Suffer the Little Children
The Armory vs. Delamirie blog of yesterday leads onto two further posts: one on the reality of life as a 'climbing boy' in Georgian London, and one on the life of Paul de Lamerie. The children get to go first.
So how did a child end up as a sweep, or an apprentice maid? To be born very poor in London was no joke. At the bottom of the working ladder there was a reasonably sized population of piecemeal workers living in lodgings, often situated around the Holborn 'rookeries' (old Tudor courtyards surviving the fire, but too rickety and infested for anyone else to want to live there). The men took casual labour, and the women made cheap cotton lace, ran errands or sorted rags, often turning to prostitution when things got very tough. Gin gave cheap recourse to temporary insensibility, but it didn't prevent pregnancy. These people didn't need the added burden of children. Neither did the unwed serving girl who ended up pregnant with her lover's, or her master's child. I'm not a fan of the theory that all Georgian gentlemen molested the servants, but Samuel Pepys's constant pestering of the beleaguered Mercer shows it took strength of character to prevent wandering hands. A look through the Old Bailey records of the time reveals too many incidences of infanticide committed by unmarried women. Typically: servant girl takes to her bed, pleading fever. Gets up two days later and visits outside privy. Returns to work. Household suspicious. Investigates privy (!). Finds dead baby in mire. I am sure only a small proportion of these cases came to court, and would depend upon the bond of affection between servant and household. How many prostitutes came to term in poor lodgings and ditched the baby without detection?
In an attempt to both understand and prevent poor parents doing away with, or mistreating their children, Thomas Coram set up the Foundling Hospital in Brunswick Square, opening in 1741. Coram was a sea captain, who returned to London and became distressed by the state of the children of the poor. William Hogarth painted a series of pictures for the hospital. He also set up a wet-nurse system near his house at Chiswick and acted as 'Inspector of Nurses'. He was supposed examine the quality of their character and dwelling, but I imagine this job had some perquisites. George Frederick Handel donated an organ to the hospital and gave performances to benefit the charity. Originally, a basket hung outside the gate of the hospital in which babies might be placed anonymously, with a token from their former life (it was intended for newborns, of less than two months). The capacity of 400 was soon reached, and in desperation Coram introduced an interview system, where mothers had to present themselves and explain their situation. At the end of the interview, they were presented with a small painted ball. A white ball meant their child had been accepted. A red ball meant they had made the waiting list. A black ball meant no, giving rise to the modern meaning of 'black-balled.'
Children taken into the Foundling Hospital were sent out to Hogarth's Chiswick until they were four or five, when they returned to Brunswick Square where in theory, they received the rudiments of an education before they were 'apprenticed', at fourteen for the boys and sixteen for the girls. The reality of the Foundling Hospital, noble though its aims were, was that it hired out the children as day labour. A fact testified to by illustrations and cartoons of the time (such as the one in the gallery below, with the sweep leaving the hospital for his day's labour). Of the fifteen thousand children presented to the hospital in its first four years, less than a third survived to adolescence. A shameful statistic, and one Coram was disillusioned by. Poor families who managed to keep hold of their children fared little better, and it was not uncommon for people in desperate straits, or poorhouses to sell children into the service of the 'master-sweeps'.
Master-sweeps were rough men who patrolled the streets of London with their climbing boys and sometimes climbing girls, waiting to be accosted by housekeepers and footmen. Reliance on coal fires for heat and cooking meant London was a smoky place, full of labyrinthine chimneys connecting rooms and even different houses. Soot collected on brick ledges and double-backs. A lot of soot meant fire, and no one in London liked the word fire. The extendable brushes still used today would not make it around the corners of Georgian London's chimneys. Only small children were agile enough to scramble up and brush the soot down, with a hand-held brush. After pushing the child up the chimney, the master-sweep would gain the roof and wait for the child to reach the top of the chimney, thus proving they had done the job properly. Often, the fireplace and chimney were still hot, particularly in kitchens where a constant fire was necessary.
It is necessary to avoid sentimentality when researching the lot of these children, but it is hard not to be affected by the tales of their woes. In 1817, the account of the death of Thomas Pitts was recounted before a Parliamentary Committee, in an attempt by humanitarians to have something done about the lot of the climbing children.
'On Monday morning, 29 March 1813, a chimney sweeper of the name of Griggs attended to sweep a small chimney in the brewhouse of Messrs Calvert and Co. in Upper Thames Street; he was accompanied by one of his boys, a lad of about eight years of age, of the name of Thomas Pitt.'
The fire was still lit at the brewhouse, so Griggs extinguished it and sent the boy down from the top. Inside the chimney was an iron pipe, perhaps carrying hot water. It remained scalding hot, and Thomas Pitt became lodged against it immediately. When ordered to come out, he apparently responded with a pathetic cry of, 'I cannot come up, master, I must die here.’ The alarm was raised and a bricklayer working nearby came and broke the boy out of the chimney, but he was dead. The report of the surgeon attending was thus:
'On inspecting the body, various burns appeared; the fleshy part of the legs and a great part of the feet more particularly were injured; those parts too by which climbing boys most effectually ascend or descend chimneys, viz. the elbows and knees, seemed burnt to the bone; from which it must be evident that the unhappy sufferer made some attempts to return as soon as the horrors of his situation became apparent.'
Should any of these boys survive to adolescence, they were prone to the serious malady 'soot-warts'. For decades it was believed to be a venereal disease resulting from sooty love-making, probably because it arrived at the same time as puberty. It was Percivall Pott, in 1775, who recognised it as the first occupational cancer in his treatise Chirurgical observations Relative to the Cataract, the Polypus of the Nose, the Cancer of the Scrotum. Pott's treatise is not for the faint-hearted or for anyone in possession of a scrotum, so I content myself with the following extract.
'The fate of these people seems singularly hard; in their early infancy, they are most frequently treated with great brutality, and almost starved with cold and hunger; they are thrust up narrow, and sometimes hot chimnies, where they are bruised, burned, and almost suffocated; and when they get to puberty, become peculiarly liable to a most noisome, painful, and fatal disease.'
Just in case you thought the girls got away with it, they didn't. There were a few incidences of climbing girls, but mostly they were put out to do 'a woman's work'. This included helping midwives such as Elizabeth Browrigg. Brownrigg was a respected midwife in Fetter Lane. She took girls from the Foundling Hospital and used them as maids to help her during births. A girl named Mary Jones ran back to the Foundling Hospital in 1765, crying cruelty. The hospital investigated and warned James Brownrigg to keep his wife under stricter control. The neighbours complained again, but nothing was done. By the 4th of August 1767, the Browrigg's had murdered a girl in their care.
Mary Clifford was fifteen, and came to the Foundling Hospital as the result of a broken home. Upon the death of her mother, her father had married another woman, also Mary. Four years later, he left her. Unable to support a young girl, Mary had left her with the Foundling Hospital and 'gone into Cambridgeshire'. Mary Clifford was put into service with Elizabeth Brownrigg with another girl, Mary Mitchell, who was to testify at the Brownrigg's trial for Clifford's murder.
Mary Clifford had the misfortune to be a bed-wetter, giving Brownrigg an excuse to shave her head, strip her naked, make her work naked, and beat her while she hung from a hook, naked. They then locked her up for the weekends when they went to Hertfordshire, without food or water. Brownrigg and her son, John, were clearly unrestrained sexual sadists. Georgian courts refrain from discussing sexual abuse (although they delight in the minute mechanics of sodomy), but the full transcript of the case in the Old Bailey records dwells repeatedly upon Mary's near-constant nakedness and the injuries inflicted upon her whilst naked, inferring sexual intention on the part of both Brownrigg and her son. She was beaten, chained, and starved. James Brownrigg, the husband, sometimes attempted to restrain his wife, by hiding her whips and sticks, but he wasn't very good at it. John Brownrigg sounds a disgusting little article in late adolescence, who liked administering beatings to a naked girl who was quite possibly of slow wit.
In midsummer 1767 Mrs Clifford returned to London and sought out her step-daughter in Fetter Lane. She was turned from the door, John Brownrigg telling her that Mary did not want to see her. The real reason was that he and his mother had beat Mary into insensibility. However, before we condemn Georgian London as a hell-hole without mercy, we see the testimony of William Clipson, apprentice baker to Mr Deacon next door. Clipson was upstairs in his master's house and happened to look into the Brownrigg's yard. There he saw Mary Clifford, lying in the filth with the Brownrigg's pig, and crawled out of a sky-light in order to get a proper look at her.
'I spoke to her two or three times, but could get no answer; I tossed down two or three pieces of mortar, and the third piece fell upon her head; then she looked up in my face, I saw her eyes black, and her face very much swelled;...I went down and told my mistress what I had seen, and what a shocking condition the girl was in; then a watchmaker's wife, that lives opposite to us, went and found out the girl's mother-in-law (he means step-mother), and she came to our house; we told her what I had seen, and what a condition the girl was in; she cried...'
The parish overseers and a Constable were called to the house. The Brownriggs denied the girl was within the house, but the neighbours, Mrs Clifford refused to leave until she was produced. In the end, James Brownrigg was threatened with Newgate, and they produced both Mitchell, and Mary Clifford. Mrs Clifford was distressed by the state of her step-daughter.
'She was in a sad condition indeed, her face was swelled as big as two, her mouth was so swelled she could not shut it, and she was cut all under her throat, as if it had been with a cane, she could not speak; all her shoulders had sores all in one....I suppose they were cut by whips or sticks...her head was cut, she had a great many wounds upon it, and cuts all about her back and her legs; when I pulled her shoes and stockings off at the workhouse, I found her legs cut cross and cross, as if done with a thin end of a whip, and her back worse than her legs, and a very bad wound upon one of her hips.'
Mary Clifford died later that day. Elizabeth Brownrigg was found guilty and hanged at Tyburn the Monday following her trial. James and John Brownrigg spent six months in Newgate and were bound over for seven years. Such was the public approbation for John Brownrigg that he shortened his name to Brown and moved further west, somewhere near Oxford Circus.
The feral desperation of abject poverty is nowhere more depressing, and well-illustrated than in Georgian London, nor the cruelties it allowed those who came to be in a position to mete them out. It also draws a clear distinction between people who mistreated children because of their own poor state, and people who abused children because it was in their nature to do so. Such niceties of distinction are still with us today. Tyburn is not.
