[Illustration: GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA, THE AUTHOR OF “TWICE ROUND THE
CLOCK.”]
TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK;
OR THE
HOURS OF THE DAY AND NIGHT
IN LONDON.
BY
GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA,
AUTHOR OF “A JOURNEY DUE NORTH,” “GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT,” ETC. ETC.
ILLUSTRATED WITH
A PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR, AND NUMEROUS ENGRAVINGS ON WOOD,
FROM DRAWINGS BY WILLIAM M’CONNEL.
LONDON:
RICHARD MARSH, 122, FLEET STREET.
1862.
PREFACE.
TO AUGUSTUS MAYHEW.
Had I not fifty other valid reasons—did I not feel myself impelled to
such a course by the long years of affectionate intercourse which have
cast sunshine on that highway of life, of which the shadier side of
the road has been apportioned to me, I should still, my dear Augustus,
dedicate this book to you. I could show, I hope, my affection and esteem
in other ways; but to address to you the Epistle Dedicatory of “Twice
Round the Clock” is only your due, in justice and in courtesy. Civility
is not so common a quality among the Eminent British Authors of the day,
and mutual admiration is not so plentifully displayed by our Fieldings
and Smolletts of 1859, that we middling and middle-class ink-spillers
can afford to throw away a chance of saying a kind or civil thing to one
another in the right way and in the right place. Do you, therefore, say
something neat and complimentary about me in the preface to your next
book; and I only trust that the task will confer as sincere a pleasure on
you as it confers on me at this moment.
But I might still, I must admit, admire you very much, without that
admiration giving you a Right to the Dedication of a Book relating
exclusively to London Life and London Manners in the nineteenth century.
Herein, however, rests, I think, your claim: That you are the author
of a capital book called “Paved with Gold,” replete with the finest
and shrewdest observation drawn from the scenes we have both delighted
to survey, to study, and to describe, and of which book, although the
basis was romantic fiction, the numerous episodes were picturesque but
eminently faithful photographs of fact. I should have liked, myself, to
tell the story of a prize fight, of a ratting match, or of a boy’s low
lodging-house, in my own way, and in these pages; but I shrank from the
attempt after your graphic narratives in “Paved with Gold.” And, again,
have you not been for years the fellow-labourer of your brother Henry,
in those deeply-tinted but unalterably-veracious studies of London Life,
of which we have the results in “Labour and the Poor” and in the “Great
World of London?” Of how many prisons, workhouses, factories, work-rooms,
have you not told the tale? of how many dramas of misery and poverty have
you not been the chronicler? Let us bow to the great ones of letters,
and, reading their books with a hearty, honest admiration, confess that
the capacity to produce such master-pieces is not given to us; but let
us, on our own parts, put in a modest claim to the recognition and
approval of the public. Please remember the reporters. Please not to
forget the bone-grubbers. Fling a pennyworth of praise to the excavators
and night-watchmen who have at least industriously laboured to collect
materials wherefrom better painters may execute glowing tableaux of
London Life. At least, we have toiled to bring together our tale of
bricks, that by the hand of genius they may be erected some day into a
Pyramid. At least, we have endeavoured to our utmost to describe the
London of our day as we have seen it, and as we know it; and, in the
words of the judicious Master Hooker—of whose works, my Augustus, I am
afraid you are not a very sedulous student—we have worked early and
late on London, and have done our best to paint the infinitely-varied
characteristics of its streets and its population, “Tho’ for no other
cause, yet for this, that Posteritie may know we have not looselie, thro’
silence, permitted thinges to pass away as in a dreame; there shall be
for men’s information extant thus much concerning the present state
of”—London.
So you see, my dear friend, that I have dedicated my work to you; and
that, _bon grè, mal grè_, you have been saddled with the dignity of its
Patron. I might have addressed you in heroic verse, and with your name
in capitals; and, in the manner of Mr. Alexander Pope, bidden you:—
“Awake, my MAYHEW: leave all meaner things
To low ambition and the pride of kings.”
I believe your present ambition extends only to few-acre farming and
the rearing of poultry, and I might well exhort you to return to your
literary pursuits, and to leave the Dorkings and Cochin Chinas alone.
But I refrain. Am I to insult my Patron with advice? Do I expect any
reward for my dedication? Will your Lordship send me a handful of
broad-pieces for my flattery’s sake by the hands of your gentleman’s
gentleman? Will you put me down for the next vacancy as a Commissioner
of Hackney Coaches, or the next reversion for a snug sinecure connected
with the Virginia Plantations or the Leeward Islands? Will your Lordship
invite me to dinner at your country-seat, and place me between Lady
Betty and the domestic chaplain? May I write rhyming epitaphs for her
ladyship’s pug-dog, untimely deceased from excess of cream and chicken?
Or will you speak to Mr. Secretary in my behalf, lest that last paper
of mine against Ministers in “Mist’s Weekly Journal” should draw down
on me the _ex-officio_ wrath of Mr. Attorney-General, and cause my ears
to be nailed to the pillory? Can I ever hope to crack a bottle in your
Lordship’s society at Button’s, or to see your Lordship’s coach-and-six
before my lodgings in Little Britain? Let us be thankful, rather, that
the species of literary patronage at which I have hinted exists no
longer, and that an Author has no need to toady his Patron in order to
make him his friend. For what more in cordiality and kind-fellowship
I could say, you will, I am sure, give me credit. When friendship is
paraded too much in public, its entire sincerity may be open to doubt. I
am afraid that Orestes, so affectionate on the stage, has often declined
in the green-room to lend Pylades sixpence; and I am given to understand,
that Damon has often come down from the platform, where he has been
saying such flourishing fine things about Pythias, and in private life
has spoken somewhat harshly of that worthy.
You will observe that, with the economy which we should all strive to
inculcate in an age of Financial Reform, I have made these remarks to
serve two ends. You are to take them, if you please, as a Dedication.
The public will be good enough to accept them as a Preface. But as the
dedicatory has hitherto disproportionately exceeded the prefatory matter,
a few words on my part are due to that great body-corporate of Patrons
whom some delight to call the “many-headed monster;” some the “million;”
some the fickle, ungrateful, and exigent—and some the generous,
forbearing, and discerning British Public.
The papers I have now collected into a volume under the title of “Twice
Round the Clock, or the Hours of the Day and Night in London,” were
originally published in the pages of the “Welcome Guest,” a weekly
periodical whose first and surprising success must be mainly ascribed to
the taste and spirit of its original proprietor, Mr. Henry Vizetelly.
I confess that I thought as little of “Twice Round the Clock” in the
earlier hours of its publication as the critics of the _Saturday
Review_—who, because I contributed for six years to another periodical
whose conductor they hold in hatred, have been pleased to pursue me with
an _acharnement_ quite exciting to experience—may think of it, now. I
looked upon the articles as mere ephemeral essays, of a description of
which I had thrown off hundreds during a desultory, albeit industrious,
literary career. But I found ere long that I had committed myself to
a task whose items were to form an Entirety in the end; that I had
begun the first act of a Drama which imperatively demanded working out
to its catastrophe. I grew more interested in the thing; I took more
pains; I felt myself spurred to accuracy by the conscientious zeal of
the admirable artist, Mr. William M’Connell, whose graphic and truthful
designs embellished my often halting text. I found, to my great surprise,
that the scenes and characters I had endeavoured to embody were awakening
feelings of curiosity and interest among the many thousand readers of
the journal to which I contributed. The work, such as it is, was in the
outset not very deliberately planned. I can only regret now, when it is
terminated, that the details I have sometimes only glanced at were not
more elaborately and completely carried out.
It would be a sorry piece of vanity on my part to imagine that the
conception of the History of a Day and Night in London is original.
I will tell you how I came to think of the scheme of “Twice Round the
Clock.” Four years ago, in Paris, my then Master in literature, Mr.
Charles Dickens, lent me a little thin octavo volume, which, I believe,
had been presented to him by another Master of the craft, Mr. Thackeray,
entitled—but I will transcribe the title-page in full.
LOW LIFE;
OR, ONE HALF THE WORLD KNOWS NOT HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVE.
Being a Critical Account of what is Transacted by People of
almost all Religions, Nations, Circumstances, and Sizes of
Understanding, in the
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS,
BETWEEN
SATURDAY NIGHT AND MONDAY MORNING.
In a true Description of a
SUNDAY,
As it is usually spent within the Bills of Mortality,
calculated for the twenty-first of June.
WITH AN ADDRESS TO THE INGENIOUS AND INGENUOUS MR. HOGARTH.
Let Fancy guess the rest.—_Buckingham._
The date of publication is not given; but internal evidence proves the
Opuscule to have been written during the latter part of the reign of
George the Second; and in the copy I now possess, and which I bought at
a “rarity” price, at a sale where it was ignorantly labelled among the
“_facetiæ_”—it is the saddest book, perhaps, that ever was written—in
my copy, which is bound up among some rascally pamphlets, there is
written on the fly-leaf the date 1759. Just one hundred years ago, you
see. The work is anonymous; but in a manuscript table of contents to
the collection of miscellanies of which it forms part, I find written
“By Tom Legge.” The epigraph says that it “is printed for the author,
and is to be sold by T. Legg, at the Parrot, Green Arbour Court, in
the Little Old Bailey.” Was the authorship mere guess-work on the part
of the owner of the book, or was “Tom Legge” really the writer of “Low
Life,” and, if so, who was “Tom Legge?” Mr. Peter Cunningham, or a
contributor to “Notes and Queries,” may be able to inform us. I have
been thus particular, for a reason: that this thin octavo is one of the
minutest, the most graphic—and while in parts coarse as a scene from the
“Rake’s Progress,”—the most pathetic, picture of London life a century
since that has ever been written. There are passages in it irresistibly
reminding one of Goldsmith; but the offensive and gratuitous coarseness
in the next page destroys _that_ theory. Our Oliver was pure. But for the
dedicatory epistle to the great painter prefixed, and which is merely a
screed of fulsome flattery, I could take an affidavit that “Low Life”
was written by William Hogarth. And why not, granting even the fulsome
dedication? Hogarth could have more easily written this calendar of
Town Life than the “Analysis of Beauty;” and the sturdy grandiloquent
little painter was vain enough to have employed some hack to write the
prefatory epistle, if, in a work of satire, he had chosen to assume the
anonymous. Perhaps, after all, the book was written by some clever,
observant, deboshed man out of Grub Street, who had been wallowing in the
weary London trough for years, and had eliminated at last some pearls
which the other swine were too piggish to discern. There, however, is
“Low Life.” If you want to know what London was really like in 1759, you
should study it by night and study it by day; and then you may go with
redoubled zest to your Fielding, Smollett, and Richardson, as one, after
a vigorous grind at his Greek verbs, may go to his Euripides, refreshed.
From this thin little octavo I need not say I borrowed the notion of
“Twice Round the Clock.” I chose a week-day instead of a Sunday, partly
for the sake of variety, partly because Sunday in London has become so
decorous as to be simply dull, and many of the hours would have been
utterly devoid of interest. I brooded fitfully over the scheme for many
months. At first I proposed to take my stand (in imagination) at King
Charles’s Statue, Charing Cross, and describe the Life revolving round me
during the twenty-four hours; but I should have trenched upon sameness by
confinement to singularity; and I chose at last all London as the theme
of description—
“A mighty maze, but not without a plan.”
As a literary performance, this book must take its chance; and I fear
that the chance will not be a very favourable one. Flippant, pretentious,
superficial and yet arrogant of knowledge; verbose without being
eloquent; crabbed without being quaint; redundant without being copious
in illustration; full of paradoxes not extenuated by originality; and of
jocular expressions not relieved by humour—the style in which these pages
are written, combines the worst characteristics of the comic writers who
have been the “guides, philosophers and friends” of a whole school of
_quasi_ youthful authors in this era. I have reviewed too many would-be
comic books in my time, not to be able to pounce on the unsuccessful
attempts at humour in “Twice Round the Clock;” I have sufficient
admiration and respect for the genuine models of literary vigour and
elegance extant, not to feel occasionally disgusted with myself when I
have found the most serious topics discussed with a grotesque grimace
the while. It is a bad sign of the age—this turning of “cart-wheels” by
the side of a hearse, this throwing of somersaults over grave-stones.
The style we write in is popular now; but a few years, I hope, will see
a re-action, when a literary man must be either clown or undertaker, and
grinning through a horse-collar will not be tolerated in the case of a
mountebank otherwise attired in a shroud. Meanwhile, I cannot accuse
myself of pandering to a depraved taste. I neither follow nor lead it.
I cannot write otherwise than I do write. The leopard cannot change
his spots. Born in England, I am neither by parentage nor education
an Englishman; and in my childhood I browsed on a salad of languages,
which I would willingly exchange now for a plain English lettuce or
potato. Better to feed on hips and haws than on gangrened green-gages
and mouldy pine-apples. I read Sterne and Charles Lamb, Burton and Tom
Brown, Scarron and Brantôme, Boccaccio and Pigault-le-Brun, instead of
Mrs. Barbauld, and the Stories from the Spelling-book. I was pitchforked
into a French college before I had been through Pinnock in English; and
I declare that to this day I do not know one rule out of five in Lindley
Murray’s grammar. I can spell decently, because I can draw; and the
power (not the knowledge) in spelling correctly is concurrent with the
capacity for expressing the images before us more or less graphically
and symmetrically. It isn’t how a word _ought_ to be spelt: it is how
it _looks_ on paper, that decides the speller. I began to look upon the
quaint side of things almost as soon as I could see things at all; for
I was alone and Blind for a long time in childhood. I had so much to
whimper about, poor miserable object, that I began to grin and chuckle at
the things I saw, so soon as good Doctor Curée, the homœopathist, gave
me back my eyes. It is too late to mend now. While I am yet babbling, I
feel that I have nearly said my say. This book, as a Book, will go, and
be forgotten; but it will, years hence, acquire comparative value when
disinterred, from the “two-penny-box” at a bookstall. Old Directories,
Road Books, Court-Guides, Gazetteers, of half a century since, are worth
something now. They are as the straw that enters into the composition
of new bricks or books. Let us bide our time, then, my Augustus, humbly
but cheerfully. _You_ may have better fortune. You write novels and
tales: and the chronicles of Love never die. But if in the year 1959,
some historian of the state of manners in England during the reign of
Queen Victoria, points an allusion in a foot note by a reference to an
old book called “Twice Round the Clock,” and which professes to be a
series of essays on the manners and customs of the Londoners in 1859,
that reference will be quite enough of reward for your friend. Macaulay
quotes broadsides and Grub Street ballads. Carlyle does not disdain to
put the obscurest of North German pamphleteers into the witness-box;
albeit he often dismisses him with a cuff and a kick. At all events, we
may be quoted some of these days, dear Gus, even if we are kicked into
the bargain.
GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
FOUR A.M.—BILLINGSGATE MARKET 9
FIVE A.M.—THE PUBLICATION OF THE “TIMES” NEWSPAPER 25
SIX A.M.—COVENT GARDEN MARKET 37
SEVEN A.M.—A PARLIAMENTARY TRAIN 49
EIGHT A.M.—ST. JAMES’S PARK—THE MALL 65
NINE A.M.—THE CLERKS AT THE BANK, AND THE BOATS ON THE RIVER 78
TEN A.M.—THE COURT OF QUEEN’S BENCH, AND THE “BENCH” ITSELF 88
ELEVEN A.M.—TROOPING THE GUARD, AND A MARRIAGE IN HIGH LIFE 104
NOON—THE JUSTICE-ROOM AT THE MANSION-HOUSE, AND THE “BAY TREE” 116
ONE P.M.—DOCK LONDON AND DINING LONDON 128
TWO P.M.—FROM REGENT STREET TO HIGH CHANGE 142
THREE P.M.—DEBENHAM AND STORE’S AUCTION-ROOMS, AND THE PANTHEON
BAZAAR 158
FOUR P.M.—TATTERSALL’S, AND THE PARK 186
FIVE P.M.—THE FASHIONABLE CLUB, AND THE PRISONERS’ VAN 200
SIX P.M.—A CHARITY DINNER, AND THE NEWSPAPER WINDOW AT THE
GENERAL POST-OFFICE 218
SEVEN P.M.—A THEATRICAL GREEN-ROOM, AND “BEHIND THE SCENES” 235
EIGHT P.M.—HER MAJESTY’S THEATRE, AND A PAWNBROKER’S SHOP 251
NINE P.M.—HALF-PRICE IN THE NEW CUT, AND A DANCING ACADEMY 268
TEN P.M.—A DISCUSSION AT THE “BELVIDERE,” AND AN ORATORIO AT
EXETER HALL 284
ELEVEN P.M.—A SCIENTIFIC CONVERSAZIONE, AND AN EVENING PARTY 297
MIDNIGHT—THE HAYMARKET, AND THE SUB-EDITOR’S ROOM 317
ONE A.M.—EVANS’S SUPPER-ROOMS, AND A FIRE 330
TWO A.M.—A LATE DEBATE IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS, AND THE
TURNSTILE OF WATERLOO BRIDGE 357
HOUR THE TWENTY-FOURTH AND LAST—THREE A.M.—A BAL MASQUE, AND
THE NIGHT CHARGES AT BOW STREET 375
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR _Frontispiece._
FOUR A.M.—BILLINGSGATE MARKET: CARRYING FISH ASHORE PAGE 17
FOUR A.M.—BILLINGSGATE MARKET: THE FISH SOLD BY AUCTION 20
FIVE A.M.—PUBLICATION OF THE “TIMES:” INSIDE THE OFFICE 32
FIVE A.M.—PUBLICATION OF THE “TIMES:” OUTSIDE THE OFFICE 33
SIX A.M.—COVENT GARDEN MARKET: THE WEST END 41
SIX A.M.—COVENT GARDEN MARKET: EARLY BREAKFAST STALL 44
SEVEN A.M.—PARLIAMENTARY TRAIN: PLATFORM OF THE LONDON AND
NORTH-WESTERN RAILWAY 60
SEVEN A.M.—PARLIAMENTARY TRAIN: INTERIOR OF A THIRD-CLASS CARRIAGE 64
EIGHT A.M.—ST. JAMES’S PARK 68
EIGHT A.M.—OPENING SHOP 76
NINE A.M.—OMNIBUSES AT THE BANK 84
NINE A.M.—PENNY STEAMBOATS ALONGSIDE THE PIER AT LONDON BRIDGE 85
TEN A.M.—INTERIOR OF THE COURT OF QUEEN’S BENCH 96
TEN A.M.—INTERIOR OF THE QUEEN’S BENCH PRISON 97
ELEVEN A.M.—TROOPING THE GUARD AT ST. JAMES’S PALACE 109
ELEVEN A.M.—A WEDDING AT ST. JAMES’S CHURCH, PICCADILLY 113
NOON—THE JUSTICE-ROOM AT THE MANSION HOUSE 121
ONE P.M.—DOCK-LABOURERS RETURNING TO WORK 137
ONE P.M.—DINING-ROOMS IN BUCKLERSBURY 141
TWO P.M.—REGENT STREET 148
TWO P.M.—HIGH CHANGE 156
THREE P.M.—DEBENHAM AND STORR’S AUCTION-ROOMS 168
THREE P.M.—THE PANTHEON BAZAAR 177
FOUR P.M.—TATTERSALL’S 193
FOUR P.M.—THE PARK 197
FIVE P.M.—THE FASHIONABLE CLUB 212
FIVE P.M.—THE PRISONERS’ VAN 216
SIX P.M.—A CHARITY DINNER 229
SIX P.M.—THE NEWSPAPER WINDOW AT THE GENERAL POST-OFFICE 233
SEVEN P.M.—A THEATRICAL GREEN-ROOM 244
SEVEN P.M.—BEHIND THE SCENES 249
EIGHT P.M.—THE OPERA 257
EIGHT P.M.—INTERIOR OF A PAWNBROKER’S SHOP 265
NINE P.M.—HOUSE OF CALL FOR THE VICTORIA AUDIENCE 276
NINE P.M.—A DANCING ACADEMY 281
TEN P.M.—A DISCUSSION AT THE “BELVIDERE” 288
TEN P.M.—AN ORATORIO AT EXETER HALL 296
ELEVEN P.M.—A SCIENTIFIC CONVERSAZIONE 312
ELEVEN P.M.—AN EVENING PARTY 316
MIDNIGHT—SUPPER-ROOMS IN THE HAYMARKET 325
MIDNIGHT—THE SUB-EDITOR’S ROOM 329
ONE A.M.—EVANS’S SUPPER-ROOMS 341
ONE A.M.—A FIRE 349
TWO A.M.—A LATE DEBATE IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS 368
TWO A.M.—THE TURNSTILE OF WATERLOO BRIDGE 372
THREE A.M.—A BAL MASQUE 381
THREE A.M.—THE NIGHT CHARGES AT BOW STREET 392
TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK; OR, THE HOURS OF THE DAY AND NIGHT IN LONDON.
FOUR O’CLOCK A.M.—BILLINGSGATE MARKET.
Reader, were you ever up all night? You may answer that you are neither
a newspaper editor, a market gardener, a journeyman baker, the driver
of the Liverpool night mail, Mrs. Gamp the sicknurse, the commander of
the Calais packet, Professor Airey, Sir James South, nor a member of the
House of Commons. It may be that you live at Clapham, that one of the
golden rules of your domestic economy is “gruel at ten, bed at eleven,”
and that you consider keeping late hours to be an essentially immoral and
wicked habit,—the immediate prelude to the career and the forerunner of
the fate of the late George Barnwell. I am very sorry for your prejudices
and your susceptibilities. I respect them, but I must do them violence. I
intend that—_bon gré, mal gré_—in spirit, if not in actual corporeality,
you should stop out not only all night but all day with me; in fact, for
the space of twenty-four hours, it is my resolve to prohibit your going
to bed at all. I wish you to see the monster LONDON in the varied phases
of its outer and inner life, at every hour of the day-season and the
night-season; I wish you to consider with me the giant sleeping and the
giant waking; to watch him in his mad noonday rages, and in his sparse
moments of unquiet repose. You must travel TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK with
me; and together we will explore this London mystery to its remotest
recesses—its innermost arcana. To others the downy couch, the tasselled
nightcap, the cushioned sofa, the luxurious ease of night-and-day rest.
Ours be the staff and the sandalled shoon, the cord to gird up the lions,
the palmer’s wallet and cockle-shells. For, believe me, the pilgrimage
will repay fatigue, and the shrine is rich in relics.
Four o’clock in the morning. The deep bass voice of Paul’s, the Staudigl
of bells, has growlingly proclaimed the fact. Bow church confirms the
information in a respectable baritone. St. Clement’s Danes has sung forth
acquiescence with the well-known chest-note of his tenor voice, sonorous
and mellifluous as Tamberlik’s. St. Margaret’s, Westminster, murmurs
a confession of the soft impeachment in a contralto rich as Alboni’s
in “Stridi la vampa;” and all around and about the pert bells of the
new churches, from evangelical Hackney to Puseyite Pimlico, echo the
announcement in their shrill treble and soprani.
Four o’clock in the morning. Greenwich awards it,—the Horse Guards allow
it—Bennett, arbiter of chronometers and clocks that, with much striking,
have grown blue in the face, has nothing to say against it. And that
self-same hour shall never strike again this side the trumpet’s sound.
The hour itself being consigned to the innermost pigeon-hole of the Dead
Hour office—(a melancholy charnel-house of misspent time is that, my
friend)—you and I have close upon sixty minutes before us ere the grim
old scythe-bearer, the saturnine child-eater, who marks the seconds and
the minutes of which the infinite subdivision is a pulsation of eternity,
will tell us that the term of another hour has come. That hour will be
five a.m., and at five it is high market at Billingsgate. To that great
piscatorial Bourse we, an’t please you, are bound.
It is useless to disguise the fact that you, my shadowy, but not the less
beloved companion, are about to keep very bad hours. Good to hear the
chimes at midnight, as Justice Shallow and Falstaff oft did when they
were students in Gray’s Inn; but four and five in the morning! these be
small hours indeed: this is beating the town with a vengeance. Were it
winter, our bedlessness would be indefensible; but this is still sweet
summer time.
But why, the inquisitive may ask—the child-man who is for ever cutting up
the bellows to discover the reservoir of the wind—why four o’clock a.m.?
Why not begin our pilgrimage at one a.m., and finish the first half at
midnight, in the orthodox get-up-and-go-to-bed manner? Simply because
four a.m. is in reality the first hour of the working London day. The
giant is wide awake at midnight; he sinks into a fitful slumber about
two in the morning: short is his rest, for at four he is up again and at
work, the busiest bee in the world’s hive.
The child of the Sun, the gorgeous golden peacock, strutting in a
farmyard full of the Hours, his hens, now triumphs. It is summer; and
more than that, a lovely summer morning. The brown night has retired,
and the meek-eyed moon, mother of dews, has disappeared: the young day
pours in apace; the mountains’ misty tops are swelling on the sight, and
brightening in the sun. It is the cool, the fragrant, and the silent
hour, to meditation due and sacred song; the air is coloured, the efflux
divine turns hovels into palaces, and shoots with gold the rags of
beggars.
“The city now doth like a garment wear
The beauty of the morning....
Never did Sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill.
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep.
The River glideth at its own sweet will;
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep,
And all that mighty Heart is lying still.”
I know that the acknowledgment of one’s quotations or authorities is
going out of fashion. Still, as I murmur the foregoing lines as I wander
round about the Monument and in and out of Thames Street, waiting for
Billingsgate-market time to begin, a conviction grows upon me that the
poetry is not my own; and in justice to the dead, as well as with a view
of sparing the printer a flood of inverted commas, I may as well confess
that I have been reading Mr. James Thomson and Mr. William Wordsworth on
the subject of summer lately, and that very many of the flowery allusions
to be found above, have been culled from the works of those pleasing
writers.
_Non omnis moriar._ Though the so oft-mentioned hours be asleep, and the
river glideth in peace, undisturbed by penny steamboats, the mighty heart
of Thames Street is anything but still. The great warehouses are closed,
’tis true; the long wall of the Custom House is a huge dead wall, full of
blind windows. The Coal Exchange (which edifice, with its gate down among
the dead men in Thames Street, and its cupola, like a middle-sized bully,
lifting its head to about the level of the base of that taller bully the
Monument, is the neatest example of an architectural “getting up stairs”
that I know)—the Coal Exchange troubles not its head as yet about
Stewarts or Lambtons, Sutherlands or Wallsend. The moist wharfs, teeming
with tubs and crates of potter’s ware packed with fruity store, and
often deliciously perfumed with the smell of oranges, bulging and almost
bursting through their thin prison bars of wooden laths, are yet securely
grated and barred up. The wharfingers are sleeping cosily far away. But
there are shops and shops wide open, staringly open, defiantly open, with
never a pane of glass in their fronts, but yawning with a jolly ha! ha!
of open-windowedness on the bye-strollers. These are the shops to make
you thirsty; these are the shops to make your incandescent coppers hiss;
these are the shops devoted to the apotheosis and apodeiknensis (I quote
Wordsworth again, but Christopher, not William) of Salt Fish—
“Spend Herring first, save Salt Fish last,
For Salt Fish is good when Lent is past.”
So old Tusser. What piles of salted fish salute the eye, and make
the mouth water, in these open-breasted shops! Dried herrings,
real Yarmouth bloaters, kippered herrings, not forgetting the old
original, unpretending red herring, the modest but savoury “soldier”
of the chandler’s-shop! What flaps of salt cod and cured fishes to me
unknown, but which may be, for aught I know, the poll of ling which
King James the First wished to give the enemy of mankind when he dined
with him, together with the pig and the pipe of tobacco; or it may be
Coob or Haberdine! What are Coob and Haberdine? Tell me, Groves, tell
me, Polonius, erst chamberlain and first fishmonger to the court of
Denmark. Great creels and hampers are there too, full of mussels and
periwinkles, and myriads of dried sprats and cured pilchards—shrunken,
piscatorial anatomies, their once burnished green and yellow panoplies
now blurred and tarnished. On the whole, each dried-fish shop is a most
thirst-provoking emporium, and I cannot wonder much if the blue-aproned
fishmongers occasionally sally forth from the midst of their fishy
mummy pits and make short darts “round the corner” to certain houses of
entertainment, kept open, it would seem, chiefly for their accommodation,
and where the favourite morning beverage is, I am given to understand,
gin mingled with milk. It is refreshing, however, to find that the
fragrant berry of Mocha (more or less adequately represented by chicory,
burnt horse-beans, and roasted corn)—that coffee, the nurse of Voltaire’s
wit, the inspirer of Balzac’s brain; coffee, which Madame de Sevigné
pertly predicted would “go out” with Racine, but which nevertheless has,
with astonishing tenacity of vitality, “kept in” while the pert Sevigné
and the meek Racine have quite gone out into the darkness of literary
limbo—is in great request among the fishy men of Billingsgate. Huge,
massive, blue and white earthenware mugs full of some brown decoction,
which to these not too exigent critics need but to steam, and to be
sweet, to be the “coffee as in France,” whose odoriferous “percolations”
the advertising tradesmen tell us of, are lifted in quick succession
to the thirsty lips of the fishmen. Observe, too, that all market men
drink and order their coffee by the “pint,” even as the scandal-loving
old ladies of the last century (ladies don’t love scandal now-a-days)
drank their tea by the “dish.” I can realise the contempt of a genuine
Billingsgate marketeer for the little thimble-sized filagree cups with
the bitter Mocha grouts at the bottom, which, with a suffocating Turkish
chibouque, Turkish pachas and attar-of-roses dealers in the Bezesteen,
offer as a mark of courtesy to a Frank traveller when they want to cheat
him.
Close adjacent is a narrow passage called Darkhouse Lane, and here
properly should be a traditional Billingsgate tavern called the
“Darkhouse.” There is one, open all night, under the same designation, in
Newgate Market. Hither came another chronicler of “twice round the clock”
with another neophyte, to show him the wonders of the town, one hundred
and fifty years ago. Hither, when pursy, fubsy, good-natured Queen Anne
reigned in England, and followed the hounds in Windsor’s Park, driving
two piebald ponies in a chaise, and touched children for the “evil,”
awing childish Sam Johnson with her black velvet and her diamonds, came
jovial, brutal, vulgar, graphic Ned Ward, the “London Spy.” Here, in the
“Darkhouse,” he saw a waterman knock down his wife with a stretcher, and
subsequently witnessed the edifying spectacle of the recreant husband
being tried for his offence by a jury of fishwomen. Scant mercy, but
signal justice, got he from those fresh-water Minoses and Rhadamanthuses.
Forthwith was he “cobbed”—a punishment invented by sleeveboard-wielding
tailors, and which subsequently became very popular in her Majesty’s
navy. Here he saw “fat, motherly flatcaps, with fish-baskets hanging over
their heads instead of riding-hoods,” with silver rings on their thumbs,
and pipes charged with “mundungus” in their mouths, sitting on inverted
eel-baskets, and strewing the flowers of their exuberant eloquence over
dashing young town rakes who had stumbled into Billingsgate to finish
the night—disorderly blades in laced velvet coats, with, torn ruffles,
and silver-hilted swords, and plumed hats battered in scuffles with the
watch. But the town-rakes kept comparatively civil tongues in their
heads when they entered the precincts of the Darkhouse. An amazon of the
market, otherwise known as a Billingsgate fish-fag, was more than a match
for a Mohock. And here Ned Ward saw young city couples waiting for the
tide to carry them in a tilt-boat to Gravesend; and here he saw bargemen
eating broiled red-herrings, and Welshmen “louscobby” (whatever that
doubtless savoury dish may have been, but there _must_ have been cheese
in it); and here he heard the frightful roaring of the waters among the
mechanism of the piers of old London Bridge. There are no waterworks
there now; the old bridge itself is gone; the Mohocks are extinct; and we
go to Gravesend by the steamer, instead of the tilt-boat; yet still, as
I enter the market, a pleasant cataract of “chaff” between a fishwoman
and a costermonger comes plashing down—even as Mr. Southey tells us that
the waters come down at Lodore—upon my amused ears; and the conviction
grows on me that the flowers of Billingsgate eloquence are evergreens.
Mem.: To write a philosophical dissertation on the connection between
markets and voluble vituperation which has existed in all countries and
in all ages. ’Twas only from his immense mastery of Campanian slang that
Menenius Agrippa obtained such influence over the Roman commons; and one
of the gaudiest feathers in Daniel O’Connell’s cap of eloquence was his
having “slanged” an Irish market-woman down by calling her a crabbed old
hypothenuse!
Billingsgate has been one of the watergates or ports of the city from
time immemorial. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s fabulous history of the spot
acquaints us that “Belin, a king of the Britons, about four hundred years
before Christ’s nativity, built this gate and called it ‘Belinsgate,’
after his own calling;” and that when he was dead, his body being burnt,
the ashes in a vessel of brass were set on a high pinnacle of stone
over the said gate. Stowe very sensibly observes, that the name was
most probably derived from some previous owner, “happily named Beling
or Biling, as Somars’ Key, Smart’s Wharf, and others, thereby took the
names of their owners.” When he was engaged in collecting materials for
his “Survey,” Billingsgate was a “large Watergate port, or harborough for
ships and boats commonly arriving there with fish, both fresh and salt,
shellfish, salt, oranges, onions, and other fruits and roots, wheat,
rye, and grain of divers sorts, for the service of the city, and the
parts of this realm adjoining.” Queenhithe, anciently the more important
watering-place, had yielded its pretensions to its rival. Each gives its
name to one of the city wards.
Some of the regulations concerning the “mystery” of the fishmongers in
old times are sufficiently interesting for a brief notice. In the reign
of Edward I. the prices of fish were fixed—for the best soles, 3_d._
per dozen; the best turbot, 6_d._ each; the best pickled herrings,
1_d._ a score; fresh oysters, 2_d._ a gallon; the best eels, 2_d._ per
quarter of a hundred. In a statute of Edward I. it was forbidden to
offer for sale any fish except salt fish after the second day. In the
city assize of fish the profits of the London fishmongers were fixed at
one penny in twelve. They were not to sell their fish secretly, within
doors, but in plain market-place. In 1320 a combination was formed
against the fishmongers of Fish-wharf, to prevent them from selling by
retail; but Edward II. ordered the mayor and sheriffs to interfere,
and the opposition was unsuccessful. The mayor issued his orders to
these fishmongers of Bridge Street and Old Fish Street, to permit their
brethren in the trade to “stand at stall;” to merchandise with them, and
freely obtain their share of merchandise, as was fit and just, and as the
freedom of the city required. A few years later some of the fishmongers
again attempted to establish a monopoly; but it was ordered that the
“billestres,” or poor persons who cried or sold fish in the streets,
“provided they buy of free fishmongers, and do not keep a stall, or make
a stay in the streets, shall not be hindered;” and also that persons and
women coming from the uplands with fish caught by them or their servants
in the waters of the Thames or other neighbouring streams, were to be
allowed to frequent the market. With these exceptions, none but members
of the Fishmongers’ Company were to be allowed to sell fish in the city,
lest the commodity should be made dear by persons dealing in it who were
unskilful in the mystery.
The old churches of London in the immediate vicinity of the fish-markets
contained numerous monuments to fishmongers. That the stock-fishmongers,
or dealers in dried or salted fish, should have formed so important
a portion of the trade is deserving of notice, as a peculiarity of
the times. Lovekin and Walworth, who both acquired wealth, were
stock-fishmongers. The nature of the commodity was such as to render the
dealers in it a superior class to the other fishmongers. A great store
might be accumulated, and more capital was required than by the other
fishmongers, who only purchased from hand to mouth.
In 1699, an act was passed for making it a free market for the sale of
fish—though the very commencement of the preamble alludes to Billingsgate
having been time out of mind a free market for all kinds of floating
and salt fish, as also for all manner of floating and shellfish. The
necessity of a new act had arisen, as the preamble recites, from various
abuses, one of which was that the fishmongers would not permit the street
hawkers of fish to buy of the fishermen, by which means the fishmongers
bought at their own prices. The extraordinary dream of making the country
wealthy, and draining the ocean of its riches by means of fisheries, had
for above a century been one of the fondest illusions of the English
people; and about the time that the act was passed, “ways to consume more
fish” were once more attracting the popular attention. The price of fish
at the time was said to be beyond the reach of the poor and even of the
middling classes; and for many days together the quantity received at
Billingsgate was very inconsiderable. To remedy these evils, carriages
were to be constructed, to be drawn by two post-horses, which were to
convey the fish to market at a rate of speed which was then thought to
be lightning rapidity. But though the project was much talked about,
it never came to a head, and ultimately fell through, the projectors
consoling themselves with the axiomatic reflection—that there are more
fish in the sea than ever came out of it.
But while I am rummaging among the dusty corners of my memory, and
dragging forth worm-eaten old books to the light; while I have suffered
the hare of the minute-hand, and the tortoise of the hour-hand (the
tortoise wins the race), to crawl or scamper at least half round the
clock, Billingsgate Market itself—the modern—the renovated—a far
different place to that uncleanly old batch of sheds and hovels, reeking
with fishy smells, and more or less beset by ruffianly company, which
was our only fish market twenty years ago—New Billingsgate, with a real
fountain in the centre, which during the day plays real water, is now
in full life and bustle and activity. Not so much in the market area
itself, where porters are silently busied in clearing piles of baskets
away, setting forms and stools in order, and otherwise preparing for
the coming business of the fish auction, as on the wharf, in front of
the tavern known to fame as Simpson’s, and where the eighteenpenny fish
ordinary is held twice every day, except Sunday, in each year of grace.
This wharf is covered with fish, and the scaly things themselves are
being landed, with prodigious celerity, and in quantities almost as
prodigious, from vessels moored in triple tier before the market. Here
are Dutch boats that bring eels, and boats from the north sea that bring
lobsters, and boats from Hartlepool, Whitstable, Harwich, Great Grimsby,
and other English seaports and fishing stations. They are all called
“boats,” though many are of a size that would render the term ship, or
at least vessel, far more applicable. They are mostly square and squat
in rigging, and somewhat tubby in build, and have an unmistakeably fishy
appearance. Communications are opened between the vessels, each other,
and the shore, by means of planks placed from bulwark to bulwark; and
these bulwarks are now trodden by legions of porters carrying the fish
ashore. Nautical terms are mingled with London street vernacular; fresh
mackerel competes in odour with pitch and tar; the tight strained rigging
cuts in dark indigo-relief against the pale-blue sky; the whole is a
confusion, slightly dirty but eminently picturesque, of ropes, spars,
baskets, oakum, tarpaulin, fish, canvas trousers, osier baskets, loud
voices, tramping feet, and “perfumed gales,” not exactly from “Araby the
blest,” but from the holds of the fishing-craft.
[Illustration: BILLINGSGATE MARKET: CARRYING FISH ASHORE.]
Upon my word, the clock has struck five, and the great gong of
Billingsgate booms forth market-time. Uprouse ye, then, my merry, merry
fishmongers, for this is your opening day! And the merry fishmongers
uprouse themselves with a vengeance. The only comparison I can find
for the aspect, the sights, and sounds of the place, is—a Rush. A
rush hither and thither at helter-skelter speed, apparently blindly,
apparently without motive, but really with a business-like and engrossing
pre-occupation, for fish and all things fishy. Baskets full of turbot,
borne on the shoulders of the _facchini_ of the place, skim through the
air with such rapidity that you might take them to be flying fish. Out of
the way! here is an animated salmon leap. Stand on one side! a shoal of
fresh herrings will swallow you up else. There is a rush to the tribunes
of the auctioneers; forums surrounded by wooden forms—I mean no pun—laden
with fish, and dominated by the rostra of the salesmen, who, with long
account-books in their hands, which they use instead of hammers, knock
down the lots with marvellous rapidity. An eager crowd of purchasers
hedge in the scaly merchandise. They are substantial-looking, hearty,
rosy-gilled men—for the sale of fish appears to make these merchants
thrive in person as well as in purse. Why, though, should fishmongers
have, as a body, small eyes? Can there be any mysterious sympathy between
them and the finny things they sell?—and do they, like the husband and
wife who loved each other so much, and lived together so long, that,
although at first totally dissimilar in appearance, they grew at last to
resemble one another feature for feature—become smaller and smaller-eyed
as their acquaintance with the small-eyed fishes lengthens? I throw this
supposition out as a subject for speculation for some future Lavater.
Among the buyers I notice one remarkable individual, unpretending as to
facial development, but whose costume presents a singular mixture of the
equine and the piscine. Lo! his hat is tall and shiny, even as the hat of
a frequenter of Newmarket and an _habitué_ of Aldridge’s Repository, and
his eminently sporting-looking neckcloth is fastened with a horse-shoe
pin; but then his sleeves are as the sleeves of a fishmonger, and his
loins are girt with the orthodox blue apron appertaining, by a sort of
masonic prescription, to his craft and mystery! His nether man, as far
as the spring of the calf, is clad in the galligaskins of an ordinary
citizen; but below the knee commence a pair of straight tight boots of
undeniably sporting cut. Who is this marvellous compound of the fishy
and “horsey” idiosyncrasies? Is he John Scott disguised as Izaak Walton?
is he Flatman or Chifney? Tell me, Mr. Chubb, proprietor of the “Golden
Perch;” tell me, “Ruff,” mythical author of the “Guide to the Turf”—for
knowing not to which authority especially to appeal, I appeal to both,
even as did the Roman maid-servant, who burnt one end of the candle to
St. Catherine and the other to St. Nicholas (old St. Nicholas I mean,
sometimes familiarised into “Nick”), in order to be on the safe side.
There are eight auctioneers or fish salesmen attached to the market,
and they meet every morning between four and five o’clock at one of the
principal public-houses, to discuss the quantity and quality of fish
about to be offered for sale. The three taverns are known as Bowler’s,
Bacon’s, and Simpson’s. The second of these is situated in the centre
of the market, and is habitually used by the auctioneers, probably on
account of the son of the proprietor being the largest consignee at
Billingsgate.
[Illustration: BILLINGSGATE: THE FISH SOLD BY AUCTION.]
As the clock strikes five, the auctioneers disperse to their various
boxes. Below each box are piled on “forms” or bulks the “doubles” of
plaice, soles, haddock, whiting, and “offal.” A “double” is an oblong
basket tapering to the bottom, and containing from three to four dozen
of fish; “offal” means odd lots of different kinds of fish, mostly small
and broken, but always fresh and wholesome. When the auctioneer is
ready, a porter catches up a couple of “doubles,” and swings one on to
each shoulder, and then the bids begin. Soles have been sold as low as
four shillings the “double,” and have fetched as high as three pounds.
There is one traditional bid on record, which took place in the early
part of the present century, of forty guineas per hundred for mackerel.
Plaice ranges from one-and-sixpence to four shillings the double. The
sale is conducted on the principle of what is termed a “Dutch auction,”
purchasers not being allowed to inspect the fish in the doubles before
they bid. Offal is bought only by the “fryers.” You may see, almost every
market morning, a long, gaunt, greasy man, of that dubious age that you
hesitate whether to call him youngish or oldish, with a signet ring on
one little finger, and a staring crimson and yellow handkerchief round
the collar of his not very clean checked shirt, buy from fifteen to
twenty doubles of one kind or another; and in the season the _habitués_
of the market say that he will purchase from twenty-five to thirty
bushels of periwinkles and whelks. This monumental “doubler,” this
Rothschild of the offal tribe, resides in Somers Town. To him resort to
purchase stock those innumerable purveyors of fried fish who make our
courts and bye-streets redolent with the oleaginous perfumes of their
hissing cauldrons. For the convenience of small dealers, who cannot
afford to buy an entire double, stands are erected at different parts of
the market for “bumbarees.” We may ask in vain, _undè derivatur_, for the
meaning of the term, though it is probably of Dutch origin. Any one can
be a bumbaree: it requires neither apprenticeship, diploma, nor license,
and it is the _pons asinorum_ of the “mystery of fishmongers.” The career
is open to all; which, considering the difficulty of settling one’s
children in life, must be rather a gratifying reflection for parents.
The process of bumbareeing is very simple. It consists in buying as
largely as your means will afford of an auctioneer, hiring a stall for
sixpence, and retailing the fish at a swingeing profit. I think that if
I were not a landed gentleman, a Middlesex magistrate, and a member of
the Court of Lieutenancy—vainly endeavouring, meanwhile, to ascertain my
parochial settlement, in order to obtain admission to a workhouse as an
unable-bodied pauper—that I should like to be a bumbaree.