_THE WELL WALK—THE SECOND PERIOD._
Although it could not be said that the Wells were ever actually closed
till subsequent to 1809, the visits of the head-borough and a _posse_
of constables at unexpected hours had so disarranged the system of play
in Well Walk that before 1725 the gaming-tables, and with them the
raffling-shops, had disappeared.
Defoe, in an early edition of his ‘Tour of Great Britain,’ tells us, in
describing the Hampstead Wells, that _besides the Long Room_, where the
gentry meet to amuse themselves and play at cards publicly, on Monday
evenings, there is an Assembly-room for dancing 60 feet long and 30
feet wide, elegantly decorated. Every gentleman who subscribes a guinea
has a ticket for himself and two ladies; to non-subscribers the fee for
admission is two and sixpence. Another authority adds that most of the
resident gentlemen are subscribers.[246]
In these days of incandescent gas and electric light, one shudders at
the thought of this handsome sixty-feet-long assembly-room illuminated
by chandeliers filled with pyramids of candles, with others in plated or
pewter sconces at set distances on the walls.
At Almack’s, long afterwards, where only the best wax-lights were
tolerated, complaints of the destruction to the ladies’ dresses, and
gentlemen’s also, from the dropping of the melted wax upon them, were
frequent. I have no doubt the same lamentation was heard at Hampstead,
where the method of lighting could scarcely have been as perfect. But if
the illumination inside be thought inadequate, what is to be said as to
the state of things outside? It was a happy circumstance when a full moon
fell due upon an assembly night, and was accordingly set forth in the
advertisement. Otherwise a row of lanterns, suspended from tree to tree
above the Well Walk, lighted the visitors to the rooms, though these,
towards the end of the century, were superseded by ill-smelling and
uncertain oil-lamps.
Under these circumstances, leaving the rooms was perilous. Groups of
flambeaux in the hands of waiting serving-men and link-boys threw a
lurid glow through the foul-smelling smoke that clouded them, and under
cover of which cut-purses and pickpockets, amongst them, perhaps, the
notorious Jenny Diver herself,[247] were enabled to mix with the company
leaving the doors, and relieve them of laced handkerchiefs, fans, purses,
snuff-boxes, and jewellery, without detection. Not unfrequently the
throng was swelled by a mob of roughs (as we now call them), who, getting
up a quarrel for the express purpose of creating confusion, could so
cover the retreat of the thieves.
This state of things was often recurring in Well Walk, and continued
down to quite the end of the eighteenth century. Cradock, quoted by Lord
Campbell in his ‘Lives of the Lord Chancellors,’ tells his readers that
one evening the Misses Thurlow (there were three of them),[248] being at
the Hampstead Assembly, were on returning in some danger from a riot at
the door, from which they were rescued by a young officer who happened to
be present, and who handed them in safety to their coach. The incident
reads like the opening of a Della Cruscan romance; but, alas! the Lord
High Chancellor Thurlow had outlived romance, though he made a point
of calling the next morning on the young gentleman, whom he found at
breakfast, and satisfied his sense of obligation to him by offering to
partake of it, which he did.
How or when the notorious Sion Chapel was disposed of we learn
nothing.[249] Park is silent on the subject. I think it not impossible
that on the falling off of visitors to the Wells, and the probable
discontinuance of marriages at the chapel, the latter being private
property, the owner may have turned it wholly to secular uses, and have
converted it into the fine Assembly Room, with the hope of adding a new
attraction to the place for the general public.
If so, he appears to have wholly failed in his speculation, for, owing
to the questionable company who found admittance to it, the resident
gentry withdrew their patronage, and held their assemblies in the long
room of the Upper Flask. This movement must have destroyed at one stroke
the prestige and prosperity of the beautiful Assembly Room, the assured
support of which rested with the resident subscribers.
But if Park ignores the fate of the degraded Sion Chapel, he is almost
as reticent with regard to the New Episcopal Chapel in Well Walk. He
makes a mistake of eight years in the date of its opening. The bell, and
the altar plate, the first given by Mr. Rous and Mr. Wood (a name long
known in connection with Hampstead), the latter by the old physician,
Dr. Gibbons, were severally inscribed, ‘New Chapel, Hampstead, 1725,’
and ‘Nova Capella de Hampstead, 1725.’ Park did not know of this till
the editor or a contributor to the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ challenged the
correctness of the date he had given (1733) for the opening of the new
chapel.
In 1725 Dr. Gibbons died, leaving, as a testimony of his concern for
them, £100 to the poor of Hampstead. Six years later I find in the
obituary of the _Gentleman’s Magazine_, under the date of September 26,
1731, ‘At Hampstead, Mr. Rous, who built a chapel there.’ Park states
that the New Chapel in Well Walk was _universally_ understood to have
been the Assembly room of the Wells Tavern,’ but he admits that Mr.
Rous having built a chapel, and the expressions ‘Nova Capella’ on the
altar plate, and ‘New Chapel’ on the bell, seem rather to contradict the
traditionary account that it was originally a ballroom; but he observes
with the tenacity of an unconvinced man, ‘I have met with no positive
evidence on this subject.’
During the lapsed quarter of a century between the opening of the Wells
and the opening of the New Chapel in Well Walk, great additions and
alterations had taken place in the village. The beauty of the situation
and the well-known healthiness of the air induced many of the wealthy
merchants of London to purchase or build mansions on and about the Heath,
and their example was followed by some of the well-to-do people of a
lower grade, who began to run up (every man being his own architect)
edifices that in their fantastic reality vied with the imaginary
structure of Joseph Wilks, of Thames Street, Esq., who, in the event of
his ticket in the lottery winning, resolved to fit up a snug little box
at Hampstead in the Chinese taste for his retirement on Sundays.[250]
I find from a guide-book of 1724 that at that time Hampstead had risen
from a little country village almost to a city. In October, 1734, Dr.
Arbuthnot, who was ill at Hampstead, says when writing to Swift: ‘I
am going out of this troublesome world, and you, amongst the rest of
my friends, shall have my last prayers and good wishes.’ He had gone
there so reduced by a dropsy and asthma that he could ‘neither sleep,
breathe, eat, or move,’ and, contrary to his expectation, had recovered
his strength to a considerable degree, and was able to ride, sleep, and
eat with appetite. He tells his friend that he expects upon his return
to London and the coming of winter that the symptoms of his disease will
return with them, for that ‘no man at his age could hope to recover.’
His experiment had been, not with a view to life, but _ease_. ‘I am at
present,’ he says, ‘in the case of a man that was almost in harbour, and
then blown back to sea; who has a reasonable hope of going to a good
place, and an absolute certainty of leaving a very bad one;’ and then
he corrects himself, having experienced many comforts in this world in
the affections of his family and the kindness of friends, and gives a
touching peep at his domestic relations in three or four lines:
‘My family give you their love and service. The great loss I sustained
in one of them gave me my first shock, and the trouble I have with the
rest to bring them to a good temper to bear the loss of a father who
loves them, and whom they love, is really a most sensible affliction to
me.’[251]
Shortly after the date of this letter, Pope, writing to one of the Miss
Blounts, tells her that he had seen Dr. Arbuthnot, who was very cheerful:
‘I spent a whole day with him at Hampstead. He was in the Long Room half
the morning, and has parties at cards every night. Mrs. Lepell and Mrs.
Saggione and her sons and two daughters are all with him.’
In the March following Dr. Arbuthnot died, as he believed he should on
his return to London.
‘Poor Arbuthnot, who grieved to see the wickedness of mankind, and was
particularly esteemed by his own countrymen,[252] is dead, to the great
regret of everyone who had the pleasure of knowing him intimately.’
Of him Swift wrote to Pope, referring to his humanity and benevolence,
‘Oh that the world had but a dozen Arbuthnots in it! I would burn my
travels’ (‘Gulliver’); and when a lady asked the satirical Dean for the
Doctor’s character, he summed it up in a sentence, ‘He has more wit than
we all have, and his humanity is equal to his wit.’
The presence of such an invalid at the Wells is a proof that faith in
the potency of the regimen observed there, and in the health-giving air
of the Heath, was by no means withdrawn from them. Indeed, we read that
at this date and during the previous season, more company had been seen
in the walks than had visited the village for years—a fact not lost upon
Dr. Soames, the friend of, and possibly the successor to, Dr. Gibbons,
whose treatise afforded him the literary material and groundwork for
his pamphlet on the ‘Hampstead Mineral Wells, with Directions how to
Drink the Waters’—an essay calculated to impress his patients, and even
the general public, with the sanitary combinations of the rural resort.
It was published in 1734, and is not without interest. He repeats the
description of the older writer and physician, that Hampstead ‘is
situated somewhat romantic, but every way pleasant, on several little
hills, on high ground of different soils.’
‘That here persons may draw in a pure and balmy air, with the heavens
clear and serene, at that season of the year that the great and populous
City of London is covered with fogs and smoke. And what adds,’ observes
the doctor, ‘to the blessings of the place is the salubrious water of
Hampstead, which may be justly called the Fountain of Health.’
He describes the chalybeate as breaking out from the declivity of the
hill, to the east of the town, near the chapel and bowling-green, and
tells us that it was conveyed through a pipe to a marble perforated bowl
or reservoir adjoining the chapel. Dr. Soames, as his predecessor had
done, notices the views from the Heath, its soils, and the number of
aromatic plants growing on it, and adds that the Apothecaries’ Company
seldom miss coming to Hampstead every spring to have their botanizing
feast.[253] ‘As for walks and shady groves,’ he continues, ‘we have our
share, and those are very delightful.’ But his praises of the spring
which trickled till within the last few years into its basin on the
left-hand side of the walk on entering it from the Heath, and his regimen
for the water-drinkers, are the most amusing part of his treatise. He
assures his readers that ‘the chalybeate, though as strong, if not
stronger, than that of Tunbridge Wells of the iron mineral, is not at all
unpleasant; that if well corked and sealed down, and kept in a cellar for
one or two years, when you have drawn the cork it will be most ready to
fly, and when poured into a glass, will sparkle and knit up like a glass
of champagne or Herefordshire cider.’
He recommends the drinking of this water in cases of defective digestion,
in preference to the drinking of drams (a thing too common in his day),
which he hopes ‘may not spread its contagion beyond his own sex.’ At the
same time he greatly hopes that the inordinate drinking of _thea_ may
be retrenched, which, if continued in, will infallibly ‘cause the next
generation to be more like pigmies than men and women.’[254] The best
time to take the waters is from June to Michaelmas; the time of day an
hour after sunrise (no wonder music began in the Long Room at 6 a.m.).
He allows his patients balm, or sage tea, with a little orange-peel in
it for breakfast; or chocolate, milk, porridge, or mutton-broth, with
bread-and-butter. An hour after taking the water, coffee may be used—the
less the better—but as for the green or bohea _thea_, that ‘ought to be
banished.’
Smoking appears to have been allowed, for Dr. Soames observes that those
who take tobacco ‘may do so with all safety’; only he politely suggests,
‘let them not offend the company, especially the ladies, who cannot well
relish that smoke with their waters.’ He recommends his patients a ride
of four or five miles one hour after drinking them, or, where there is
an objection to riding, to divert themselves with the amusements of the
place. These, as we have said, had considerably contracted since the days
when the members of the Kit-Cat Club had mingled with the visitors in the
walks, and exchanged smart repartees together, as was the fashion of the
day, when the last bon-mot at Button’s was set against the newest scandal
at the Wells.
Dr. Soames’ regimen, it will be seen, consisted in early hours,
temperance, pure air, invigorating exercise, and whatever tended to
maintain a cheerful temper; these made the curative charm of the
Hampstead waters, and for a time restored the reputation of the Wells.
It is rather amusing to find the curate in league with the doctor, and
setting himself forth as an example of the efficacy of the waters.
‘Could my pen convey to others the idea I have of them,’ exclaims this
enthusiastic partisan, ‘and the advantages we should have in using them,
we should see the walks crowded as heretofore, twenty or thirty years
ago. And it is some pleasure,’ he adds complacently, ‘to be informed that
this summer they have not been without a pretty number of visitors.’
[Illustration: _Old Cottages, North End_]
If we add the amount of satisfaction felt by Mr. Watts, Curate and
Lecturer of Hampstead, to that of the inhabitants whose tenements were at
the disposal of the said visitors, we get the idea that Hampstead must
have smiled all over this season with a satisfaction it had not known
in many preceding ones. All the little green-fenced white cottages in
the neighbourhood of South End and the Vale of Health (reminiscent in
its very name of the Gibbons and Soames period), as well as those on the
upper slope of the East Heath and Squire’s Mount (to which a then leafy
lane ran up from the Wells), had had a fresh coat of spotless paint put
on. The mistresses of them were nodding and smiling to one another at
their doors, and asking if they were ‘all let,’ or ‘quite full,’ or some
question or other, indicative of a personal and neighbourly interest,
which left it without doubt that they themselves had not another room
to spare; while the select houses in Pond Street, and Lower Flask Walk,
with their better accommodation and superior landladies, received such an
access of purification and polish, that the flashing of the fanlights
over the hall doors, and the shining of brass knobs and knockers, and the
superlatively white, neatly-festooned blinds to every window, were in
themselves so many letters of recommendation writ large.
Lodgings were to be had in the High Street, where little else was to be
had, the few shops in it, with their half-hatch doors, open shop-boards,
and hanging shutters, showing only the most simple necessaries of
village life—always excepting the so-called general shop, with its
heterogeneous stock of dry-goods, drapery, and drugs. Every household
in those days baked its own bread, and an itinerant butcher visited the
village weekly.[255] But the farms and cottages around supplied the
freshest butter, eggs, milk, cream and poultry, with the common kinds
of vegetables and fruit; for the rest, there was the London carrier,
who led his horse by easy stages up the hill, bringing provisions, as
requisitioned from day to day, for the visitors.
At the opening of the season, the farmhouse productions rose to famine
price; the laundresses who lived in a congeries of cottages, at the
bottom of the Vale of Health, with their backs to the east wind and the
pool—for the pond as we see it now was not made till 1777, previous to
which date it was a mere pool fed by a spring that trickled from the bank
that margined it—immediately raised their prices. The parson bethought
him of charity sermons, and the doctors of increased fees; and thus the
whole social system of the village found itself comforted, and enriched,
by a restored faith in the medicinal springs. In fact, to again quote
Baker, ‘everything became as dear as a freeholder’s vote, and as great an
imposition as a Dutch reckoning.’
But the Hampstead of these later days was an altered place from what it
had been when Baker’s comedy was written. It had been made to see the
error of its ways, and as the greatest sinners are said to become the
greatest saints, so the peccant village appears to have recoiled to the
opposite degree from its former self, even to the verge of decorous (some
said dismal) dulness, and had fallen into neglect, as Dr. Soames very
oddly phrases it, ‘through the knavery of some, the folly of others, and
the exceeding great zeal for the glory of God and the good of the poor.’
The raffling-shops shut up, Mother Huff’s no longer heard of, the
tea-gardens deserted for the most part by all but the common people, ‘who
on Sundays, always mindful of the commandment which enjoins them to do no
work on that day, took occasion to eat buns at Chelsea, drink beer at St.
Pancras, of being sworn on the Horns at Highgate,[256] and of drinking
tea at Hampstead or _Little_ Hornsey,’[257] which was in the centre of
the present Finsbury Park.
New Georgia was as yet unheard of, but, if I remember aright, the
bowling-green had not disappeared. The tavern is doing a brisk business;
the Long Room is full of fine company, and the walks between the elms and
limes in blossom, bright with colour, and gay with mirth, which, more
robust than in these artificial times, laughed out merrily and was not
ashamed.
Cards, I am obliged to say, were as much in request as ever, but the
cheats at them were not professionals; and though Dr. Soames distinctly
set his face against the ‘violent exercise of country dances,’ the
fortnightly meetings in the Long Room were not thinned thereby. Concerts
were of frequent occurrence, and the following ditty,[258] originally
printed on a broad-sheet, and which afterwards appeared in the _Musical
Entertainer_, and was set to music by Mr. Abel Whichello, under the
title of ‘The beauties of Hampstead,’ was, in all probability, first sung
at the Wells:
‘Summer heat the town invades,
All repair to cooling shades;
How inviting, how delighting,
Are the flowery hills and vales!
‘Here, where lovely Hampstead stands,
And the neighbouring vale commands,
What surprising prospects rising,
All around adorn the lands.
‘Here ever-woody mounts arise,
There verdant lawns delight the eyes,
Where Thames wanders—in meanders—
Lofty domes approach the skies.
‘Here are grottos, purling streams,
Shades defying Titan’s beams;
Rosy bowers, fragrant flowers,
Lovers’ wishes, poets’ themes.
‘Of the crystal, bubbling well,
Life and strength the currents swell;
Health and pleasure, heavenly treasure.
Smiling, here united dwell.
‘Here, nymphs and swains, indulge your hearts,
Share the joys the scene imparts;
Here be strangers to all dangers
All but those of Cupid’s darts!’
It is not impossible that a local speculator may have bribed the muse of
one or other of the ever-ready Grub Street poets to compose these verses,
which read very like a lyrical advertisement of the place; while the
broad-sheet form in which they first appeared was the usual one in which
such poetical puffs were presented.
Nothing can be more Arcadian than the conceits and images in this
effusion; no one reading it at this time of day would imagine danger
lurking in the shape of footpads in St. Pancras Vale, where Smollett
makes one of his heroes walk with a drawn sword by the side of his
mistress’s coach on her way to town from the Flask Walk. It was better to
fall into the hands of the redoubted Turpin himself than into those of
these cruel and rapacious robbers.[259] He, on the other hand, affected a
certain bonhomie in his proceedings, and loved best to disembarrass his
victims of their property without unnecessary violence. His wit appears
to have been heavier than his hand.
‘You will soon be caught!’ cried out an angry but non-combative
gentleman, one of two in a chaise, whom, besides others, he had robbed on
a certain Sunday on the road between Hampstead and Highgate.
‘So I have thought myself,’ returned Dick, ‘but believe I am in no danger
from you!’
During the years that had passed between the first opening of the Wells
and this temporary resuscitation of their popularity, death had broken
up that knot of brilliant wits and writers whose presence there has made
Hampstead classical. Addison and Steele, Arbuthnot and Gay, were, in
one sense, simply names, but names so intimately interwrought with the
literature of their age and country as to be for ever inseparable from it.
‘Those sovereigns of the Muse’s skill
Are the true patterns of good writing still!’
Swift, parted by the Irish Sea from his old associates, still lived,
Dean of St. Patrick’s; and only Pope, pale and sickly, represents the
bright band of literary brothers who had found many suggestive themes,
in the Well Walk and its vicinity, for the exercise of their genial
humour or piquant censorship. Jarvis, the friend of the poet, writing
about this period to Dean Swift, observes: ‘Pope is off and on, here
and there, everywhere, _à son ordinaire_, therefore as well as we can
hope for a carcase so crazy.’ Jarvis was the well-known ‘face-painter,’
contemporary with Sir Godfrey Kneller, and who had given lessons to Pope
in portrait-painting.[260]
The latter continued to visit Hampstead for Murray’s sake, whose love for
the charming place ‘amounted almost to a passion,’ and who sought it on
every opportunity.
One of the persons most constantly seen in the Long Room and the walks,
at this period, was the newly-made Poet Laureate (Colley Cibber), a man
of vast intelligence, though a little too full of self-importance, and
perhaps egotism. His ‘Birthday Odes’ were the delight of the wits and
the amusement of the critics, who pounced down upon them in the _Grub
Street Journal_, and other publications, and literally tore them line
from line. Colley was himself insensible to satire, though he could
wield it very successfully against others. He always remained perfectly
satisfied with his own performances as playwright, manager, and poet. So
devoid was he of any sense of the absurdity of his odes, that he was in
the habit of carrying them about with him, and reading them to those of
his acquaintances who would listen, all the while unconscious that the
little ill-dressed man, with the pain-drawn, sallow face and large, dark,
luminous eyes, who was never without a knot of the best people in the
company, _la crême des beaux esprits_, about him, was passing round an
epigram of his own, the reading of which occasioned hilarious laughter.
The lines ran as follows:
‘In merry old England it once was a rule,
The King had his poet, and also his fool;
But now we’re so frugal, I’d have you to know it,
That Cibber can serve both for fool and for poet.’
Let us take Swift against Pope:
‘Sir, I admit your general rule,
That every poet is a fool.’
No doubt Colley Cibber, who at seventy years of age aped the airs of a
man of fashion, made himself as ridiculous on the walks at Hampstead
as he subsequently did on the Pantiles at Tunbridge Wells, where
Richardson describes him making love to the handsome Miss Chudleigh
(the pseudo Duchess of Kingston[261]), and growing green with jealousy
when she bestowed a smile on anyone but himself. His appointment to the
Laureateship, and the Birthday and other odes in which he exhibited his
poetical fitness for the honour of the wreath, occasioned Lady Betty
Germain to remark, in one of her clever letters to Dean Swift, that if it
was the Queen, and not the Duke of Grafton,[262] that picked out such a
Laureate, she deserved his poetry in her praise.
In May we find Mrs. Donnellan,[263] sister to the Bishop of Killala,
and a friend of Swift’s and Mrs. Delany’s,[264] writing to the latter
that she is waiting in Dublin to cross to England ‘when the wind
served.’ This lady, who appears to have frequently renewed her visits to
Hampstead, was received in the best society, and especially sought that
of distinguished literary people. She was the Philomela of the Widow
Pendarves’ correspondence with her sister—an affectation that suggests
that, like so many of her charming country-women, she had the gift of
a melodious voice added to that exquisite Gaelic endowment of taste
and feeling in the use of it. Richardson, who after the appearance of
‘Pamela’ had become famous, and was fêted and run after, especially by
women who affected literature, was a friend of hers. She appears to have
preferred Hampstead, not only for the sake of the Wells, but from her
innate love for the natural beauty of the place.
In 1748, the year ‘Clarissa’ took the reading world by storm, Richardson
succeeded in persuading her that the air of the north-west suburb was
too sharp for her, and so lured her for a time to North End, Fulham. But
though getting into years, the lady appears to have had a will of her
own, and in the summer of this year returned to her favourite place of
abode and the shelter of Pond Street.
Richardson, writing to Mrs. Delany, informs her of her friend’s removal,
and adds: ‘I did myself the honour to dine with her there (Pond Street)
yesterday. The weather was not propitious ... she complained.... I
chid her for her removal. But upon my word, madam, I do think it is
not so very much amiss sometimes that control ... but no more on this
subject.... I will only add that she rejoices in her prospects variegated
with hill and dale. They are certainly very fine.’ To this epistle, the
style of which is very like that of his epistolary novels, Mrs. Delany,
whose ‘deportment was all elegance, and speech all sweetness,’ as Burke
expressed it, a born courtier at heart, replies that she has written
to Mrs. Donnellan, ‘condemning her, though she was loath, for going to
that _ugly Hampstead_, which she had never loved since Clarissa had such
persecutions there.’
Nevertheless, Mrs. Donnellan continued to enjoy the air of Hampstead
from time to time for ten years longer. Mrs. Barbauld, in her ‘Life of
Richardson,’ tells us that a friend of hers at Hampstead could remember
her ‘a venerable old lady with very sharp, black eyes.’
She was an intimate friend of the famous Mrs. Montague, the acknowledged
patron of the literary and artistic celebrities of the time, the entrée
to whose drawing-rooms bestowed a sort of diploma on the favoured
recipient, which, by the way, was never extended to the literary
bookseller. Mrs. Donnellan died of what Mrs. Montague calls ‘a cold and
fever,’ the precursor, probably, of our modern influenza, as universal a
plague in 1772 as the latter in 1893-94.
Though for a brief period after the publication of Dr. Soames’ treatise
the presence of an increased number of visitors gladdened his heart, it
soon became apparent that no persuasive pamphlet, no poetical puff, could
restore it. The favour of people of fashion had passed away from it.
The walk without the raffling-shops and gaming-tables, and the ballroom
without the freedom of the all-night dancing, had no charms for any
others than the real lovers of the delightful suburb for its own sake. It
came to be considered as a sort of natural sanatorium, a pleasant rustic
summer resort and resting-place; and as the fame of the waters fell away,
except in the grateful remembrance of those who had imagined themselves
benefited by them, the reputation of its pure, health-giving air and the
natural beauty of its situation and surroundings became more obvious to
persons who, like Mrs. Donnellan, Mr. Murray, and others, were permeated
with an ever-growing love of them.
It was no doubt the dearth of entertainment for the visitors that
suggested to the inventive imagination of the sexagenarian Robert Causton
the idea of opening the tea-drinking house, with pleasure-gardens,
waterworks, and various ingenious contrivances (to which I have
elsewhere referred) in a part of Turner’s Wood, the wood where the
lilies-of-the-valley, once indigenous on Hampstead Heath, lingered latest.
It was opened in 1737, and became so popular with Londoners and the
general public, that it remained open twenty years afterwards, so that
the enterprise must have amply repaid the originator.
From this it would seem that not only Mother Huff’s, but others of these
apparently innocent places for refreshment and recreation (so-called tea
and bun houses), with their fair bowling-greens, and garden bowers, for
summer evenings’, and Sunday afternoons’ rest and pleasure, were included
in the general blight which the drastic measures of the magistrates
at Hicks’s Hall had inflicted on Well Walk and its neighbourhood. We
recognise the reason for this measure when we learn that many of their
proprietors had succeeded, through a direct infringement of the law,
in obtaining licenses for the sale of wine and punch, and in this way
tea-houses had become sources of dissipation and vice.
In 1744, Pope, whose life had been one long illness, finally disappeared
from the Well Walk, where with Murray and so many other wits and
celebrities he had shared with the lighter crowd in the fashions and
follies of the place—the last but one of that bright galaxy of literary
stars in which it had been his privilege to shine and mingle. He died,
to the regret of many admirers and the sincere sorrow of his friends.
With all his faults—and they were flagrant—there must have been something
lovable and sympathetic in his nature, to have won and kept the life-long
friendship of men with minds and dispositions so differently constituted
as Dr. Arbuthnot’s, Dean Swift’s, John Gay’s, and Mr. Murray’s.
His love for his mother and Gay was almost feminine in its steadfastness
and tenderness, and I fancy we may discover something noble in his
self-restraint when tending the latter from time to time during his
illness at Hampstead, for, though suffering himself from the same
circumstances, he never seems to have alluded to his own share of loss in
the South Sea Bubble.
How affectionately each of the three ‘Yahoos’—Jonathan Swift, John Gay,
and Pope—alludes to the time they spent together at Twickenham, and how
much of real pathos he, the most artificial of poets, crushed, as it
were, into the two last lines of his intended epitaph on Gay!—
‘For all thy blameless life the sole return,
My verse, and Queensberry’s tears above thy urn.’
Everyone knew of the misunderstanding between him and Addison from
the commencement of his career; yet in expressing his regret for the
essayist’s death, he observed there was in Addison’s conversation ‘more
charm than he had heard in any other man’s.’ High praise from a supposed
adversary, but praise that was assuredly due to him.
In the _Penny London Advertiser_, under the date of June 13-15, 1744, and
the heading ‘Home News,’ it is stated that ‘Last week the body of Mr.
Pope was privately interred at Twickenham, when twelve men and twelve
women were entirely new cloathed, and attended his corpse to the grave,
pursuant to his will.’[265] No reference is made to his genius, no word
is said of his works; nor does it appear that any personal friends
attended his funeral. I have said that, owing to his deformity and other
causes, his life had been pronounced one long disease. I wonder if his
more robustly-constituted critics took this fact into consideration when
sitting in judgment on the bitterness, irritability, and other sins
of omission and commission of the man of whom the friends around his
death-bed observed ‘that his humanity survived his understanding,’ and
whom Gay had said ‘he loved as his own soul.’ Think of fifty-six years’
habitation of a misshapen, dwarfed, feeble body, in which he could never
have known freedom from physical depression, and say how many of us under
the same conditions might not have dentated sharpest incisors rather than
wisdom-teeth.
In 1748 Richardson, after eight years’ abstinence from novel-writing,
produced his crowning work, ‘Clarissa Harlowe,’ a book that occasioned
intenser excitement and more eager expectation than any work of fiction
that had preceded it. To understand this, one has only to take a course
of eighteenth-century belles-lettres, as exhibited in the romances of the
magazines, and so-called memoirs, and narratives of the day.
In these no attempt is made to depict human nature naturally, or to endue
the characters represented with the ordinary language, idiosyncrasies,
temper, or feelings of living beings. Richardson’s style was formal and
spiritless, and the epistolary form in which he developed his long-drawn
stories absolutely wearisome; but he painted men and women, and made
them speak. Their joys and sorrows, trials and temptations, were true
to Nature, as were their weaknesses and vices; and this living force in
his delineations—the human passion and the human pathos, that make many
of his descriptions throb with life—touched the hearts of his readers,
unaccustomed to such graphic treatment, with spontaneous sympathy, and
set all England weeping over the imaginary wrongs and sorrows of _Miss
Clarisse_, which Mr. Lang tells us the Young Pretender, with a reward of
£30,000 for his apprehension hanging over his head, requested a lady of
his acquaintance to secure for him. Not only matrons and maidens, but
men also, persisted through the seven or eight volumes with unflagging
interest, and any amount of lachrymatory effusion, amongst them a
Bishop, who cheerfully averred that he had ‘shed buckets full of tears
over its pages.’[266] No wonder if the author (whom Horace Walpole and
others regarded as a ‘conceited prig’) did feel a little lifted up in
self-estimation, especially when Johnson sententiously observed to him
that in writing his story of ‘Clarissa Harlowe’ he ‘had enlarged the
knowledge of human nature, and taught the passions to move at the
command of virtue.’
There is no doubt that Richardson’s writings initiated the English novel,
which henceforth became the favourite form with writers of fiction. It
will be remembered by those who have read ‘Clarissa Harlowe,’ a reprint
of which, edited by Dallas, was brought out some years ago, that the
heroine, in her innocence, takes shelter at the Upper Flask Tavern, and
subsequently finds lodgings in Flask Road. Mrs. Barbauld tells us of her
own knowledge of a Frenchman who paid a visit to Hampstead for the ‘sole
purpose of finding the house in Flask Walk where Clarissa had lodged, and
was surprised at the ignorance or indifference of the inhabitants on the
subject,’ just as if Clarissa had been a living being.
Her story indelibly associates the author with Hampstead, where, indeed,
the smooth-faced, precise, placid-looking little man might often be
seen in retired corners of the pump-house or Long Room, or sidling
behind the trees in the walks, or propped upon his stick, his favourite
attitude, ‘one hand in his bosom, and the other supporting his chin.’
The year in which ‘Clarissa’ appeared was that in which Johnson, in
spite of his poverty, had taken lodgings for the exacting Tetty in that
‘little house beyond the church,’ and was hard at work upon the ‘Vanity
of Human Wishes,’ possibly to provide the means of paying for them. In
this year—the ‘Clarissa’ year—the inhabitants of Hampstead being ‘very
desirous to prevent any robberies or felonies being committed in the said
parish,’ had joined with those of Hackney, Clapham, and probably other
outlying suburbs, and subscribed amongst themselves to a common fund,
which enabled them to offer a reward of ‘ten pounds to any person or
persons who shall apprehend or take any highwayman or footpad, who shall
commit any robbery within the said parish.’[267]
Similar announcements, differing in no way but in the name of the place,
appeared almost simultaneously in the columns of the _Daily Advertiser_
in the month of June, 1748.
As early as 1736 the gentlemen of Hackney, then a beautiful subrural
village, much affected by rich City men and merchants, had agreed to
have ‘a good and substantial watch to patrol the footway between London
and Hackney, from six at night till ten, all armed with halberts’; and
years previously the turnpike men had provided themselves with long
speaking-trumpets, that upon the first notice of a robbery they might
alarm the distant villages, and enable the inhabitants to pursue the
robbers. It was this state of social terror that roused the householders
from time to time to band themselves together, and, armed with
blunderbusses and cutlasses, to patrol the roads in the neighbourhood of
their homes for mutual protection. Evidently a lawless time, with only
one remedy, the gibbet, which an appearance before Sir John de Veil, or
other Bow Street justice, was almost certain to be the prelude to.
The laws of England were draconic, the quality of mercy unknown. All
gradations of crime were condemned together, and convicts came out by
cart-fulls to Tyburn, where the cruel, stealthy, midnight murderer, and
the pitiful thief who had filched a sixpence from a farmer’s boy,[268]
came to the same end, and were hanged. ‘The death penalty,’ says Horace
Walpole, ‘was as frequent as curses in the Commination Service.’
Through all these years no attempt had been made by those in authority to
remedy the dangerous state of the roads. All round the Metropolis, even
at noonday, no traveller was safe. Barnet, Hoxton, the Hendon Fields,
Finchley Common, Tottenham Court Road, Pancras Meadows, the Half-way
House (Mother Red-Cap), Kilburn, and the Highgate Road, were all haunts
of footpads and highwaymen, of whom, in 1736, Dick Turpin, especially
in Epping Forest, was the most active and successful. Hence the crude
co-operation of the inhabitants of Hampstead and other villages to defend
themselves.
A pamphlet written by Henry Fielding, the novelist, who had been himself
a magistrate, lets us into the fact that the sympathies of the working
classes were with the law-breakers, who, though publicly known for
such, rode impudently through the streets[269] in the very sight of an
officer who held in his pocket the warrant for their arrest, but dare
not serve it for his life’s sake. It was verging towards the close of
the eighteenth century before Sir Richard Ford established his plan of
the horse patrol, or blind Sir John Fielding his system of Bow Street
runners—his ‘black band,’ as they were called—and it was not till the
fifteenth year of George III. (1774) that an Act was obtained for the
lighting of the streets, roads, and public passages within the town of
Hampstead, and for the establishment of a nightly patrol between the said
town and London.
With light, and the horse patrol, the vocations of footpad and highwayman
very soon showed signs of decline; but intermediately we read such
paragraphs as the following: ‘On Saturday night between eight and nine
o’clock four men were attacked in a field between Tottenham Court Road
and the Half-way House to Hampstead by a single footpad, who came to them
with a pistol in each hand, and robbed them of what money they had.’
A Mr. Herman was robbed of eight guineas and some silver on Finchley
Common, on his return from Barnet, by two well-mounted highwaymen. A man
was stopped close to the barn near the Mother Red-Cap by some villains,
who robbed and murdered him, leaving him under the eaves of the barn,
and two ladies were robbed on Hampstead Heath by a young man who informed
them that he was ‘a baronet’s son, but in great distress.’
Very often we read of persons dying from wounds received in these brutal
encounters, the scene of which, as in the instances above quoted, was
often very near to Hampstead. ‘Mr. Bocket, an old inhabitant, remembered
the mail-coach being robbed opposite Pilgrim Lane in 1800’—a fact for
which I am indebted to Martin H. Wilkin, Esq.