London in the 1840s was sprawling and smoke-filled, a city of extreme
wealth and abject poverty. Some streets were elegant with brilliantly
gas-lit shop windows full of expensive items, while others were narrow,
fetid, muddy, and in many cases foul with refuse and human filth.
Railways, stations and sidings were devouring whole districts and
creating acres of slums or 'rookeries' into which the poor of the city
were jammed and where crime, disease and prostitution were rife.
The most sensational crime of the epoch, the murder of Patrick O'Connor
by Frederick and Maria Manning, filled the press in the summer and
autumn of 1849. Michael Alpert uses the trial record of this murder,
accompanied by numerous other contemporary sources, among them
journalism, diaries and fiction, to show how day-to-day lives, birth,
death, sickness, work, shopping, cooking, and buying clothes, were lived
in the crowded, noisy capital in the early decades of Victoria's reign.
These sources illustrate how ordinary people lived in London, their
incomes, entertainments, religious practice, reading and education,
their hopes and anxieties. Life in Early Victorian London reveals how
ordinary people like the Mannings and thousands of others experienced
their multifaceted lives in the greatest capital city of the world.
Early Victorian London lived on the cusp of great improvements, but it
was a city which in some aspects was mediaeval. Its inhabitants enjoyed
the benefit of the Penny Post and the omnibus, and they were protected
to some extent by a police force. The Mannings fled their crime on the
railway, were trapped by the recently-invented telegraph and arrested by
'detectives' (a new concept and word), but they were hanged in public as
murderers had been for centuries, watched by a baying, drunken and
swearing mob.
