GEORGE JULIAN HARNEY was born by the Thames at
Deptford on 17 February 1817. The "Great Wen" of Lon-
don had not yet absorbed the dockyard community downstream;
Deptford still retained its eighteenth-century character, the ship-
building area along the river being an easy walk from the market
gardens and farms which produced strawberries and vegetables
for the London market. A harsher environment lay at Dept-
ford's door, however, both in place and time. The Thames,
where it ran beside the wooden hulls on the ways, was black with
the sewage of London; with an indifference like Regency Eng-
land's own it carried the coal barges in which the "whippers"
worked away their short drunken lives, and the cholera which
periodically decimated the London populace, as well as the great
East and West Indiamen whose cargoes had enriched a portion
of the nation. Back from the river below old London Bridge
stretched neighbourhoods in which, as one contemporary news-
paper described it, "both physically and mentally the rising
generation is distinguished for its demoralized condition beyond
that of any other part of the Metropolis". On one side were the
rabbit warrens of Bethnal Green and Spitalfields, on the other
the narrow streets and blind alleys of Bermondsey and South-
wark. The open fields which separated Deptford from this
atmosphere of squalor and violence were to disappear within a
generation. Julian Harney plunged into that atmosphere before
adolescence.

Both Harney's parents were of the working classes, but the
household in which he spent his early years, though poor, was
hardly dull. His father, George Harney, had carried on the
family's sea-going tradition by serving in the transport service of
the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic wars; and the boy heard
the glorious echoes of that era at first hand, including such
dubious incidents as the death of a soldier from the wind of a
cannon-ball in his father's landing-boat, during Abercrombie's

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