“Houndsditch”: A London Illustration of Upper Class Ignorance

Gustave Doré sketched with beautiful technique, very dramatic depictions of Victorian life in London in his image Houndsditch. His extreme detail, shading, and his unique use of line direction, shade, thickness, and spacing add a lot of depth and realism to the works. This realism adds to the dramatic differences in the classes that are depicted within each image. When I look at this sketch, I see a man of a wealthier class who is walking down an alley looking at what this woman and her children have to sell. He is dressed in a long coat and a top hat while they are all dressed in wrinkled rags and huddled together as if it is cold. The house behind them is falling apart and has cracks in the windows.

The image appears at first glance to be a local market, but when you look closer you see the ignorance of the man towards the women and her kids. He is oblivious to their state, to the possible importance of the things that lie on the table. There is a watering can, a guitar, a large knife, pots and pans, vases, and it appears to be everything that family has. He is looking down at their table as an outsider looking in, but their faces and defeated forms give a lot away. When I look into the mother’s eyes they are fallen, lost, and sad. The girls in the back are huddled together while the girl in the middle looks angry and frustrated.

The composition is focused right in the middle with the center drawing your eye and when it begins to wander from the family, the background reinforces the conclusions drawn from the image pictured. The moos seems to be solemn, devastating, and ignorant depending on which character the viewer tends to focus on. I focus on the mother’s response to the wealthier man near her table. The focus of this image seems to be the ignorance of a man who has never walked in the shoes of another. A devastating truth can be laid out right in front of us, but we will never see the reality as long as we remain naïve and ignorant.

This image reminds me of a mission trip I went on to the Dominican Republic. Along the airports and the shores are tropical beaches and 5-star resorts, but if you go less than a few miles farther into the island, there are devastated, poverty stricken neighborhoods. The ones who work their whole lives to cater to the rich who travel their on vacation, go home at night to a house that can hardly be considered a house at all. These people could never support their families and are forced to sell anything they can get their hands on to these rich foreigners who remain ignorant to the lives these locals live. In the case of the story within this image, they all live in the same country, the same city, the same neighborhoods, and yet they remain ignorant to the reality around them.

William Blake wrote a poem titled “London” and it depicts what a man who walks through London in this era sees, but in his case he chooses to highlight and focus on these aspects of impoverished to remove the veil that lies over reality. Blake writes of weakness, plagues, mentally ill, crying of men, and fear. If the same man in Blake’s poem had been the rich man in Doré’s illustration then the image would have captured sympathy, recognition, and understanding rather than ignorance and pride. The image and poem both highlight the problems in society, the failings, the ignorance, but both take on the task in different ways. While Blake chooses to highlight the reality of the impoverished lives, Doré highlights the reality in the extreme dynamics of the relationship between the upper and lower classes in Victorian England.