A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain (31 page)

Toppers varied in style. In the mid-century – the era during which Albert, Brunel and Abraham Lincoln are pictured wearing them – they became higher in the crown (the ones owned by Lincoln were seven inches high, though they looked taller when seen on him) and earned the nickname ‘stovepipes’ for their resemblance to ‘chimney tops with a border’. They had both advantages and drawbacks. Being tall, they blew off very easily, and made it necessary to remember to duck constantly both indoors and out. If sitting taking notes, however, they made an ideal ‘desk’ when placed on the knees, and
they were very useful for storing things in – papers, and even books could be put inside them, and Dickens once encountered a man who kept a large meat pie in his.

In the first half of the century, the top hat in one form or another had been worn even by the poor, and was certainly seen on the heads of policemen, postmen, labourers, street sweepers and young boys. These cheaper models were made from felt or rabbit fur and appeared, when new, acceptably smart. Once rained upon, they quickly looked bedraggled and the fur became shaggy. It was even possible to buy a soft, collapsible and very cheap version that could be stuffed in the pocket. By the time the stovepipe disappeared in the seventies, top hats had become more exclusive, for they had become the symbol of the office clerk and of those above him in society. The notion that those who did not wear a top hat were somehow outside the polite world is one that crops up in Victorian writings. A periodical reviewing a ‘decadent’ play when it was performed in London sniffed that it was likely to appeal only to ‘long haired, soft hatted, villainous or sickly-looking socialists’,
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and when looking back on the Queen’s reign at the time of the Diamond Jubilee, the
Illustrated London News
cited as evidence of creeping informality (or, if readers preferred, the country having gone to the dogs) this observation on the House of Commons: ‘In the time of Mr Canning, the Minister always came down in silk stockings and pantaloons or knee breeches, and even in the last generation members thought it essential to dress for Parliament at least as well as for a Society call or a garden party. But in recent days unconventionality has been the rule, and low hats and short jackets are quite common.’
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By 1897 the top hat had already largely been relegated to formal wear, because another type of headgear had become the customary wear of office clerks. This was the ‘bowler’,
though it was called a Derby in the United States (Americans first encountered it at Epsom) and its inventors, the firm of Lock in St James’ Street, called it – as they still do – a Coke. This was a narrow-brimmed hat of pressed felt with a rounded crown. The first of these had been ordered in 1850, from Lock’s, by William Coke, the Norfolk estate owner who was later Earl of Leicester. Coke had sought a more hard-wearing hat with which to equip the gamekeepers on his estate, for their top hats were constantly knocked off by low branches. When a prototype was made for him, he visited the shop and tested it by stamping several times on the hat. It withstood his weight, and he ordered more of them. Widely worn in the countryside, the bowler was soon taken up by urban office-workers, and became something of a symbol of the nineties. Sherlock Holmes’ assistant, Doctor Watson, was often depicted wearing one.

The hair styles concealed – or set off – by these forms of headgear varied as much as would be expected over a period of sixty-four years. In the thirties beards were almost unheard of and were deeply unfashionable, as they had been all through the eighteenth century. Moustaches were not worn except by foreigners or by somewhat rakish Englishmen (Prince Albert had one, but does not seem to have started a trend). Since before the beginning of the reign, men had had a habit of wearing their hair parted vertically down the back of the head and combed forward at the sides. This style, which can sometimes be seen in old photographs, gave their faces a look that is entirely of the age. Pictures of old men at the end of the century often show them with this hair style, so deeply engrained was the habit that they never broke it. In Dickens’ time these side-combed
locks, grown long and trained into points thrust forward like horns, were sported by young street-corner men, as can be seen in Cruikshank illustrations.

Whiskers became fashionable at the time of the Crimean War. Partly because the officers in the field were too busy, or too ill-equipped, to shave every day, a certain carelessness in this respect became stylish. The Army had for some time worn moustaches, and in the severe Crimean winter beards were permitted. Dandies in England began to sport facial hair in the hope of being mistaken for returning heroes. Such adornments had, in any case, been out of fashion for so long that it was inevitable they would return. By the sixties no self-respecting ‘swell’ would be seen about without a pair of ‘dundrearies’. These were a combination moustache and side-whiskers, the latter often so long that they hung down to the chest. The name derived from a character – Lord Dundreary – in Tom Taylor’s 1855 play
Our American Cousin
. The style, which became as emblematic of the 1860s as the platform shoe was of the 1970s, became particularly associated with foppish, drawling, lady-killing ‘mashers’ who filled the pages of novels by the then popular author George Whyte-Melville. By the following decade full beards were more common, and these were often worn for the whole of their lives by men of the generation that grew up in the eighties and nineties. By the latter decade small, neat moustaches were considered more suitable, and hair – which in the middle decades had often been grown over the ears (one thinks of John Ruskin) – became neat and short, as it would remain until the 1960s.

Men commuted to work in several ways. The wealthiest travelled in their own carriages or in hired cabs. Others went
by omnibus, though this was initially too expensive a conveyance for the many to use. In the early decades of the reign, when a clerk might make seven shillings a week, the cost of a single journey was a shilling. Only gradually, with the advent of the tram and the Underground, would a majority of London commuters travel on wheels. Prior to that, crowds of them walked to work – a daily journey that might well take an hour or more. One of the sights of the capital was to see them pouring in their thousands through the turnstiles on Waterloo Bridge, paying the toll as they went.

And what of the places of work to which they repaired? The office was an environment that changed between the beginning and end of the reign as completely as it has changed between 1901 and the present. The word ‘office’, today a catch-all term for any work space that contains a desk, was not applied to commercial premises, where the place for doing paperwork was called the ‘counting house’. Readers of Dickens will be familiar with early nineteenth-century clerks – whether Uriah Heep or Newman Noggs – and with the surroundings in which they toiled. Many firms – though they might well be important and successful – were extremely small. Before the monstrous growth of such modern paraphernalia as marketing, human resources and user support departments, a business might, indeed, consist of a single man, who dealt with all the paperwork himself. Equally common would be a proprietor and a single clerk (Bob Cratchit was Scrooge’s sole employee), and even this man might be temporary or part-time. A study carried out in Liverpool in the 1870s estimated that the average number of clerks in a firm was four.

A large enterprise, such as a government department, the Bank of England or the East India Company, would have dozens of clerks, and so would a shipping company in any major port. These men often worked in large rooms that allowed even less privacy than the open-plan offices of today. Darkness and cold were familiar problems, for lighting would be provided only by candles or oil lamps, and the stove or fireplace might well be at the far end of a long room. For a clerk to keep his scarf on, as Cratchit did, would not have been unusual. Desks were high and sloping, like that of an old-fashioned schoolteacher, and in a large office could be long enough for half a dozen men to sit side by side, perched on high, backless stools (spinal pain and rounded shoulders were endemic) and perhaps facing a similar row of clerks. Whatever else was to change in the course of the century, offices furnished in this way were to continue in use throughout the reign of Victoria and beyond.

Despite their numbers, the places in which these clerks laboured would have had the stillness of a church, for there was no machinery to create noise. Many counting houses were extremely cramped and unhealthy, for they might be squeezed into back courts in a crowded commercial district like the City of London or, in industrial premises, they might be too close to the noise and fumes of factory machinery. In either case there were no ‘health and safety’ regulations to ensure access to minimal daylight or fresh air.

Documents were written out in the ‘court hand’ that the men learned and practised, and a glance at surviving ledgers or letters, in which not a single error can be spotted among the rows of precise lettering, bears witness to their skill. They were required to be equally meticulous in adding columns of figures and entering these in cash books. In an era when the majority of people could not read or write, these abilities represented a
valuable asset, and clerks were a small, exclusive fraternity (in 1851 they made up less than 1 per cent of the population). With the coming of compulsory education in the seventies, they were to feel they had lost both professional mystique and status.

They had a life that was relatively secure, but normally without excitement. They were recruited into their positions while in their early or mid-teenage years. A majority came by personal recommendation (a vital element in any Victorian dealings), by family precedent (a great many people of both sexes followed their parents’ occupations) or by advertisements in newspapers – a tactic resorted to by both employers and those seeking positions. The notices always asked for the same thing: ‘must write a good hand’. The applicant must also, as for any respectable position, furnish testimonials. Once accepted, he might well remain with the same firm for the whole of his working life, for the ethos of the time involved a very high degree of mutual loyalty between employer and employee. Relations within an office might well be highly personal, for companies were family-run to a vastly greater extent than is the case today, and both the proprietors and those who worked for them might bear the same surname for generations. A clerk who served a single family for the whole of his working life was not much different in outlook from a domestic servant who did the same.

A young man in a counting house would serve a five-year apprenticeship, usually under the tutelage of an individual, more senior clerk, before being allowed to see himself as qualified. Clerks were as varied a group as the wide worlds of commerce and administration could produce. Those in banks were considered to be the at the top of the profession, but international commerce was not far behind, for there was always glamour attached to the whiff of exotic places that this
brought with it. The men themselves varied between those – the majority – of modest income and ambition and those of comfortable means, who sometimes worked for a few years without pay. These latter were often the sons of merchants, and chose to learn the ropes of their profession before setting up in business on their own. After he had completed his training, a clerk might – if he were in a small firm that had no hierarchy or ‘career ladder’ – do literally the same work every day until old age or failing eyesight made him unable to continue. In a large organization it might be possible for a valued employee to receive a pension, but this was not something to which most could look forward. In a great many cases, they would hope for a parting gift from their employer, consisting of whatever he was willing to bestow.

Clerks dressed in black, and would have been immediately recognizable in the street from their stooped shoulders, ink-stained hands and general pallor. Their hours of work might be extremely civilized – some government departments began at ten and finished at four, and half-past four or five were typical finishing times – with a break of an hour for lunch. However, clerks had to remain in their offices until the necessary work was finished, and if that took longer than the allotted span of their day, they would simply have to continue. Depending on the nature of their business, there would be busy times of the week or the month or the year, during which they might be expected to work into the night. On Saturdays, when under normal circumstances they could hope to finish at lunchtime and have the afternoon off, they might just as easily have to stay late to complete the week’s paperwork. A survey of banks comments that in Manchester in the thirties and forties, before the introduction of Saturday half-days had taken hold, it was ‘quite common in the principal banks and warehouses to see every window illuminated up
till nine, ten and even eleven p.m., and the longest and sweetest of midsummer evenings often sank in the west before ever a door was locked and a lad set free.’
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They were not paid overtime, and – like everyone else until the 1930s – had no paid holidays. Though they sat down all day, their work was physically taxing, for until the latter decades of the reign there were no devices to save labour or to lessen the wearisome nature of their tasks.

Dickens, in
Sketches by Boz
, describes an inhabitant of this world, with its:

dingy little back-office into which he walks every morning, placing his hat on the same peg, and placing his legs beneath the same desk: first, taking off that black coat which lasts the year through, and putting on one which did duty last year, and which he keeps in his desk to save the other. There he sits till five o’clock, working on, all day, as regularly as the dial over the mantel-piece, whose loud ticking is as monotonous as his whole existence: only raising his head when someone enters the counting-house, or when, in the midst of some difficult calculation, he looks up at the ceiling as if there were inspiration in the dusty sky-light with a green knot in the centre of every pane of glass. About five, or half-past, he slowly dismounts from his accustomed stool, and again changing his coat, proceeds to his usual dining-place.
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