Today, budget travel might mean squeezing into a hostel dorm, booking the cheapest room on a hotel app or sleeping overnight at an airport to save on accommodation. In Victorian England, however, the truly budget-conscious had far fewer options; and some were barely recognisable as beds. For the poorest residents of Britain’s growing industrial cities, cheap lodging houses, or doss houses, offered somewhere to spend the night when a conventional bed was beyond their means.
At the very bottom of the scale were arrangements such as the penny sit-up, while accounts also describe the more unusual two-penny hangover, where exhausted lodgers rested over ropes stretched across a room. There were also four-penny coffins: small, coffin-like sleeping spaces that offered the luxury of actually lying down.
It sounds bizarre. But these arrangements reveal something much darker about Victorian poverty: when you couldn’t afford a bed, even sleep became something you had to buy.
A penny to sit, but not sleep
The penny sit-up was about as basic as accommodation could get. For a penny, a customer could enter a crowded lodging room, sit on a bench and shelter indoors for the night. And these guests would be sandwiched between other guests on the same bench.
But in some establishments, the penny did not actually buy the right to sleep.
Contemporary accounts describe penny sit-ups where customers were expected to remain upright throughout the night. Some establishments employed attendants or monitors to make sure nobody nodded off. The distinction was important: customers were paying for somewhere to sit and shelter, not a bed.
The timing also reflected the working lives of their clientele. People would generally arrive in the evening, after the working day had finished, and remain through the night before being required to leave in the morning. One contemporary account of the penny sit-up in Preston describes entering “in the evening, when the day is done”; other rope-lodging accounts describe a 5 or 6 am wake-up, when the establishment needed to clear its overnight occupants.
Why sleep on a rope?
The better-documented two-penny hangover took the idea of cheap sleeping a step further.
Instead of a bed, lodgers sat on a bench with a rope horizontally stretched in front of them. They could lean forward onto it and doze. The arrangement was designed to maximise the number of people who could be accommodated while avoiding the expense and space required for beds.
And the rope had another useful purpose: it provided a very efficient alarm clock.
According to a description in George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, which was based on the accounts of living on the margins of poverty during the Great Depression, described it as: “at the Twopenny Hangover, the lodgers sit in a row on a bench; there is a rope in front of them, and they lean on this as though leaning over a fence. A man, humorously called the valet, cuts the rope at five in the morning.” Basically, a member of staff would simply release the rope at the appointed hour, causing the sleepers to lose their support and wake up.
An earlier literary description in The Pickwick Papers similarly explains that ropes were used because people sleeping on the floor would stay there too long; releasing the ropes in the morning ensured that everyone got up and left.
So the rope wasn’t merely about comfort, it was also about turnover. A lodging house owner couldn’t have people occupying the same cheap space all day when another night’s customers would be arriving that evening.
Fourpence for the luxury of lying down
If a penny bought a seat and two pence bought a rope to lean against, fourpence could buy something approaching an actual bed. The “four-penny coffin” was a narrow, coffin-shaped wooden box on the ground in which a lodger could finally stretch out horizontally. Despite the grim name, it wasn’t an actual coffin: the boxes were simply built in a shape that gave each person a small, defined sleeping space. Some accounts describe them as being supplied with a covering, making them a considerable step up from spending the night upright.
The coffin was still cramped, communal and far from comfortable, but for someone who had spent the day working, travelling or searching for employment, the ability to lie flat could make those extra pennies worthwhile. Four-penny coffins were found in cheap lodging houses and shelters serving people experiencing extreme poverty, including travelling workers and people without permanent accommodation.
Who needed a doss house?
The customers weren’t simply adventurous travellers looking for cheap accommodation.
Doss houses served people living on the margins of Victorian urban life: casual labourers, dock workers, hawkers, street sellers, people looking for work and itinerant travellers. A 1910 account of a charitable lodging house in Preston (Lancashire) described a mixture of honest men seeking employment, hawkers, beggars and other people living precariously.
For some, the doss house was temporary accommodation while they searched for work. For others, it could be a regular necessity because their wages were too low or irregular to secure permanent housing.
Why not just sleep on the floor?
Victorian cities were notoriously overcrowded, and poor neighbourhoods could have inadequate sanitation, filthy streets (think rats and horse manure), and dangerously cramped housing. The streets offered no protection from rain or cold and exposed people to theft and violence. For someone carrying everything they owned, even a miserable indoor space could offer a degree of security.
There were also contemporary fears about “miasma”: the belief that disease was carried through foul or poisonous air. While germ theory would eventually replace this explanation, the terrible smells, sewage and poor sanitation that inspired those fears were very real.
And crucially, simply finding a floor to sleep on wasn’t necessarily permitted. A penny at doss houses bought you a recognised place to be for the night, however uncomfortable.
The original budget accommodation
Doss houses were less a Victorian version of today’s budget hostel than a reflection of how precarious life could be for the urban poor.
At one end, you could pay a penny to sit awake through the night. Spend more and you could obtain a coffin-like space where you could actually lie down. Most customers weren’t travelling for pleasure. They were travelling because work, poverty or circumstance had left them with nowhere else to sleep.
Today’s budget traveller sacrifices comfort to save money. The customers of Victorian doss houses were making a far more fundamental trade-off: how much comfort could they afford to sacrifice simply to get through the night?
