A Fast Food Generation

We tend to think of our generation as being one of “fast food” people, but the reality is not that we eat fast food (which, of course, we do) but that we are fed by fast food chains.  The Victorians were “fast food” consumers, but what they ate came largely from individual purveyors on the streets of London and the other large cities.

Food and drink was readily available at all hours of the day and night, purchased from individual entrepreneurs. Henry Mayhew, in the middle years of the nineteenth century, listed “The Street-sellers of Eatables and Drinkables”  and included, in his list,

the vendors of fried fish, hot eels, pickled whelks, sheep's trotters, ham sandwiches, peas'-soup, hot green peas, penny pies, plum 'duff,' meat-puddings, baked potatoes, spice-cakes, muffins and crumpets, Chelsea buns, sweetmeats, [and] brandy-balls … constituting the principal eatables sold in the street; while under the head of street-drinkables may be specified tea and coffee, ginger-beer, lemonade, hot wine, new milk from the cow, asses milk, curds and whey and occasionally water. 

In addition, one might find “sherbet, and some highly-coloured beverages which have no specific name, but are introduced to the public as 'cooling' drinks …”

Men, women and children, especially those working the long hours common among the labouring classes, might take all of their meals in the streets.  The primitive and overcrowded conditions under which so many city dwellers were forced to live during the Victorian Era meant that for most there was no facility available for cooking meals. Street food was varied, cheap and tasty, if not nutritious and, at times full of dangerous additives or fouled by human or animal excrement.

The variety of what was available was extensive and, as Henry Mayhew tells us,

The coffee-stall supplies a warm breakfast; shell-fish of many kinds tempt to a luncheon; hot-eels or pea-soup, flanked by a potato 'all hot,' serve for a dinner; and cakes and tarts, or nuts and oranges, with many varieties of pastry, confectionery, and fruit, woo to indulgence in a dessert; while for supper there is a sandwich, a meat pudding, or a 'trotter.'

In the middle years of the century, there were literally thousands of street sellers of food and drink.  Mayhew estimated that there were 500 sellers of Pea-Soup and Hot Eels, alone and 300 sellers of Fried Fish.  Prices were such that all but the very poorest might eat.  For example, a half-penny  serve of hot eels might consist of 5 to 7 small pieces with ¾ of a cup of liquid while for the  same price, one might have a pint of pea soup.

Street sellers of food and drink provided refreshment, too, for those who were looking to buy the variety of other goods available at the kerbside.  There one might find the vendor of matches, farthing windmills, flowers, shirt-studs, animals, fruit, vegetables, paper flags and all the needs of the poor resident in a large metropolis. Not only were there goods to be bought to separate the consumer from his or her shillings and pence, there were games to be played and all sorts of amusements.  George Sims, writing at the end of the Victorian era, commented that “ the weighing chair, the shooting gallery, and the try-your-strength machine are to be found by the pavement's edge.”

One of the most popular dishes sold on the streets was jellied eel or, as it was sometimes called, eel jelly.  Cheap and nutritious it was a staple in the diet of the Victorian poor.  The eels were chopped and boiled in fish stock with various herbs and spices.  Their naturally gelatinous texture set the stock and they were ready to be marketed. For those who have never tasted them, the flavour is similar to rollmops. 

Here in all its glory the ell-jelly trade is carried on.  In great white basins you see a savoury mess.  Behind the stall mother and father, sometimes assisted by son and daughter, wash up cups and spoons, and ladle out the local luxury to a continuous stream of customers.  Many a time on a terribly cold night have I watched a shivering, emaciated-looking man eagerly consuming his cup of eel-jelly, and only parting with the spoon and crockery when even the tongue of a dog could not have extracted another drop from either.

For those who were either up late or rose early there were the coffee stalls.  Some opened as early as midnight, while others did not start trading until three or four in the morning.  The former appealed to "'night-walkers'" - fast gentlemen and loose girls" while those that opened in the morning were more likely to be patronized by working men.

 They usually sell coffee and tea, and some of them cocoa. They keep hot milk in one of the large cans, and coffee, tea, or cocoa in the others. They supply bread and butter, or currant cake, in slices - ham sandwiches, water-cresses, and boiled eggs. The price they charge is ld. per mug, or ½d. per half-mug, for the coffee, tea, or cocoa; and ½d. a slice the bread and butter or cake. The ham sandwiches are 2d. each, the boiled eggs ld., and the water-cresses a halfpenny a bunch.

The street vendors of food and drink continued to be a common sight in London until the end of the Victorian Era; and for good reason.  If they served as a kind of outdoor café for the poorest of the poor, they served a significant portion of London's population.  As late as 1889, Booth estimated that 30 percent of Londoners lived in poverty and to this must be added the more casual users of the street vendors; children seeking ice-creams, after-theatre crowds gathering around a coffee vendor and those who simply found it more convenient than going to a restaurant or café. 

While street vending  remained, for the individual purveyor, a precarious trade, for Londoners it was a popular and importaint institution.

Aboard the Hulks: A Voyage to Nowhere

By today's standards, the criminal justice system in Victorian times was hard and cruel. Although lip service had been paid to imprisonment as a reformative process, most people saw it as punishment; and the harder, the better. The hardest punishment was, of course, the death sentence but this was a punishment which was often commuted to “transportation beyond the seas.” Not all of those who were so sentenced were actually transported. Many were placed aboard ships which provided a voyage to nowhere; serving their full sentence aboard the “hulks.”

Lying in the Thames estuary, anchored along the banks of the river and in ports such as Portsmouth and Plymouth were old navy ships which had been converted into floating gaols. Generally a hulk was demasted, the rigging and rudders were removed as were any other features that might make the craft seaworthy. Inside, the decks were restructured to include cells for the convicts. Reforms in the first two decades of the nineteenth century led to a more standardized “prison” ship.

On each of the decks which housed the convicts a passage ran down the middle with cells on either side containing from ten to sixteen prisoners. The cells opened onto the passage by means of barred doors in order to insure that the activities of the convicts were always visible from the passageway. By the 1830s, when Charles Cozens, a military prisoner, was incarcerated in one of these floating prisons, the Justitia, he tells us that this former man of war was

drawn up close adjacent to the arsenal, with which a platform communicates from the ship’s gangway. It is subdivided into so many different apartments termed “wards,” varying in size according to the number and nature of their occupants, and forming three distinct stories or tiers, called the upper, middle, and lower decks, altogether capable of containing from eight to ten hundred men. Hammocks supply place of berths, which, from the facility of slinging, accommodate a much greater number of men.

In 1776, Parliament had authorized the use of these decommissioned and converted warships for a two year period as temporary holding pens for transportees. Like most government measures the hulk system seemed to take on a life of its own and they were still in use more than eighty years later. Sir Samuel Romilly, speaking in the House of Commons in May of 1809 commented on "the extreme depravity" and the "wretchedness they were condemned to suffer on board the hulks," describing them as " miserable receptacles, where so many met a melancholy death."

Indeed,  Charles Cozens may well have been right when he described other prisons as,  “delightful suburban retreat[s]” when compared to the hulks.  

 

Because those either too ill or too old to make the trip to Australia were not transported, the hulks were always at risk of becoming human dumping grounds. “We lament,” investigators noted, “the great proportion of persons on board the hulks generally who from age, infirmity, accident or incurable disease are wholly incapable of work.” Among the criticism directed at the hulks was that the overcrowding aboard the vessels was such as to create an environment in which criminals of all types and ages were co-mingled, “and by that constant intercourse, they corrupt and confirm each other in every practice of villainy.” The hulks became schools for criminals where they were “confirmed in every vicious habit.”  Nor was it uncommon for there to be boys among the men.  Aboard the Justitia, Cozens found  two brothers whose ages were estimated at eleven and twelve years.

Charles Cozens was aboard the Justitia, a hulk which was not noted for its cleanliness.  Even so, attempts were made, no matter how unsuccessful they might prove to be, to maintain some minimal degree of hygiene. After all, cleanliness was next to Godliness, and so convicts were required to wash and shave on Saturday evenings to prepare for the Lord’s Day, Sunday.

 

Cozens was a “laundress,” whose job, in his words, was “washing the shirts or linen of the remainder of the family, amounting at the time … to about five hundred.” The first four days of the week were spent in scrubbing the thick smock-frocks or shirts inside and out with a brush and they were then hung from lines between the yards. They were finally ironed and folded. Charles Cozen supported existing views on cleanliness aboard the hulks, noting that

the greatest inconvenience experienced in this … was occasioned by the filthy state of the shirts from vermin, which, on some, literally swarmed, and every place in the wash-house, from long usage, was in the same state.

 

Life aboard the hulks followed a relatively tight routine; at least during the daylight hours. The ordinary working day started with the cooks rising at 3.00 a.m. to prepare breakfast for the convicts who arose at 5.30. They were then mustered on the deck fifteen minutes later and as soon as they finished breakfast one of the three decks on the ship was washed. The decks were washed alternately thus meaning that one was cleaned every three days. This was completed by 6.45 at which time the convicts stowed their hammocks and left the ship to work on shore in the dockyards or on the banks of the Thames. As they left the ship, in irons, the restraints were checked by the guards who also made sure that the convicts had nothing hidden about their persons and it is likely that the guards were fastidious in their searches since, if anything was found on the prisoners later, the guard was held responsible.

The work gangs, usually consisting of ten men, were set up although the numbers might vary depending upon the particular assignment for the day. They were under the supervision of a free overseer and while they worked, they were, of course, closely guarded to make sure that they didn’t slack off or attempt to escape. Among the jobs undertaken by convicts were

cleaning shot in the arsenal, or erecting mounds and scarps, under the direction of sappers and miners, for artillery practice. Others loaded and unloaded barges in the mud, or attended the different tradesmen and mechanics employed in the dockyard.

There were frequent musters and the prisoners were closely guarded. On their return to the ship,  their irons were examined and they were searched. In the evening there might be school, chapel and a final muster before the prisoners were locked into their wards for the night. Finally at 9.30, it was lights out. Violence aboard the hulks was not uncommon. What might appear at first glance to be small issues could blow up and cause major disruption. In the history of the hulks, attempts were made to burn or scuttle the ships and the thin line between discipline and riot was not always easy to maintain.

 

Although descriptions from visitors might suggest a well run organization, this was often far from the truth. At one of the Hulks at Sheerness, a visitor found that the prisoners were largely in control. They commonly stole from the dockyards where they worked and used what they stole for purchasing beer which, as he noted, “was sold in the hulks by night, as well as by day … with the sanction and the authority of the captain.” And he went on to suggest that the authorities allowed this since they profited from the sale of the beer.

In 1835, witnesses before the House of Lords Committee on Gaols, including some former prisoners, testified that after lights out the intensely crowded lower decks became places where the convicts robbed one another, quarrelled, fought, swore and apparently did pretty much as they pleased. As Branch-Johnson has noted, “from almost whatever hulk witnesses came, the phrase ‘hell upon earth’,: or something very like it, finds its way into the evidence.” So bad was life aboard the hulks that one of the Convicts in one of these floating prisons freely admitted “that if it should be his son’s fate to be placed in confinement, he prays to God that he may never be put into a hulk.”

 

Click here to download Charles Cozen's Adventures of a Guardsman.

Child Labour in Victorian England

Although child labour was to arouse the strongest of emotions during the Victorian Era, it was certainly not a new phenomenon.  In England children had always worked although, while Britain was a primarily agrarian society, much of the work was “hidden,” being in the fields and a part of a family’s work structure.

From the middle of the eighteenth century, a number of factors combined to make child labour more visible and more dramatic.  As I. J. E. Keil has noted, “ ‘Industrial Revolution’ became the commonplace characterisation of the complex developments in Britain during the later 18th and first half of the 19th cents.”  With the advent of the steam engine and its application to factory production there was accelerated movement from animal power to machine power.  The development and rapid expansion of railways, dependent for their motive power on steam, contributed to the distribution process, but at the same time allowed for the movement of people. Movement to the urban centres was expedited by a series of Parliamentary Acts in the later years of the 18th and the early years of the nineteenth century which accelerated the process of enclosure.  Indeed, in the eighty years between 1780 and 1830, more than 4,000 local acts were passed and between six and seven million acres or just over twenty percent of the land area of Britain was enclosed, forcing many smallholders off the land.

Many of those who left the land were forced into factories, Blake's "dark Satanic Mills." Here workers, especially women and children, were exploited.  Children especially were useful where the industrial processes required access to those parts of machines which were too difficult to be reached by the larger adults.  Children were cheap and were always available since their small earnings were often just enough to make the difference between survival and starvation for a family.  In Lancashire alone, 30,000 children  a year were employed in the mills in the 1830s.  Children were in demand, as well, in the mines where they could squeeze through small openings and were often harnessed to wagons full of coal to pull the loads to the surface.

Some of the voices of the working children can still be heard in the 1842 Report of the Children's Employment Commission. John Riley worked in a pin making factory.  At the time he was interviewed, he was eleven years old, had been in the workhouse for six years and had been making pins for five years, having started when he was six years of age. He worked from 9 to 12 and from 1 to 4 and in addition to which he worked after supper two or three times a week.  He told the interviewer that he never got beaten; even if he failed to do the quantity of pins that was expected.

John Edelsten of the firm of Edelsten and Price, pin manufacturers, noted, in testimony, that the children working in the factory were of the lower class and their families "could not afford to do without the produce of their children's labour, however small." He went on to say that if the children did not work, "the parents of most of them must come on the parish for relief."

Ellen Clark, who worked for a tobacconist had begun working as a tobacco stripper at around the age of ten.  The work entailed the stripping of the wet leaves and “laying them smooth in a row.”  At first, the smell was so unpleasant that she threw up, but in a few days she became accustomed to it.  The smell, she said, “makes all the children ill at first.”  Her workday began at 7 o'clock in the morning with  a thirty minute break for breakfast at 8:30 and an hour for dinner at noon.  At 4 o'clock she had half-an-hour for tea.  She went to Sunday School for most of that day finishing at 8:30 in the evening. 

Ellen told the interviewer that she “never gets to walk out in the fields even on Sundays,” but of course that day was taken up with schooling.  She did have a few holidays during the year; New Year's Day, Christmas Day and Good Friday and, on those days she went to Church and to school. Those were, however, her only holidays.
 
In the Derbyshire Potteries children were also employed. Esther Ann Eley was eight years of age when she was interviewed.  She had been employed for ten days turning a wheel for which she received 2s 6d a week. She had been to school, but as she said, “they ne'er larnt her aught.”

John Froggart  was eleven years old and worked at the Shipley Pottery where he had been employed for three months.  For turning the wheel he received 3s per week.  His work day began at six in the morning and ended at six in the evening.  During the day he had half an hour for breakfast and an hour for dinner. He got his meals on the premises where he had meat, potatoes, bread, and beer for dinner.  Although he had attended Sunday school for four years, he was still doing the Easy Lessons.

Even for those children who were slightly older, the work must have been hard and dangerous. Frederick Cave was fifteen years of age when he testified and had been working in the Machine Rooms of a Lace Manufacturer.  He worked from ten to twelve hours a day and often, in addition, he might work all night two or three times a week, finishing at six in the morning before returning to work at eight.  His father had died two years earlier and “he was forced to look out for his own living.”  Although he had a little school and now attended Sunday School, he could barely read and couldn't write, signing his testimony with his mark.

Such was life for many of the working children in the first half of the century. Children died or were terribly maimed in the pursuit of employment.    But even as late as the 1880s, George Sims could write,

I know one little lad who is employed at pulling out the planks which have been pushed through the machine by men, and he has one hand now on which only the thumb is left. Then there is the lemonade-bottling, which is another industry largely employing the lads of poor neighbourhoods. The bottles are liable to burst, and cases of maiming are almost of daily occurrence.

To see a portion of the 1842 Report on the use of child labour in the mines, including some horrific images, click here.

A note on manners, gentle reader

During the middle years of the nineteenth century, a knowledge of etiquette became increasingly important on formal occasions. Books on the subject regularly appeared in order to provide a guide to proper behaviour for those who wanted, or needed, to know how to engage in formal relationships. Just how significant these rules were for most people is questionable. Certainly some elements of them filtered down into everyday behaviour, but they were hardly the be-all and end-all that the writers of books on the subject would have had their readers believe them to be. Cassell’s handbook on etiquette, published in 1860 and aptly entitled, The Hand-Book of Etiquette: Being a Complete Guide to the Usages of Polite Society, opens with a preface which informs the reader that:

In order to enjoy polite society, and to be thoroughly suited for it, we must have a knowledge of those rules and regulations which the custom and common consent of well-bred people have established and drawn up into a kind of social code, entitled Etiquette. To render the public familiar with this code is the object of the present work.

Etiquette has a long and fascinating history. Reference to the correct order of precedence is mentioned as early as in Beowulf, when Wealtheow the queen, “mindful of etiquette,” takes the goblet first to the King then to the courtiers. Not surprisingly many of the procedures and orders of precedence centred around the court from which, like the circles from a stone dropped in water, they expanded into all classes and places.

By the end of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the influence of certain individuals who were considered masters of social etiquette, or at least setters of the fashionable trends, men like Beau Nash and Beau Brummell, was strongly affecting British polite society. The rules they imposed were often mere whims, but so powerful were they as arbiters of taste that it is said that the Prince Regent was careful never to leave his waistcoat unbuttoned beyond that degree that Beau Brummell stipulated as correct.

G. Kitson Clark, in The Making of Victorian England, has argued that the development of Victorian etiquette was

essentially part of the history of the battle for refinement and civilization, and above all the better protection of women, against the promiscuity, animalism, brutality and grossness which had been common even in the eighteenth century.

“Unfortunately” he continues, this led to “the development of an etiquette which becomes in many points otiose and extremely cumbersome, the encouragement of taboos which are at best ridiculous, and the imposition of a code which can be extremely cruel.”

In George and Weedon Grossmith’s Diary of a Nobody, Carrie, the wife of a senior clerk, Charles Pooter becomes quite concerned about the proper order for paying a call. Both she and her husband have pretentions to move in a better class. The matter is, at least temporarily, resolved when Carrie finds she has no calling cards and, therefore, could not possibly visit her friend. Clearly more cards would have to be printed and then there “would be quite time enough to discuss the etiquette of calling.”

Undoubtedly, Carrie had been reading either Cassell’s or some other guide to etiquette which made quite clear the process of using calling cards. Cassell’s, for example, explains that "The etiquette of visiting cannot be carried on without proper attention to the time when cards should be sent or brought, and without recollecting the persons for whom they should be left.”

As to who could visit whom, there was an accepted structure of what was or was not appropriate. A lady could not visit bachelors or widowers unless a female relative of the person being visited was present to do the honours. A married woman might call on a bachelor or widower if she was accompanied by her husband or brother. If she was unmarried, even though accompanied by a male relation she “should have the countenance of a married lady’s presence.”

By the middle and late years of the Victorian Era, the most trivial demands of etiquette could lead to the downfall of one in the upper strata of society. Poor speech or the incorrect usage of terminology might prove fatal. As “Madge” in one of her guides to etiquette pointed out, “coffee” must be pronounced “cawffee”, “lunch” is never heard in good society–the meal is “luncheon”, calls are “made,” not “paid,” and one drinks “tea” but doesn’t “take” it.

Even something as slight as the correct manner to crack nuts at the dinner table was not too miniscule a topic to fall under the eagle eye of “Madge” who noted that the man who knew how to crack nuts would be “in request by the ladies on either side, for, for some reason, women are seldom adepts in freeing the nut from the shell.”

All through the Victorian Era, knowledge of what was correct seemed to become increasingly important, particularly for women but also for men in their relations with women of their own or better classes. In the process, and as part of the attempt to maintain a degree of exclusivity, the rituals became gradually more trivial and progressively more exacting. Etiquette had truly become a game for the initiates.

To download Routledge's Manual of Etiquette (c. 1860), click here.

The tailors and the Lady

A dispute between a tailor and a customer hardly seems newsworthy. Even should the matter go to court, it would be unlikely to merit more than passing notice in a local newspaper. Yet in May of 1873, just such a dispute (Creed and another v Walters) was the subject of great interest in papers around London, ranging from the Daily News to the Illustrated Police News. The story even made it into the Western Mail in Cardiff. What made this case so remarkable was the defendant in the case was Catherine Walters, better known as “Skittles” and the most celebrated courtesan of the middle years of Victoria's reign. So popular was she - or at least so well known - that The Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times thought it sufficiently amusing to make her case the subject of one of its frequently appalling puns. "'Skittles' speaks of a fashionable tailor as being 'one of the old war-horses of the trade.' A heavy charger we suppose."

In the court it was pointed out that

the defendant, Miss Walters, was a lady very well known in London and in Paris, and her personal attractions had secured for her a very considerable number of admirers, under the protection of some of whom she had from time to time lived.

The argument was over a bill in excess of three hundred pounds for riding habits and numerous alterations.

Nor was this the only time Skittles name was to appear in the popular press. Just three years later, when she was in Paris, the following appeared.

Miss Catherine Walters, an English lady, who may, perhaps, be better known to some of your readers than she is to your correspondent, brought an action, which came on for hearing yesterday, against M. Faure, the well-known publisher, demanding damages for injury to her reputation occasioned by a book called 'Memoires d'une Biche Anglaise," with her portrait in the title-page. The curiosity of the public met with a disappointment, for it happened that - to use the words of a disappointed Irish attorney - a 'compromise broke out between the parties.' The publisher undertook to destroy all the copies of the work remaining on hand, and the lady's counsel declaring that she scorned to make the action a monetary speculation the affair was concluded.

Again, in 1890, her name featured in the case of Beauclerk v Beauclerk in which Skittles was named as having been intimately involved with the husband almost thirty years earlier. Such was the power of her name that it took precedence over the names of several others with whom the husband was involved. Although the couple had been living separately for twenty years, the court held that there were no grounds for a dissolution of the marriage since there was no proof that the husband had molested his wife or interfered with the custody of their child in the years of their separation.

During the sixties and seventies, the grand decades for the courtesans, Skittles was the most talked abut and admired of the breed. She was, as William Hardman so bluntly put it, “a w[hore] sir, much sought after by fast young swells.” With all of the most elegant women of the day she rode, through the season, in Rotten Row.

The Danae! the Amazons! the lady cavaliers! the horsewomen! can any scene in the world equal Rotten Row at four in the Afternoon, and in the full tide of the season?

asked the journalist, George Augustus Sala. There the dandies of London gathered at the wooden rails, ladies in their crinolines strolled accompanied by their footmen, children played in the park and here and there one could see “wicked old bucks, splendidly attired, leering furtively under the bonnets” of respectable women.

The “pretty little horsebreakers” as those of the demi-monde parading up and down the Row were known, could be seen

in their ravishing riding-habits and intoxicatingly delightful hats: some with the orthodox cylindrical beaver, with the flowing veil; others with roguish little wide-awakes, or pertly cocked cavalier’s hats and green plumes.

One correspondent to The Times of 29 January 1861 suggested that if its editors took chairs to Rotten Row they might then see, and be able to tell the public in a "leader",

Who rides the best horse in the row? Who drives the most rampageous ponies? Whom do all the best girls ape in dress and deportment, and in equipage if they can; aye, and in talk too? Who first set the fashion of the ‘pork pie’ hat? Who restored the ancient chimney pot? Why one of our ‘pretty horse-breakers.

"And there, as Alfred Austin, later Poet Laureate, wrote in 1861, “… defiant, spurning frown and foe,/With slackened rein swift Skittles rules the Row./Though scowling matrons champing steeds restrain,/She flaunts Propriety with flapping mane."

She had a passion for horses and was a first class rider. Sir Willoughby Maycock, as a young man, was riding home from the hunt with his father when two riders raced past “and were over the fence and in front of us in the twinkling of an eye.” One, a woman, “wore a habit that fitted like a glove, and a bit of cherry ribbon round her neck. … she was a perfect dream.” As they pelted past, she shouted to her companion, Jim Mason, the winner of the 1839 Liverpool Grand National, and one of the finest horsemen in England, that she expected when they reached home her bottom would be as red as her ribbon. It was, of course, the incomparable Skittles.

Born in 1839, at sixteen she became the mistress of George, Lord Fitzwilliam and, when she left him for Lord Cavendish, Fitzwilliam settled £300 a year on her and banked £2,000 in her name. Cavendish, later Marquess of Hartington, settled £500 a year on Skittles in addition to giving her horses and a house. The affair lasted for four years, and was frequently painful for both of them. Among her intimate friends were the Prince of Wales and the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. W. E. Gladstone, who always had an interest in the demi-monde, sent her twelve pounds of Russian tea and brought her a bunch of narcissi, telling her she had a small waist and then testing his statement “by manual measurement.” “I have not,” he assured her, “come to talk politics.”

Skittles was painted by Sir Edwin Landseer and had poems written to her and about her by Wilfred Scawen Blunt aas well as Alfred Austin. Her notoriety was such that even without being named, it must have been clear to readers of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine that the criticism of Landseer’s “The Shrew Tamed” was referring to Skittles, especially since the model (not Skittles herself) looked so much like the lady in question.

“The Shrew Tamed”--a high-bred horse of soft silken coat, dappled with play of light and shade as on velvet--subdued by a “pretty horsebreaker,” is certainly unfortunate as a subject. ... We hope it will now be felt by Sir Edwin Landseer and his friends that the intrusion of “pretty horsebreakers” on the walls of the Academy is not less to be regretted than their presence in Rotten Row.

Skittles lived into her eighties, long enough to see the end of the First World War. In her last years she would take the air, pushed in a bath-chair in Hyde Park, where once she had ruled the Row.

To read the report of the case of Creed and another v Walters as it appeared in The Daily News (London, 6 May 1873), click here.