The Victorians E-Book

John D Wright

• Herausgeber: Amber Books Ltd
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 279

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

'We have long passed the Victorian Era when asterisks were followed after a certain interval by a baby.' - W. Somerset Maugham The Victorian era boasted the glory of the Empire and the grandeur that Empire afforded, it saw huge technological advances in civil engineering and transport, mass urbanisation and social change, as well as still-treasured literature and the most popular sports that we play today. But it was also a time of great poverty, of mass child labour and prostitution, of the Irish Potato Famine and British concentration camps in the Boer War, of the boom and bust of the California Gold Rush and slavery being fought over in America, of sexual hypocrisy and rigid class differences. The Victorians explores the Victorian world from its cholera epidemics and asylums to its workhouses and chimneysweeps, from the Opium Wars to London’s opium dens, from the gangs of New York to convicts bound for Australia, from body-snatchers to freakshows, from the British in Afghanistan to the American Civil War, from imposters claiming fortunes to women pretending to be men. Included are the lives of such colourful figures as Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, the Elephant Man and Jack the Ripper, and the world that inspired Dracula, detective stories and the character of Sherlock Holmes. Expertly written and using 180 photographs, paintings, and illustrations, The Victorians reveals that behind the splendour and the facades was a world of poverty, disease and hypocrisy, where fortunes could be quickly made – and swiftly lost.

Leseprobe

THE VICTORIANS

FROM EMPIRE AND INDUSTRY TO POVERTY AND FAMINE

THE VICTORIANS

FROM EMPIRE AND INDUSTRY TO POVERTY AND FAMINE

JOHN D. WRIGHT

This digital edition published in 2024

Copyright © 2018 Amber Books Ltd

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All rights reserved. With the exception of quoting brief passages for the purpose of review no part of this publication may be reproduced without prior written permission from the publisher. The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. All recommendations are made without any guarantee on the part of the author or publisher, who also disclaim any liability incurred in connection with the use of this data or specific details.

ISBN: 978-1-83886-620-4

Project Editor: Michael Spilling

Designer: Zoë Mellors

Picture Researcher: Terry Forshaw

Contents

1. The City

2. Mind and Body

3. The People

4. Crime and Punishment

5. Empire

6. America

7. Gothic Lives

8. Science and Technology

Index

1 THE CITY

Mention of the Victorians will naturally call up thoughts of London. Vivid images of the city were captured by writers such as Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle, while newspapers added real criminal horror, covering Jack the Ripper and other murderers.

This ‘Bandits’ Roost’ in a New York slum was photographed by Jacob Riis in 1888.

LONDON WAS the home of comfortable Victorian families who supported morality and the best of British traditions. Those in the fine houses of the rising middle class, however, were acutely aware of the poverty, disease and crime festering in the background. This was often brought into their own houses by the unfortunate servants who laboured downstairs. Both rich and poor seemed resigned to inequality and to the immense human problems caused by the city’s rapid growth.

Victorian ‘progress’ was the surprising cause of these dreadful conditions. The Industrial Revolution, which had begun in Britain in about 1760, was in full force by the mid-nineteenth century as factories relied on more and larger machines for mass production. This job-destroying efficiency had already provoked the Luddites, redundant textile workers in Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire and Lancashire, who wrecked machinery between 1811 and 1813 and in later sporadic attacks, including in southern England. Many early leaders were tried and hanged or transported to the colonies.

Industries including textiles and ceramics lured workers from the fields to the cities. By 1851, Britain’s urban population was larger than its rural one. The rush from the land created overcrowded and filthy cities, where many ambitions died in slums and workhouses. The large numbers of skilled and unskilled workers kept wages down to barely subsistence level. The result was an increase in violent crime, robbery, prostitution, alcoholism and early death, often from unhealthy food and sickness.

An agitator of the destructive Luddites was depicted wearing women’s clothes in this political satire.

While London was the emblem of the Victorian age – after all, the queen reigned among its residents – these effects were equally felt in Britain’s industrial powerhouses, such as Birmingham and Manchester, as well as in the growing world cities. Although Victorians were eager for progress, they faced uncertainties in their daily lives, resulting in frustration and anxiety that often led to violence. This was not confined to Britain, as seen in the 1863 Draft Riots in New York City and the Paris Commune insurrection in 1871.

The ‘dark satanic mills’ of the industrial revolution condemned workers to a life of misery and hopelessness.

POVERTY

Victorians believed that the poor had caused their own situation, either through laziness and refusal to work or because they drank, gambled or wasted money. To some, there appeared to be a natural order in which superior people led decent, secure lives and inferior types were condemned to terrible poverty. A survey in 1886 found that one-third of London’s residents were poor. Some paid one penny to sleep in shelters provided in the city. One run by the Salvation Army in Blackfriars in the 1890s offered its only sleeping places in wooden boxes called ‘coffin beds’, on benches, or on the floor.

Poverty was also thought to be a crime that was morally wrong and one that should be punished with prison. Charles Dickens provided the best-known descriptions of London’s debtors’ prisons. His father John and his family had been sentenced to Marshalsea Prison in Southwark in 1824 over a £40 debt to a baker. Charles, then 12, had to quit school and work polishing shoes in a blacking factory to help his family. He wrote about these experiences in Little Dorrit, serialized from 1855 to 1857.

A cartoon published in Punch magazine in 1858 depicted death amid the sewage and pollution in the River Thames.

Dickens’ case was not unusual for Victorians: about 10,000 debtors were imprisoned each year. This could mean an indefinite stay until the money was repaid – not an easy task because prisoners were forced to pay for their rooms and meals. The Debtors’ Act was passed by Parliament in 1869 to stop imprisonment, but those who owed money could still be locked up if they had the necessary funds but refused to pay. By 1900, the prisons still contained 11,427 debtors.

One step above prison was the workhouse, where paupers could live under harsh controls and work to improve their moral character. The sick and elderly were also taken in, while many others were orphans, widows with young children, wives who had been deserted, and ‘fallen women’. The conditions were purposely unpleasant to discourage people from applying or extending their stay.

DIRTY LONDON

Life in the city was filthy. Streets were caked with mud and the droppings of horses and other animals, while the hazy air was choked with fog, smoke and soot. Cesspools in the basements of houses often became blocked and overran, adding to the general stench. When water closets became popular, the raw sewage was run into pipes built to transport rainwater into the Thames. This was to be cleaned as drinking water, but resulted in diseases such as cholera and typhoid. The river’s dreadful smell increased until the ‘Great Stink’ of 1858 occurred. Members of Parliament suffered so much that the curtains of the House of Commons were soaked in chloride of lime to try to block the stench. The effort proved unsuccessful, so the members passed a law to construct a new sewer system.

The Victorian age’s polluted cities greatly shortened a person’s lifespan, especially for the poor who were crowded into slums. In 1851, someone living in the small market town of Okehampton had a life expectancy of 57 years, compared to 26 for a resident of inner Liverpool. Home coal fires and factory fumes caused respiratory diseases and early deaths. Birmingham and Sheffield were more dangerous than London due to their intense coal burning for metal production.

LIFE IN A DEBTORS’ PRISON

INMATES IN DEBTORS’ prisons lived, strangely enough, in a type of community organization run by their own committees. Families could live there with the debtor, and children were born and raised in the prison. Debtors with more money than others were allowed better quarters closer to the prison master. They were allowed visitors who might provide funds so the inmates could pay for items at the prison shop and restaurant, and even spend time outside. The poorest, however, made do with the barest necessities in another wing, sharing rooms with others.

If inmates had little money, they would find debtors’ prison to be an overcrowded miserable existence.

THE TOOLEY STREET FIRE

Fire was a constant fear in Victorian cities, which were crowded with wooden buildings protected by inadequate fire brigades. Londoners were especially wary of the danger, mindful of the Great Fire of 1666 and the more recent memory of the Houses of Parliament burning down in 1834, three years before Victoria ascended the throne.

Another massive fire ravaged the city in 1861 and proved to be the largest since the Great Fire. It began on 22 June, a Saturday, at Cotton’s Wharf on Tooley Street, among warehouses stacked with combustible goods, including hemp, jute, cotton, oil, paint, tallow and saltpetre. Spontaneous combustion of hemp was thought to be the cause, while carelessness increased the blaze, the iron fire doors having been left open.

The ferocious Tooley Street fire shocked Londoners into providing a city-wide fire brigade to prevent future tragedies.

By evening, the inferno stretched from London Bridge to Custom House. Even the surface of the Thames was burning from materials that had spilled onto it, destroying several boats. Fourteen fire engines tried to fight the flames with a low amount of water; even a floating fire engine failed because of the low tide. More tragedy occurred when the fire superintendent, James Braidwood, was killed as a warehouse collapsed on him. ‘It made one very sad’, wrote Queen Victoria in her diary when told of his death. More than 30,000 Londoners gathered to watch the fire, enjoying refreshments sold by vendors and pubs that remained open throughout the night. The fire burned for two weeks and destroyed an estimated £2 million in goods and buildings.

The Tooley Street Fire led to an upgrading of London’s fire services. The small London Fire Engine Establishment (LFEE), run by 25 insurance companies, was replaced in 1866 by a public service, the Metropolitan Fire Brigade.

INCREASED MIGRATION

The overcrowding of cities and harsh economics led to unprecedented emigration, both to and from Britain. Many left for America, Australia and various colonies. The Irish formed the largest number, with an estimated two million escaping the potato famine of 1845–49 to seek a better life in the United States and also in England and Scotland. The UK’s growing industries also attracted migrants from Europe and more distant countries. One could walk London’s streets and soon encounter Japanese, Chinese, Indian and Arab people. Many Jews settled in the city’s East End, especially Spitalfields, and kept up their own language and traditions. They attracted sympathy at first after escaping the Russian pogroms and other persecutions, but the public attitude eventually turned against them. One leader of the anti-immigration movement, Arnold White, called the Jews ‘a danger menacing to national life’, and some members of Parliament unsuccessfully called for restrictions on general immigration.

OTHER GREAT FIRES

WOODEN BUILDINGS IN CITIES around the world in Victorian times were crowded on narrow streets and packed with people who had to fend for themselves during major fires that exceeded the skills and resources of early firemen.

Hamburg lost a third of the buildings in its old district in 1842 when a fire began in a cigar factory and burned from 5 to 8 May. It killed 51 people and destroyed 1700 homes. The fire was the first to shake the new international insurance business, with many British insurers taking enormous losses. Bucharest was devastated on 23 March 1847 by a fire that levelled one-third of the city and virtually all of the central business area. It was started by a teenage boy firing a gun into a loft of dry hay. Fifteen people were killed and 1850 buildings burned down, including 12 churches.

Chicago’s great fire of 1871 burned from 8 to 10 October and destroyed roughly one-third of the city. It left 300 dead, 90,000 homeless and destroyed 17,450 buildings, resulting in $200 million in damage. Tradition says the blaze was caused by Mrs Catherine O’Leary’s cow kicking over a lamp in a barn.

Hong Kong in 1878 suffered a great fire on Christmas night that destroyed several hectares of the city. Local photographers were selling pictures of the tragedy while the embers still smouldered. An English businessman, Edward Fisher, was accused of arson for insurance but was acquitted.

The fire’s terrible destruction of wooden buildings led to Chicago building the world’s first steel skyscrapers.

The potato famine of the 1840s drove millions of Irish to the United States to settle into equally desperate lives.

The most unpleasant migration out of Britain was enforced transportation. Those who broke the law – even for minor street crimes – might be shipped to overseas colonies for seven to 14 years, but often for the remainder of their lives. Even criminals due to be executed sometimes had their sentences reduced to transportation. The policy had begun in 1717, when convicts were sent to penal colonies in America. After that country’s independence, Australia became the main destination. The system was flawed, adding political prisoners such as Irish nationalists and increasing shipments to provide Australia with needed cheap labour. Victorians began to regret this and the idea of giving criminals a free voyage to a new, if rugged, life. The practice was abolished in 1868, after the transport of 158,702 convicts in around 80 years.

IRISH SLUMS IN NEW YORK

The Irish who fled poverty in the Victorian era did not find the ‘American Dream’ in New York City. They were packed into dismal tenements in the city’s Lower East Side, with nearly 300,000 occupying one square mile. One in four residents of Victorian New York was Irish. Sometimes five families would share one room in an apartment that had no toilet, bath or running water. This huddling together of humanity led rapidly to physical and moral decline, evident in epidemics and widespread drunkenness, crime and violence. Many Irish took part in the city’s 1863 Draft Riots, in which more than 100 African Americans were killed.

TAMMANY HALL

THOMAS JEFFERSON, author of American’s Declaration of Independence, observed his nation’s growing population and worried about people ‘piled high up on one another in the cities’. His prediction proved accurate by 1880, when the population of more than 50 million had created major cities. What he did not forecast was the enormous growth of city governments and corruption. Big-city political organizations could handle problems efficiently, but many members were keen to reward themselves and swap favours for patronage.

New York had one of the worst political machines in the Democratic Party’s executive committee, known as Tammany Hall. Under its notorious William ‘Boss’ Tweed, it corrupted local elections, bribed rival politicians, and even influenced state and national politics. Its members had no qualms about a little honest graft. One, George Washington Plunkitt, made large profits from tips about land selected for parks and other major projects. He snapped up the properties and sold them to the city for inflated prices.

Tammany Hall outlived the Victorian era, but erred in not supporting Democratic candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt in his successful 1932 presidential race. He reduced the machine’s power, aided by the new reformist mayor, Fiorello La Guardia.

American artist Thomas Nash depicted the Tweed ring where each member points blame at the next person.

New York’s Draft Riots were a working class protest against conscription to fight in the Civil War.

Outside was no better. As in London and other overcrowded industrial Victorian cities, New York’s streets were filled with animal and human waste, which promoted stench, disease and death. Children played in the filth next to dead horses and roaming pigs and drank contaminated milk sold by street vendors. About 25 per cent of the immigrant Irish children died.

Charles Dickens toured the Five Points area of Manhattan in 1842 accompanied by two policemen, because this was an Irish slum of utter poverty and degradation. In his American Notes for General Circulation published that year, he noted that ‘poverty, wretchedness and vice are rife’. He described the area’s narrow ways as ‘reeking everywhere with dirt and filth’. However, he was quick to compare these conditions with those of other Victorian cities. ‘Such lives as are led here,’ he wrote, ‘bear the same fruits here as elsewhere. The coarse and bloated faces at the doors have counterparts at home and all the wide world over’.

THE GANGS OF NEW YORK

The shocking violence on the streets of nineteenth-century New York was described in Herbert Asbury’s 1927 book The Gangs of New York, filmed by Martin Scorsese in 2002. The basis for both was the underworld that existed in Manhattan’s districts of Five Points, Hell’s Kitchen and the Bowery, the homes of murderers, prostitutes, pickpockets and other thieves. The streets were ruled by such gangs as the Plug Uglies, the Forty Thieves, the Bowery Boys, the Daybreak Boys, the Whyos, and the Dead Rabbits. Their dangerous criminals bore frightening names such as Bill the Butcher, Ludwig the Bloodsucker, Hell-Cat Maggie, Eat ’Em Up Jack McManus, Slobbery Jim, Cow-legged Sam McCarthy, Sadie the Goat (who head-butted victims) and Dandy Johnny Dolan. The latter wore axe blades on his shoes and carried a copper eye gouger.

These gangs were so powerful and dangerous, they would post warnings for the police to stay out of their patches or pay the consequences. They also operated as political clubs supporting various candidates and owned legitimate businesses such as casinos and saloons. Sometimes gang members were business-like in a different way. Piker Ryan, a member of the Whyos, was once caught with a price list for his services, including a punch in the face for $2, crewing an ear off for $15 and murder, listed as ‘doing the big job’, for $100.

The vicious Short Tail Gang in 1887 terrorized New York’s Lower East Side and the docks.

HELL-CAT MAGGIE

ONE OF THE MOST feared gang members in the Five Points district, Hell-Cat Maggie was an Irish immigrant first recruited by the Whyos as a thief. Graduating to violence, she joined the Dead Rabbits, filing her teeth to points and wearing razor-sharp brass fingernails into battle, often against the Bowery Boys.

She screamed as she charged enemies, clawing and biting. She particularly enjoyed tearing ears off victims and pickling them in alcohol for display behind the bar where she worked as a bouncer. Political parties also hired Maggie as a ‘shoulder-hitter’ to threaten or attack opponents during elections.

VIENNESE POVERTY

All the glories of music, architecture, culture and polite society could not hide Vienna’s abject poverty in the Victorian years, when the city was ringed by slums and factories. Even Adolf Hitler fumed about the city’s ‘dazzling riches and loathsome poverty’. Vienna was overwhelmed by poor workers flooding in from the large Austrian Empire after the failed 1848 revolution. These newcomers were housed in the inner city in dreadful tenements with minimal sanitation. The poor seldom received medical treatment, and diseases, especially tuberculosis, cost many lives. Among its victims were the homeless, some of whom lived in the city sewers. Hungry people, many of them children, scraped through rubbish in the streets in search of kitchen waste. By 1891, only one-third of the population had been born in the city. The population of 1.5 million ranked only after London and Paris, but in 1894 Vienna exceeded those cities in its degree of poverty.

THE POPULATION OF 1.5 MILLION RANKED ONLY AFTER LONDON AND PARIS, BUT IN 1894 VIENNA EXCEEDED THOSE CITIES IN ITS DEGREE OF POVERTY.

CHILD LABOUR

Dickens became the best-known victim of the Victorians’ use of working children who had their education cut short and their health often seriously endangered. Yet his work polishing shoes was mild compared to the rough labour of many boys and girls who worked as chimney sweeps, coal miners and workers in factories, shipyards and farms. At the age of five, boys were working in coal mines and girls in domestic service. In many instances, they were badly treated and physically abused. When laws were passed, they only limited the hours and ages of child workers. The Factory and Workshop Act of 1878 banned work for children younger than 10. By 1891, more than 100,000 girls aged 10 to 14 were still in domestic service.

An 1866 engraving depicts child labourers struggling to move coal from the coalface in an English mine.

Child welfare did slowly improve; by the end of Victoria’s reign, most children were schooled to the age of 12. While one-third of boys and girls had received no education in 1852, this had increased to nearly 90 per cent in 1899 for children up to eight years old.

CHILD ABUSE

Two notions intended to better the Victorian family often led to difficult childhoods. The father was considered to be in charge of his family, and he often dealt out strict discipline. This could be administered by a nanny if one was employed, and some proved to be intolerant and mean. Punishments such as moderate smacking and even blows using belts or other instruments were deemed to be family matters. The same painful treatment of young servants and pupils drew little concern, giving sadistic employees and teachers a free hand.

CHARLES DICKENS

BORN IN 1812, Charles Dickens quickly came face to face with Victorian society’s unjust economic and social conditions. Besides being the most popular novelist of that era, Dickens used his stories to expose London’s poverty and social wrongs. Some scenes came from his family’s life, as when Mr Micawber was imprisoned for debt in David Copperfield (1850). He levelled criticism at such sensitive topics as education, public opinion, greed, selfishness and the lack of sympathy for the poor and vulnerable. His despair was expressed in novels such as Oliver Twist (1838) and Bleak House (1853) and increased in his last finished work, Our Mutual Friend (1865).

Dickens also despaired about industrial pollution, as seen in Hard Times (1854), where a mill town’s tall chimneys were ‘puffing out their poisonous volumes’ until domestic windows ‘showed the Coketown people a sun eternally in eclipse, through a medium of smoked glass’.

Along with his fame, Dickens was also a philanthropist, working to right the many social problems he wrote about. He helped establish a safe house in Shepherd’s Bush to aid destitute girls and women who had fallen into prostitution and crime. Another project supported Ragged Schools for poor children, since he believed that education was the best cure for crime and poverty.

Dickens had to leave school and do manual work in a factory but became the world’s most popular Victorian author.

Children from poor families suffered more. They usually had tiring jobs from a young age and might return home to alcoholic, violent parents who abused them. Many boys and girls chose to live mostly on the streets, often as runaways, and some fell prey to thieving or prostitution to obtain food and shelter. In 1848, nearly 2700 girls aged 11 to 16 were admitted to London hospitals for venereal diseases, most resulting from prostitution. The sexual exploitation of children, including rape and incest, was widespread and the Victorian public somewhat hypocritical in condemning without acting. Churches and charity organizations worked to rescue children from moral danger, but the age of consent was only raised from 12 to 13 in 1865. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children was only established in 1891 – 67 years after the one to prevent cruelty to animals.

Poor Victorian children often suffered physical and sexual abuse, with nowhere to turn for help.

MARY ELLEN’S ORDEAL

The first case of child abuse officially documented in the United States had to be reported in 1874 to an animal welfare agency. Mary Ellen Wilson’s working mother boarded her with a woman when the girl was nearly two. When she could no longer pay, the woman turned Mary Ellen over to New York City’s charity department. They allowed another couple, Mary McCormack and her husband, to adopt the girl and then told her real mother she had died.

McCormack, a cruel woman living in Manhattan, would beat the child night and day with anything at hand, including scissors and a rawhide whip. Mary Ellen was not allowed outside and when her mother went to work was chained in a small closet. This torture went on for more than seven years as Mrs McCormack beat, burned, cut and starved the girl. Neighbours could hear her screaming all day, but nothing was done until a case investigator, Etta Wheeler, saw her with scars on her face and arms. She went to authorities who refused to intervene, saying Mary Ellen’s unfortunate situation was better than taking her from her mother.

Mrs Wheeler then contacted Henry Bergh, founder of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, since there was no law against protecting children from physical abuse. He sent an agent to the neighbourhood to confirm the cruelties, and New York State’s Supreme Court removed Mary Ellen from her mother’s custody. The 10-year-old girl testified in court in 1874, drawing the New York Times headline ‘Inhuman Treatment for a Little Waif’. Mrs McCormack received five years of hard labour.

Henry Bergh founded a society to end animal cruelty in 1866 after visiting Britain and seeing one there.

This case inspired a crusade against child abuse and the establishment that year of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, supposedly the world’s first such organization. Mary Ellen was sent to live happily with Mrs Wheeler and her mother. She eventually married, had children and lived to the age of 92, dying in 1956.

THE NEW YORK SOCIETY FOR THE PREVENTION OF CRUELTY TO CHILDREN WAS SUPPOSEDLY THE WORLD’S FIRST SUCH ORGANIZATION.

CRIMINAL ABORTIONS

To be unmarried and pregnant in the Victorian era was considered the end of a woman’s virtue and reputation. Abortion was used to prevent such humiliation and for birth control by working women and those in the middle class wishing to limit their families. Parliament, however, passed the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act (still on the books) that made it illegal for a woman to terminate her own pregnancy. The penalty for her and anyone assisting, including a doctor, was life in prison. Despite this, abortions were very common, with some being labelled as miscarriages. Even doctors were allowed to perform ‘therapeutic abortions’ for married women when pregnancy threatened their lives.

The infamous back-street abortions were usually induced by injecting water into the uterus. Worse methods involved knitting needles and other sharp instruments. Rough activities often worked, such as riding, running or even taking falls. Eating or drinking a herb, drug or dangerous substance such as turpentine were quicker though often just as painful, and even fatal. In Sheffield in the 1890s, abortions were caused by lead poisoning from water pipes, and this quickly inspired a lead compound marketed for that purpose.

THE PHYSICIANS’ CRUSADE

HORATIO ROBINSON STORER, a Boston surgeon, was a fiery campaigner against abortion. He started the Physicians’ Crusade Against Abortion that led to anti-abortion laws in almost every state. It was generally believed that life began at ‘quickening’, when a mother first felt movements of the foetus (about the fourth month), but Storer argued that life began earlier. He also used the fear of the United States being overrun by migrants if abortions lowered the birth rate of native-born whites. ‘This is a question our women must answer’, he said in 1868. ‘Upon their loins depends the future destiny of the nation’.

After an abortion, a poor woman sometimes turned to the black market to sell her dead foetus. Anatomists were eager for bodies to dissect and would pay for a foetus that had resulted from abortion, miscarriage or even infanticide.

While women from better families could receive proper abortions, the poor had to rely on dangerous back-street practitioners.

VICTORIAN FEMINISTS

A woman’s place was in the home throughout the nineteenth century. She had the very best role model in Queen Victoria, who stressed happy family life, motherhood and respectability. For these virtues, women were romanticized and idolized. Their restricted lives began to change, however, with the Industrial Revolution, which created concern for those who laboured in awful conditions and those left unemployed and destitute. Especially in cities, women began to leave their homes to do charitable work, and their entry into the real and rough world prompted the beginnings of the feminist movement. In his novel Bleak House (1853), Charles Dickens satirized female activists with the characters of Mrs Jellyby and Mrs Pardiggle, who neglected their families for charity work.

Emmeline Pankhurst campaigned for women’s vote for 40 years and saw the voting equality act passed weeks before her death.

Britain’s feminist movement became organized in 1859 with the Langham Place Circle in London, formed of middle-class women who campaigned for proper education and employment for women. Several members, including the artist and activist Barbara Leigh Smith, began the first campaign for women’s suffrage in 1866. Emmeline Pankhurst, whose husband actively supported votes for women, founded the Women’s Franchise League in 1889. New Zealand had become the first democracy in the world to grant women the vote in 1893, but this right would come later in Britain in 1918 and the United States in 1920. Pankhurst in 1903 would help found the militant Women’s Social and Political Union, whose members were the first to be called ‘suffragettes’.

CHICAGO GAMBLERS

Among the hard-working and moralistic Victorians, gambling was considered an addictive vice. Often invisible to respectable London families, it was more difficult to control in the young American cities. Chicago soon became a centre of illegal gambling for cards and dice and such sports as boxing, horseracing and cockfighting. By the 1830s, objections by church groups activated city officials to crack down on two gambling dens and jail their proprietors. By 1850, however, some 100 gambling houses existed in the city centre, many of them connected to saloons. Little was done to close these establishments, since they contributed to Chicago’s economy through rents, salaries of employees and gambling customers spending in nearby businesses. During the Civil War (1861–65), gamblers from the struggling South moved into Chicago’s richer fields, joining Union soldiers around the card and dice tables. The winners were often seen riding in an open carriage with a consort, normally from a bordello.

Gambling dens had progressed into large houses and in 1870 these began to link up as big syndicates. They became strong enough to influence politicians by contributions and keep the police away with payoffs. Soon three syndicates controlled gambling, and violence was used to keep control. Chicago, however, was not immune to the Victorian sense of morality, and campaigns by the public and press forced politicians to close down the city’s more obvious gambling organizations. In the 1890s, casinos moved to the suburbs beyond the control of the city.

SUSAN B. ANTHONY

FROM HER HOME NEAR Rochester, New York, Anthony campaigned to abolish slavery and support temperance before she became an early crusader for women’s right to vote in the United States. She voted illegally in the 1872 presidential election and was arrested, convicted and given a fine she refused to pay. In 1888, Anthony helped establish the International Council on Women and in 1892 became president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. ‘There never will be complete equality,’ she said, ‘until women themselves make laws and elect lawmakers’. She was the first woman depicted on US currency when her image appeared on a new dollar coin in 1979.

Susan B. Anthony also campaigned for women to own their own property and keep their earnings.

Casinos and other gambling dens in Chicago drew a mixed crowd of rough characters and the city’s elite.

NEW YORK’S DRAFT RIOTS

The Victorian era coincided with the American Civil War, producing tension and violence in New York City. On 13 July 1863, one of the deadliest riots in American history began when thousands in Manhattan went on a five-day rampage of murder and looting as they reacted to the new law of conscription into the Union army. Since the war was against slave states, the white residents targeted blacks whose cause of freedom they blamed for the war. The city also supported the Southern cause in many ways because of strong economic links to Southern products, especially cotton, which made up 40 per cent of shipping from New York. If the slaves were freed, there was a fear they would flood the city with cheap labour. New Yorkers had voted strongly against Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 presidential election, and Mayor Fernando Wood even made an unsuccessful proposal that the city itself should secede.

THE VICTIMS WERE MURDERED, MUTILATED AND THEIR BODIES DRAGGED THROUGH THE STREETS TO BE HUNG FROM LAMPPOSTS.

The victims were murdered, mutilated and their bodies dragged through the streets to be hung from lampposts. The official death count was 119, but locals said it had been twice that or more. The mob, often inspired by Irish labourers opposed to African Americans taking their jobs, burned down the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue and any place that catered to African Americans, from businesses to rooming houses and bordellos. The riots continued until federal troops arrived, but many African-American families fled the city forever.

IRISH MOLLIE

ONE OF CHICAGO’s richest and best-dressed gamblers was a Virginian, George Trussell. His special love was Mollie Cosgriff, whom he had met as a 14-year-old chambermaid, and they had a child out of wedlock. Mollie then became the madam, known as ‘Irish Mollie’, at a brothel.

When the Civil War ended, Trussell purchased a famous trotting horse, Dexter. As Trussell spent more time at his stables, Mollie became lonely. This came to a head in 1866 when he asked her to host a champagne dinner to celebrate one of Dexter’s victories. Mollie dutifully invited guests and was humiliated when Trussell failed to attend. Still wearing her white dinner gown, she tracked him down in a saloon, where he stood at the bar. Mollie hugged him and pulled a handgun from her purse, shooting the 32-year-old gambler in the heart. ‘George!’ she shrieked, ‘Have I killed you?’ When the police arrived, she begged to kiss Trussell one last time, saying ‘I gave up all for him’.