Clerkenwell Contrasts

October 4, 2018 Comments Off

With Literary Footprints 2018 well under way, Jen Pedler returns to draw the contrast between the hip and happening Clerkenwell of today and the Victorian-era Clerkenwell portrayed by George Gissing. You can discover much more on Jen’s walk The Nether World: George Gissing’s Clerkenwell which features as part of our literary walks festival, dates and booking information can be found on Jen’s walks page.

Google Maps describes Clerkenwell today as:

“… a trendy area where creative firms and smart flats fill old industrial warehouses and factories. Weekday office workers mingle in stylish eateries and cosy gastropubs like the Eagle, while a young crowd packs the area’s sleek bars and clubs after dark.”

This is a far cry from the “squalid and toil-infested ways” that George Gissing describes his 1890s novel The Nether World.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Clerkenwell was a grimy industrial area where many of the inhabitants both lived and worked. Gissing describes the grinding toil they experienced.

“Go where you may in Clerkenwell, on every hand are multiform evidences of toil, intolerable as a nightmare…. Here every alley is thronged with small industries.”

Living conditions were insanitary and overcrowded. Many lived in decrepit, rotting slums where

“… the walls stood in a perpetual black sweat; a mouldy reek came from the open doorways; the beings that passed in and out seemed soaked with grimy moisture, puffed into distortions, hung about with rotting garments.”

And as for “stylish eateries”…

“There was a kind of cake exposed in a window in Rosoman Street, two layers of pastry with half an inch of something like very coarse mincemeat between; it cost a halfpenny a square … A cookshop … exhibited at midday great dough-puddings, kept hot by jets of steam that came up through the zinc on which they lay.”

But despite the changes many of the buildings and streets that George Gissing would have been familiar with can still be found today. Recreate the atmosphere of Victorian Clerkenwell on my walk The Nether World: George Gissing’s Clerkenwell, part of Literary Footprints 2018.