Blanchard
Jerrold, the son of the successful journalist, Douglas
Jerrold, was was born in London in
1826. Educated in London and France, William intended to become an
artist but this plan was abandoned when he developed problems with
his eye-sight.
Jerrold became a writer and four of his plays, including Beau
Brummel, were performed. He also worked as a journalist
and on the death of his father in 1857, replaced him as editor of
Lloyd's Weekly newspaper.
In 1869, Gustave Dore, the famous French artist,
was in London having talks with his English
publisher. Jerrold suggested to Dore that they worked together to
produce a comprehensive portrait of London. Jerrold had got the idea
from The Microcosm of London (1808),
that had been produced by Rudolf Ackermann,
William Pyne and Thomas
Rowlandson and Life in London
by Pierce Egan and George Cruikshank.
Jerrold and Gustave Dore signed a five-year
project with he publishers, Grant & Co. Dore was paid the vast
sum of £10,000 a year for the proposed art work. The book, London:
A Pilgrimage with 180 engravings by Dore, was eventually
published in 1872.
Although a commercial success, many of the critics disliked the book.
Several were upset that Jerrold and Dore had concentrated on the poverty
that existed in London. Gustave
Dore was accused by the Art Journal
of "inventing rather than copying". The Westminster
Review claimed that " Dore gives us sketches in which
the commonest, the vulgarest external features are set down".
Blanchard Jerrold died in 1884.
Gustav
Dore, A Clothesman at Work
(1872)
(1)
Blanchard Jerrold, London: A Pilgrimage (1872)
Among the watchmakers and jewellers of Clerkenwell; the starving descendants
of the Spitalfields weavers; the cabinet makers and workers of wood,
by the Aldersgate Street purlieus; the Teutons who bake and refine
sugar in Whitechapel; the unsavoury leather workers of Bermondsey;
the shoemakers of Shoreditch and Drury Lane; the potters of Lambeth;
are hosts of shiftless, hopeless victims of the fierce competition
of the overcrowded labour market: the slop-workers, needlewomen, street
vendors, mountebanks, sharpers, beggars and thieves, who disgrace
our civilisation by their sufferings or their misdeeds.
The extremes lie close together. How many minutes' walk have we between
St. Swithin's Lane, and that low gateway of the world-famed millionaire;
and this humble authority in exchanges, in materials for shoddy, in
left-off clothes cast aside by the well-to-do, to be passed with due
consideration and profit to the backs of the poor? The old clothesman's
children are rolling about upon his greasy treasure, while he, with
his heavy silver spectacles poised upon his hooked nose, takes up
each item, and estimates it to a farthing.
(2)
Blanchard Jerrold, London: A Pilgrimage (1872)
It was in the poor markets, it need hardly be said, that we found
our most striking subjects, and ever as we neared the poorest, we
saw the buyer at a fresh disadvantage. In Convent Garden, there is
the higgler, or middle-man, who buys from the producer to sell to
the retailer, who will, in his turn, sell to the humble customer.
The rich man buys first-hand; the poor man, fifth-hand.
If we pass from the great markets to the small; from the West End
shops to Phil's Gardens, by St. Mary Axe, and Petticoat Lane, and
the New Cut, and Somers Town; we come upon immense wor-begone communities,
who are without knowledge or skill, and can consequently command only
the lowest wage. Behold them keenly testing and examining the huge
bunches of rags that are temptingly hung from old clothesmen's doors
and windows; and how their eyes run along the rows of old boots and
shoes upon the pavement. The eagerness of the vendors is as remarkable
as the anxiety painted on the faces of the customers. This is a hard
battle over every rag and trinket: and the noise of the strife is
deafening.
(3)
Blanchard Jerrold, London: A Pilgrimage (1872)
London boasts something like a hundred hospitals, a hundred homes
and refuges for the houseless, fifty orphan asylums, over twenty institutions
for the blind and deaf, fourteen for the relief of discharged prisoners,
eighteen penitentiaries for fallen women, five asylums for incurables,
over forty homes and institutions for poor sailors, and nearly twenty
for soldiers; twelve charitable institutions for the benefit of poor
Jews, and between thirty and forty relief societies for the clergy.
Gustav Dore,
Buying Fifth-Hand (1872)
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