Jacob's Island was a notorious slum in Bermondsey, London, in the 19th century. It was located on the south bank of the River Thames, approximately delineated by the modern streets of Mill Street, Bermondsey Wall West, George Row and Wolseley Street. Jacob's Island developed a reputation as one of the worst slums in London, and was popularised by the Charles Dickens novel Oliver Twist, published shortly before the area was cleared in the 1860s.
History
The origin of the name is not clear, but one possibility is that it derives from a vernacular term for frogs.
Swamp
Bermondsey was historically a rural parish on the outskirts of London until the 17th century when the area began to be developed as a wealthy suburb following the Great Fire of London. By the 19th century, the once affluent parts of Bermondsey had experienced a serious decline, and became the site of notorious slums with the arrival of industrialisation, docks and migrant housing, especially along the riverside.
The most notorious of the slums was known as Jacob's Island, with the boundary approximately the confluence of the Thames and subterranean River Neckinger, at St Saviour's Dock across from Shad Thames, to the west, a tidal ditch just west of George Row to the east, and another tidal ditch just north of London Street (now Wolseley Street) to the south. It was a particularly squalid rookery, and described as "The very capital of cholera" and "The Venice of drains" by The Morning Chronicle in 1849.
In the 1840s it became "a site of radical activity", and, after attention from novelists Charles Dickens and Charles Kingsley, joined other London areas of "literary-criminal notoriety" that emerged "as symbols of a developing urban counterculture". The 19th century social researcher Henry Mayhew described Jacob's Island as a "pest island" with "literally the smell of a graveyard" and "crazy and rotten bridges" crossing the tidal ditches, with drains from houses discharging directly into them, and the water harbouring masses of rotting weed, animal carcasses and dead fish. He describes the water being "as red as blood" in some parts, as a result of pollutant tanning agents from the leather dressers in the area.
Clearance and redevelopment
In the early 1850s Jacob's Island was gradually removed as part of a slum clearance, starting with the tidal ditches that formed the eastern and southern boundaries being filled. In 1861, the slum was partly destroyed by a fire, and the area later redeveloped as warehouses. In 1865, Richard King, writing in A Handbook for Travellers in Surrey, Hampshire, and the Isle of Wight, observed that "Many of the buildings have been pulled down since Oliver Twist was written, but the island is still entitled to its bad pre-eminence". A decade later, a missionary for the London City Mission provided a more positive report:
Charles William Heckethorn had reservations about these improvements, telling readers of London Souvenirs in 1899, that "Many of the horrors of Jacob's Island are now things of the past ... in fact, the romance of the place is gone".
In 1934, a new public housing development called the Dickens Estate was opened on the site of the former Jacob's Island. The houses of the development were named after Dickens' characters but the only one to have lived, and died, on Jacob's Island, the murderous Bill Sikes, was not honoured.
Fiction
Charles Dickens
Jacob's Island was immortalised by Charles Dickens's novel Oliver Twist, in which the principal villain Bill Sikes dies in the mud of 'Folly Ditch'. Dickens provides a vivid description of what it was like:
... crazy wooden galleries common to the backs of half a dozen houses, with holes from which to look upon the slime beneath; windows, broken and patched, with poles thrust out, on which to dry the linen that is never there; rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the air would seem to be too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they shelter; wooden chambers thrusting themselves out above the mud and threatening to fall into it – as some have done; dirt-besmeared walls and decaying foundations, every repulsive lineament of poverty, every loathsome indication of filth, rot, and garbage: all these ornament the banks of Folly Ditch.
Dickens was taken to this then-impoverished and unsavory location by the officers of the river police, with whom he would occasionally go on patrol.