William Gilbert’s The City, An Inquiry is a work of Victorian investigative journalism — part polemic, part audit — aimed at the Corporation of London, its livery companies, and the charitable endowments they controlled in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Gilbert writes as an insider turned accuser: he presents himself not as a lawyer but as a plain observer who will let the reader “judge of the tree by its fruits,” and he builds his case from parliamentary returns, newspaper reports, and the companies’ own account books. The book proceeds through the City’s charities, its guilds, its hospitals, and its schools, closing with a formal conclusion.
“In the first place, then, we hold that the government of no capital in the world enjoys a reputation so far above its merits as that of the ancient City of London.”
At the centre of the book lies a single charge: that institutions founded to relieve the poor, regulate trade, and educate the young had been turned into engines for enriching the rich. Gilbert’s method is cumulative rather than theoretical — he piles up figures, leases, and dinner bills until the pattern becomes impossible to miss.
From Demolition to the Domesday of Endowments
The Inquiry Begins
William Gilbert opens his book not with a survey of the City’s monuments but with a charge sheet. Plenty of writers, he grants, have already exposed the abuses of the Corporation; his complaint is that defects just as grave have escaped censure altogether. He will not argue points of law—his ignorance of it might damage the cause—but will lay out the results of twenty-five years of metropolitan civic legislation and let the reader judge the tree by its fruits. No capital, he insists, enjoys a reputation so far above its merits. The City’s loudest admirers are men with an interest in continued abuses, while distant observers swallow the flattering speeches made at civic feasts. Behind the banquet tables he finds tyranny, dishonesty and cruelty toward the poor and the industrial classes—those earning under two hundred pounds a year—legalised by statute and practised by City magnates. Judges and bishops lend an air of justice and morality to guild dinners whose cost may come out of misappropriated trade and charity funds; several of those judges are themselves members of City companies. He records a magnate’s remark about ejected Bishopsgate Street tenants: “we have got rid of them out of the City.”
The Poor Laws and the Price of a Parish
From this he moves to the machinery of overcrowding. Ninety-eight parishes each maintain their own poor, and demolitions near the Bank and Royal Exchange have packed the displaced into Farringdon Street. The poor-law abuses follow: rich parishes give paupers a shilling to seek lodging elsewhere; the cost of removing paupers to their legal settlements mounts; three City unions are formed, with casual wards built at Bow, five miles away. The rates tell their own story—a penny in the pound at St. Michael’s, Cornhill, five shillings in a Farringdon Street parish, a tenth of a farthing at St. Christopher-le-Stock, eight shillings at St. Ann’s, Blackfriars. St. Bartholomew the Great, with a single pauper boarded twenty miles off, advertised for a replacement when he died. Cholera brought the demolition of the Farringdon Road line: over forty thousand people driven out, the land left as the “Farringdon Street wastes.” Dr. Letheby and Dr. Ross report overcrowding and infant mortality so severe that not one child in five reaches the age of five. In 1861 Charles Pearson moved a resolution in the Common Council; the Corporation voted money, bought a site for £25,000, waited nine years, then sold the land to the Metropolitan Railway Company. A working men’s building society later took ground near Clerkenwell at £700 a year in ground rent.
Improvement as Eviction
New Cannon Street was promoted as civic improvement but served really to drive away poor-rate liabilities; a clergyman’s offer to build a model lodging-house was refused. Overcrowding in Clerkenwell, Southwark and Blackfriars is documented through the Building News, Dr. Griffiths, Mr. Bianchi and Mr. Rendell—much of the Southwark property belonging to the Church. The Metropolitan Board of Works cut Southwark Street through crowded districts and left waste ground behind. Only after twenty years did the Board let the Peabody trustees build model lodging-houses, and then only on payment of a heavy ground-rent. Grand improvements near the Bank and Royal Exchange destroyed every dwelling-house worth £150–£200 a year; the Cannon Street terminus alone ejected more than twelve hundred persons. Nor was this confined to the centre: alterations in the eastern, north-eastern and south-western districts, done by the Corporation or by companies under its patronage, all pushed working men, small tradesmen and skilled craftsmen beyond the City boundaries.
The Workhouse and the Empty Parish
In the East London Union the Blackwall terminus dislodged thousands into Whitechapel and Shoreditch, already overburdened. Gilbert sets the unused St. Olave’s, Hart Street workhouse—closed fifteen years, its entrance bricked up, its interior dilapidated, though the parish held enormous wealth in the Corn Exchange and the dock company warehouses—against the crowded Whitechapel workhouse described by Dickens in Household Words, where five ragged women lay outside the casual ward and the master said the place was full. The Metropolitan Railway from King’s Cross to Moorgate Street and Liverpool Street ejected small tradesmen and operatives; Moorgate Street Station alone displaced three thousand householders and lodgers without compensation, demolished the parish church, while the Corporation obtained licenses for three new gin-shops. The ejected lost their identity as citizens, their rights to charitable endowments and their votes; employer and employed grew estranged. In the West London City Union, ejections drove many into St. Clement Danes, which became the most unhealthy parish, deaths exceeding births; when the Government chose a site there for the law courts, six thousand working people were turned out and the ground lay waste for more than ten years.
Printers, Rents and the Cost of Distance
The ejectments, Gilbert argues, are not complete: the Corporation and the livery companies mean to exclude working men, clerks and warehousemen and leave the City to the Mayor and Corporation. No mansions are built for the rich, who will not live in them; houses for incomes under three or four hundred pounds cannot be built, ostensibly to escape the inhabited house duty. Printers suffer most unjustly—compositors, pressmen, machinemen, readers, reading boys—not one in ten can find a house within a mile and a half of work, and lung disease is frequent. At least a hundred and twenty thousand working men have been driven from the City in forty years; in 1793 there were a hundred thousand more than now. The lost time, an hour a day at sixpence, comes to a quarter of a million sterling a year. Rents are no cheaper: a porter on Ludgate Hill earning twenty-six shillings a week paid nine for two rooms a mile and a half away, his masters’ lease from a livery company forbidding anyone to sleep on the premises. Boys lived at Highgate and Chelsea; a reading boy from Bow was nearly rejected for living too far off.
Troutbeck’s Legacy and the Charity Accounts
Against the argument that the poor had no proprietary right, Gilbert answers that many grievances were legalised by the Court of Chancery and blessed by bishops and archbishops. The case of Troutbeck of Wapping stands as his emblem: dying in 1815, he left £6,000 to build a wing to St. John’s charity schools and the residue for poor boys; the Prince Regent’s debts exceeding a quarter of a million, the Minister, authorised by Lord Chancellor Eldon, declared the property an escheat to the Crown for want of relatives, and it was divided among black-legs, fiddlers, jewellers, opera dancers, tailors and other creditors. Invested as intended, it could have maintained the poor children of the whole eastern district. He cites Lady Mico’
The Bishop’s Sermon and the Livery Companies
The segment opens with a sermon preached at Paul’s Cross by the Bishop of Worcester, who called bishops, abbots, priors, parsons, canons, priests, dukes, and lords “strange thieves.” The bishop praised a parliamentary act requiring certain men to sow two acres of hemp, though he judged it insufficient to hang England’s thieves. He urged the clergy to reduce their servants and dishes, return to their first foundation, and keep hospitality that fed the needy rather than “jolly fellows with golden chains and velvet gowns,” barring such men from religious houses and calling them “knave bishop, knave abbot, knave prior” while feeding none of them, their horses, or dogs. The author wishes a Latimer among modern bishops to reform the livery companies and the Corporation of London, substituting judges, peers, members of parliament, and bankers for the bishop’s targets.
The Cost of Guild Feasts
Modern guild dinners are lavishly expensive. At a Mercers’ Company dinner, a guest near the prime warden admired a light hock; a gentleman said it cost 104 shillings a dozen, noting the warden must replace the wine. A Goldsmiths’ member countered that when the Prince of Wales dined with them, the cheapest wine cost 120 shillings a dozen. Five haunches of venison were served at the Mercers’ feast. A Dyers’ Company dinner at Richmond, following the custom of allowing ladies, cost £3 a head, with committee members allowed two guineas each for private dinner and expenses, and guests’ railway fares paid. Asked whether any dyers’ trade members belonged, the inviter said they differed from other companies: “We have one honourable member of the craft still with us.”
Seymour’s Indictment
Mr. Danby Seymour’s lecture to the St. Pancras Working Men’s Club in April 1876 compared abuse of a poor-law guardian for buying flowers and hiring a fly at the poor’s expense with praise for a rich guild entertaining princes and ministers out of funds left for trade regulation, technical education, and relief of poor decayed members. He objected to £30,000 a year spent by one company on “bloated banquets,” likening bonbons to the guardian’s bouquet. The author contrasts old and modern feasts: formerly “void baskets” of wicker received scraps, later distributed to the poor, especially debtors in the City Prison; this charity degenerated into costly bonbons for satiated guests, whose annual cost could provide Christmas treats for workhouse inmates and London district school children. Seymour added that liverymen sometimes receive pounds on feast days; court of assistants seats carry salaries; committee meetings are paid; some companies dine twice weekly; five-pound notes are secreted under guests’ plates; relations are educated at company schools or given university exhibitions, livings, almshouses, and pensions. A “knowing hand” attributed the companies’ license to abuse of hospitality: early feasters paid for their own dinners, and the companies once acted as benefit societies, trades unions, and public analysts; the Goldsmiths now spend £30,000 a year on dining.
Friends of the Mammon of Unrighteousness
The author suspects the lavish expenditure aims to “make themselves friends with the mammon of unrighteousness,” gathering influential persons who hesitate to attack hosts whose hospitality they enjoyed. Mr. Firth agrees: companies invite government officers and legal dignitaries, and no one who has quaffed the Skinners’ wines or dined with the Merchant Taylors inquires into charters or tailors’ numbers—preparing friends in times of need. Modern liverymen cite former royal and noble membership to justify admitting judges, chancellors, princes, and dukes, but formerly such magnates were only honorary members, the livery confined to craft brethren and sisters. Now trade members are nearly driven out while outsiders absorb management and funds. A Times extract from October 1876 lists eminent freemen of the seventy-six companies: the Prince of Wales as Fishmonger and Haberdasher; the Dukes of Connaught, Edinburgh, and Cambridge as Fishmongers alongside Gladstone, Lowe, Samuel Morley, Sir Morton Peto, Russell Gurney, Sir A. D. Sassoon, and Barons Lionel and Nathan Rothschild; the Marquis of Lorne and Baron Heath as Grocers; Lord Beaconsfield, Sir Richard Baggallay, Sir Moses Montefiore, and Sir Anthony Rothschild as Merchant Taylors; and a long roll of judges, bishops, colonels, and bankers distributed among the Cooks, Coopers, Curriers, Feltmakers, Goldsmiths, Leathersellers, Drapers, Mercers, Haberdashers, and Spectacle-makers.
Neglected Trade Duties
The passage argues that the companies once held serious trade-inspection and municipal duties, many now abandoned. Firth’s “Municipal London” is quoted on an order that two Ironmongers and two Grocers stand all day at Bishopsgate to check that no citizen wore dress his position did not entitle him to. Such duties have died out, but the Grocers’ inspection of their trade and right to prosecute offenders still exists, though public apathy lets them neglect duties for which, with charitable funds, their charter was obtained. The Merchant Taylors’ municipal duties grew so onerous that substitutes among wardens were admitted; in March 1596 an enactment created “wardens’ substitutes” plus sixteen assistants to meet at the hall. This arrangement failed: the substitutes thought themselves capable of governing, fell to extravagant eating, and ran the company into debt; in 1661 the company found them “a great grievance” and dismissed them. Herbert is cited on the Skinners’ charter, which ordered search for abuses in the workmanship of “Skinners and Skinneresses”: every fur pure and without admixture, no old furs sold except as from vestments, no selling in streets or markets lest people be deceived. The author argues fashions changed but the charter is unrepealed, funds are enormous, the trade still exists, and the livery should control it; he asks how many reduced craftsmen receive charity.
The Goldsmiths and the Brewers
Mr. Beal is quoted on the Goldsmiths: artificers driven from the City, charities lost to them; dinner and festivity spending could fund £20 annuities for a thousand poor artisans. Edward III licensed purchase of lands in mortmain for weak, blind, and infirm goldsmiths; lands remain but pensioners are questioned; some receive £300 a year; almshouses stand at Hackney, Acton, and Woolwich. In 1812 almshouses for twenty cost £12,000; now £60–£70 per annum rent each. The Goldsmiths’ 1876 notice offers prizes for design, model, and execution of silver articles, with a £100 travelling scholarship for a student winning design prizes three successive years. The author asks why this was not done before, funds not being lacking, and questions £1,000 for chemical research as unrelated to the craft.
Hospital Reform and the Lancet
The narrative turns to the abuses of power long exercised by surgeons, physicians, and the medical school, which provoked the late Mr. Wakley, M.P., and Mr. Lambert, a surgeon, to seek reform. They founded the Lancet chiefly for that purpose, attacking abuses at St. Thomas’s and Guy’s—partly for the patients’ sake, partly to open a career to talented medical men who, without patronage, had no chance against candidates backed by the hospitals’ medical staff. The author credits Wakley and the Lancet with immense good to the sick poor, the profession, and the public, and judges that so large a measure of reform was achieved that little cause for censure remained, save the continuing difficulty of talented men without patronage joining the staff—a difficulty expected to persist until such appointments are thrown open, as in Paris and other Continental cities, to public competition or some system selecting the most worthy rather than the best-connected.
The Removal of St. Thomas’s
A circumstance then caused a revolution in the hospital’s affairs, contemplated to advance the medical staff and especially the medical school. St. Thomas’s remained on its original Borough site until purchased some years since, at heavy cost, by the Charing Cross Railway Company. Patients were moved to a temporary hospital in the grounds of the Surrey Zoological Gardens, and a new site had to be found. A strong difference of opinion divided the authorities. Some trustees argued that, as St. Thomas’s was to all intents a City charity, it ought to be built where the working classes employed by City firms were densest and accidents most common; it was the inheritance of the City poor, who should not be deprived of its benefits. The medical staff and school professors proposed removal to a convenient locality near the West-end.
The Case for the Eastern Districts
Great opposition followed—not only from outsiders but, mirabile dictu, from the City authorities themselves, indignant at the injustice to the crowded poor of the eastern districts; they were sufficiently roused from their ordinary torpor to raise their voices against the plan. The West-end, they argued, was far better supplied with hospital accommodation than the East—already having the Westminster, Charing Cross, Middlesex, St. George’s, St. Mary’s, King’s College, and West London general hospitals, besides many special hospitals and a score of similar establishments—so another large hospital there was hardly needed. Removing St. Thomas’s further westward would leave the enormous population of the Borough, Walworth, Bermondsey, and districts stretching eastward with only one general hospital, Guy’s, totally insufficient, without considering Woolwich, Greenwich, Deptford, and Rotherhithe, which sent a large proportion of serious cases to St. Thomas’s and Guy’s. Before removal both hospitals were full to overflowing. They showed how scant accommodation was in the south-east by citing the poor girl found nearly murdered in a lane near Eltham: at the point of death she had to be carried, sitting erect beside a policeman in a street cab, nearly ten miles through the crowded south-eastern districts before reaching Guy’s. In the north-eastern districts, with a population exceeding 600,000 souls, there was not one general hospital except the German Hospital at Dalston; as the immense majority were working classes dependent on labour provided by City firms, a hospital of distinctly City origin would be better placed among them.
The Western Site Chosen
The trustees, evidently actuated by the advice of the medical professors, still held that the hospital should be removed westward; their opponents offered no further opposition, and a site was selected opposite the Houses of Parliament—notwithstanding that close on the other side of the river stood the Westminster, fully capable of affording first-class relief to the neighbourhood, the more so because the destruction of working-class dwellings for the Westminster improvements had driven no fewer than 35,000 of the poor from their homes. The author finds it difficult to discover any plausible reason for the choice. The strongest argument for removal was that the physicians and surgeons attached to St. Thomas’s were among the most expert and learned in the metropolis, and as with many of them minutes were as guineas, it was not to be supposed they could, as a rule, visit the districts farther east and north-east where the vast majority of the poor reside, great as their charity might be. This, the author answers, utterly ignores that the hospital was endowed and supported for the working classes of the City, not for the convenience of the medical staff; and it would deprive the poor of the benefits of extraordinary skill. Without disputing the admirable skill and humanity of St. Thomas’s officers, he states without hesitation that the whole ability of London’s medical profession is not confined to the staff of two or three larger hospitals; there is as much skill, earnestness, and philanthropy among other London practitioners whose names are seldom heard beyond the poor parishes where they reside, whose only impediment to fame and fortune is that their private patients are not so lucrative.
The Lying-In Wards and Their Mortality
A lying-in institution, seeking to avoid excessive mortality and serve as a model, opened two wards designed to perfect obstetrical and sanitary requirements. The floor was oak, less liable to absorb organic matter than deal boards; the walls had costly cement rather than ordinary lime-white. Each patient received between four and five thousand cubic feet of air per bed, with liberal and complicated warmth and ventilation. Cost averaged some £600 per bed. Results did not match the arrangements: after four years mortality was so great that the governors doubted whether to close the wards; the promoters refused and proposed further scientific arrangements. After alterations and reopening, results were worse: over the next two years mortality rose to one in fifteen of gross patients received, and the wards were definitively ordered closed. Mortality over the six years averaged about one in twenty-three. In eleven metropolitan workhouse infirmaries—including Bermondsey, Chelsea, Clerkenwell, Fulham, St. James’s, and six others—out of 2,413 deliveries there was not one death; these were superintended by parish surgeons, while King’s College and the lying-in hospitals used highly reputed physicians.
The Cost of the Great Hospitals
The text urges extending the benefits of St. Thomas’s and St. Bartholomew’s eastward to the districts where the City’s labouring poor reside, and argues that philanthropy is not the sole motive at work: appointments are valuable, the first step to wealth and eminence, and the attached medical schools are remunerative. In 1876, 551 students were attached to the two schools; fees of £30 per annum would yield £16,530. It questions whether hospital funds and land bequeathed for patients should support schools, citing the Grocers’ Company’s £25,000 “Grocers’ Wing” at the London Hospital and a house committee resolution to replace £290 annual grants to the college with £2,000 per annum for three years—at five per cent, interest on £40,000. The London Hospital school had 131 pupils at £30, yielding £3,690.
Bethlem and the Comparison of Endowments
The narrative turns to St. Mary’s, Bethlehem, a royal hospital instituted for “
The Argument That Holds the Book Together
Gilbert’s case rests on a distinction between legal right and moral duty. Again and again he concedes that the companies and the Corporation act within the letter of the law — the Court of Chancery has blessed their schemes, bishops and archbishops have dined at their tables — and then insists that the law’s letter is precisely the scandal. The Troutbeck bequest, willed to educate poor boys of Wapping, is declared an escheat to the Crown and scattered among the Prince Regent’s creditors, “black-legs, fiddlers, jewellers, opera dancers.” A charity for poor widows spends £8 on the trustees’ dinner and £11 on the secretary. The pattern is not theft in the criminal sense but something subtler and harder to prosecute: funds diverted by quibble, absorbed by management, and applied to the comfort of those who administer them.
The same logic governs his treatment of the guilds. Gilbert traces the livery companies back to genuine benefit societies — brotherhoods that buried their dead, supported decayed members, and searched the trade for false weights and adulterated wares. The Goldsmiths assayed metal; the Fishmongers rejected bad fish; the Merchant Taylors kept a silver yard of thirty ounces and sent searchers to Bartholomew Fair. What he documents is the slow abandonment of those duties alongside the steady growth of the endowments that once funded them. The companies’ charitable giving, he notes pointedly, was proportionally greatest when the membership was actually composed of craftsmen, and shrank as the lands grew valuable. By the 1870s the livery had been thrown open to princes, judges, and financiers while the working tailors and goldsmiths were “nearly driven out” — a transfer of both money and power from the trade to the outsider.
Feasts, Patronage, and the Machinery of Capture
Gilbert’s most memorable pages are about food, because the dinner is where his argument becomes visible. He records hock at 104 shillings a dozen, five haunches of venison at a Mercers’ feast, a Dyers’ dinner at £3 a head with railway fares paid, and the transformation of the old “void baskets” — scraps once distributed to debtors in the City prison — into costly bonbons for satiated guests. His explanation for the extravagance is not mere gluttony but strategy: the companies are “making themselves friends with the mammon of unrighteousness,” binding ministers, judges, and members of Parliament to them by hospitality so that no one who has drunk the Skinners’ wine will inquire too closely into the Skinners’ charter.
The same capture operates through patronage. Gilbert catalogues the church livings, school masterships, almshouses, and pensions in the companies’ gift, and the Corporation’s own payroll — a solicitor at £17,699 across thirty items, a hall-keeper at nearly £4,000, a remembrancer whose chief labour is opposing reform bills in Parliament. His demand is institutional rather than personal: an official audit, published accounts, and appointments thrown open to competition rather than private interest. He points to Paris, where hospital posts are won by public competition, as proof that another system is possible.
What the Book Leaves Behind
The City, An Inquiry belongs to the great Victorian genre of institutional exposure that runs from the sanitary reports through the Lancet‘s hospital investigations to the later royal commissions on the City guilds. Gilbert’s own heroes are telling: Wakley and the Lancet attacking the hospital staffs, Trevelyan’s letter to The Times, Danby Seymour lecturing a working men’s club, Firth’s Municipal London. He writes as one voice in a chorus, and the book’s value now is as a document of that reform moment — the moment when the livery companies’ exemption from scrutiny became untenable. Its portrait of a chartered body that owns Irish estates, controls a parliamentary lobby, and educates a fraction of the children its endowments could reach has not lost its edge; the details are Victorian, but the mechanism — private benefit dressed as public trust — is recognisable in any century. Gilbert ends not with a scheme but with a verdict, and the verdict is that the tree has been judged by its fruits.
