The element of the grotesque was very noticeable to me in the most
striking collection of the shabbier English types that I had seen since
I came to London. The occasion of my seeing them was the funeral of Mr.
George Odger, which befell some four or five weeks before the Easter
period. Mr. George Odger, it will be remembered, was an English radical
agitator of humble origin, who had distinguished himself by a perverse
desire to get into Parliament. He exercised, I believe, the useful
profession of shoemaker, and he knocked in vain at the door that opens
but to the refined. But he was a useful and honourable man, and his own
people gave him an honourable burial I emerged accidentally into
Piccadilly at the moment they were so engaged, and the spectacle was one
I should have been sorry to miss. The crowd was enormous, but I managed
to squeeze through it and to get into a hansom cab that was drawn up
beside the pavement, and here I looked on as from a box at the play.
Though it was a funeral that was going on I will not call it a tragedy;
but it was a very serious comedy. The day happened to be
magnificent--the finest of the year. The funeral had been taken in hand
by the classes who are socially unrepresented in Parliament, and it had
the character of a great popular "manifestation" The hearse was followed
by very few carriages, but the _cortège_, of pedestrians stretched away
in the sunshine, up and down the classic gentility of Piccadilly, on a
scale that was highly impressive. Here and there the line was broken by
a small brass band--apparently one of those bands of itinerant Germans
that play for coppers beneath lodging-house windows; but for the rest it
was compactly made up of what the newspapers call the dregs of the
population. It was the London rabble, the metropolitan mob, men and
women, boys and girls, the decent poor and the indecent, who had
scrambled into the ranks as they gathered them up on their passage, and
were making a sort of solemn "lark" of it. Very solemn it all
was--perfectly proper and undemonstrative. They shuffled along in an
interminable line, and as I looked at them out of the front of my hansom
I seemed to be having a sort of panoramic view of the under side, the
wrong side, of the London world. The procession was filled with figures
which seemed never to have "shown out," as the English say, before; of
strange, pale, mouldy paupers who blinked and stumbled in the Piccadilly
sunshine. I have no space to describe them more minutely, but I found
the whole affair rather suggestive. My impression rose not simply from
the radical, or, as I may say for the sake of colour, the revolutionary,
emanation of this dingy concourse, lighted up by the ironical sky; but
from the same causes that I had observed a short time before, on the day
the Queen went to open Parliament, when in Trafalgar Square, looking
straight down into Westminster and over the royal procession, were
gathered a group of banners and festoons inscribed in big staring
letters with mottoes and sentiments which a sensitive police department
might easily have found seditious. They were mostly in allusion to the
Tichborne claimant, whose release from his dungeon they peremptorily
demanded, and whose cruel fate was taken as a pretext for several
sweeping reflections on the social arrangements of the time and country.
These impertinent standards were allowed to sun themselves as freely as
if they had been the manifestoes of the Irish Giant or the Oriental
Dwarf at a fair. I had lately come from Paris, where the
police-department is more sensitive, and where revolutionary placards
are not observed to adorn the base of the obelisk in the Place de la
Concorde. I was, therefore, the more struck on both of the occasions I
speak of with the admirable English practice of letting people
alone--with the good sense and the good humour and even the good taste
of it. It was this that I found impressive, as I watched the
"manifestation" of Mr. Odger's underfed partisans--the fact that the
mighty mob could march along and do its errand, while the excellent
quiet policemen stood by simply to see that the channel was kept clear
and comfortable.
When Easter Monday came it was obvious that every one (save Mr. Odger's
friends--three or four million or so) had gone out of town. There was
hardly a pair of shutters in the West End that was not closed; there was
not a bell that it was any use to pull. The weather was detestable, the
rain incessant, and the fact that all one's friends were away gave one
plenty of leisure to reflect that the country must be the reverse of
enlivening. But all one's friends had gone thither (this is the
unanimity I began by talking about), and to restrict as much as possible
the proportions of that game of hide-and-seek of which, at the best, so
much of London social life consists, it seemed wise to bring within the
limits of the dull season any such excursion as one might have projected
in commemoration of the first days of spring. After due cogitation I
paid a little visit to Canterbury and Dover, taking Rochester by the
way, and it was of this momentous journey that I proposed, in beginning
these remarks, to give an account. But I have dallied so much by the way
that I have come almost to my rope's end without reaching my first
stage. I should have begun, artistically, by relating that I put myself
in the humour for remote adventure by going down the Thames on a penny
steamboat to--the Tower. This was on the Saturday before Easter, and the
City was as silent as the grave. The Tower was a memory of my childhood,
and having a theory that from such memories the dust of the ages had
better not be shaken, I had not retraced my steps to its venerable
walls. But the Tower is very good--much less cockneyfied than I supposed
it would seem to my maturer vision; very gray and historical, with the
look that vivifies--rather lividly indeed--the past I could not get into
it, as it had been closed for Passion Week, but I was consequently
relieved from the obligation to march about with a dozen fellow-starers
in the train of a didactic beef-eater, and I strolled at will through
the courts and the garden, sharing them only with the lounging soldiers
of the garrison, who seemed to connect the place with important events.