The Lodging House

A low lodging house was distinguishable from private houses by its dirtier exterior and the fact that its windows contained more paper than glass. The worst sort were known as ‘doss' or ‘flop' houses and were little more than brothels. Local police were sometimes asked to provide information on prostitution and the extent to which lodging houses were involved.

Drink-fuelled assaults were common. Social investigators remarked on the violence in such lodging houses and described 'the distinctive odour of human waste and rotting rubbish' in the 'labyrinths of courts and passages and covered ways' where they congregated, shut out from the light and the air.

Wilkie Collins describes one in "a wretchedly lighted bystreet" in his 1879 novel The Fallen Leaves. It was accessed via "a trap-door in the pavement' which was "pushed open from below" by "a sturdy boy with a dirty nightcap on his head". His protagonist is driven back by the sickening stench when he peers into the opening and sees "men, women, and children ... all huddled together in closely packed rows'.

The air inside a lodging house would be thick with obscenities and tobacco smoke. Two or three strangers slept in a bed intended for one, covered by a rug or leather coverlet, with a pail in the middle of the room for a toilet. Only a water butt was provided for washing. Keepers locked the doors to the sleeping area and employed ex- boxers to deal with disagreeable customers.

The better lodging houses only admitted sober and relatively clean lodgers. They would not admit anyone after midnight and would compel lodgers to leave in the morning. Pen, paper and ink might be available, as well as soap, and it was possible to hire a razor or pay a penny to read the newspaper. Accomodation was basic. Floorboards were bare and there were no curtains - the window was obscured by clothing hanging from the curtain rail. Furnishings might consist of a bed, small table, clothes horse and storage cupboard.

The average wage of an unskilled labourer was below subsistence level so many people lived in a twilight zone between legitimate society and the underworld. They never enjoyed the benefits of regular employment but were able to pick up occasional jobs or worked as hawkers. Occupations commonly seen at lodging houses include bone collector, dealer in old iron, umbrella-maker, sugar boiler, marine-store dealer and second-hand clothes dealer. Some scoured the shoreline for timber and metal detritus or made a living out of things they found discarded in the streets. This is how my great great grandfather in Ramsgate started out, lodging above a public house in King Street.

In a place like Blue Town, dominated by the Sheerness dockyard, the average lodger was a man between the ages of 20 and 40 working in the docks. This was a precarious business - many more men were trying to make a living on the docks than could be employed. Dockers might manage to get three days’ work a week and would commonly go several days without food or drink. Contemporary accounts describe streets thronging with sailors and prostitutes, who slept huddled in doorways, clusters of Irish labourers, smoking short pipes, washing lines ‘dangling dirty white clothes to dry’ and ‘ragged, unwashed, shoeless children’. There was plenty of opportunity for pilfering at the docks. As a result, dockside lodging houses were associated with stolen goods.

Houses favoured by criminals were known as ‘flash' houses. They provided cover for lodgers who valued their anonymity as they were not required to provide a name. In his 1879 novel The Fallen Leaves, Wilkie Collins describes 'filthy people and bad language' at one of the worst lodging houses in London where the landlord was 'a returned convict' with 'long grey hair all tumbled over his face'. He had “every sort of thief among his lodgers, from a pickpocket to a housebreaker".

Many lodging houses were in the hands of Irish owners who attracted their countrymen as lodgers. They were blamed for many ills due to anti- Irish and particularly anti- Catholic bigotry endemic to all sections of English society. For example, typhus was known as the ‘Irish fever’ and it was claimed that the Irish turned lodging houses into breeding grounds of disease.

At the other end of the spectrum, Collins describes a lodging house where his protagonist falls foul of a landlady's strict rules of propriety. She tells him that

"This is a respectable house, and it shall be kept respectable at any sacrifice".

Then she issues a stern ultimatum.

“If that creature in the bedroom is not out of my house in an hour’s time, I shall send for the police.”

Collins often stayed in Ramsgate with one or other of his partners and practiced subterfuge to gain admittance to smart seafront lodgings. These would not have tolerated an unmarried couple so he was forced to adopted the assumed names of Mr and Mrs Dawson for himself and the mother of his children.

Illustration: Low Lodging House, St. Giles

Wood engraving by Hubert von Herkomer 1872

Read more ...

'The Secret World of the Victorian Lodging House' by Joseph O'Neill (2014)