2 Over-exposure

      Ten and sometimes twenty yards ahead, a small knife-thin figure in threadbare fustian led Henry Hilditch past the fish merchants and marine insurance offices of Lower Thames Street. They had walked, one before the other, from the West End and the guide showed no sign of slackening his brisk pace nor of indicating proximity to their destination.

      Hilditch’s footsteps clacked loudly on flint-dry cobblestones. A flaring street lamp briefly distinguished a pale face and hands from uniformly black apparel and showed him to be young. His voice, however, choked with the irritation of dissatisfied middle age. ‘A guinea for a bit of mutton and some dressed crab!’ he snorted. ‘A guinea!’ and shook his head as he increased his pace to match that of the small creature scuttling ahead. The decision had been his own and so the folly keener felt.

      A temptation to brush buttons with society had lured him from the free and fresh air of Hyde Park to the over-priced and over-decorated restaurant rooms in which he had found himself among a crush of excursionists, the disengorgings of special trains from the Midlands and the North. Gore House, despite its finery and the presence in the kitchens of the remarkable Alexis Soyer, was clearly only another conduit for Exhibition cash.

      Conceivably, he could have rescued something from the occasion. He knew that he might have furthered his observations of the London poor by talking to the pot boys, the cellar men, the grooms and the footmen, the under-cooks and scullery maids, to the mob of hungry men and women assembled in hope by the kitchen doors.

      The singular occasion of the Great Exhibition was already furnishing unique and significant information. Henry Mayhew, whose startling publications on London’s poor were opening wide the eyes of their more affluent neighbours, had himself acknowledged this much. And now, Henry Hilditch, engaged by a rival newspaper to exploit Mayhew’s success, had also found much to interest him and much more to provide sensational copy for the readers of the Morning Messenger. Mayhew’s reporting of the Exhibition would be sensible, worthy and full of facts but it would lack the drama that Henry’s editor always insisted upon and which Henry always provided.

      As an entrée to the evening’s investigations, Hilditch had found himself exchanging banalities with his countryfolk: among the outpourings of Lancashire, the Potteries and the Black Country he encountered a house-builder from York, a confectioner from Pontefract and a landowner he knew by sight from Whitby, men he might have met at any time, in a past life. There was no profit in this nor in the substance of the intercourse itself. Half a mile from the Exhibition, Paxton’s glasshouse and its cornucopia of invention was the main course of all conversations.

      Enfin, Hilditch admitted, the most valuable contact he had made the whole evening had been with a waiter, whose own personal history Hilditch had quickly dismissed as trite but who had hired out the kitchen boy as his guide for preliminary explorations of London’s East End. He had intended to go from Hyde Park directly to an address at which he had been advised he would find the poor at play and material sufficiently interesting for inclusion in his own survey of London’s lower classes. Not only would this satisfy the curiosity of his readers but it would go some way towards answering a need of another sort that was lodged deep in the heart of the young man himself.

      The waiter had confidently asserted that boy Daniel knew just the place to interest the gentleman and so it proved, but only after the waiter had consented to take a shilling and Daniel himself had pocketed a shiny sixpence.

      Now, digested by black anonymous streets and cuts in which one soot-blackened tenement back was the same as the next, Hilditch found himself unwilling host to an insidious and unreasonable dread that had been welling slowly since they had left the West End. The last rays of the sun that had scorched Hilditch’s neck all afternoon in Hyde Park had glanced off the dome of Wylde’s Monster Globe as they crossed Leicester Square and now it was only when moonlight found access and lit up the name of a street or the sign above a shop or lodging house that he dispelled the fantastical notion that he had wandered down some abysmal path to blackest Hell, and was still in the overworld. In these slums and rookeries were the very subjects of his investigations; he had realised that meeting London’s poor on his West End ground was insufficient; that he must eventually follow them to their homes. But now, on his first visit to the deeper reaches of the East End at night, he found himself breathing hard and stumbling to keep up with the boy in a labyrinth of nameless passages. Then, when the inclination to run hell-for-leather until he found a main thoroughfare and a passing cab was strongest upon him, just up ahead he saw light and heard a commotion.

      ‘Whitechapel!’ the boy exclaimed, and Hilditch berated himself for his foolishness as he hurried out of the empty by-way into streams of pedestrians. But no sooner had he stepped upon a wide and well-lit street than Hilditch again lost sight of his companion among crowds gathered about line upon line of costermongers’ barrows and fish-fryers’ stoves. Hilditch held fast his purse and called out, but his ‘Halloa, boy!’ was lost among a dissonant chorus of street-cries, the braying of donkeys, the sizzling of frying fish and the hubbub of Londoners out on a Saturday spree. He pushed past faces made hellish by burning braziers or jaundiced by grease lamps and candles; knocked down a uniformed beggar outside the Three Tuns; had his coat seared by a fire-eater outside the Alhambra’s noisy dancing rooms and roughly apprehended the wrong boy among a crowd of young people leaving the shabby premises of a penny gaff theatre.

      ‘What’s your game, guv’nor?’ the boy demanded, shaking free of Hilditch’s grasp and showing a face pock-marked with disease.

      ‘A mistake only,’ said Hilditch. ‘See here, I am looking for a boy.’

      ‘I might be that boy. A lot of toffs wants boys here. Depends on your price and what you wants.’

      ‘No, that boy – there!’ said Hilditch as he remarked his guide, stroking a small dog clasped by a boy of about his own age. ‘Over here, boy, over here!’ Hilditch gestured while the pock-marked boy bowed ostentatiously to the other.

      ‘Your ’umble pardon, Dan’l! I didn’t know this gent was engaged with you.’

      ‘None o’ that, Pineapple Joe,’ said Hilditch’s boy. ‘I’m a respectable fellow in regular employ.’

      ‘Wiv no time for your old pals, is that it?’

      ‘I ha’n’t got time for no one tonight,’ said the other. ‘My old