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BELOW Watercolour of Jacob’s Island, painted in 1887 by J Stewart. It shows the mill stream and run-down buildings; the poles to hang linen can be seen, along with pots and pails in the windows to lower into the ‘Folly Ditch’. Charles Dickens visited the notorious Jacob’s Island slum while researching the dramatic dénouement of Oliver Twist.
Few writers conjure up images of Victorian London more readily than Charles Dickens, born two centuries ago this February. Among his most famous London-based novels is the page-turner story of
Oliver Twist, published chapter by cliffhanging chapter from 1837-1839. Long after the eponymous urchin asks for another portion of gruel, the story unravels into a tale of bloody murder. The killer, Bill Sykes, flees the North London scene of his crime. But where should he go? Ultimately, there was only one refuge befitting a soul so dirty, and that place was Jacob’s Island, in South London, said to be the worst slum in the city. There, amid the stinking dilapidation, the novel reaches its climax, as (spoiler alert!) Sykes is hanged by his own noose.
In his novel, Charles Dickens offers a lengthy and graphic description of Jacob’s Island, which appears too grotesque to be anything other than pure fiction. But in fact, Jacob’s Island really did exist. So how true was Dickens’ description? Might archaeology provide answers? To discover more, in 1996 I led a team from Museum of London Archaeology to excavate at the site of Jacob’s Island, just east of St Saviour’s Dock, Bermondsey, South London. The story of our dig, and the insights it provides into the lives of the real people who once lived there, has never been presented to a wide readership, but in memory of the 200th anniversary of Dickens’ birth, the time is now right. So light the fire, settle down, and listen to the true tale of 19th-century slums and squalor in South London.
The rise and fall of Jacob’s Island
Life on Jacob’s Island had once been good. It was in Medieval times the location of St Saviour’s mill, owned by the Cluniac monks of Bermondsey Abbey. During the 17th and 18th centuries trade and employment were flourishing there, with much of the local employment focused in the timber and boat-building industries.
However, by the turn of the 19th century, much of the trade had moved downriver to Rotherhithe, where the existing docks were deepened and enlarged. Becoming part of the Surrey Commercial Dock System they took much of the trade, especially the timber trade. This had a damning effect on the lives of the inhabitants of Jacob’s Island: with employment prospects crippled, the pay was poor and jobs insecure. By the
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time Dickens visited Jacob’s Island it had become a notorious slum.
Our excavations revealed some evidence of its more prosperous, pre-Dickensian past. Within the northern part of the site, we uncovered parts of the Medieval mill, and the former 18th-century water works. These were enclosed by a large brick building that formed the eastern and southern revetment walls to the River Neckinger and the Mill Pond.
Come the 1830s, the water works were replaced by a lead mill. As a letter by Henry Mayhew to the Morning Chronicle in 1849 reveals (see box on p.15), not only did the inhabitants suffer poor sanitary conditions, but they were poisoned by sulpuretted hydrogen and hydrosulphate of ammonia produced by this, and other lead mills, located at the northern end of Mill Street. Life was by now, as Dickens described and our excavations demonstrate, very far from good.
Dickens on Jacob’s Island
…beyond dockhead in the Borough of Southwark, stands Jacob’s Island, surrounded by a muddy ditch, six or eight feet deep and fifteen or twenty wide when the tide is in, once called Mill Pond, but known in the days of this story as Folly Ditch… at such times, a stranger, looking from one of the wooden bridges thrown across it at Mill Lane, will see the inhabitants of the houses on either side lowering from their back doors and windows, buckets, pails, domestic utensils of all kinds, in which to haul the water up…
(Chapter 50, Oliver Twist)
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