The abyss, Dickens, and our close and immediate past

St Marylebone workhouse, c. 1903

In E M Forster’s Howards End, the unfortunate – and ultimately tragic – Leonard Bast is described as standing, “at the extreme end of gentility. He was not in the abyss, but he could see it, and at times people who he knew had dropped in, and counted no more.” At the   time of Forster’s writing Howards End (completed 1909), people typically ‘dropped into the abyss’ if they lacked health, money, sanity, education, social status, connections. And the abyss took the form of homelessness, the workhouse, the debtor’s prison, the ‘lunatic’ asylum. It was grim and grey: a true nightmare. Moreover, the stigma of being pauperised haunted the lives of the very poor, and struck to the marrow of their being. Deference and respectability permeated the social fabric of Victorian and Edwardian society; and it is probably not an exaggeration to say that respectability took precedence over all other social considerations. I knew, in the 1970s, an old lady who had enough money put by for a decent (respectable) funeral. I also met a man who had worked as a porter in a Newcastle hospital in the early 1920s. He was once struck in the face by a doctor for having entered the open door of his room without first knocking.

Gustave Dore, London

In respect of the latter examples, the year 1900 is arbitrary, and what we call ‘Victorian England’ profoundly influencing the social and political life of the 20th century – and continues to influence us in unseen ways. The Poor Law was not abolished until 1948, and I remember being astonished when my step–grandmother told me that the workhouse too remained as an institution up to that year. She knew the couple who ran the workhouse in Bletchingley, Surrey. They were a Mr and Mrs Sneezum. Dickens need have looked no further for a name. It is thought that Dickens exaggerates. I doubt he had any need to. My mother remembers being taken to the London offices of my paternal grandfather during the war. She was particularly struck by a hat stand in a narrow upstairs corridor. It had on it a bowler hat thick with the dust of decades. Moreover, in Sidney Street, Cambridge, as recently as the mid–1990s, I saw a boy of about 14 running along the pavement, crying out excitedly, “Dropped a fiver, mine!” Once retrieved from the pavement, he held the grubby note briefly in the air, before – eyes shining – giving it a kiss!