The following article, written by Frederick A. McKenzie, was published in the Daily Mail on 16 July 1901

Dorset Street, Spitalfields

Where our Criminals are Trained.

Dorset Street, Spitalfields, has recently sprung into undesired notoriety. Here we have a place which boasts of an attempt at murder on an average once a month, of a murder in every house, and one house at least, a murder in every room. Policemen go down it as rule in pairs. Hunger walks prowling in its alleyways, and the criminals of to-morrow are being bred there to-day.

BLUE BLOOD.

The lodging-houses of Dorset Street and of the district around are the head centres of the shifting criminal population of London. Of course, the aristocrats of crime – the forger, the counterfeiter, and the like do not come here. In Dorset Street we find more largely the common thief, the pickpocket, the area meak, the man who robs with violence, and the unconvicted murderer. The police have a theory, it seems, that it is better to let these people congregate together in one mass where they can be easily be found than to scatter them abroad. And Dorset Street certainly serves the purpose of a police trap.

If this were all, something might be said in favour of allowing such a place to continue. But it is not all. No criminal centre is wholly criminal, and to represent even the lodging houses of Dorset Street as wholly inhabited by the utterly depraved would be wrong. There are many men in them who are simply “down on their luck.” There are many boys there whose sole desire is to lead a free life, and who have not yet known the policeman’s clatch on their shoulder. There are even a few women, though but a very few, who have not yet shared in the almost inevitable rain which comes on their sex in such a place.

Here comes the real and greatest harm that Dorset Street does. Respectable people, whose main offence is their poverty, are thrown in close and constant contact with the agents of crime. They become familiarized with law-breaking. They see the best points of the criminals around them. If they are in want, as they usually are, it often enough a thief who shares his spoils with them to give them bread. And there are those who are always ready to instruct these new-comers in the simple ways of making a dishonest living. Boy thieves are trained as regularly and systematically around Dorset Street to-day as they were in the days of Oliver Twist.

THE CANCER OF THE “DOSS HOUSE”

There must seem, I am well aware, an air of unreality about this to follow who read it in comfortable surburban homes or bright country houses. It seems impossible that in our new century these things should continue. But perhaps those who think it unreal will look over for their own satisfaction the indictments of any of our great criminal courts. They may notice there the number of petty thieves, and brutal assaulters, of burglars, even of murderers at every session. These men have to learn their business. You do not become a burglar without training, and even the art of the knuckle-duster requires a little practice. Where are these folks trained? Many of them are from Dorset Street.

The chief harm the common lodging-houses do is in the free association of criminals with those who have not yet learned the ways of crime. The mixed houses where men and women go together are, of course, infinitely the worse, and the authorities might well consider it worth while to secure the more rigid enforcement of elementary laws for good morality in such houses. But common lodging-houses there must be, and to close the present places without giving better accommodation in their stead would be to do more harm than good. London to-day has a sad lack of good temporary shelters for poor folks. Lord Rowton in his admirable homes has supplied a great want for some of the better class.

The County Council has made a very small endeavour, but its house, too is not for the really poor. We want in London places like the great Municipal or Burn’s Homes in Glasgow, where for 3½d. Or 4d. A night a man can secure a simple cubicle and the use of the common rooms. This experiment has been enormously successful in Glasgow. It yields fair returns on the money invested in it; it has swept away innumerable criminal dens; it is giving the poorest and the worst a chance of honestly re-starting again. But a still greater need is a good lodging-house for women. I understand that the curate of Christ Church, Spitalfields, has started in that neighbourhood a small home for respectable girls. This is admirable, but he himself would probably be the first to admit that something very much more is wanted. Those of us who know the enormous difficulties in the way of running a successful common lodging-house for women yet believe that with really good management the difficulties which have frightened so many off this thing would vanish.

FURNISHED ROOMS.

The lodging-houses are bad, but they are the best side of a bad street. They at least have certain official inspection, and a certain minimum amount of sanitation and decency is there secured. But the furnished rooms so-called are infinitely worse. Farming furnished rooms is exceedingly profitable business. You take seven or eight-roomed houses at a rent of 10s. Or 11s. A week, you place on each door a padlock, and in each room you put a minimum amount of the oldest furniture to be found in the worst second-hand dealers’ in the slums. The fittings of the average furnished room are not worth more than a few shillings. Then you let the rooms out to any comers for 10d. Or 1s. A night. No questions asked. They pay the rent, you hand them the key. If by the next night they have not their 10d. or 1s. Again ready you go round and chuck them out and let a new-comer in.

But for mere want we find here “depths below the lowest deep.” There are some to whom even the common lodging-house or the penny shelter are unobtainable luxuries. In the summer months they do not mind. A seat on the Thames Embankment is in many ways to be preferred to a bed in a big dormitory in Dorset Street. But on winter nights, when well-fed and well-clothed citizens shiver over their roaring fires, then it is that the lot of these poor souls is truly pitiable. I have seen them on such nights lying on the stones of the doorways, or crouched asleep by the half-dozen on the damp brick passage-ways of the furnished houses.

They tell me it is a poor look-out for the School Board officer who pokes his nose into unwanted quarters of Dorset Street, The children are trained in the gutter, their first lessons are in oaths and crime. They learn ill as they sip at their mother’s gin, and you can see them at six and eight years’ old gambling in the gutter-ways.

The County Council showed what it could do in Boundary Street. Surely here, under such needs, it might make a special endeavour. For every pound spent in reforming this street would mean many pounds saved on our prisons and legal machinery to-morrow.

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The shape of the borough of Kensington was likened to a man’s leg and foot in a top-boot, being bordered on the west by Uxbridge Road Station, Addiston Road Station and West Brompton to Chelsea Station; the Brompton Cemetery being the heel, the sole as Fulham Road and Walton Street, and the pointed toe being Hooper’s Court, west of Sloane Street. However, the heart of Kensington is the district gathered around Kensington Square.

Until the mid-19th century, Kensington and its neighboring boroughs (Brompton, Knightsbridge, et al) was an outlying hamlet. In the Regency period, Hyde Park Corner was considered the last outpost of safety, and people needing to venture beyond this point traveled in bands for protection. As the district increased in safety, people began to build snug little houses in these quiet “suburbs” and by the 1870s, Kensington was a prosperous area favored by the wealthy upper middle class.

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Ladies began to carve out a separate, independent life of their own by the late 1890s, and there came to London a proliferation of clubs catering specifically to gentlewomen of rank and means. Inside, the clubs mirrored that of their more famous counterparts like White’s or the Marlborough Club, as centers of leisure and relaxation, as well as providing a London address for women who primarily resided in the country.

The Albermarle Club, founded in 1874, is marked at the first ladies’ club, but it admitted both gentlemen and ladies–a shocking development in and of itself. The first women’s club was the Somerville Club, founded in 1879, for graduates of the college and those of a strong intellectual and philanthropic bent, but the first ladies’s club was the Alexandra, which was founded in 1884 and required its prospective members maintain eligibility to attend Court Drawing Rooms. The other ultra-exclusive club was the Victoria (1894), and both possessed dining rooms, reading rooms, drawing rooms, and bed chambers for its members, the last of which accommodated ladies for a fortnight’s lodging. Other clubs of note were the University Club (1887), which counted among its members university graduates, licensed physicians, and students or lecturers who had been in residence for at least three terms in Girton or Newnham, Cambridge, or Lady Margaret or Somerville, Oxford; the Pioneer Club (1892), founded by Mrs. Massingberd for ladies of rank and professional women, its aim being that of promoting democracy and abolishing class lines within its handsome residence; and the Writers’ Club (1892), which strove to provide opportunities for English lady journalists.

By 1899, London saw nearly twenty-five clubs catering specifically to the needs of London’s aristocratic and middle class women–and that number did not include the growing number of clubs and societies formed for the benefit of working-class women. Soon, not only did other British cities follow the lead with such clubs as Edinburgh’s Queen’s Club (1897) and Manchester’s The Ladies’s Club, but American cities, with New York’s The Colony Club being the most opulent and aristocratic club of its kind. Though they were primarily sociable in focus, the clubs could be a hotbed of political activism, with many suffragists taking prominent positions in the multitude of clubs which sprang up since 1899, and social change.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, meals could be obtained at chop houses, coaching inns, hotels, and coffee houses, yet all these ways of eating were deemed unsuitable for respectable women, who generally ate at home. This situation changed in the 1860s with the arrival of better railway hotels, who welcomed women in the dining rooms, and in the late 1880s, with the appearance of restaurants such as the Holborn, the Criterion, and the Gaiety. Women were welcome also in tea and coffee shops, of which began to appear in London in the 1870s when several temperance societies opened them. By 1879, London contained 100 such establishments, many of which offered food and entertainment. However, those owned by temperance societies were often mismanaged and of poor quality, and were relatively short-lived.

What did survive, was the Aërated Bread Company or A.B.C., which was founded in 1862 by Dr. John Dauglish. Though originally founded to mass produce healthy, additive-free breads using a new bread leavening technology invented by Dauglish, the company found its name on its famous tea-shops, of which the first was opened in 1864 in the courtyard of London’s Fenchurch Street Railway Station. Soon, tea rooms opened up all over, and a rival to the A.B.C. firm arrived as well: that owned by Joseph Lyons, who opened his first tea shop on Piccadilly in 1894, and the first of his famous Corner Houses 15 years later. These establishments not only offered afternoon tea, but provided, for the first time, a place that an unchaperoned young lady could visit with her friends and maintain her reputation. Should she so wish, she could even be accompanied by a young gentleman.

Tea rooms were opened in both London’s leading hotels and London’s leading department stores, where ladies were provided with a space in which to rest, to take tea, and to write the copious letters integral to a woman’s busy day. A tea room was also a most respectable manner in which to make a living. For ladies who had fallen on hard times, or even aristocratic women wanting to express their independence (and earn a little money), tea rooms were an extremely lucrative business. Tea rooms were also significant to the growth of female independence and a separate feminine sphere, and many of them were a hotbed of agitation for women’s suffrage. By 1910, the higher-end tea rooms became a little more sophisticated: palm court orchestras were added, the food became a little more cosmopolitan, cocktails were served, space for dancing was created, and afternoon tea was transformed into thé dansant.

Further Reading:
An economic history of London, 1800-1914 by Michael Ball & David Sunderland
The Making of the Modern British Diet by Derek J. Oddy & Derek S. Miller
Plenty and Want: A Social History of Food in England from 1815 to the Present Day by John Burnett
1900s Lady by Kate Caffrey
Shopping in Style: London from the Restoration to Edwardian Elegance by Alison Adburgham

Much as today, the publishing industry of the Edwardian era wrestled with such familiar issues as distribution, declining interest in reading, literary fiction versus “trash” for the masses, competition for bookstores from cheap editions & used book sales, and the eternal assumption of an “us versus them” between aspiring authors and editors/literary agents of major publishing houses. Though things like iPods, television, the internet or video games were not distractions from reading, nonetheless around the turn of the century, the London correspondent of the New York Evening Post reported that the British bookseller was liable to tell a tale of woe: “The trade is not what was once, you know, sir, and what with the war and six-penny reprints, some of us are pretty well at the end of our tether,” and would then “proceed to show you a shelf after shelf of war-books which are not selling, and shelf after shelf of spring which we hoped to get rid of, but which is now so much old stock.”

At this time the industry was in a state of flux and readership was split amongst such disparate tastes as readers of popular novelists Marie Corelli, Elinor Glyn and Ouida, adventure novelists H. Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling, and the Ruritanian genre, and readers of a more serious vein of fiction–G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, or the Webbs–though Dickens, Eliot and Thackeray remained perinneal favorites. The quantity of books published during the 1900s advanced considerably, with the number of new publications doubling between 1901 and 1913 from 6,044 in the former year to 12,379 in the latter. This trend lay in the improvement in family incomes and the ever-increasing interest in education, which accelerated with the decline in illiteracy. Aligning with this increase were the sudden growth of public libraries, whose public expenditure jumped from 286,000 pounds in 1896 to 805,000 pounds in 1911. Also, during this time, publishers made an attempt to make the classics more accessible to the reading public, and Collins’ Classics and the Everyman’s Library, each sold at modest prices in relatively durable editions, did much to extend an interest in classic English novelists and essayists.

For the aspiring novelist hoping to break into this seemingly impenetrable market, a score of books nestled on the shelves, some written by popular authors of the day and others by publishers themselves, full of advice on not only how to submit a novel but on the actual publishing process itself. The typical course to publication was detailed as following:

1. First, the aspirant should see that the typewritten copy was accurate, fastened together securely, and most importantly, clean. Their name and address, the title and description of the manuscript, and the length of the manuscript in words, should be prominent on the first page. A letter offering a view to publication and a request for return should the manuscript be rejected accompanied the manuscript in the mail.

2. When the manuscript arrived at the publishers’ offices, a clerk enters the particulars of the book into a ledger and it was shoved aside with other manuscripts to await the casual inspection of a partner or manager. The book is then taken from the pile and handed to a reader. It was their job to sift through the chaff to get to the wheat, and authors were advised to remember that “Publishing firms flourish by making profits; and profits are made out of books that sell; and it is in the business of the reader to recommend not good books merely, but good books that will sell.” Even if the reader enjoyed the book, there was a chance for rejection from the publisher if the lists were full or the reader’s remarks weren’t eye-catching enough. However, should the publisher accept the novel, to the trembling author went a contract.

3. The author was advised that under no circumstances should they bear the whole or part of the expenses of publication–that was to be born entirely by the publisher–nor should he agree to be remunerated on the half-profit system. The newly acquired author would then be remunerated in one of three ways: the publisher buys the entire copyright of the book for a lump sum down, (b) the publisher buys the copyright for a term of years, at the expiry of which it reverts to the author, and (c) the publisher may acquire the right to publish during the whole term of copyright, or for a shorter term, by agreeing to pay the author a royalty on every copy of the book sold (generally 10%, though well-established authors could revieve 25-33%). However, unlike today, this latter system did not guarantee an advance, and first-time authors were advised against insisting on an advance until they made a reputation.

4. The proofs were sent to the author, which were either in long “slips” or in page form, according to arrangement. After the proofs were returned, the next time the author saw their book was when a parcel of six free copies arrived on the day of publication. The author was advised to subscribe to a press-cutting agency for cuttings of reviews. If the first book achieved a sale of a thousand copies it was considered to have done very well, as the average circulation of first books was nearer to five hundred or less. After this first book, the author was further advised to have books published on a moderate, but regular schedule to build their reputation, stating that “even mediocre talent, when combined with fixity of purpose and regular industry, will infalliably result in a gratifying success.”

5. The literary agent was someone to aspire for, as the more successful agents were loathe to take on unknown authors who could prove unprofitable. According to advice, when the aspirant has made a name for himself and has the ability to his work on his own, then was the time to go to an agent as now the popular author–via their newly acquired agent–could demand a higher advance, more publicity and better placement in the lists. The agents’ percentage hovered around 10%, though once the author’s income exceeded two thousand a year, the agent should be willing to accept 5% on all sums over that amount.

The author with a little success would be tempted to publish their books in other countries, and while first-time authors were advised against worrying over foreign copyrights, then as today, a book that was a smash hit in England frequently fizzled in the United States, and vice versa. But in the end, the aspiring novelist turned published, had as equal a chance for success as authors today. Worries over advances, publishing profits, and so on preoccupied everyone, but thankfully, not enough to mitigate such wonderful novelists whose works have remained timeless classics in our age.

Further Reading:
Edwardian England, 1901-1914, ed by Simon Nowell-Smith
1001 Places to Sell Manuscripts: A Complete Guide for All Writers by James Knapp Reeve
Authors and Publishers: A Manual of Suggestions for Beginners in Literature by George Haven Putnam & John Bishop Putnam
Practical authorship‎ by James Knapp Reeve
The Author’s Desk Book by William Dana Orcutt