July, while Parliament is in session, belated clerks wending homeward
between seven and eight o’clock find the great houses occupied and
dinner-parties in progress with as much universality as a New York
clerk, under like circumstances at home, would expect to see in
December. All Mayfair, Belgravia, and Pimlico is indulging in feasting
and merriment, and the austere aloofness of their retired squares,
with central parks high-fenced in iron from contact with the “ordinary
person,” is broken by the whirl of the carriages and motors of arriving
guests. The sudden flood of soft lights from the reception hall as
Hawkins throws open the door, and the quick and noiseless disappearance
of the conveyances, is all of a moment and our clerk finds himself
disconsolately gazing at the frowning front of some solid, ivy-grown,
and altogether charming old mansion, through whose carefully-drawn
window draperies only the slightest of beams dares venture forth to
him. Were he to indulge such a passion for walking as characterized
Lord Macaulay,—said to have passed through every street of London in
his day,—he would find the same thing in progress at this hour in all
the exclusive region that lies in the purlieus of Buckingham Palace.
Dignity, riches, elegance, and power would be his in hasty, grudging
glimpses—and then the dim square again and the high iron fence. The
London square, indeed, seems decorative only—trees, turf, flowers, and
the fence, and the surrounding houses playing dog-in-the-manager. This
is not always without its bewilderment to foreigners; and so confirmed
a traveler as Théophile Gautier puzzled over the matter considerably
before he dismissed it with the conclusion that it is probably
satisfaction enough to the owners to have kept other people out.
If our clerk were to take the “tube” at Brompton Road and come out at
Whitechapel Station in the East End, he would see the other side of the
story with a vengeance. To quote Gautier again, “to be poor in London
is one of the tortures forgotten by Dante.” Here the air is stifling
with dirty dust, and thousands of miserable, unkempt creatures with
wan and pasty faces feed, when they can muster a penny, on a choice
of “black puddings,” pork-pies, “sheep-trotters,” or the mysterious,
smoking “faggots.” In old Ratcliffe Highway, which is now St. George
Street, they make out by munching kippers carried in hand as they go
their devious ways. An occasional stale fish from Billingsgate is that
much better than nothing. Yiddish seems to be the prevailing national
tongue east of Aldgate Pump, and if you understand it there will be
no trouble over the signs and announcements. With characteristic
Hebrew thrift it is always “open season” for buyers. Each product
has its special habitat. Toys or other sweatshop articles come from
Houndsditch, shoes from Spitalfields, leather goods from Bermondsey,
beef remnants from Smithfield, left-over poultry from Leadenhall,
vegetable “seconds” from Covent Garden, birds are to be had in Club
Row, meat and clothing in Brick Lane, and a general outfitting in
Petticoat Lane which the reformers have rechristened Middlesex Street.
As for a “screw o’ baccy” or a “mug o’ bitter,” the “pub” of any corner
will answer. The University Settlement workers of Toynbee Hall are
doing what men can to better conditions, but so have others tried for
ages—yet here is the malodorous East End practically as unwashed and
unregenerate as of old. The glimpses one catches of squalor and filth
up narrow passages and of the damp and grimy “closes” that remind you
of Hogarth’s drawings are apt to content the most curious, unless he be
an insatiable investigator, indeed, and is willing to take his chances
of being “burked.” Hand on pocket you thread narrow alleys where people
are said to have been offered attractive bargains on their own watches
when they reached the other end. Here after the day’s work is over and
the “moke” and barrow safely stabled for the night, with a “Wot cher,
chummy; ’ow yer ’oppin’ up?” our industrious coster friends, ’Arry
and ’Arriet, make merry among pals at a “Free and Easy,” or lay out a
couple of “thri’-p’ny bits” for seats in a local theatre, whence they
emerge between acts for a “’arf-en’-’arf” or a “pot-o’-porter” with
instant and painfully frank opinions if “it ’yn’t fustryte.” Dinner at
“The Three Nuns,” of course, is only for state occasions. They are the
people, just the same, to get most out of Hampstead Heath on a Bank
Holiday or a picnic at Epping Forest any time. With them originated
in days gone most of the catchy street-cries for which London was long
curiously noted. But one hears no more “Bellows to Mend!” or “Three
Rows a Penny Pins!” or “Cockles and Mussels, Alive, Alive oh!” or
“Sweet Blooming Lavender, Six Bunches a Penny!” or “One a Penny, two
a Penny, Hot Cross Buns!” or the traditional tune of “Buy a Broom!”
or the barrow-woman’s “Ripe Cherries!” and “Green Rushes O!” You may,
however, have a chance at “’Taters, all ’ot!” or “Three a Penny,
Yarmouth Bloaters; ’ere’s yer Bloaters!” After all, it takes a very
limited inspection of the East End to wish them all in Hyde Park, as
the flag falls at seven-thirty, to join the hundreds of men and boys
there who are out of their clothes before the signal is barely given
and taking an evening plunge in the Serpentine.
Between the truffles of Mayfair and the “faggots” of Whitechapel lies
the region of the menu with which the average Londoner is most familiar
and which he is now exploring with profound earnestness according to
his lights and shillings. Dining, as every one knows, is an important
expression of the British conscience, a solemn rite of well-nigh
religious momentousness. The traditional fate of the uninvited guest is
his in double measure who ventures to intrude between the Briton and
his beef. One might “try it on,” perhaps, on the Surrey Side where they
incline to “dining from the joint” around six o’clock—though nothing
short of compulsion should take a sight-seer to South London after
nightfall. The shabby Southwark shore of dingy wharves and grimy sheds
is half concealed in drifting shadows raised by the uncertain light of
flickering gas jets and the net results are not worth the trouble of
walking London Bridge, unless we except the picture of quiet dignity
and mellow beauty presented by the ancient church of St. Saviour. This
rare old survivor finely expresses by night the subtle sense of a
long-continued veneration and the finger-touches of the passing years.
And to think that St. Saviour’s was doing parish duty and was a delight
to look upon long before the Globe Theatre of Shakespearean fame had
reared a neighboring head! But the gloom of the Surrey Side is thicker
and more discomforting than the fog. Long, monotonous, cheerless
streets, poorly lighted and scantily employed after dark, emerge from
drab perspectives of gloaming and fade sullenly away into others. The
scattered pedestrians one encounters reflect by solemn countenance the
prevailing depression and seem able to take but little heart of courage
as they go their melancholy ways. The whole region appears given over
to breweries, potteries, factories, and hospitals. By night Lambeth
Palace itself takes on the universal brewery aspect. You even detect
a vatish look to the Greenwich Observatory and mistrust some trace of
beer in the famous meridian. And then the tarry hotels of Greenwich
must add their quota to the general dejection by offering everything
in the world in the way of fish excepting its celebrated whitebait,
which was, of course, the one thing you had come for. The lights of St.
George’s Circus—the Leicester Square of South London—may be few in
point of fact, but they seem highly exhilarating down there; nor are
you to scorn the good cheer of the comfortable old tavern hard by that
rejoices in the extraordinary name of “The Elephant and Castle.” There
may also be a kindly feeling for the Old Kent Road where Chevalier’s
coster “knock’d ’em,” but otherwise the breweries win. There is one
on the sacred site of the old Globe Theatre, something like one where
stood the Tabard Inn whence Chaucer started his immortal Pilgrims for
Canterbury, and you will find a brazen gin palace if you search for
“The White Hart Inn,” of “Henry VI” and “Pickwick Papers.” Poor old
Southwark! Her glorious days of light have passed!
“And ‘she’ shakes ‘her’ feeble head,
That it seems as if ‘she’ said,
‘They are gone.’”
Even Southwark is not much duller at this hour than that ancient
nucleus that is still styled the “City.” Where the leading commercial
centres and money markets of the world were in frenzied activity,
two or three hours ago, a few belated pedestrians now go clattering
along echoing and deserted streets with an unhappy air of apology.
No section of London undergoes so amazing a transformation each
day; nor is any other so drear and cheerless by the suddenness of
contrast—attesting the keenness of Lowell’s observation that nothing
makes so much for loneliness as the sense of man’s departure. There is
little dining now in the region where Falstaff once reveled at “The
Boar’s Head” and the Shakespearean coterie at “The Mermaid Tavern.”
The low, windowless, stolid Bank of England gropes like a blindman
toward Wellington on his horse before the lofty Corinthian portico
of the Royal Exchange, and the massive, sombre Mansion House of the
Lord Mayor suggests some ruined temple of Paestum. “Gog” and “Magog”
slumber in the dusty recesses of the old Guildhall, and the pigeons
nest in its blackened eaves unstartled by the impassioned oratory of
government ministers at banquets. But it is the time of times to attend
the sweet chiming of Bow Bells, under the dragon in the beautiful tower
that Wren built for St. Mary’s, and one could almost wish to have
been born cockney if only to have heard them ringing from babyhood.
The winding and gloomy little streets whose names recall so much in
the lives of the Elizabethan literati entice one craftily, like so
many Bow runners, into the purlieus of the Tower, within the shadows
of whose momentous walls cabmen drowse securely on the boxes of dusty
four-wheelers. To the imaginative stranger its bright fascination by
day suffers a night-change into something gruesomely repellent, and
the “beef-eaters” do not protect the crown jewels half so effectively
as do the headless shades of Lady Jane Grey and Henry’s unhappy
queens, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard. Doubtless there are safer
thoroughfares on earth than Lower Thames Street in the early evening,
but they would not lead to as diverting a neighborhood. The wharves
and storehouses may not be as tumultuous as by day, but the fastidious
wayfarer encounters at Billingsgate enough strength of language and
odor to satisfy. Tom Bowling is entertaining Black-eyed Susan at some
East End “hall,” but the “pubs” are roaring with “the mariners of
England that guard our native seas.” Still, cutty-pipes are glowing
at Wapping Old Stairs, and the heaving turmoil of the shipping in the
“Pool,” with swaying riding-lights dotting the vast tangle of masts and
cordage, prepares you for the shock of the amazing human wave that is
ever surging with a ceaseless roar across old London Bridge. Caught in
the strong current of that billow one washes back to Wellington and his
horse and drifts aimlessly along under the raised awnings of the tailor
shops of Cheapside, with scarce time for a grateful hand-wave to hushed
and shadowed St. Augustine’s for the “Ingoldsby Legends” its former
rector gave us, before he finds himself high and dry in Paternoster
Row and the bookish churchyard of St. Paul’s. The great cathedral is
imposing, without doubt, and no one would think of saying that Wren
did not earn the two hundred pounds per annum he received during the
thirty-five years it took him to build it;—and yet it can hardly be
expected to appear over-cheerful by night, when it is chill and gloomy
and repellent by day with the sun powerless to warm the tessellated
floor and stiff, gloomy monuments with the brightest colors of its
stained-glass windows—futile to rival even the moon in that vision of
Keats as she
“Threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breast,
Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest,
And on her silver cross soft amethyst,
And on her hair a glory, like a saint.”
The moon, however, will aid us now in quickening into life the rich
memories that adhere to the surrounding churchyard and to Paternoster
Row, where so many generations of authors and publishers in dingy shops
and inns and coffee-houses have debated the launching of immortal
books. Every English-published volume must still start its race from
neighboring Stationers’ Hall.
The foolish stranger who chooses such an hour for a tramp about the
“City” will breathe more freely, after he has exorcised the last
whimpering shade of Newgate and “the poor prisoners of the ‘Fleet,’”
as he hurries along Ludgate Hill and attains unto his heart’s desire
at Fleet Street. Thence on, it is all the primrose way. No matter what
the hour or season, he can never be companionless in the “Highway of
Letters” for its very excess of material and immaterial presences.
In its brief and narrow course of a few hundred yards, the richest
in literary associations of any region on earth, the weather-beaten,
irregular fronts of its old stone houses look down affectionately, and
perhaps pityingly, on hurrying journalists and anxious authors, as
they have been doing for ages. The leisurely diner of the old school
who clings to the mellow places of inspiring associations is pretty
sure to be going along Fleet Street at this time, intent on a chop and
kidneys and a mug of stout at “The Cock,” preferred of Tennyson, or a
beefsteak-pudding and toby of ale at the sand-floored “Cheshire Cheese”
palpitant with memories of autocratic and snuffy Dr. Johnson exploding
with “Sirs,” of good-natured Goldsmith, crotchety Reynolds, impassioned
Burke, merry Garrick, and all the others of that deathless company. The
usual evening idler and aimless stroller always makes Fleet Street a
part of his pleasant itinerary, and it matters little to him that the
sidewalks are narrow and the crowd uncomfortably large, when he can
beguile each yard or two by lingering glances up dim and fascinating
little rookery courts full of mysterious corners and deep shadows whose
paving-stones have reëchoed the tread of so many sons of fame. The
lights may not be as bright nor as numerous as in the Strand, nor the
shops as attractive, but they are non-existent to the sentimentalist
who is seeing Izaak Walton in his hosier shop at the Coventry Lane
corner and Richard Lovelace in dingy quarters up Gunpowder Alley, and
is peering wistfully through the arched gateway to the Temple for a
glimpse of Lamb’s birthplace or Fielding’s home or Goldsmith’s grave or
a sight of those delightful “old benchers,” brusque “Thomas Coventry,”
methodical “Peter Pierson,” and gentle “Samuel Salt.” Doubtless he is
able even to detect the rich aroma of the chimney-sweeps’ sassafras tea
in the neighborhood of “Mr. Read’s shop, on the south side of Fleet
Street, as thou approachest Bridge Street.”
The shadows fall away with startling suddenness as Fleet Street becomes
the Strand at Temple Bar. The jolliest uproar of all London storms
impetuously along that modern Rialto all the way into Trafalgar Square.
Brilliant lights, shop displays of every description, theatres, hotels,
and restaurants create a profusion of excitement for the gay and
jostling crowd that harries you perilously near to the curb and the
heavy wheels of the ponderous busses.
And what an amazing institution the London bus is! The Strand might
still be the Strand if St. Mary’s and St. Clement Danes were effaced
from its roadway, but what if the busses went! Gladstone’s partiality
for these archaic contrivances was extreme, which naturally disposed
Disraeli to take the other side and champion the fleeting hansom—“the
gondola of London,” as he aptly styled it. And, indeed, much may be
said in commendation of the omnipresence, economy, and convenience
of the latter, and of its friendly way of flying to one’s aid at the
merest raising of the hand to whisk you away at breakneck speed and
through a thousand hairbreadth escapes to any possible destination
you may indicate. But the majority vote with Gladstone, nevertheless,
and take their ease on a bus-top. It is true that in the profusion
of advertising signs you may not always be certain whether you
are bound for Pear’s Soap or Sanderson’s Mountain Dew, but with
blissful indifference you pocket the long ticket, and, ensconced
among the glowing pipe-bowls in the dusk of a “garden-seat,” “rumble
earthquakingly aloft.” What a delight it is to hear the cockney
conductor drawl “Chairin’ Crauss,” “Tot’nh’m Court Rauwd,” “S’n
Jimes-iz Pawk,” and the rest of it! From your heaving perch beside
the ruddy-faced driver in his white high hat you observe that your
ark keeps turning to the left,—the English rule of the road,—and
that now you must look down instead of up to find the placards on the
trolley posts that mark the stopping-places of the trams. You see
belated solicitors and barristers hurrying out of the great gray courts
of justice, and above the heads of the pedestrians you may study the
gloomy arches of Somerset House or the ornate Lyceum where Sir Henry
Irving reigned or the neat little Savoy where Gilbert and Sullivan won
spurs and fortune. It is a great satisfaction to look down in comfort
on the elbowing throng you have escaped, with its jostling and its
stereotyped “I’m sorry,”—the top-hats and the caps, the actors,
bohemians, professional men, tourists, tramps, beggars, thieves, Tommy
Atkins in “pill-box” and “swagger,” blue-coated and yellow-legged boys
of Christ’s Hospital, red-coated bootblacks, barmaids in turndown
collars, well-dressed and shabbily-dressed women, as well as that
particularly flashy brand to whom you return a “_Vade retro, Satanus!_”
to her “Come to my arms, my slight acquaintance.” No wonder when
Kipling’s “Private Ortheris” went mad of the heat in India that he
babbled of the Adelphi Arches and the Strand!
In the lull before the turning of the evening tide toward the opera and
the theatre there is opportunity for each to indulge his _penchant_.
What the shops of Fleet Street and the Strand show in general, the
windows of specialists elsewhere are presenting in particular and
with increased elaboration. Regent Street will draw the fanciers of
pictures, leather goods, perfumes, and jewelry; Bond Street, rare
paintings and choice porcelains; Wardour Street, curios and antiques;
Stanway Street, silver and embroidery; Charing Cross Road, old
bookstalls; and Hatton Garden, diamonds,—the same Hatton Garden that
Queen Elizabeth gave a slice of to a favorite courtier and threatened
the Bishop of Ely in a brief but sufficient note to hurry up with the
necessary details or “I will unfrock you, by God!” This methodical
fashion of grouping certain interests in definite localities is carried
even further; as, for example, should you feel the need of a physician
it is not necessary to wade through the thirty-five hundred pages of
Kelly’s Post-Office Directory, but take a taxi to Harley Street where
any house can supply you. No matter where you ramble, surprises and
delights await you. It will be found so to those in particular who
stroll down Oxford Street—with thoughts, perhaps, of De Quincey when a
starved and homeless little boy groping a timorous and whimpering way
down this street as he clutched the hand of his new acquaintance; or
of Hazlitt’s dramatic struggle with hunger and poverty—and suddenly,
on reaching High Holborn, catch their first glimpse of the picturesque
beauty of mediæval Staple Inn. There are few lovelier spots in all
London, and the sparrows still chatter there as clamorously every
evening as they did when Dr. Johnson frowned up at them from the
manuscript of “Rasselas,” or when Dickens lived and worked there, or
when Hawthorne visited and revisited it with increasing delight.
The princely spaces in the neighborhood of Buckingham Palace are quite
as attractive at this hour as when the afternoon sun is warm along
fair Piccadilly—“radiant and immortal street,” said Henley—and
the gay coaches clatter back toward Trafalgar Square with blasts of
horn and jangling chains. The Mall, the Grand Walk for ages, fairly
exhales class and pride in the deepening dusk of the late English
twilight. The clubmen of Pall Mall and St. James’s Street, in their
fine, imposing old houses, are taking up the question of the evening’s
amusements with as much bored listlessness by the aristocrats at
Brooks’s as rakish enthusiasm by the country gentlemen of Boodle’s.
Signs of approaching activity are even to be observed in the stately
mansions of exclusive Park Lane—a street that half the business men of
London hope to be rich enough to live in some day; so effectually has
time effaced the memory of Jack Sheppard and Jonathan Wild and the rest
of the air-dancing specialists who figured here in chains in the days
when Tyburn Hill was a name to shudder over.
But the appeal of the “halls,” which began when the curtains of the
Alhambra and the Pavilion went up at seven-thirty, grows almost
imperative as the hour wears around toward eight. The rank of waiting
cabs up the middle of Haymarket is thinned to the merest trickle.
“Heavy swells” of clubdom and the West End are strolling in groups
across the wide, statue-dotted expanse of Trafalgar Square, stopping
to scratch matches on the lions of Nelson’s Column or General Gordon’s
granite base. The artists are forsaking the studios of Chelsea, the
real bohemians—not the pretenders of the Savage Club and the Vagabond
dinners—the cheap restaurants and the performing monkeys of Soho, the
students their quiet quarters in Bloomsbury and the forty miles of
book-shelves of the British Museum, the musicians their Baker Street
lodgings up Madame Tussaud’s way, the literary people their charming
Kensington, and even the gay Italians are deserting the organ-grinding
on Saffron Hill and the disorder of St. Giles—and all are rapidly
moving on Leicester Square, Piccadilly Circus, and the Strand. There
they will view the elaborate ballets according to their means; from
the “pit” for a shilling, or from a grand circle “stall” for seven
shillings sixpence, with another sixpence to the girl usher for a
programme loaded with advertisements. It is the hour when Pierce Egan
would have summoned “Tom and Jerry” to be in at the inaugural of the
night life of the great city, and Colonel Newcome would have marched
Clive out of the “Cave of Harmony” to hear less offensive entertainers
at the “halls.” It is the time Stevenson’s “New Arabian Nights” has
invested with the richest potentiality for adventure, and when, in
consequence, any polite tobacconist is likely suddenly to disclose
himself as a reigning sovereign in disguise. Sherlock Holmes and Dr.
Watson, you may be sure, are never in their Baker Street lodgings at
such a time as this. In the preliminary uproar about the bars of the
favorite cafés and in the flashing of electric signs, glare of lights,
and rush of hansoms and motors, one may discern the beginnings of “a
night of it” for many whom the early sun will surprise with bleared
eyes and battered top-hats about the coffee-booths of Covent Garden.
And, indeed, unless you have access to a club, night-foraging is a
highly difficult undertaking in London. Every restaurant closes down at
half an hour after midnight; and thereafter, unless you come across a
chance “luncheon-bar” that defies the authorities, or a friendly cabman
introduces you to a “shelter,” you may have to content yourself with a
hard-boiled egg at a coffee-stall. Many a sturdy Briton trudging along
behind his linkman could have found better accommodation two hundred
years ago when the watch went by with stave and lantern and cried out
that it was two o’clock and a fine morning.