Images of London in 1890

I enjoyed creating my post about 1889 so much that I had to do one for 1890. I could turn 1890 into two posts because there are more great images from London that year than I can fit into this post. The selection I've chosen create a sense of place, and help me imagine everyday life in the city.

I found it interesting that most of the street photos capture more men than women, with the exception of the railway station and the butcher's shop. Other photos of women on the streets that I found seemed deliberate, like they were trying to capture those ladies in an image.

It was more challenging for women to be out and about town, without hurrying to and from their destinations. Women would sometimes pee themselves on the train because the geography of urban London didn't allow them any place to use the bathroom. Basically, women would take the train into the city to go shopping for the day, then do the pee-pee dance all the way home. Department stores were trying to address this issue, so maybe that's where most of the women are hiding.

Enjoy!

Fleet Street, London 1890

Fleet Street. By James Valentine c.1890
For more pictures of Fleet Street click here.

Victoria Street, London, c.1890

Boundary Street 1890

Gracechurch Street, London, c.1890

High Holborn, London, c.1890
This is one of the areas people suspected that Lady Meux worked
as a prostitute before marrying and becoming so influential.

Oxford Street, London, in 1890

Oxford Street, London, c.1890

De Hailes' Locksmith & Ironmongery in Key Close, Whitechapel, 1890.

Museum of London. Regent Street, c.1890

Farringdon Street by Charles Wilson, c.1890

1890-ish. Looking toward the Bank of England. (ty @p1966k)

Wych St, c.1890.

Oooh... Electric light...

How the artists at Punch saw London in 1890.

Bishopsgate Street, London, c.1890.

Broad Street Railway Station, London, c.1890

The Angel Inn, High Street Roehampton London Pictured circa 1890

Heal's delivery depot in central London.

London Screever on the Thames 1890

Salvation Army women's night refuge: c.1890

London Family (1890)
Apparently, plaid was in that year.

1890 engraving

Requesting a dance, 1890
Dancing was a good way for men to meet eligible women.

London & North Western Railway engineers and navvies at Stockport,
after having widened the Edgeley Viaduct around 1890.

Not sure what this guy is doing, but he is in London in 1890.
Makes me think of the baker on Sesame Street in the 80s with some
very high number of banana cream pies, and THAT never ended well!

Scene outside a London Pub, 1890.

Maids at work in a large kitchen, circa 1890.

Textile printing at Merton Abbey, London in 1890.

Shops in London 1890
Looks like the butcher was having a sale.

The Great Mastodon in the South-East Gallery of
the Natural History Museum,
South Kensington, London, 1890

Electric light at the British Museum, London, 1890. 

Want more? Look at images of London in 1889, 1891, 1892, 1893, 1894, and 1895.

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Images of London in 1889

In compiling this little collection of pictures taken in London in 1889, I was reminded that in any given place at any given time so much is happening. In 1889, London's streets were crowded with striking workers and pooped on by passing elephants, as the circus came to town. I read about couples, who visited London that year on their honeymoon, and others, who could barely afford to eat. In spite of a lack of opportunity, some women were graduating from university with honours, while others toiled away in factories, buried deep within the East End. Certainly made for some interesting images.

London Dock Strike 1889

London Dock Strike (1 September 1889)

1889 Night Mail Euston Railway Station London 

Bird`s-eye View of London, 1888 from: Illustrated London News 1889, volume II, p 496/97.

1889 London Theatre 

1889 Parnell Commission
(Oscar Wilde's brother covered this story for
the Daily Telegraph)

1889 Shah Royal Family State Concert Royal Albert Hall London Spectators

The Symth Family (London 1889)

Street view 1889
(I love the omnibus)

Honours for Ladies at the University of London
(1 June 1889)

Frances Evelyn ('Daisy') Greville (née Maynard)
Countess of Warwick
circa 1889

Giant from the Barnum and Bailey Circus (1889)

Circus performers (London 1889)

Want more? Look at images of London in 1890, 1891, 1892, 1893, 1894, and 1895.

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Willie Wilde’s Failure as a Husband

Oscar Wilde (2nd from left) & Willie Wilde (sitting on right).

Oscar Wilde's one-time sister-in-law once declared to her then-husband Willie Wilde that she had married the wrong brother. Such bitter irony because Oscar was already married, and we all know how that turned out. Then I found this wonderfully gossipy 1893 article that outlines what made Willie even worse as a husband!

The Morning Call, 8 June 1893, 10.
WILL LOSE WILLIE
Mrs. Leslie in the Divorce Court
RECOLLECTIONS OF A VISIT
The Great Matrimonial Comedy About to Close - Willie Wilde’s Failure as a Husband

Many people out here who had the opportunities a year and a half ago to please themselves by meeting Mrs. Frank Leslie and the brother of Oscar Wilde will gossip with considerable relish about the dissolution of the matrimonial alliance between them.

Mrs. Leslie expects that the bonds will be put assunder by Judge Brown of Newburg, N.Y., in a very few days, and the very minute she finds herself a free woman again she will sail to Europe.

That was a funny sort of match from the start, and the breaking of it now only makes people smile. The characteristic passages in the married life of Mr. and Mrs. William Wilde would make a more delightful society comedy than the stage ever presented if properly selected and strung together.

Mrs. Frank Leslie

People out here who met them when they visited California with the League of Press Clubs were not impressed by the idea that it was one of those tender love affairs. They had been married about four months then, so that the trip came pretty near being a honeymoon tour. Everybody who had ever seen Mrs. Leslie thought they knew what she looked like, for next to President Harrison her picture had been published as often as anybody else’s in America, displaying the bright, handsome face and the trim and stylishly dressed form of a striking and fascinating young woman.

But oh, what a difference time had wrought since the negatives from which all of Mrs. Leslie’s pictures have been made were new! She came as bright, independent, positive and hustling as she ever was, but there were furrows where the bloom had once rested and nature had acquired that careless way of letting lines of grace sag into less pleasing outlines. No good picture of Mrs. Leslie has ever been labeled “From a recent photograph.” But everybody was curious and ambitious to meet the famous woman who had taken a great publishing business where her husband had left it at his death - deeply involved in debt - and by her own shrewdness made an independent fortune out of it.

Oscar & Willie by Unseam

And Willie Wilde - William C. Kingbusy Wilde - was regarded with little less curiosity. He was a great tall, bewhiskered, large-eyed Englishman in rather ill-fitting clothes, with a stoop about his shoulders, a slowness in his talk and movements and a very unaggressive manner.

He was a man who had distinguished himself - by becoming brother of a poet and by marrying Mrs. Frank Leslie. He was the husband of Mrs. Frank Leslie and was always identified that way. That suited the bride to a T - in fact, she insisted on it herself. She never proposed her identity be swallowed up in a mere husband and she never betrayed a disposition to do any great amount of cleaving to him. She was always “Mrs. Frank Leslie,” though at times she would let “Wilde” be tacked on with a hyphen, and she always went right a head having her own way with as little regard for her hubby’s wishes as though he were her coachman. In fact, the ruthless way in which she would “sit down” on him in the presence of strangers was often quite distressing. It was even more distressing to be compelled to witness the apologetic “Will you allow me, madame?” way that William C.K. Wilde had in her presence.

And when Mrs. Leslie and Willie Wilde returned to New York to take up the routine of life they did it in very different ways, and as time went on no affinity was developed. She got out of bed betimes and attended to her business. while he, ready to receive the good sent by the gods, took up the “dolce far niente” style of languid existence, the hustling wife trying in vain to just “sha-ake” him into doing something in the way of “getting there.”

Then there was Willie’s careless way of leaving his teeth lying around her boudoir and little things like that to gradually increase a desire on her part to lose him. So it was no wonder that Willie finally went back to London where she met him and whence he came nerved up to a grim resolve not to weary in persuading, which resolve enabled him to make the one brilliant stroke in his life.

Mrs. Frank Leslie is a brilliant success as a publisher, but like a few other women she was not so smart about getting married. Now people will wonder if she will not go back to Europe to again set the gossips to talking and perhaps see if she can’t do better next time.

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Dracula After Stoker

Something about finding Dracula serialized in the Washington Times five years after Bram Stoker died struck me. In 1917, it still looks very Victorian and domestic with the images around it.

Although Dracula wasn't as successful and Stoker would have liked, during his life, Florence Stoker (born: Florence Anne Lemon Balcombe - I love the name "Lemon") protected its copyright viciously and benefited from a good income, long after her husband's death. Indeed, she is best remembered for suppressing Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's film Nosferatu (1922), which was based on her husband's novel.

Screenwriter, Henrik Galeen changed the main character's names and some certain key points, but the resemblance to Stoker's novel was still undeniable. As Stoker's literary executor, Florence never gave permission for the adaptation, or received payment for it. She was furious and demanded the financial reparation that was due to the estate. She also wanted all of the negatives and prints of the film  destroyed.

Despite her success in court, Nosferatu survived and slowly began to resurface in the late 1920s, with the first American screenings taking place in New York City and Detroit in 1929.

Surely she got payment for the novel's serialization in the Washington Times.

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Willie Wilde & Mrs. Frank Leslie

Willie Wilde, Los Angeles Herald (1892).

"Vulgarity in journalism, like vituperation in argument, weakens the point." - Willie Wilde, The Los Angeles Herald, 13 February 1892.

I found this marvellous article in the Los Angeles Herald with a sketch of Oscar Wilde's wicked brother in it. Willie Wilde grows more and more wicked with every bit I learn about him. This article ends with Willie's American wife, Mrs. Frank Leslie, complaining about the way the press has treated her for her marriage to Willie. The author, Belle Hunt, also reveals that Willie was caught forging a cheque in Leslie's name a year before they were married. As George Takei would say: "Oh my!"

It certainly seems that Willie's vile reputation preceded him in the United States.

To be fair, Leslie was old enough to be Willie's mother. Within a year's time, she would send him back to his mother.

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Some Don'ts and Do's for Letter-Writers (Circa 1896)

I found the most wonderful book today, granted it's from the wrong London (but so am I).

Social Etiquette or Manners and Customs of Polite Society was written by Maud C. Cooke and published in 1896. I found it, while looking for more information on letter writing, so while Social Etiquette covers everything from "Introductions and Salutations" to "How to be Beautiful," I shall focus on those pages which provide an epistolary guide.

Cooke devotes several pages to the etiquette of letter writing summarizing it all in a list at the end: Some Don'ts and Do's for Letter-Writers. Much of her advice is contradictory and confusing. We are supposed to speak openly and naturally in a letter, but never say too much. Really one should sound like they are saying everything without saying very much at all.

And don't squirm as you think about how to go about this task. There are right and wrong ways to sit, when you are writing a letter, and it's different for ladies than it is for gentlemen.

The improper position for a man looks rather a lot like the proper position of a lady, if you ask me.

Guides and manuals, like this, were quite popular in the 19th century. Lewis Caroll published Eight or Nine Wise Words About Letter-Writing in 1891. Of course, Caroll took a very tongue-in-cheek approach to an art form that changed from decade to decade. Earlier in the century, ribbons were very popular and letters could be decorated, like ladies visiting cards, but by the 1890s letters were plain - though not very simple.

Some Don'ts and Do's for Letter-Writers

Don’t write an anonymous letter; it is a cowardly stab in the dark.
Don’t pay any attention to an anonymous letter; it is not worth your regard.
Don’t conduct private correspondence on a postal card. Many persons consider this an insult. A purely business message may be thus sent, but even then the slight saving in postage is small recompense for the delay so often attending the delivery of postal cards.
Don’t use a postscript; it is unnecessary, old-fashioned, school-girlish, and in a particular, punctilious letter the omission of any important matter necessitates the rewriting of the entire letter rather than the use of a postscript. In very friendly letters one may be permitted to add the forgotten paragraph in the form of a postscript, omitting, however, the obsolete abbreviation, “P.S.”
Don’t write on a half-sheet of paper unless the nature of the correspondence permits the use of the ordinary business letter-head. If the note is short, write only on one side of the paper, but don’t tear a sheet in half for economy’s sake. The rough, torn edges, denote haste, ill-breeding, or carelessness on the part of the writer.
Don’t use tablet paper for ceremonious letters.
Don’t write on both sides of the paper to any but very intimate friends or relatives, they being disposed to tolerate slight departures from formality on our part.
Don’t meddle with foreign nouns or verbs unless conversant with the language itself; incorrect and ungrammatical usage is too apt to be the unhappy result. Even foreign names and titles should not be used without the exactest care as to their orthography and application.
This rule should be especially remembered with reference to all matters destined to pass through hands editorial.
Don’t erase misspelled words in letters of any moment. Recopy the entire missive.
Don’t quote too constantly.
Don’t underscore your words, unless they express something very important.
Don’t send enclosures in a letter written by some one else; only the greatest intimacy can excuse this practice. Write your own letters and send in a separate envelope.
Don’t write a letter in a towering passion; you would not care to have it confront you in some cooler moment.
Don’t cross the writing in your letters. Life is too short and the time and eyesight of your correspondent too precious for this.
Don’t fill up every available blank space and margin of your letter with forgotten messages. If these are very valuable, add an extra sheet to your letter, thus saving its appearance and the patience of its recipient.
Don’t divide a syllable at the end of a line. The printer may do this, not the letter-writer.
Don’t fall into the habit of using long words in a letter, they show a straining after effect. One should “say,” rather than “observe,” “talk,” rather than “converse,” if one’s missives are to be easy, well-bred and readable.
Don’t refold a letter, the marks always remain to show your carelessness. Fold it correctly the first time.
Do remember to answer all important questions in a letter clearly and decisively.
Do burn the great majority of your letters after answering. Those that are to be kept should be filed away in packages adding date and writer’s name on corner of envelope and by a word or two suggesting the topics with which they deal. This will save time in referring to them.
Do answer your friendly letters with reasonable promptness. To do otherwise is a breach of etiquette. An unanswered letter is an insult, a cut direct. Business letters, of course, must be replied to at once.
Do send a postage stamp when you write a letter of inquiry, the answer to which is of interest only to yourself. A stamped and addressed envelope would be a still better enclosure.
Do, if you are an absent son or daughter, write home promptly and regularly; the comfort this will be to the parents at home, and the pain they suffer at any negligence on your part, cannot be overestimated. Husbands and wives, when separated for a time, would do well to follow this same advice.
Do date your letters carefully. Events and proofs of the greatest importance have hung upon the date of a single letter.
Do put sufficient stamps upon a letter to make sure of no extra postage falling to the lot of your correspondent.

 

Do put your address plainly in all letters. This ensures a prompt answer and, in case of miscarriage, a speedy return from the Dead-Letter Office.
Do, if a business man or woman, have your address on the outside of your envelope. This will make sure of your uncalled-for letters returning to you immediately. It is well to do this in any case where a little uncertain as to the exact address of your correspondent.
Do read your letters over carefully before sending, that no errors may be overlooked.
Do give every subject a separate paragraph instead of running the whole letter, social items and sentiment, all into one indistinguishable whole.
Do begin the first line of each paragraph, at least, one inch from the margin, of the page.

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Mrs. Beeton, Boars' Heads, and Scotch Broth

My characters are gathered around a dining table in one of the most up-scale and scandalous households in 1891 London. A little scandal is all the more reason to be there, but it is no reason to lose sight of all civility. The ideal is to let scandals entertain and amuse you - not to become one (especially not by something so dull as eating the meal).

Mrs. Beeton

Dinner, in this house begins, with soup. All respectable dinner parties do. To help my protagonist get it right, I’ve consulted Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management.

THE GUESTS BEING SEATED AT THE DINNER-TABLE, the lady begins to help the soup, which is handed round, commencing with the gentleman on her right and on her left, and continuing in the same order till all are served. It is generally established as a rule, not to ask for soup or fish twice, as, in so doing, part of the company may be kept waiting too long for the second course, when, perhaps, a little revenge is taken by looking at the awkward consumer of a second portion. This rule, however, may, under various circumstances, not be considered as binding.

Right, so I only get one serving of soup, if I’m to avoid becoming as scandalous as my hostess. What has sploshed into my bowl now?

IT HAS BEEN ASSERTED, that English cookery is, nationally speaking, far from being the best in the world. More than this, we have been frequently told by brilliant foreign writers, half-philosophers, half-chefs, that we are the worst cooks on the face of the earth, and that the proverb which alludes to the divine origin of food, and the precisely opposite origin of its preparers, is peculiarly applicable to us islanders. Not, however, to the inhabitants of the whole island; for, it is stated in a work which treats of culinary operations, north of the Tweed, that the "broth" of Scotland claims, for excellence and wholesomeness, a very close second place to the bouillon, or common soup of France.

It’s astonishing that the English have known so long that their cooking was so bad for so long, but I’m happy to say that I know the delicious Scottish broth, to which Mrs. Beeton refers. It’s thick and incredibly filling. The meat is perfectly in balance with all of the other ingredients and my grandpa used to make it.

However, the first Sottish soup recipe I found perusing Mrs. Beeton’s book made me wish I wasn’t so curious!

KALE BROSE (a Scotch Recipe).

INGREDIENTS.
Half an ox-head or cow-heel, a teacupful of toasted oatmeal, salt to taste, 2 handfuls of greens, 3 quarts of water.

Mode.
Make a broth of the ox-head or cow-heel, and boil it till oil floats on the top of the liquor, then boil the greens, shred, in it. Put the oatmeal, with a little salt, into a basin, and mix with it quickly a teacupful of the fat broth: it should not run into one doughy mass, but form knots. Stir it into the whole, give one boil, and serve very hot.

Time.
4 hours.

Average cost, 8d. per quart.

Seasonable all the year, but more suitable in winter. Sufficient for 10 persons.

Of course, the off-putting aspect was the boiled head or foot. According to Mrs. Beeton, heads were of great importance in Scottish cookery.

IMPORTANCE OF THE BOAR'S HEAD, SCOTTISH FEUDS, &c. The boar's head, in ancient times, formed the most important dish on the table, and was invariably the first placed on the board upon Christmas-day, being preceded by a body of servitors, a flourish of trumpets, and other marks of distinction and reverence, and carried into the hall by the individual of next rank to the lord of the feast. At some of our colleges and inns of court, the serving of the boar's head on a silver platter on Christmas-day is a custom still followed; and till very lately, a bore's head was competed for at Christmas time by the young men of a rural parish in Essex. Indeed, so highly was the grizzly boar's head regarded in former times, that it passed into a cognizance of some of the noblest families in the realm: thus it was not only the crest of the Nevills and Warwicks, with their collateral houses, but it was the cognizance of Richard III., that

"Wretched, bloody, and usurping boar,
That spoil'd your summer fields and fruitful vines,
Swills your warm blood like wash, and makes his trough
In your embowell'd bosoms,"

and whose nature it was supposed to typify; and was universally used as a sign to taverns. The Boar's Head in Eastcheap, which, till within the last twenty-five years still stood in all its primitive quaintness, though removed to make way for the London-bridge approaches, will live vividly in the mind of every reader of Shakspeare, as the resort of the prince of Wales, Poins, and his companions, and the residence of Falstaff and his coney-catching knaves, Bardolph, Pistol, and Nym; and whose sign was a boar's head, carved in stone over the door, and a smaller one in wood on each side of the doorway.

Most people agree that, historically, people were weird, and Victorians were kooky and even a little prissy. I have known all along that Victorians ate some weird food, and when Mrs. Beeton puts boiled heads in the context of her island’s history it begins to make more sense. I begin to imagine my Scottish grandfather’s graandfather serving him Scotch Broth at a wooden table in a room with a stuffed boar’s head on the wall, as he recounted the stories that Mrs. Beeton inserted into her book on household management.

The traditions and deeds of savage vengeance recorded in connection with this grim trophy of the chase are numerous in all parts of Europe. But the most remarkable connected with the subject in this country, were two events that occurred in Scotland, about the 11th and 15th centuries.

A border family having been dispossessed of their castle and lands by a more powerful chief, were reduced for many years to great indigence, the expelled owner only living in the hope of wreaking a terrible vengeance, which, agreeably to the motto of his house, he was content to "bide his time" for. The usurper having invited a large number of his kindred to a grand hunt in his new domains, and a feast after in the great hall, returned from the chase, and discovering the feast not spread, vented his wrath in no measured terms on the heads of the tardy servitors. At length a menial approached, followed by a line of servants, and placing the boar's head on the table, the guests rushed forward to begin the meal; when, to their horror, they discovered, not a boar's but a bull's head, a sign of death. The doors were immediately closed, and the false servants, who were the adherents of the dispossessed chief, threw off their disguise, and falling on the usurper and his friends, butchered them and every soul in the castle belonging to the rival faction.

A tribe of caterans, or mountain robbers, in the Western Highlands, having been greatly persecuted by a powerful chief of the district, waylaid him and his retinue, put them all to the sword, and cutting off the chief's head, repaired to his castle, where they ordered the terrified wife to supply them with food and drink. To appease their savage humour, the lady gave order for their entertainment, and on returning to the hall to see her orders were complied with, discovered, in place of the boar's head that should have graced the board, her husband's bleeding head; the savage caterans, in rude derision, as a substitute for the apple or lemon usually placed between the jaws, having thrust a slice of bread in the dead man's mouth.

The last tale sounds like an episode of American Horror Story or Game of Thrones! And I’m not sure how it made animal heads any more palatable to Mrs. Beeton’s Victorian readers.

However, I’ve gone entirely off topic and nearly abandoned the wonderful soup Mrs. Beeton initially told us about. As I’m often distractible and not planning to have them serve Scottish broth at the dinner party in my novel, I lost patience trying to find the recipe in Mrs. Beeton’s book, but let Google answer that question for me. BBC food has a good recipe here, which made me think that we’ve just replaced the boiled head with “stock” because that’s basically what you’d get after following Mrs. Beeton’s instructions.

For the purpose of my story, I think my wealthy and scandalous 1891 dinner hostess will be serving Mrs. Beeton’s Almond Soup.

ALMOND SOUP.

INGREDIENTS.
4 lbs. of lean beef or veal, 1/2 a scrag of mutton, 1 oz. of vermicelli, 4 blades of mace, 6 cloves, 1/2 lb. of sweet almonds, the yolks of 6 eggs, 1 gill of thick cream, rather more than 2 quarts of water.

Mode.
Boil the beef, or veal, and the mutton, gently in water that will cover them, till the gravy is very strong, and the meat very tender; then strain off the gravy, and set it on the fire with the specified quantities of vermicelli, mace, and cloves, to 2 quarts. Let it boil till it has the flavour of the spices. Have ready the almonds, blanched and pounded very fine; the yolks of the eggs boiled hard; mixing the almonds, whilst pounding, with a little of the soup, lest the latter should grow oily. Pound them till they are a mere pulp, and keep adding to them, by degrees, a little soup until they are thoroughly mixed together. Let the soup be cool when mixing, and do it perfectly smooth. Strain it through a sieve, set it on the fire, stir frequently, and serve hot. Just before taking it up, add the cream.

Time.
3 hours.

Average cost per quart, 2s. 3d.

Seasonable all the year.

Sufficient for 8 persons.

I'll have to remember not to let my protagonist ask for a second helping!

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