Back to: SingSurf home page Derek Morris
From his birth in 1840 until his death 62 years later James Bagot Morris lived in the centre of London and ran the tailors shop that he had inherited from his father when he was only nineteen years old. With Queen Victoria on the throne, an Empire to excite support and living in a rapidly growing city there was much for the Morris family to dicuss and admire. Whilst the Morris business prospered there were many parts of London where conditions were appalling and were to remain so for many years.
In 1844 Engels wrote:
"I know nothing more imposing than the view which the Thames offers during the ascent from the sea to London Bridge, The masses of buildings, the wharves on both sides, especially from Woolwich upwards, the countless ships along both shores, crowding ever closer and closer together until, at last, only a narrow passage remains in the middle of the river a passage through which hundreds of steamers shoot by one another; all so this is so vast, so impressive, that a man cannot collect himself, but he is lost in the marvels of England's greatness before he sets foot upon English soil."
Many passengers would leave their steamers at Wapping and take a hansom club into London. To one visitor:
"the drive of four or five miles seemed interminable, streets, streets, streets, at first chokingly narrow and notoriously alike, but gradually broader and more various, and in every street, shops and their signboards, till one grew dizzy with looking out! Such an impression of vastness and populousness one has never received before what an enormous aggregate of wakeful humanity."
Twenty five years later in 1868 Henry James described his first arrival in London in similar words
"a wet, black Sunday about the first of March... that drive from Euston after dark to Morley's Hotel in Trafalger Square ... dusky, tortuous miles in the greasy four wheeler to which my luggage had compelled me to commit myself... [London's] immensity was the great fact and that was a charm the miles of house tops and viaducts, the complication of junctions and signals through which the train made its way to the station had already given me the scale. The weather had turned wet. The low black houses were as inaminate so many rows of coal scuttles, save where at frequent corners from a gin shop, there was a flare of light more brutal still than the darkness."
Back to: SingSurf home page Derek Morris