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Rites of Passage: Youthful Walking and the Rhythms of the City, c.1850–1914

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Walking Histories, 1800-1914

Abstract

Sleight takes to the bustling streets of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century city to explore young people’s access to, and use of, the outdoor urban realm. Primary and secondary archival evidence from London, New York and Melbourne yields both hard data and well-informed speculations. Sleight argues that, though often marginalized in contemporary cities, the sheer variety and prevalence of young people’s walking practices shows the centrality of these individuals to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century city life. In an era of burgeoning mass transit and the take-up of bicycles, the main mode of movement was still on foot. As Sleight makes clear, young city walkers have long dwelt in a world of scattered horizons contingent upon age, gender, class and ethnicity.

I crawl. The Titanic sinks. I stand. The Archduke is assassinated at Sarajevo, and I walk at last into my own memories.

Hal Porter, The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony: An Australian Autobiography (1963)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For definitions and usages of the terms discussed here, see http://www.oed.com/.

  2. 2.

    As noted by Joseph A. Amato, On Foot: A History of Walking (New York and London, 2004), 10.

  3. 3.

    On the relationship between language and experience, see John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (London, 1996), 59–78.

  4. 4.

    Sam Bass Warner, Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston (1870–1900) [1962] (Cambridge, MA, 1978), 15–21, 179. My emphasis.

  5. 5.

    Ibid., 62.

  6. 6.

    Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York and Oxford, 1985), 14–15. For the 1850s, Peter Ackroyd notes that some 200,000 people are estimated to have walked into the City of London from surrounding areas each working day: Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography (London, 2001), 591.

  7. 7.

    Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 17–20.

  8. 8.

    Bernard Salt, ‘The Journey to Work: The Case of Foy & Gibson in Collingwood, 1891’, Journal of Australian Studies, 11(21) (1987), 40–4. For further comparison, see Lionel Frost, The New Urban Frontier: Urbanisation and City-Building in Australasia and the American West (Kensington, NSW, 1991), 5–14.

  9. 9.

    Amato, On Foot, 2, 11, 156, 162, 171.

  10. 10.

    Andrew Brown-May, ‘In the Precincts of the Global City: The Transnational Network of Municipal Affairs in Melbourne, Australia, at the End of the Nineteenth Century’, in Pierre-Yves Saunier and Shane Ewen (eds), Another Global City: Historical Explorations into the Transnational Municipal Moment, 1850–2000 (New York and Basingstoke, 2008), 19–34.

  11. 11.

    Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (London, 1963).

  12. 12.

    To compare population figures: London in 1851, 2,286,609 (of which inner London 1,995,846); New York City in 1850, 515,547; Melbourne in 1851, between 23,000 and 29,000; London in 1911, 7,157,875 (of which inner London 4,997,741); New York City in 1910, 4,766,883; Melbourne in 1911, c.593,000.

  13. 13.

    On street trading, see for example VPRS 3181, Town Clerk’s files, Series 1, Unit 70, By-laws (1898), Public Record Office Victoria (PROV). On ‘jay-walking’, see Peter D. Norton, ‘Street Rivals: Jaywalking and the Invention of the Motor Age Street’, Technology and Culture, 48(2) (2007), 331–59; Argus (Melbourne), 16 February 1921, 8; Daily Mirror (London), 9 June 1934, 2.

  14. 14.

    For an introduction to international findings, see Claire Freeman and Paul Tranter, Children and their Urban Environment: Changing Worlds (London and Washington, 2011), 182–201.

  15. 15.

    Exceptions include sections within Richard Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York, 1980) and Colin G. Pooley and Siân Pooley, ‘Constructing a Suburban Identity: Youth, Femininity and Modernity in Late-Victorian Merseyside’, Journal of Historical Geography, 36(4) (2010), 402–10.

  16. 16.

    For comparison, see Anna Davin, Growing Up Poor: Home, Street and School in London, 1870–1914 (London, 1996), 85–7, 98–111; Timothy J. Gilfoyle, ‘Street-Rats and Gutter-Snipes: Child Pickpockets and Street Culture in New York City, 1850–1900’, Journal of Social History, 37(4) (2004), 861; Simon Sleight, Young People and the Shaping of Public Space in Melbourne, 1870–1914 (Farnham and Burlington, 2013), 51–2, 65.

  17. 17.

    Simon Sleight, ‘“For the Sake of Effect”: Youth on Display and the Politics of Performance’, History Australia, 6(3) (2009), 71.1–71.22. See also David M. Pomfret, Young People and the European City: Age Relations in Nottingham and Saint Etienne, 1890–1940 (Aldershot, 2004), ch. 6.

  18. 18.

    Steven Mintz, ‘Reflections on Age as a Category of Historical Analysis’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 1(1) (2008), 91–4.

  19. 19.

    Jon Savage, Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture (New York, 2007), 66.

  20. 20.

    For discussion, see for instance: Ruskin Teeter, ‘Coming of Age on the City Streets in 19th-Century America’, Adolescence, 23(92) (1988), 909–12; Christine Stansell, ‘Women, Children, and the Uses of the Streets: Class and Gender Conflict in New York City, 1850–1860’, Feminist Studies, 8(2) (1982), 309–12; Davin, Growing Up Poor, 162; Sleight, Young People, 39–43.

  21. 21.

    Such as the fortunate 3-year-old boy rescued in suburban Melbourne having been ‘toddling’ along a railway line one summer’s afternoon in 1898 (Argus, 28 November 1898, 3).

  22. 22.

    Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City (Ithaca and London, 1995), 3.

  23. 23.

    For an exemplary analysis of the language of walking, see Joanna Guldi, ‘The History of Walking and the Digital Turn: Stride and Lounge in London, 1808–1851’, Journal of Modern History, 84(1) (2012), 116–44.

  24. 24.

    Argus, 22 March 1882, 9; 18 May 1910, 9; 24 January 1914, 39. In the 1910 article, ‘Vesta’ advises her female readership that ‘It is a little difficult to describe exactly what is a good walk. The authorities agree, however, on certain points. The head must be held erect … The chin should be slightly lifted, the chest up, the shoulders back, and the stomach in. But there should be no appearance, and no feeling, of effort … The length of the stride should be moderate … The step should be clean and neat.’

  25. 25.

    Howard Chudacoff, Children at Play: An American History (New York and London, 2007), 4–5, 53–4; Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor [1861–2] (New York, 2009), I, 36, 421, 477.

  26. 26.

    See for instance the caution issued to five ‘young girls’ (of working age) in Melbourne in March 1883 (Argus, 6 March 1883, 10). The girls were accosted by a policeman for ‘roaming about the street’ at midnight. On New York, see Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (London, 2001), 239.

  27. 27.

    Examples noted in Australasian, 21 January 1893, 44; Australian Sketcher with Pen and Pencil, 17 May 1873, 34–5; Argus, 31 January 1882, 4; Age, 20 February 1896, 5. On larrikins, see Melissa Bellanta, Larrikins: A History (St Lucia, 2012).

  28. 28.

    Marcus Clarke, ‘Peripatetic Philosophy’ [1867–8], in L. T. Hergenhan (ed.), A Colonial City: High and Low Life. Selected Journalism of Marcus Clarke (St Lucia, 1972), 5.

  29. 29.

    For an introduction, see Andrew Brown-May, Melbourne Street Life: The Itinerary of Our Days (Kew, Victoria, 1998), 36–41, 43–63; Argus, 17 January 1905, 7; David M. Scobey, Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape (Philadelphia, 2002), 174–80.

  30. 30.

    Norton, ‘Street Rivals’.

  31. 31.

    See, for instance, ibid., 335, 341; David Nasaw, Children of the City: At Work and At Play (New York, 1985), 18–28; G. H. Martin and David Francis, ‘The Camera’s Eye’, in H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff (eds), The Victorian City, vol. II, Images and Realities (London, 1978), plate 93; Sleight, Young People, 56–7; Marvellous Melbourne: Queen City of the South (prod. C. Spencer, c.1910), http://aso.gov.au/titles/documentaries/marvellous-melbourne/ (accessed 20 August 2014).

  32. 32.

    Examples reported in New York Times, 7 August 1899, 5; Argus, 28 September 1893, 7; Daily Mirror, 3 June 1911, 3. The advent of the motor car increased the range of urban perils: motorists had killed over 1,000 children in New York by 1914. See Clay McShane, Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City (New York, 1994), 176.

  33. 33.

    VPRS 3181/756, Parks (1899), item 4329, report dated 6 December 1899, PROV.

  34. 34.

    See http://www.pepysdiary.com/encyclopedia/1167/#references (accessed 20 August 2014).

  35. 35.

    See, for example, Illustrated London News, 2 January 1847, 8; ‘The Link Boy of Old London’, serialised in Boys Standard, 1882–3; Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers (London, 1837), ch. 35, 391: ‘The red glare of the link-boy’s torch’.

  36. 36.

    As reported in Argus, 25 January 1905, 8.

  37. 37.

    For discussion of this phrase and others including ‘roving race’ and ‘wandering propensity’, see Mayhew, London Labour, I, 1–4, 477–85; II, 364. My thanks to Elizabeth Womack for suggesting leads on Mayhew. This section should be read in tandem with her essay on Mayhew in the present volume.

  38. 38.

    Ibid., I, 33, 43–4; II, 351. Other young workers are witnessed carrying luggage, sweeping road crossings, running messages and scouring the banks of the Thames for items of value.

  39. 39.

    Ibid., I, 151.

  40. 40.

    See Sleight, Young People, 92–4, 96–7; Nasaw, Children of the City, 48–61, 88–100; Stansell, ‘Women, Children’, 313–17.

  41. 41.

    Victorian Parliamentary Debates (VPD), Session 1888, LVII, 496.

  42. 42.

    Edith C. Onians, Read All About It (Melbourne, c.1953), 38–9.

  43. 43.

    Sleight, Young People, 101–10; Gilfoyle, ‘Street Rats’, 855–66; David E. Whisnant, ‘Selling the Gospel News, Or: The Strange Career of Jimmy Brown the Newsboy’, Journal of Social History, 5(3) (Spring 1972), 269–309; Nasaw, Children of the City, 74, 84.

  44. 44.

    See: Stansell, ‘Women, Children’, 317–18; VPRS 3181, Unit 863, Streets (1896), item 2398, PROV; and (for a discussion of accusations pertaining to newsgirls in New York and Melbourne) MS 9910, archive of William Forster Try Boys Society, box 41, cuttings book (1883–1906), State Library of Victoria (SLV): ‘Melbourne’s Neglected Children’ (dated 26 July 1891).

  45. 45.

    For example the ‘centrefold’ image, ‘The Flower Girl – “Please Buy”’, Illustrated Australian News, 31 March 1888, supplement, 11–12. Many similar examples exist for London and New York. On juvenile female prostitution, see Stansell, ‘Women, Children’.

  46. 46.

    Danielle Thornton, ‘Factory Girls: Gender, Empire and the Making of a Female Working Class, Melbourne and London, 1880–1920’ (PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 2007), 68–97.

  47. 47.

    Age, 6 May 1891; Argus, 27 May 1898 (newspaper cuttings in MS 9910, box 41, SLV); Argus, 26 July 1916, 10.

  48. 48.

    VPRS 3181, Unit 70, By-Laws (1897–1900), SLV; Street Trading Act (Vic) 1925.

  49. 49.

    Davin, Growing Up Poor, 181–3.

  50. 50.

    Indeed, ‘errand girl’ is noted as a category of occupation in the 1881 census, such workers having presumably graduated to paid employment from informal, family-instigated, assignments as children. See Peter Sanders, The Simple Annals: The History of an Essex and East End Family (Gloucester, 1989), 93.

  51. 51.

    Davin, Growing Up Poor, 180–6.

  52. 52.

    Raphael Samuel, East End Underworld: Chapter in the Life of Arthur Harding (London, 1981), 42, 60; for sister, 28.

  53. 53.

    Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 [1982] (Urbana, 1987), 49–51.

  54. 54.

    VPRS 3181, Unit 748, Parks (1892), item 3215, report dated 22 August 1892, PROV. On New York, see Nasaw, Children of the City.

  55. 55.

    Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (Princeton, 1994), 209.

  56. 56.

    This section draws on and extends the analysis in Sleight, Young People, 122–7.

  57. 57.

    Melbourne Punch, 17 February 1870, 55.

  58. 58.

    For discussion, see Penny Russell, Savage or Civilised? Manners in Colonial Australia (Sydney, 2010), 277–9; Argus, 19 April 1890, 13.

  59. 59.

    Argus, 16 June 1882, 7; 19 June 1885, 7; 30 November 1910, 5; Henry Handel Richardson, The Getting of Wisdom [1910] (Melbourne, 1998), ch. 14.

  60. 60.

    Sydney Morning Herald, 13 January 1883, 7.

  61. 61.

    Elaine Macdonald, ‘Journalist’s Child’ (1945), MS 198, box 53, Royal Historical Society of Victoria, 282.

  62. 62.

    Argus, 3 December 1887, 4.

  63. 63.

    Ibid., 18 January 1895, 6.

  64. 64.

    Ibid., 22 January 1914, 13.

  65. 65.

    Hergenhan, Colonial City, 25–6. Melbourne possessed a high proportion of young women working in the garment trades in this period.

  66. 66.

    Australasian, 19 January 1878, 7. In this article, ‘A. S.’ mounts a strong defence of the morality of the ‘hundreds – perhaps thousands’ of young women seen parading in this location.

  67. 67.

    Argus, 2 April 1904, 5, and compare with Clarke’s observations of those in Bourke Street who ‘pass and repass for hours’: Hergenhan, Colonial City, 102.

  68. 68.

    Andrew Davies, Leisure, Gender and Poverty: Working-Class Culture in Salford and Manchester, 1900–39 (Buckingham, 1992), 102–3.

  69. 69.

    Christopher Breward, The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life 1860–1914 (Manchester and New York, 1999), 206–14.

  70. 70.

    Catriona M. Parratt, ‘More Than Mere Amusement’: Working-Class Women’s Leisure in England, 1750–1914 (Boston, 2001), 111.

  71. 71.

    Stansell, City of Women, 183–4, 93. Also compare David Scobey, ‘Anatomy of the Promenade: The Politics of Bourgeois Sociability in Nineteenth-Century New York’, Social History, 17(2) (1992), 203–27.

  72. 72.

    Solnit, Wanderlust, 232.

  73. 73.

    May Stewart, ‘Diary’ (1906), MS 12995, SLV: 26, 30 January, 1 February (‘went to meet M went into Edinburgh gardens smooged till 11 P.M. came home and went to bed’), 23 February (‘went to meet Charlie … smooged till 10.15 P.M.’), 24 October.

  74. 74.

    The Melbourne Punch notes the arrival of the word in 1883 (27 December 1883, 251), stating that it is a corruption of ‘ma chère’ (or ‘my dear’). The first known use of the term in the sense employed here occurred in 1879; definitions include ‘An infatuation, a “crush”; a flirtation’ and ‘to flirt, strike up a flirtatious acquaintance (with)’ – see www.oed.com/.

  75. 75.

    Stewart, ‘Diary’, 8 July (St Kilda), 26 December (Sandringham), 17 February (flirting in Bourke Street). For discussion of beachside settings as a site for promenading and romance, see Caroline Ford, ‘Gazing, Strolling, Falling in Love: Culture and Nature on the Beach in Nineteenth Century Sydney’, History Australia, 3(1) (2006), 08.1–08.14.

  76. 76.

    Stewart, ‘Diary’, entries for 10 February and 14 August 1906.

  77. 77.

    Ibid., 14 October 1906 (loose sheet).

  78. 78.

    Argus, 14 February 1914, 14; 18 February 1914, 14; Truth, 7 February 1914, 5.

  79. 79.

    Argus, 8 February 1872, 6; Truth, 5 December 1914, 5; Argus, 11 March 1914, 15.

  80. 80.

    See Macdonald, ‘Journalist’s Child’, 52; Ada Cambridge, The Three Miss Kings [1883] (New York, 1987), 36, 76–9, 83; Australasian, 19 March 1898, 43. On the strictures of mid-Victorian walking for younger girls, see Australasian, 19 August 1916, 42–3.

  81. 81.

    ‘Home range’ implies that children’s independent mobility is tethered exclusively to the home; ‘urban range’ promises a more encompassing analysis. For a sample of the relevant scholarship, see Freeman and Tranter, Children and their Urban Environment, 187–9; Lia Karsten, ‘It All Used to be Better? Different Generations on Continuity and Change in Urban Children’s Daily Use of Space’, Children’s Geographies, 3(3) (2005), 275–90; James C. Spilsbury, ‘“We Don’t Really Get to Go Out in the Front Yard” – Children’s Home Range and Neighbourhood Violence’, Children’s Geographies, 3(1) (2005), 79–99.

  82. 82.

    See Margaret O’Brien, Deborah Jones, Michael Rustin and David Sloan, ‘Children’s Independent Spatial Mobility in the Urban Public Realm’, Childhood, 7(3) (2000), 271–4; and Mayer Hillman, John Adams and John Whitelegg (eds), One False Move: A Study of Children’s Independent Mobility (London, 1990).

  83. 83.

    See the scholarship cited in note 81 and also Sue Palmer, Toxic Childhood: How the Modern World Is Damaging Our Children and What We Can Do about It (London, 2006).

  84. 84.

    Kate Simon, Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood (New York, 1982), 1, 83, 168–9; Lewis Mumford, ‘What is a City?’ [1937], in Richard T. LeGates and Frederick Stout (eds), The City Reader (London, 1996), 9.

  85. 85.

    Samuel, East End Underworld, 37.

  86. 86.

    Colin Pooley, Jean Turnbull and Mags Adams, ‘Kids in Town: The Changing Action Space and Visibility of Young People in Urban Areas’, in Alex Schildt and Detlef Siegfried (eds), European Cities, Youth and the Public Sphere in the Twentieth Century (Aldershot and Burlington, 2005), 90–109; Colin G. Pooley, Jean Turnbull and Mags Adams, ‘The Journey to School in Britain Since the 1940s: Continuity and Change’, Area, 37(1) (2005), 43–53; Sanford Gaster, ‘Urban Children’s Access to their Neighborhood: Changes Over Three Generations’, Environment and Behavior, 23(1) (1991), 70–85; Sanford Gaster, ‘Public Places of Childhood, 1915–30’, Oral History Review, 22(2) (1995), 1–31.

  87. 87.

    For discussion, see Sleight, Young People, 68.

  88. 88.

    Ibid., 78, 59–60.

  89. 89.

    VPRS 3181/967, Trams (1898–9), item 607, report dated 6 February 1899, PROV.

  90. 90.

    Sleight, Young People, 98–9; MS 9910, box 41, cutting dated 27 July 1887, SLV. It is possible, however, that more poor children travelled to work by train than might be assumed: for evidence on London, see Simon T. Abernethy, ‘Opening up the Suburbs: Workmen’s Trains in London, 1860–1914’, Urban History, 42(1) (2015), 70–88.

  91. 91.

    Mayhew, London Labour, I, 150.

  92. 92.

    Walking distances were calculated using the MapInfo program. For control purposes, the figures show the distance from the home address to the centre of the open space in question. The files do not provide precise locations of the reported offences within the parks. The full list of those apprehended features in Sleight, Young People, appendix 1.

  93. 93.

    On home conditions in Collingwood forcing ‘growing lads and girls [to] naturally seek enjoyment elsewhere’, see Collingwood History Committee, In Those Days: Collingwood Remembered (Melbourne, 1979), 19.

  94. 94.

    See VPRS 3181, Unit 753, Parks (1897), item 3942, PROV, for further details.

  95. 95.

    Oswald Barnett, I Remember (1964–5), transcribed by Betty Blunden, http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/andy/betty/os-barnett/i-remember.htm (accessed 20 August 2014). See also Sleight, Young People, 70–1 for further examples.

  96. 96.

    VPRS 3181, Unit 756, Parks (1899), item 4218, PROV.

  97. 97.

    VPRS 3181, Unit 757, Parks (1900), item 3914, PROV.

  98. 98.

    See, for instance, Geoffrey Serle, John Monash: A Biography (Melbourne, 1982), 21–7; Norman Lindsay, My Mask: For What Little I Know of the Man Behind It (Sydney, 1970), 83–9.

  99. 99.

    Nancy Adams, Family Fresco (Melbourne, 1966), 68; Macdonald, ‘Journalist’s Child’, 55.

  100. 100.

    Mabel Brookes, Memoirs (Melbourne, 1974), 1–2.

  101. 101.

    Tanu Priya Uteng and Tim Cresswell (eds), Gendered Mobilities (Aldershot and Burlington, 2008).

  102. 102.

    Lilian H. Montagu, quoted in Parratt, ‘More than Mere Amusement’, 110.

  103. 103.

    See, for example, Amie Livingstone Stirling, Memories of an Australian Childhood 1880–1900 (Melbourne, 1980), 62; Mildred Snowden, ‘Reminiscences and Family Life, 1829–1938’, MS 10748, SLV, 10. In Victoria, the 1872 Education Act considered non-attendance admissible only if there was ‘no State school which the child can attend within a distance of two miles’ (The Education Act, 1872 [Victoria], s. 13). From anywhere within that radius, schoolchildren were expected to walk.

Acknowledgement

I wish to acknowledge my dual affiliations in the writing of this chapter, both with King’s College London and, as Adjunct Research Associate, with the School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies at Monash University, Melbourne.

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  1. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA

    Simon Sleight

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  1. University of North Carolina at Chapel H, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA

    Chad Bryant

  2. Department of History, King's College London, LONDON, United Kingdom

    Arthur Burns

  3. Department of History, King's College London, LONDON, United Kingdom

    Paul Readman

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Sleight, S. (2016). Rites of Passage: Youthful Walking and the Rhythms of the City, c.1850–1914. In: Bryant, C., Burns, A., Readman, P. (eds) Walking Histories, 1800-1914. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48498-7_4

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