Dodger

Author’s acknowledgements, embarrassments and excuses with, at no extra cost, some bits of vocabulary and usage

DODGER IS SET broadly in the first quarter of Queen Victoria’s reign; in those days disenfranchised people were flooding into London and the other big cities, and life in London for the poor – and most of the people were the poor – was harsh in the extreme. Traditionally, nobody very much bothered about those in poverty at all, but as a decade advanced, there were those among the better off who thought that their plight should be known to everybody. One of those, of course, was Charles Dickens, but not so well known was his friend Henry Mayhew. What Dickens did surreptitiously, showing the reality of things via the medium of the novel, Henry Mayhew and his confederates did simply by facts, lots and lots of facts, piling statistics on statistics; and Mayhew himself walked around the streets chatting to little orphan girls selling flowers, street vendors, old ladies, workers of all sorts, including prostitutes, and exposed, by degrees, the grubby underbelly of the richest and most powerful city in the world.

The massive work known as London Labour and the London Poor ought to be in every library, if only to show you that if you think things are bad now, they were oh so much more worse not all that long ago.

Readers may have heard of the movie Gangs of New York; well, London was worse and getting even more so every time fresh hopefuls arrived to try their luck in the big city. Mayhew’s work has been shortened, rearranged and occasionally printed in smaller volumes. The original, however, is not heavy going. And if you like fantasy, in a very strange way fantasy is there with realistic dirt and grime all over it.

And so, it is to Henry Mayhew that I dedicate this book.

Dodger is a made-up character, as are many of the people he meets, although they are from types working, living and dying in London at that time.

Disraeli was certainly real, and so was Charles Dickens, and so was Sir Robert Peel, who founded the police force in London and became Prime Minister (twice). His ‘peelers’ did indeed replace the old Bow Street runners who were, more or less, thief-takers and not known for excessive bravery. The peelers were a very different kettle of fish, being drawn from men with military experience.

Readers will recognize other personages from history along the way, I expect. Most fantastic of all was Miss Angela Burdett-Coutts, heiress of her grandfather’s fortune when she was still quite young and at that time the richest woman in the world, apart perhaps from a queen here or there. She was an amazing woman who did indeed once propose marriage to the Duke of Wellington. But more importantly, for me at least, she spent most of her time giving her money away.

But she wasn’t a soft touch. Miss Coutts believed in helping those who helped themselves, and so she set up the ‘ragged schools’, which helped kids and even older people to get something of an education, wherever they were and however poor they were. She helped people start up small businesses, gave money to churches, but only if they were in some way assisting the poor in practical ways, and all in all was a phenomenon. She plays a major role in this narrative, and since I couldn’t ask her questions, I had to make some informed guesses about the way she would react in certain circumstances. I assumed that a woman as rich as her without a husband would certainly know her own mind and generally not be frightened of anything very much.

The Romans did build the sewers in London; they were haphazardly repaired as the generations passed. The sewers were mostly intended for rain water, rather than human waste, cesspits and septic tanks effectively doing that job, and it was when these overflowed, simply because of too many human beings, that you were in the land of cholera and other dreadful diseases.

There were indeed toshers, whose lives were anything but glamorous, but the same applied to the mudlarks and the young chimney sweeps who had nasty diseases of their very own. Dodger, then, was very lucky to find a landlord who was in receipt of four thousand years’ worth of food safety information. But even then, I have to admit, as Mark Twain did many years ago, that I may have put a little touch of shine on things.

I didn’t need to put a shine on Joseph Bazalgette, who appears in this book as a young but keen man. He was the leading light among the surveyors and engineers who changed the face, and most importantly the smell, of London sometime after the story of Dodger has been told. The new London sewers and sewer works were one of the technological miracles of the new Iron Age and so, with some maintenance here and there, they remain.

‘Boney’, of course, was the nickname of Napoleon Bonaparte, and if you don’t know who he was, I am quite certain, alas, that your keyboard will sooner or later let you know.

A note about coinage. Explaining the British pre-decimal coinage to generations that haven’t had to deal with it is difficult, even for me, and I grew up learning it. I could talk at length about such things as thrupence ha’penny, and tanners and crowns and half crowns and the way it drove American tourists, in particular, totally nuts. So all that I can say is that there were coins made of bronze, of all sizes, and these were the cheaper coins; and then there were the coins made of silver which, as you might expect, occupied the middle ground finance-wise, and then there were the gold coins which were, well, gold and in Dodger’s day were truly golden, not like the coins you get today, mumble, mumble, complain. But in truth, the old currency had a certain reality to it that the modern ‘p’, God help us, does not; it just doesn’t have the same life.

Then there was the wonderful ‘thrupenny bit’, so heavy in a little kid’s pocket . . . No, I’d better stop here, because if this goes on, sooner or later I’ll be talking about groats and half farthings and someone might have to shoot me.

The wonderful thing about slang is, if you like that kind of thing, that it is interesting to note that once upon a time the word ‘crib’ meant, among many other things, a building, or place where you lived, and quite recently for some reason has come back again in the English-speaking countries.

Victorian slang, and there was such a lot of it, can be a minefield. Looking at the world from Dodger’s point of view means that you can’t say ‘posh’, because that word had not yet been created. But nobby does the trick. It would be possible to fill up this book with appropriate slang, but sooner or later, well, it’s not there to be a textbook of slang and so I’ve left in some of the ones I liked. Unfortunately, I cannot find a place for my favourite piece of slang which is ‘tuppence more and up goes the donkey’ because, alas, it’s just a little bit too modern.

And very short though Dodger is, I’ve been helped time and again by friends with particular expertise, and my thanks go out to Jacqueline Simpson, Bernard Pearson, Colin Smythe and Pat Harkin, who stopped me putting a foot wrong. Where one is wrong is probably my own dammed foot.

I have to confess ahead of the game that certain tweaks were needed to get people in the right place at the right time – students of history will know that Tenniel didn’t illustrate his first Punch cover until 1850 and Sir Robert Peel was Home Secretary before Victoria came to the throne, for instance – but they are not particularly big tweaks, and besides, Dodger is a fantasy based on a reality. It was the devil’s own job to find out where the headquarters of the Morning Chronicle was. It seems that they changed offices periodically, so I’ve stuck them, for the purposes of Dodger, in Fleet Street – where they ought to have been anyway. This is a historical fantasy, and certainly not a historical novel. Simply for the fun of it, and also too, if possible, to get people interested in that era so wonderfully catalogued by Henry Mayhew and his fellows.

Because although I may have tweaked the positions of people and possibly how they might have reacted in certain situations, the grime, squalor and hopelessness of an underclass which nevertheless survived, often by a means of self-help, I have not changed at all. It was also, however, a time without such things as education for all, health and safety, and most of the other rules and impediments that we take for granted today. And there was always room for the sharp and clever Dodgers, male and female.

Terry Pratchett, 2012