londoners downed 360m pints of the fine mild, bitter porter and the odd lager beers every year, alongside some of the 550m oysters consumed. But Baedeker, consciously European, sniffs that the wine was always expensive and often bad., although you might find better stuff in a Gentleman's Club if you could get in. Tally Ho!
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| London Pub 1880s |
It is conceded that things, especially the consumables, might be better if you could inveigle your way into a Gentleman's Club. It lists 45 of the most important (!), many of which had over 2000 members, all of which charged for entrance, practiced some form of exclusivity. So no 'walkup' tourists then!
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 ’s largest ant heap with 4m+ inhabitants in around 120sq miles, now we have twice as many people in almost five times the area. Few areas were free of overcrowding and squalor.
Of course European cities had similar problems but the tourist might adversely compare the scene with the Napoleonic elegance of the boulevards of Paris. Those were achieved through the relatively dictatorial political clout of Napoleon III while London’s growth was largely serendipitous. In any event, Napoleon’s influence wasn't valued too much either; he ended up buried in the leafy London suburb of Chislehurst.
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 the 6.5m 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 cloaked buildings until the 1960s! Then there were the many heaving slums which explain the density and the traders and shops that occupied a far greater proportion of the road frontages than they do now.
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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’.
So, the initial assault on the senses overcome…...
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 included 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). None of this was too formal.
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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 detail 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.
Each Baedeker is ‘of its time’ and has no external perspective on its flavour, so I have added some links to not-at-all serious writing from each of the three decades, from the free collection at Project Gutenberg. This post covers the first of the three, the other two will come in the next.
Elsewhere in the empire, the unrelentingly well-tailored Stanley Baker and Jack Hawkins fought off the Zulus at Rorke's Drift, with an eye on the 1964 film rights and, outrageously, the first women students were accepted by Oxford University. Is nothing sacred?
Hanson Cab reading : Diary of a Nobody by Weedon Grossmith. On the entertainingly bleak life of the anal London clerk Charles Pooter. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1026 (free)