©^ GettyImagesthey depicted middle-class perceptions
of London life – something that Dickens
could be accused of – and often in
a moralised fashion. Moreover, the
argument that there was a criminal
class quite separate from the working
poor has been queried by those who
suggest that much crime was a matter
of necessity by the latter. Indeed, the
Courier newspaper noted on 12 October
1832: “Poverty, misery, and crime, are
near-a-kin. When will the sense of
mankind be turned to prevent rather
than to punish the crimes to which the
most culpable neglect drives unwilling
but despairing offenders?”
Yet this approach could be taken too
far, as there was not only criminality
but organised criminal groups. Violence,
theft, abuse and alcoholism were
all major problems, while, alongside
criminal networks, there was the often
violent chaos of the street. This was
a vision of London life that Dickens
dipped into frequently, such as at the
end of Oliver Twist, when the villainous
Bill Sikes takes refuge in a rookery
(a colloquial term for a slum).
As the financial centre of the world,
London offered Dickens the chance to
write about fraud too, a crime of the
rich and powerful. It was a prominent
theme in a number of his works, notably
with Merdle in Little Dorrit and Carker
in Dombey and Son, but also with an
insurance fraud of the 1830s, which is the
point of reference in Martin Chuzzlewit.
Godfrey Nickleby considers insuring his
life before committing suicide; while, in
Great Expectations, Herbert Pocket wants
to “buy up some good Life Assurance
shares, and cut into the Direction”.
London smog
Crime, which in the case of the rich
also included construction of cheap
buildings with inferior materials for
a quick profit, was not the sole blight
on society: infectious disease was
another. Sanitation fed back into the
very dynamics of population growth,
not least because of exposure to disease
from elsewhere in the world as London
became a hub of international travel.
Other major problems included the lack
of clean water, as well as air pollution,
notably in forms of smoke and fog,
forming the smog with which London
was often associated. The water question
was in part one of sewage, with the filthy
River Fleet known as the Black River of
North London. The problem of polluted
water was tackled head on as it was
known to cause many diseases, but the