Can someone who owns almost nothing, through the sheer force of their presence, come to ‘own’ a corner of the street? And should we still describe as ‘itinerant’, or ‘rootless’ a pauper whose stolid regularity in one place enshrined them in memory, popular culture, and art? The history of begging and urban poverty throws up many questions like these. Begging, or ‘mendicity’ as it would also be known to the well-heeled in the early nineteenth-century, was a survival strategy for the urban poor which worked to solidify their ephemeral presence in public, often in a prominent place featuring a lot of pedestrian traffic.
When someone begs, they often work carefully to take up a specific amount of space. They tend to stay in one place; they make themselves visible. In a way, they make a public place theirs. When someone begs, they ask for more than casual charity. They are also asking to be seen, for mere acknowledgement: they are here, human, and suffering. To work, begging must be seen not just in the everyday sense but also socially, so that others see the begging person be relieved, or spurned, and in turn feel drawn to help. The relationship between begging, public spaces, and urban density accordingly dates to ancient societies; historically, streets are not just makeshift shelters for homeless people, but a necessary and complex part of their survival strategies. Begging people find begging places, they use every aspect of their bodies and surroundings to become as visible as possible, generally without puncturing the ephemeral ‘order’ of public spaces and people’s movements in and through them.
I would say that begging people make begging places, and the person whose place I want to explore today is Charles McGee (Charles’s last name was also variously printed as Mackay or Mackey, for ease I will stick to McGee here). I had occasion recently to write a short piece about Charles, hardly the first historian to do so, upon which I am drawing here. Historians typically encounter Charles McGee first in art, or printed works such as John Thomas Smith’s 1817 Vagabondiana. There Smith describes Charles as a one-eyed, elderly black man from Jamaica who stood at the foot of Ludgate Hill in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Charles and other ‘famous’ poor people of colour like him on London’s streets, whose stoic endurance and resolute emplacement about the city enabled their lives to be interrogated and their likenesses drawn, all serve collectively as a cipher for an unnamed and unheralded number of poor and itinerant people drawn from Britain’s imperial peripheries. In Regency London, their presence, difference, and visibility marked them out as exotic objects of charity and fascination, and just as often as tattered boundary markers past the limits of urban respectability. Every day except Sunday, when he attended church, Charles stood sweeping the crossing and collecting alms near the Obelisk at the foot of Ludgate Hill, which was apocryphally part of the highest point in the city of London and within shouting distance of St Paul’s Cathedral. Oskar Jensen tells us that Ludgate obelisk he stood by was ‘younger than Charles himself’. Jensen invites us to take seriously the possibility that Charles was friends with the Waithman family who lived nearby, it was rumoured that at his death he left over £7,000 to a Miss Waithman, related to the former progressive Lord Mayor Robert Waithman, and she was said to have regularly provided Charles with hot meals. And why not? Perhaps Charles did ‘take advantage of the connection in order to bank, even to invest, his weekly savings’. Perhaps he could afford a place of his own. He was certainly intelligent and resilient. John Thomas Smith reflects on the astuteness with which McGee chose his begging place, writing that ‘Charles is supposed to be worth money. His stand is certainly above all others the most popular, many thousands of persons crossing it in the course of the day.’
To pass McGee on the streets of Regency London was to pass the consequences and the echoes of three-hundred years of trading in human lives. So, we must understand Charles’s life as itinerant at least in one key respect. He was likely born unfree in Jamaica, many thousands of miles, and at least one dangerous ocean, away from Ludgate Hill, and it would have taken a complex and difficult set of migrations to enable him to sweep its streets and ask for casual charity in his later years. Slavery must surely have been on the minds of Londoners during this period, with the trade having been banned only a few years previously; but with the institution, and its ‘plantation interest’, still very present in British political and cultural life. We don’t know for sure that Charles was born unfree, though we can say it was highly likely, and the author of Vagabondiana seemed to agree.
Charles was well-known enough to appear in no less than eight prints representing either Bridge Street or race in Regency London, including a famously racist anti-abolition cartoon by George Cruikshank in 1819 entitled The New Union Club. Charles was himself a distinctive person, and not necessarily by dint of his skin colour. A ‘Singular’ man was how John Thomas Smith described him. Smith’s engraving of him, drawn on 9 October 1815, shows us a solemn elderly black man, gazing one-eyed out of the picture, and standing slightly hunched but dignified with his shadow cast behind him. John Church Dempsey was said to have painted Charles around 1824, which would put this portrait at the very beginning Dempsey’s long fascination with painting poor and vagrant figures (and becoming one, himself, due to bankruptcy). In the engraving, Charles holds a battered hat in the begging way in his right hand, and a broom for sweeping streets in his left, signification of his willingness to perform the work of maintaining the streetscape to further legitimate his presence in it. ‘Crossing-sweeper’ was already established by 1815 as a prominent street occupation, and contemporaries mused that ‘hundreds’ of poor black men might have to have taken to sweeping dust out of the way of well-dressed pedestrians in exchange for a charitable tip.
Being Black and free in Regency England was hardly a blessing. Because parochial settlement could not generally be proven, many Black paupers forcibly became unmoored and itinerant in another way: they were denied access to the parish relief system. This situation of racialised access to welfare was understood well enough to feature prominently in the Parliamentary mendicity committee minutes of 1815, as follows:
[Hon. George Rose, question] In the case of Africans, are there any means of taking care of them?
[Michael John Fitzpatrick, Chief Clerk of Guildhall, answer] I know of none; the only way in which we can dispose of them is to fix them on the parish where they fall, as a casualty.
Fitzpatrick also reported to the committee that he was regularly instructed by the Guildhall magistrates to dispense two to three shillings in casual charity to indigent Black people appearing before them, as further evidence of the idiosyncrasies of law and welfare when confronted by Black poverty.
We do not know what circumstances carried Charles McGee from Jamaica to London’s Ludgate Hill, but we can imagine the unequal social and economic structures, the ‘slavery hinterland’, which may have kept him there. We also know that by 1815 the United Kingdom had a long history of attempting to export the problems of poverty, whether understood in racialised terms or not. Poor Black men, women, and children who had managed to put down roots could be, and were, easily uprooted again. By the 19th century, Black veterans of the Seven Years War and American Revolutionary wars, as well as poor Lascars cast adrift in London after serving on East India Company voyages, had all been the subjects of removal campaigns putatively in the interests of their welfare. The philanthropist and utopian Jonas Hanway became involved in the last years of his life with the scheme to re-settle ‘the Black Poor’ of London to Sierra Leone, as for a brief time did Olaudah Equiano. In 1787, 329 people were eventually sent aboard the Atlantic and the Vernon to the Sierra Leone colony, where they experienced all manner of disasters.
Charles McGee was not shipped to Sierra Leone. He planted himself at the foot of Ludgate Hill and there made a living for himself such as he could. In so doing, McGee’s ‘singular’ presence sweeping the streets for the charity of passers-by became enshrined in local memory and popular culture. Charles earned a ‘begging place’ not just by the Obelisk of Ludgate Hill but in the minds and sentiments of his contemporaries. Charles was such a fixture that his apocryphal biography became integral to an 1833 comedic re-interpretation of Othello, now subtitled as The Moor of Fleet Street and featuring a picaresque Othello in blackface who sweeps the streets near ‘Waithman’s crossing’. In the play, Desdemona serenades the begging Othello in a manner reminiscent of The Beggar’s Opera—a play adapted two-hundred years later by Bertolt Brecht as a critique of capitalism—as The Threepenny Opera:
With his broom so neat he sweeps the street
From Waithman’s door to Ludgate Hill.
The ladies’ hearts he did trepan,
did my curly-headed African,
In a very real sense, the lives and struggles of the begging poor persist not just archivally, but spatially. These lives linger visibly in the afterimages, presences, and memories of the places they slept, begged, stood, talked, sat, and swept. Many poor people carved out a place, it was and is a recognised part of survival strategies. They did so determined and creative; in larger-than-life ramblings and cunning antics which became popular mythology, or through stoic service at one well-chosen urban intersection, where their reliable presence on the street calcified them into a human obelisk as decades passed. London’s patchwork of cultures—the city’s invisible tissue of place and belonging—was sewn together by more than neighbourhoods and wards, sightlines, markets, lanes, and prominent buildings, or through the busy circulations of commerce or its inhabitants. It was held together too by the places in-between; the begging places, where men whose faces and bodies were stories swept out their names over and over in the dust.
This article is a reworked version of, and develops from, David’s book chapter ‘Begging Places: Poverty, Race, and Visibility on Ludgate Hill, c. 1815‘ in a recent anthology: Charlotte Grant and Alistair Robinson (eds), Cultures of London: Legacies of Migration (London, Bloomsbury: 2024).