Corridor, the Chancellor's Corridor, the Victoria Tower, the Royal
Staircase, and numerous courts and corridors. At the south end, nearest
Millbank, are the Guard Room, the Queen's Robing-Room, the Royal Gallery,
the Royal Court, and the Prince's Chamber. The river front is mostly
occupied by libraries and committee-rooms. The northern or Bridge Street
end displays the Clock Tower and the Speaker's Residence. In the interior
of the structure are vast numbers of lobbies, corridors, halls, and
courts. The Victoria Tower, at the southwest angle of the entire
structure, is a wonderfully fine and massive tower; it is 75 feet square
and 340 feet high. The clock tower, at the north end, is 40 feet square
and 320 feet high, profusely gilt near the top. After two attempts made
to supply this tower with a bell of fourteen tons weight, and after both
failed, one of the so-called "Big Bens," the weight of which is about
eight tons (the official name being "St. Stephen"), now tells the hour in
deep tones. There are, likewise, eight smaller bells to chime the
quarters. The clock is by far the largest and finest in England. There are
four dials on the four faces of the tower, each 22-1/2 feet in diameter;
the hour figures are 2 feet high and 6 feet apart; the minute marks are 14
inches apart; the hands weigh more than 2 cwt. the pair; the minute hand
is 16 feet long, and the hour hand 9 feet; the pendulum is 15 feet long
and weighs 680 lbs. The central tower rises to a height of 300 feet.
Its rooms and staircases are almost inconceivably numerous. The river
front is nine hundred feet in length, with an elaborately decorated façade
with carven statues and emblems. By 1860 the cost had exceeded by a
considerable sum £2,000,000.
The growth of the British Museum and its ever increasing store of
knowledge is treated elsewhere, but it is worth recording here, as one of
the significant events of contemporary times, the opening of the present
structure with its remarkable domed reading-room.
This great national establishment contains a vast and constantly
increasing collection of books, maps, drawings, prints, sculptures,
antiquities, and natural curiosities. It occupies a most extensive suite
of buildings in Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury, commenced in 1823, and
only finished during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It has
cost a sum little less than £1,000,000. Sir Richard Smirke was the
architect. The principal, or south front, 370 feet long, presents a range
of forty-four columns, with a majestic central portico, with a sculptured
pediment. Since its commencement, in 1755, the collection has been
prodigiously increased by gifts, bequests, and purchases; and now it is,
perhaps, the largest of the kind in the world. The library contains more
than eight hundred thousand volumes, and is increasing enormously in
extent every year. The magnificent reading-room is open only to persons
who proceed thither for study, or for consulting authorities. It was
opened in 1857, and built at a cost of £150,000, and is one of the finest
and most novel apartments in the world; it is circular, 140 feet in
diameter, and open to a dome-roof 106 feet high, supported entirely
without pillars. This beautiful room, and the fire-proof galleries for
books which surround it, were planned by Mr. Panizzi, an Italian and a
former keeper of the printed books.
In connection with the library proper is an equally vast collection of
antiquities, etc., of which all guide-books and those publications issued
by the Museum authorities tell.
The building was complete by 1865, and for the last forty years has stood
proudly in its commanding situation, the admiration of all who have come
in contact therewith.
What Hampstead Heath is to the coster, the Crystal Palace is to the
middle-class Londoner, who repairs there, or did in Dickens' time, on
every possible auspicious occasion. This structure itself, though it can
hardly be called beautiful by the most charitably disposed, is in many
respects one of the most remarkable in the world, and owes its existence
to the Great Exhibition of 1851 in Hyde Park. The materials of that
building, being sold to a new company toward the close of that year, were
transferred to an elevated spot near Sydenham, seven miles from town, to
the south. The intention was to found a palace and park for the exhibition
of art and science on a paying basis. The original estimate was £500,000,
but the expenditure was nearly £1,500,000, too great to assure a probable
profitable return.
The palace and grounds were opened in 1854, the towers and fountains some
time after.
The building itself is 1,600 feet long and 380 wide, and at the transept
is nearly 200 feet in height. Exhibition-rooms, reading-rooms,
restaurants, and a vast orchestral auditorium were included under one
roof, with bazaars and small shops and stalls innumerable.
The parks and garden were laid out to cover some two hundred acres, with
terraces and fountains galore, the idea being to produce somewhat the
effect as at Versailles, with Les Grande and Petite Eaux, on "grand days"
the fountains consuming over 6,000,000 gallons. Cricket, football, and
sports of various kinds used to draw vast throngs to "the Palace," and the
firework displays at night were, and are to-day, justly celebrated. In
short, this "Cockney Arcadia," if rather a tawdry attraction, has had the
benefit of much honest admiration of the Londoner, who perforce could not
get farther afield for his holiday, and its like can hardly be said to
exist elsewhere in Europe or America. Hence it must perforce rank in a way
as something unique in present-day outdoor entertainment, as near as is
left to us of those of the days of Ranelegh and Vauxhall. Beloved of the
clerk and shopkeeper, and altogether an attraction which few of their
class appear to be able to resist for long at a time.
London is no more the dread of the visitor who feared the ways that are
dark and the tricks that are vain.
London tricks are old as London's history, and from the days of Chaucer
the countryman's fear of London's vastness and the cheats practised by her
nimble-witted rogues have passed into literature. In the year 1450 John
Lydgate sang the sorrows of a simple Kentish wight, who found that, go
where he would in London, he could not speed without money:
"To London once, my stepps I bent,
Where trouth in no wyse shoulf be faynt;
To Westmynster ward I forthwith went,
To a man of law to make complaynt.
I sayd, 'for Mary's love, that holy saynt!
Pity the poor that would proceede;'
But for lack of mony I cold not spede."
After going among the lawyers of King's Bench, the Flemings of Westminster
Hall with their hats and spectacles, the cloth men and drapers of
Cheapside, and the butchers of Eastcheap, poor Lackpenny found that
nowhere, without money, could he be sped in London. His final adventure
and reflections were these:
"Then hyed I me to Belynsgate;
And one cryed 'hoo, go we hence!'
I prayd a barge man for God's sake,
That he wold spare me my expence.
'Thou scapst not here,' quod he, 'under 2 pence,
I lyst not yet bestow my almes dede;'
Thus lacking mony I could not spede.
"Then I convayed me into Kent;
For of the law wold I meddle no more
Because no man to me tooke entent,
I dyght me to do as I dyd before.
Now Jesus that in Bethlem was bore,
Save London, and send trew lawyers there mede,
For who so wants mony with them shall not spede."
Again one might quote that old Roxburghe ballad, "The Great Boobee," in
which a country yokel is made to tell how he was made to look foolish when
he resolved to plough no more, but to see the fashions of London:
"Now as I went along the street,
I carried my hat in my hand,
And to every one that I did meet
I bravely bent my band.
Some did laugh, some did scoff,
And some did mock at me,
And some did say I was a woodcock,
And a great Boobee.
"Then I did walk in haste to Paul's,
The steeple for to view,
Because I heard some people say
It should be builded new.
When I got up unto the top,
The city for to see,
It was so high, it made me cry,
Like a great Boobee.
* * * *
"Next day I through Pye-corner past,
The roast meat on the stall
Invited me to take a taste;
My money was but small:
The meat I pickt, the cook me kickt,
As I may tell to thee,
He beat me sore, and made me rore,
Like a great Boobee."
It should be remembered, however, that the great classic of London
every-day life, Gay's "Trivia," with its warnings against every danger of
the street, from chairmen's poles to thimblerigging, from the ingenious
thefts of periwigs to the nuisances caused by dustmen and small coalmen,
from the reckless horseplay of the Mohawks to the bewilderment which may
overtake the stranger confronted by the problem of Seven Dials, was
written for the warning of Londoners themselves. Those were the days when
diamond cut diamond.
In the last fifty years the roving swindler has become rare in the
streets. London now frightens the countryman more by its size than
anything else. And yet the bigger London grows the more it must lose even
this power to intimidate. Its greatest distances, its vast suburban
wildernesses, are seen by him only through a railway carriage window. He
is shot into the centre, and in the centre he remains, where help and
convenience are increased every year. It was different in the old days,
when the countryman rolled into London by coach, and was robbed on
Hounslow Heath before he had seen more than the light of London in the
sky. No one nowadays is in danger of being driven mad by the mere
spectacle of London opening out before him, yet this was the fate of a
West Country traveller who saw London for the first time from a coach
early in the nineteenth century. Cyrus Redding tells the story in his
entertaining "Fifty Years' Recollections." All went well as far as
Brentford. Seeing the lamps of that outlying village, the countryman
imagined that he was at his journey's end, but as mile after mile of
illumination went on, he asked, in alarm, "Are we not yet in London, and
so many miles of lamps?" At last, at Hyde Park Corner, he was told that
this was London; but still on went the lamps, on and on the streets, until
the poor stranger subsided into a coma of astonishment. When at last they
entered Lad Lane, the great Cheapside coaching centre, a travelling
companion bade the West Countryman remain in the coffee-room while he made
inquiries. On returning, he found no trace of him, nor heard any more of
him for six weeks. He then learned that he was in custody at Sherborne, in
Dorsetshire, as a lunatic. He was taken home, and after a brief return of
his reason he died. He was able to explain that he had become more and
more bewildered by the lights and by the never-ending streets, from which
he thought he should never be able to escape. Somehow, he walked blindly
westward, and at last emerged into the country, only to lose his memory
and his wits.
Things are different to-day, and yet many people from the remoter parts of
England are bewildered, distressed, and crazed by a visit to London. One
meets them drifting wearily and anxiously toward King's Cross or St.
Pancras at the end of their stay. They will be happy again when they see
the utensils glitter on their old kitchen wall; when they have peeped into
their best room and found the shade of stuffed squirrels resting
undisturbed on the family Bible; and when the steam rises above their big
blue teacups more proudly than ever the dome of St. Paul's soars above
this howling Babylon, then they will acquiesce in all that is said in
praise of the Abbey, the Bank of England, and Madam Tussaud's.
THE UNDER WORLD
As for the people of Dickens and the people he knew so well, they were
mostly of the lower middle classes, though he himself had, by the time his
career was well defined, been able to surround himself with the society of
the leading literary lights of his time.
Surely, though, the Cockney _pur sang_ never had so true a delineator as
he who produced those pen-pictures ranging all the way from the
vulgarities of a Sykes to the fastidiousness of a Skimpole. It is a
question, wide open in the minds of many, as to whether society of any
rank is improving or not; surely the world is quite as base as it ever
was, and as worthily circumspect too. But while the improvement of the
aristocracy in general, since mediæval times, in learning and
accomplishments, was having its untold effect on the middle classes, it
was long before the immense body of workers, or perhaps one should say
skilled labourers, as the economists call them, partook in any degree of
the general amendment. Certainly we have a right to assume, even with a
twentieth-century standpoint to judge from, that there was a constantly
increasing dissemination of knowledge, if not of culture, and that sooner
or later it might be expected to have its desired, if unconscious, effect
on the lower classes. That discerning, if not discreet, American,
Nathaniel Parker Willis, was inclined to think not, and compared the
English labourer to a tired donkey with no interest in things about him,
and with scarce surplus energy enough to draw one leg after the other. He
may have been wrong, but the fact is that there is a very large proportion
of Dickens' characters made up of a shiftless, worthless, and even
criminal class, as we all recognize, and these none the less than the
other more worthy characters are nowhere to be found as a thoroughly
indigenous type but in London itself.
There was an unmistakable class in Dickens' time, and there is to-day,
whose only recourse, in their moments of ease, is to the public
house,--great, strong, burly men, with "a good pair of hands," but no
brain, or at least no development of it, and it is to this class that your
successful middle-Victorian novelist turned when he wished to suggest
something unknown in polite society. This is the individual who cares
little for public improvements, ornamental parks. Omnibuses or trams,
steamboats or flying-machines, it's all the same to him. He cares not for
libraries, reading-rooms, or literature, cheap or otherwise, nothing, in
fact, which will elevate or inspire self-respect; nothing but
soul-destroying debauchery and vice, living and dying the life of the
beast, and as careless of the future. This is a type, mark you, gentle
reader, which is not overdrawn, as the writer has reason to know; it
existed in London in the days of Dickens, and it exists to-day, with the
qualification that many who ought, perforce of their instincts, to be
classed therewith do just enough work of an incompetent kind to keep them
well out from under the shadow of the law; these are the "Sykeses" of a
former day, not the "Fagins", who are possessed of a certain amount of
natural wit, if it be of a perverted kind.
An event which occurred in 1828, almost unparalleled in the annals of
criminal atrocity, is significantly interesting with regard to Dickens'
absorption of local and timely accessory, mostly of fact as against purely
imaginative interpolation merely:
A man named Burke (an Irishman) and a woman named Helen M'Dougal,
coalesced with one Hare in Edinburgh to murder persons by wholesale, and
dispose of their bodies to the teachers of anatomy. According to the
confession of the principal actor, sixteen persons, some in their sleep,
others after intoxication, and several in a state of infirmity from
disease, were suffocated. One of the men generally threw himself on the
victim to hold him down, while the other "burked" him by forcibly pressing
the nostrils and mouth, or the throat, with his hands. Hare being admitted
as king's evidence, Burke and his other partner in guilt were arraigned on
three counts. Helen M'Dougal was acquitted and Burke was executed.
This crime gave a new word to our language. To "burke" is given in our
dictionaries as "to murder by suffocation so as to produce few signs of
violence upon the victim." Or to bring it directly home to Dickens, the
following quotation will serve:
"'You don't mean to say he was "burked," Sam?' said Mr. Pickwick."
With no class of society did Dickens deal more successfully than with the
sordidness of crime. He must have been an observer of the most acute
perceptions, and while in many cases it was only minor crimes of which he
dealt, the vagaries of his assassins are unequalled in fiction. He was
generally satisfied with ordinary methods, as with the case of Lawyer
Tulkinghorn's murder in Lincoln's Inn Fields, but even in this scene he
does throw into crime something more than the ordinary methods of the
English novelist. He had the power, one might almost say the Shakespearian
power, of not only describing a crime, but also of making you feel the
sensation of crime in the air. First and foremost one must place the
murder of Montague Tigg.
The grinning Carker of "Dombey and Son" is ground to death under the
wheels of a locomotive at a French railway station; Quilp, of "The Old
Curiosity Shop," is dramatically drowned; Bill Sykes' neck is broken by
the rope meant for his escape; Bradley Headstone and his enemy go together
to the bottom of the canal; while the mysterious Krook, of "Bleak House"
is disposed of by spontaneous combustion.
Certainly such a gallery of horrors could not be invented purely out of an
imaginative mind, and must admittedly have been the product of intimate
first-hand knowledge of criminals and their ways.
Doubtless there was a tendency to improve moral conditions as things went
on. Britain is not the dying nation which the calamity howlers would have
us infer.
In the year 1800, there were--notwithstanding the comparative sparseness
of population--eighteen prisons in London alone, whereas in 1850, when
Dickens was in his prime and when population had enormously increased,
that number had been reduced one-third.
In the early days the jailor in many prisons received no salary, but made
his livelihood from the fees he could extort from the prisoners and their
friends; and in some cases he paid for the privilege of holding office.
Not only had a prisoner to pay for his food and for the straw on which he
slept, but, if he failed to pay, he would be detained until he did so.
In Cold Bath Fields prison, men, women, and children were indiscriminately
herded together, without employment or wholesome control; while smoking,
gaming, singing, and every species of brutalizing conversation obtained.
At the Fleet Prison there was a grate or iron-barred window facing
Farringdon Street, and above it was inscribed, "Pray remember the poor
prisoners having no allowance," while a small box was placed on the
window-sill to receive the charity of the passers-by, and a man ran to and
fro, begging coins "for the poor prisoners in the Fleet."
At Newgate, the women usually numbered from a hundred to one hundred and
thirty, and each had only eighteen inches breadth of sleeping-room, and
all were "packed like slaves in the hold of a slave-ship."
And Marshalsea, which Dickens incorporated into "David Copperfield" and
"Little Dorrit," was quite as sordid, to what extent probably none knew so
well as Dickens, _père et fils_, for here it was that the father fretfully
served out his sentence for debt.
Of all the prisons of that day it may be stated that they were hotbeds of
immorality, where children herded with hoary criminals; where no sanitary
laws were recognized; where vermin swarmed and disease held forth, and
where robbery, tyranny, and cruelty, if not actually permitted, was at
least winked at or ignored.
In 1829 Sir Robert Peel brought into force his new police establishment,
an event which had not a little to do with the betterment of social life
of the day.
"The whole metropolitan district was formed into five local divisions,
each division into eight sections, and each section into eight beats, the
limits of all being clearly defined and distinguished by letters and
numbers; the force itself was divided into companies, each company having
one superintendent, four inspectors, sixteen sergeants, and one hundred
and forty-four police constables, being also sub-divided into sixteen
parts, each consisting of a sergeant and nine men." Incalculable as the
boon was in the repression of crime, the Corporation of the City of London
could not be persuaded, until several years afterward, to follow such an
example, and give up their vested interests in the old system of watchmen.
The police system, as remodelled by Sir Robert Peel in 1829, was, of
course, the foundation of the present admirable body of constabulary, of
which the London "Bobby" must be admitted by all as ranking at the very
head of his contemporaries throughout the civilized world. Certainly no
more affable and painstaking servants of the public are anywhere to be
found; they are truly the "refuge of the inquiring stranger and timid
women."
The London policeman, then, is essentially a product of our own times; a
vast advance over the peripatetic watchman of a former day, and quite
unlike his brother on the Continent, who has not only to keep the peace,
but act as a political spy as well. Perhaps it is for this reason that the
London policeman is able to exhibit such devotion and affability in the
conduct of his duties. Surely no writer or observer has ever had the
temerity to assail the efficiency of the London "Peeler" or "Bobby," as he
now exists.
No consideration or estimate of middle-class London would be complete
without mention of that very important factor in its commissariat--beer,
or its various species, mild or bitter, pale or stale. Your true Cockney
East-Ender, however, likes his 'arf and 'arf, and further admonishes the
cheery barmaid to "draw it mild." Brewers, it would seem, like their
horses and draymen, are of a substantial race; many of the leading brewers
of the middle nineteenth-century times, indeed, of our own day, are those
who brewed in the reigns of the Georges.
By those who know, genuine London ale (presumably the "Genuine Stunning
ale" of the "little public house in Westminster," mentioned in
"Copperfield") alone is supposed to rival the ideal "berry-brown" and
"nut-brown" ale of the old songs, or at least what passed for it in those
days.
The increase of brewers has kept pace with London's increase in other
respects. Twenty-six brewhouses in the age of Elizabeth became fifty-five
in the middle of the eighteenth century, and one hundred and forty-eight
in 1841; and in quantity from 284,145 barrels in 1782 to 2,119,447 in
1836. To-day, in the absence of any statistics to hand, the sum total must
be something beyond the grasp of any but the statistician.
Without attempting to discuss the merits or demerits of temperance in
general, or beer in particular, it can be safely said that the brewer's
dray is a prominent and picturesque feature of London streets, without
which certain names, with which even the stranger soon becomes familiar,
would be meaningless; though they are, as it were, on everybody's tongue
and on many a sign-board in nearly every thoroughfare. As a historian, who
would have made an unexceptionable literary critic, has said: Beer
overflows in almost every volume of Fielding and Smollett. Goldsmith was
not averse to the "_parson's black champagne_;" Hogarth immortalized its
domestic use, and Gilray its political history; and the "pot of porter"
and "mug of bitter" will go down in the annals of the literature, art, and
history of London, and indeed all Britain, along with the more
aristocratic port and champagne.
LONDON TOPOGRAPHY
From Park Land to Wapping, by day and by night,
I've many a year been a roamer,
And find that no Lawyer can London indite,
Each street, every Lane's a misnomer.
I find Broad Street, St. Giles, a poor narrow nook,
Battle Bridge is unconscious of slaughter,
Duke's Place can not muster the ghost of a Duke,
And Brook Street is wanting in water.
JAMES SMITH, _Comic Miscellanies_.
It is not easy to delimit the territorial confines of a great and growing
city like London. The most that the most sanguine writer could hope to do
would be to devote himself to recounting the facts and features, with more
or less completeness, of an era, or an epoch, if the word be thought to
confine the period of time more definitely.