Victorian Urban Legends: The Gentleman Crossing-Sweeper June 10, 2022
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
***I’m putting a series of Victorian Urban Legends posts up to draw the reader’s attention to my forthcoming book: The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends. This legend (with full references) will appear in a second volume. If anyone can fill in missing pieces or offer other sources… I’ll be grateful and you’ll be credited. drbeachcombing AT gmail DOT com.***
London and other Victorian cities had large populations of vagrants who begged for money to pay for food and occasionally lodging. There were also those, like crossing sweeps or singers, who did small public services for ‘considerations’. These were familiar figures on the streets and two main legends grew up around them: first the idea that children were stolen by ‘tramps’ and mutilated; and, second, the notion that many beggars were secretly wealthy individuals. The evidence we have about Victorian begging suggests that it was a difficult and unrewarding life.[1] But the Victorian middle classes were convinced that some beggars put away a tidy sum. Take, for instance, this account from Christmas 1887:
At a season when charity is sometimes misdirected it is better that the public should learn the following facts, for the truth of which I can vouch. A lady near London was asked lately by her coachman for a holiday. As she was going to town she gave it. In Regent street she observed a man, in rags, singing. Looking again she recognised her coachman, and heard him tell a piteous tale of being out of work, with a sick wife and eight children. Next morning, when he came for orders, she taxed him with it, and told him he must go if he did so again. He replied that he would sooner give up his situation than give up singing in the streets, and confessed to having made 8s on that one day.[2]
This leads us to the legend of the ‘gentleman crossing-sweeper’. In 1860 one Samuel Brache wrote to Notes and Queries with a personal experience from a friend of a friend:
I have more than once heard the following very remarkable story from a venerable friend who was, rather more than twenty years ago, one of the principal members of my congregation; who had himself heard it from the gentleman to whom the incident happened, and who was his highly respected personal friend.[3]
A Mr. Simcox, once found himself caught in London in a shower. A servant in livery came out from a ‘handsome house’ and offered him, on his master’s instruction, shelter. Simcox entered the house and found the owner strangely familiar.
‘You seem, Sir,’ said he, ‘to look at me as though you had seen me before.’ Mr. Simcox acknowledged that his host was right in his conjectures, but confessed his entire inability to recall the occasion. ‘You are right, Sir, ‘replied the old gentleman; and if you will pledge your word as a man of honour to keep my secret, and not to disclose to any one what I am now going to tell you until you have seen the notice of my death in the London papers, I have no objection to remind you where and how you have known me. In St. James’s Park, near Spring Gardens, you may pass every day an old man who sweeps a crossing there, and whose begging is attended by this strange peculiarity; that whatever be the amount of the alms bestowed on him he will retain only a halfpenny, and will scrupulously return to the donor all the rest. Such an unusual proceeding naturally excites the curiosity of those who hear of it; and any one who has himself made the experiment, when he happens to be walking by with a friend, is almost sure to say to him, ‘Do you see that old fellow there? He is the strangest beggar you ever saw in your life. If you give, him sixpence he will be sure to give you five pence half-penny back again.’ Of course his friend makes the experiment, which turns out as predicted; and, as crowds of people are continually passing, there are numbers of persons every day who make the same trial; and thus the old man gets many a half-penny from the curiosity of the passers-by, in addition to what he obtains from their compassion. ‘I, Sir,’ continued the old gentleman, ‘am that beggar. Many years ago I first hit upon this expedient for the relief of my then pressing necessities; for I was at that time utterly destitute; but finding the scheme answer beyond my expectations, I was induced to carry it on until I had at last, with the aid of profitable investments, realised a handsome fortune, enabling me to live in the comfort in which you find me this day. And now, Sir, such is the force of habit, that though I am no longer under any necessity for continuing this plan, I find myself quite unable to give it up; and accordingly every morning I leave home, apparently for business purposes, and go to a room where I put on my old beggar’s clothes, and continue sweeping my crossing in the park till a certain hour in the afternoon, when I go back to my room, resume my usual dress, and return home in time for dinner as you see me this day.’[4]
In reply another correspondent to Notes and Queries described a similar tale ‘heard from the lips of my old nurse’.[5] A ‘gentleman prepossessing in person and manners, and evidently of large fortune’[6] proposes to a woman on the condition that she never try and discover his profession. She respects this promise but her mother attempts to find her future son-in-law’s job by following him. ‘At last one dirty day she was picking her way across the street, when a ragged sweeper held out his hand for alms; she looked in his face, beheld her son-in-law, uttered a scream, and fell down in the mud in a fainting fit.’[7]
In 1869, meanwhile, this story appeared in the newspaper:
At a time when London did not contain much more than half of its present, population, the late Mr. Alderman Waithman… kept a very large drapery establishment at the south-east end of Fleet Street, fronting also to New Bridge Street. I was personally acquainted with the Alderman, and frequently saw him in his shop. There was a man apparently in a state of absolute destitution, who swept, and had for many years swept the crossing to Ludgate Hill. Miss Waithman, out of pure compassion to this man, was in the frequent if not daily habit of supplying him with soup and other means of support; at length the poor man died, leaving her £7000. These facts were well known at the time, and I have no doubt are still within the recollection of some few at least of those still living, of whom I am one.[8]
In the same year a similar wealthy-beggar story is told about a blind mendicant in Paris in the British press.[9]
On the evidence of these reports, the idea of the wealthy crossing-sweepers stretches back, at least, into the first years of the nineteenth century. In fact, the earliest, instance known to me is Thackeray’s short story, ‘Miss Shum’s Husband’, first published Jan 1838.[10] Here Mrs Shum eventually discovers the job of her mysterious son-in-law. ‘Mr. Haltamont SWEP [sic] THE CROSSING FROM THE BANK TO CORNHILL!!’ The lack of elaboration suggests that stories like this were known to Thackeray’s readers. The servant narrator sees his master many years later. ‘I met him, few years after, at Badden-Badden, where he and Mrs. A. were much respectid, and pass for pipple of propaty.’[11] There were other adaptations to fiction. In 1870 a short-story writer described how a ‘ruined gentleman’:
continued to maintain the wife of his affections in a life of ease by presenting himself as a one-legged beggar on a crowded city crossing, notwithstanding the conviction that it would one day bring him to grief. He was finally run over by his own wife’s brougham. She had never suspected what his business was till she saw the victim of the accident.[12]
Then, the ‘gentleman crossing-sweeper’ (or something very like it) turned up in one of the best Sherlock Holmes stories. In ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’, first published in 1891, a journalist goes missing and is believed murdered. A beggar is suspected of the killing but Holmes, cleaning off the filth from the beggar’s face, shows that it is the ‘murdered man’ who had secretly begged to keep his wealthy house, earning some £300 a year.[13]
Were crossing sweeper’s sometimes secretly wealthy? A number of late nineteenth century articles about factual legal cases suggests a real fascination with the question. If the information given in the press is correct, then we can say that many very poor people had collected, probably over decades, significant small hoards of a hundred and more pounds.[14] However, there is one remarkable instance of a street sweeper, one Whittaker Butterworth who ‘was a wealthy man, and owned house property at Blackpool and Great Harwood’. Apparently Whittaker swept streets ‘to keep out of mischief’.[15]
[1] Amateur Impostor, ‘A glimpse’.
[2] ‘Street Singers’.
[3] Bache, ‘The Crossing Sweeper’, 20; it is dated, 21, to the 1810s or the 1820s.
[4] Bache, ‘The Crossing Sweeper’, 20-21. The story also appeared in the British press at the time and was re-elaborated in 1881, ‘The Rich’.
[5] Magog, 287.
[6] Magog, 286-287.
[7] Magog, 287.
[8] ‘A Wealthy’(30 Jan 1869).
[9] ‘Singular Story’.
[10] Note that Neil Howlett points out to me that rich beggars can be traced back to Elizabethan England, Harman, A caveat, 33-39.
[11] Thackeray, Papers, 1-40 at 40.
[12] Busk, ‘Gentleman Crossing Sweeper’: note this is a notice from the author who published the story in 1870 in Jun, The Million. I have not yet been able to trace the original.
[13] Doyle, The New, I, 159-193.
[14] E.g. ‘A Wealthy Crossing Sweeper’ (17 Jan 1885); ‘A Wealthy Crossing Sweeper’ (29 Jan 1887).
[15] ‘A Wealthy Street Sweeper’ (26 Oct 1900): though as a street sweeper he would have received a corporation wage.
