Watching this movie (which takes place in 1855) and there's a chase scene where a character runs through a room full of guys leaning on ropes.
Can someone explain what is going on here? Are they dead? Sleeping? Just "hanging out"?
Thanks in advance for your knowledge!
The image you have linked to shows a recreation of what is supposed to be a "twopenny hangover". It's a term increasingly commonly found on Google, and it purports to describe a type of cheap Victorian-era doss-house in which indigents could secure shelter and rest for the night more cost-effectively than by paying the cost of a bed, which typically cost fourpence or fivepence. The idea was that, in exchange for the payment, the poor would be allowed to sleep, several men at a time, draped over a rope that had been suspended across a room at chest level.
Acceptance that these hangovers actually existed has become very widespread over the past few years, and a look at a Google Image search for the term "twopenny hangover" shows at least four different photos that supposedly depict examples, including the one you have found. Most of these images might easily be mistaken for contemporary photographs that depict real sleepers in real sleeping conditions, but I feel pretty certain that at least some are modern recreations.
So let's look at this subject a little bit more deeply.
So far as I can tell, the term "twopenny hangover" originates with George Orwell, who in his highly influential Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), a book which was based on his own experience of living on the margins of poverty during the Great Depression, wrote that
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.
Orwell did not claim to have visited a lodging house of this sort himself; his details came from an informant, a London pavement artist he called Bozo, though he claimed to be aware of "similar" places in Paris as well. You'll note, in addition, that his description of the system used in such places does not actually match the recreation that you've stumbled across, since Orwell was clear that men in these establishments slept in a sitting position and merely leaned forward to support their upper bodies on the rope. A reconstruction of this sort of lodging featured some years ago in the 2016 BBC series "The Victorian slum", in which "a group of 15 volunteers aged between 10 and 59 are transported back to Victorian London as they spend three weeks living and working in a recreation of the notorious Old Nichol slum in Bethnal Green in London's East End." It can be glimpsed in this video trailer for the series, 11 seconds in.
Tracing the same basic story back to the 19th century, we next need to notice another very well-known account, How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis, which is a book by a social reformer about life below the poverty line in the New York City of the 1880s. Riis's book was published in 1890 and is especially notable for the flash photographs that he took to illustrate it. The author includes an entire chapter on the "cheap lodging houses" of the city, and delineates the downward progression from varied from relatively salubrious 25–cent-a-night properties, where "guests" could at least expect their own bed, flimsily partitioned, down through 15–cent dives where the residents slept four deep on filthy bunks, to 10–cent properties, where, Riis observes, "the locker for the sleeper’s clothes disappears. There is no longer need of it. The tramp limit is reached, and there is nothing to lock up, save, on general principle, the lodger."
Below the 10 cent houses there was a further sort of establishment which charged seven cents a night in which the "bed" provided was a strip of canvas strung between two "rough timbers". All these places did exist, and Riis visited them himself, but he adds a note to the effect that he has heard it rumoured that a cheaper sort of lodging might also be found, though "so far as I am informed, it has never been introduced in this country." This was something that "use to be practiced, if reports spoke truly, in certain old-country towns" [he means European ones], where
the "bed" was represented by clothes-lines stretched across the room upon which sleepers hung by the arm-pits for a penny a night. In the morning the boss woke them up by simply untying the line at one end and letting it go with its load; a labour-saving device certainly, and highly successful in attaining the desired end.
What has Riis just told us here? Several quite important bits of information, actually:
This latter point is particularly interesting in that German archives do offer two images – one a drawing dating to before 1909, and the other a photograph that might, possibly, date to 1929 or 1930. But both these images show establishments that very closely resemble Orwell's description of a "twopenny hangover" – complete with sleepers seated at a bench – rather than a clothes-line house.
The drawing apparently comes from the well-known German socialist Eduard Fuchs's six-volume Illustrierte Sittengeschichte vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, an exploration of the customs and culture of the period. The photograph apparently shows jobless men in a depression-era "emergency shelter" – several of the versions that appear online claim it was taken in Hamburg, and Brooman's 1985 school textbook Weimar Germany: Germany 1918-1933 prints it with the caption: "These men have paid to sleep 'on the line' in a warm room during the winter of 1930. The rope holds them up while they sleep." More work would need to be done to trace both these images to their source and, hopefully, confirm at least some of these details. I have some doubts about the drawing in particular, because, while the image caption associates it with the Salvation Army, which had indeed operated in Germany since 1886, it very closely resembles the sort of style used in late Victorian-era British illustrated newspapers, and I'm not sure if the same style was equally common in Germany. But the key point seems to be that, if establishments like this were the source of the rumours that Riis got hold of, those rumours seem to have made them less comfortable and more desperate than they actually were.
Thus far, you'll note, we've got no further back than the 1880s, and the stories that Riis refers to can't, so far as I have been able to establish, be traced in reports that date any earlier than that; an attempt to search for the term "twopenny hangover" in the online British Newspaper Archive, for instance, produced nothing but 1930s references to Orwell's book. There is, however, one literary account that dates as far back as the 1830s, and this is a passage that appears in Dickens's The Pickwick Papers.
Dickens, of course, was an experienced newspaper reporter with a longstanding interest in low-life, and there is quite an extensive literature on the extent to which this book should be seen as an example of realism – but, while it has not, so far as I can say, been shown that the sort of establishment described below really did exist in the London of the late Georgian period, a close reading suggests it might be possible that Dickens's famous and best-selling account somehow contributed to the rumours that Jacob Riis heard half a century later; note the telling repetition of the detail of how the rope was "undone" each morning to terminate the sleepers' rest. In addition, this passage bears such strong similarities in terminology to Orwell's that it may have been an inspiration for the "twopenny hangover" as well. Yet note – here as before – that the sleeping arrangements described only very superficially resemble the situation shown in the photo you have linked to!
The speaker here is Pickwick's cockney manservant, Sam Weller, who explains that, at one low point in his life, he was forced to take "unfurnished lodgin’s for a fortnight":
In addition to the excellent answer of u/mikedash, I'd like to mention that this particular sleeping system was described in France as early as 1842 (so later than the Pickwick Papers, but those were only translated in French in 1887). It was known as coucher à la corde, or dormir à la corde.
An anonymous writer in Le Charivari wrote in 1842:
There is somewhere, under the pillars of Les Halles [then the district of the Paris food market], in the neighborhood of Paul Niquet, a place where one sleeps at night on the floor for 7 centimes and a half per head. In this hovel there is a rope stretched out at support height and on which the mylords and aristocrats of the area have the privilege of leaning for the additional payment of five centimes. This is called coucher à la corde [sleeping on the rope].
Paul Niquet was an (in)famous cabaret owner in Les Halles, known for selling strong liquor.
In 1852, the chief editor of the same journal, Taxile Delord, a left-wing journalist, used the expression coucher à la corde in a short funny piece about the trouble he had finding a place to sleep in Paris due to the Carnival. After trying to rent a room in several hotels, he ends up in a "quite dark an filthy street":
"Impossible, my good man," replied a voice behind the counter, "so many Limousins have come to Paris for the Carnival that I have no more rope." I saw that I could not even find a place to sleep on the rope, so I decided to wait until dawn in my carriage.
The following year, Delord wrote an article titled "Down to the rope" full of outrage about projected street demolitions in Paris and the resulting homelessness of poor people:
Last night at midnight, as I passed through the Place du Carrousel, I saw a man planting two stakes in the ground to which a long rope was attached. No sooner had this rope been stretched than a crowd of people approached it eagerly. These unfortunate people were homeless tenants who had come to sleep on the rope in the Place du Carrousel. There are dormitories of the same kind in a great many districts of the capital. They fight for places with a fierceness that often leads to brawls and duels. On nights when it rains, the sleepers hold their umbrellas open over their heads. This is what we have come to.
While Delord's text is presented as a direct account, his article includes several jokes (he talks about a man whose house was demolished when he was vacationing!) and it is impossible to know whether he actually saw people "on the rope" or just made it up to sell his outrage.
In 1857, writer Charles Aubin wrote the following about the life of Parisian ragpickers (chiffonniers):
From three to five in the morning, the ragpickers meet in certain cabarets in the Halles district, for example at the famous Paul Niquet's; there each of them receives for two sous a small glass of brandy and the right to sleep for two hours on the rope, [...] In front of the counter where the brandy is served, the cabaret-keeper stretches out a long rope, on which the ragpickers lean to sleep. At dawn, they must wake up and leave; to save the trouble of waking each ragpicker one by one, the barman unties the rope by one of its ends; all the sleepers fall on top of each other; they are awakened, they pick up their belongings and return to the filthy houses where they pile up the day's harvest.
One should note that Paul Niquet's establishment was demolished in 1853 (Huart, 1853), so Aubin's text was already outdated.
The expressions coucher à la corde and dormir à la corde seem to have entered the French language in the 1860s. It was mentioned in Pierre Larousse's Dictionnaire Universel in 1869 as follows:
Coucher à la corde, dormir à la corde: To spend the night in one of these lodgings that they existed a few years ago in the outer districts and in the vicinity of the Halles, seated with one's arms supported on a rope stretched waist-high, that is untied early in the morning in order to awaken the sleepers.
By then, the practice seems to have acquired a legendary status. It shows up in numerous newspaper articles and novels until the 1930s, and it is often presented as something of the past, as in the novel of Léo Lespès Les secrets de Paris (Lespès, 1874):
This way of being housed was called coucher à la corde. It was misery, not crime, that lodged in this way.
Lespès' novelistic description includes some details not found elsewhere, notably that the sleepers were separated by knots on the rope, something that he may have made up. Others claimed that the practice still existed but that it was on its way out. An article on the "lugubrious Paris" mentions that the hotels à la corde were disappearing in the late 1870s (Mérican, 1879). According to journalist Paul Bluysen, the hotels à la corde had been put out of business by the opening of municipal shelters in 1886. In 1890, he wrote that there was only one hôtel à la corde remaining in Paris, in the Goutte d'Or district (18th arrondissement). Charles Virmaître, in his slang dictionary of 1894, also claimed that municipal shelters ended the practice, and describes a hôtel à la corde of the 11th arrondissement as follows:
Before the invention of the municipal shelters, there was a hostel in the rue des Trois-Bornes, run by Father Jean. The only room was about twenty metres long and three metres wide. A thick rope was stretched along the whole length, finished with two strong rings which fixed it at each end. The customers, most of them giverneurs, paid three sous for the entrance; this sum gave them the right to sit with their arms on the rope and to sleep. About fifty people could fit in. At five o'clock in the morning Father John rang the alarm bell by tapping an old saucepan with a piece of iron. Among the sleepers there were some whose sleep was hard and who did not get up. Then Father John would unhook the rope and the sleepers would fall onto the flagstones. Sleeping on a rope is legendary (popular slang).
In the 1890s, another establishment, the Hôtel Fradin, near the Halles, was often reported to use a rope. However, a journalist who visited the hotel found no such thing, and while it was a miserable place, people slept on benches and on beams, not on ropes (Blosseville, 1895). When Fradin died in 1902, newspapers mentioned the rope again, though the claim was that the rope was used as a "pillow" (Le XIXe Siècle, 1902). In the 1920s, the Fradin hotel was still known for its rope, as shown by this drawing published in Le Petit Journal in 1923 (Chabannes, 1923). In 1930 the left-wing journal L'Ami du Peuple wrote that the "inn of the Grappe d'Or and hovels near place Maubert were places where bums could sleep on the rope for 1.5 francs", but the author may have used the expression in the general sense of "sleeping rough" (Lédé, 1930).
So, what to make of this? Like in the UK/US situation, it is difficult to separate facts from fiction. The numerous mentions of hôtels à la corde in Paris, notably by left-wing writers (Delord, Bluysen) since the 1840s seem to indicate that the practice was real, though uncommon, and that it may have survived until the early 1920s, in some form or another. In any case, the name of the practice seems to have acquired over the years the general meaning of "sleeping rough". But it was also described as legendary (the Niquet place in the 1840-50s, the Fradin hotel since the 1890s), and it became something of a vivid literary trope (poor people sleeping on ropes, with the cruel hotelier waking them up at 5 or 6 am by untying the rope) useful to describe the sordid past - and occasionally the sordid present - of Paris.
Sources