last-mentioned fish in batches of threes and fours, with a string passed
through the gills), are the only fish sold by auction. Fresh herrings are
sold from the vessel by the long hundred (130). They are counted from
the hold to the buyers in “warp” fives. Twopence per hundred is charged
to bring them on shore. Eels are sold by the “draft” of twenty pounds
weight—the price of the draft varying from three shillings to fifteen.
Twopence per draft is paid for “shoreing” or landing the fish from the
vessels. Sprats are sold on board the ships by the bushel. A “tindal” is
a thousand bushels of sprats. When we come to consider the vast number of
these oily, savoury little fishes that a bushel will contain, the idea
of a “tindal” of them seems perfectly Garagantuan; yet many “tindals” of
them are sold every week during the winter season—for the consumption of
sprats among the poorer classes is enormous. What says the Muse of the
Bull at Somers Town—what sweet stanzas issue from the anthology of Seven
Dials?—
“O! ’tis my delight on a Friday night,
When sprats they isn’t dear,
To fry a couple of score or so
Upon a fire clear.
“They eats so well, they bears the bell
From all the fish I knows:
Then let us eat them while we can,
Before the price is rose.”
(Chorus—ad libitum) “O! ’tis my delight,” &c.
The last two lines are replete with the poetry and philosophy of the
poorer classes: “Let us eat them while we can, before the price is rose;”
for even sprats are sometimes luxuries unattainable by the humble.
Exceedingly succulent sprats labour under the disadvantage of being
slightly unwholesome. To quote Mr. Samuel Weller’s anecdote of the remark
made by the young lady when remonstrating with the pastrycook who had
sold her a pork pie which was all fat, sprats are “rayther too rich.”
And yet how delicious they are! I have had some passably good dinners
in my time; I have partaken of _turbôt à la crême_ at the Trois Frères
Provençaux; I have eaten a _filet à la Chateaubriand_ at Bignon’s: yet
I don’t think there is a banquet in the whole repertory of Lucullus and
Apicius—a more charming red-letter night in the calendar of gastronomy,
than a sprat supper. You must have three pennyworth of sprats, a large
tablecloth is indispensable for finger-wiping purposes—for he who would
eat sprats with a knife and fork is unworthy the name of an epicure—and
after the banquet I should recommend, for purely hygienic and antibilious
reasons, the absorption of a _petit verre_ of the best Hollands.
To return. As regards salmon, nine-tenths of the aristocratic fish are
brought up by rail in barrels, and in summer packed in ice. Salmon and
salmon-trout are not subjected to the humiliation of being “knocked
down” by an auctioneer. They are disposed of “by private contract” at so
much per pound.
Of dried and smoked fish of all kinds the best come from Yarmouth; but
as regards the costermonger and street-vender—the modern “billestres,”
of dried haddocks, smoked sprats and herrings, entire or kippered—they
are little affected by the state of the cured fish market so long as they
can buy plenty of the fresh kind. The costermonger cures his fish himself
in the following manner:—He builds a little shed like a watch-box, with
wires across the upper part; and on this grating he threads his fish.
Then he makes a fire on the floor of his impromptu curing-house with coal
or mahogany dust, and smokes the fish “till done,” as the old cookery
books say. There is a dealer in the market to whom all fish-sellers
bring the skins of departed soles. He gives fourpence-halfpenny a pound
for them. They are used for refining purposes. And now for a word
concerning the crustacea and the molluscs. Of oysters there are several
kinds: Native Pearls, Jerseys, Old Barleys, and Commons. On board every
oyster-boat a business-like gentleman is present, who takes care that
every buyer of a bushel of oysters pays him fourpence. No buyer may carry
his oysters ashore himself, be he ever so able and willing. There are
regular “shoremen,” who charge fourpence a bushel for their services; so
that whatever may be the market-price of oysters, the purchaser must pay,
_nolens volens_, eightpence a bushel over and above the quoted rate.
Of mussels there are three kinds: Dutch, Exeters, and Shorehams. They are
brought to market in bags, of the average weight of three hundredweight;
each bag containing about one hundred and sixty quarts, inclusive of dirt
and stones. They are sold at from five shillings to seven shillings a
bag. Of periwinkles—or, as they are more popularly and familiarly termed,
“winkles”—there are four sorts: Scotch, Clays, Isle of Wights, and
Maidens. They are sold by the bushel, or by the “level” or gallon. Crabs
are sold by the “kit” (a long shallow basket) and by the score. Lobsters
by the score and the double.
At the “Cock,” in Love Lane, and at the “White Hart,” in Botolph Lane,
there is a boiling-house in the rear of the premises. Each boiling-house
consists of a spacious kitchen filled with immense cauldrons. Here winkle
and whelk buyers, who have neither utensils nor convenient premises
sufficient to boil at home, can have it done for them for fourpence
a bushel. Each boiling is performed separately in a wicker-basket;
crabs and lobsters may likewise be boiled at these houses. Half-a-dozen
scores of the fish are packed in a large basket, shaped like a
strawberry-pottle, a lid is put between each lot, and the hot-water
torture is inflicted at the rate of sixpence a score.
If your servant, the writer, were not precluded by the terms of his
contract from taking any natural rest, he might, pleading fatigue, retire
to bed; and, tossing on an unquiet couch, as men must do who slip between
the sheets when the blessed sun is shining, have fantastic dreams of Ned
Ward and Sir William Walworth: dream of the market-scene in “Masaniello,”
and hum a dream-reminiscence of “Behold, how brightly beams the morning!”
which, of course, like all things appertaining to dreams, has no more
resemblance to the original air than the tune the cow died of. Then
fancy that he is a supernumerary in a pantomime, and that Mr. Flexmore,
the clown, has jumped upon his shoulders, and is beating him about the
ears with a “property” codfish. Then he might be Jonah, swallowed by the
whale; and then Tobit’s fish. Then he would find himself half awake, and
repeating some lines he remembered reading years ago, scrawled in ink on
a huge placard outside the shop of Mr. Taylor, the famous fishmonger, in
Lombard Street. Yes: they ran thus—
“So the ‘Times’ takes an interest in the case of Geils;
I wish it would take some in my eels!”
What a queer fish Mr. Taylor must have been! Where is he now? Why,
he (your servant) is Taylor—Jeremy Taylor—Tom Taylor—Taylor the
water-poet—Billy Taylor—the Three Tailors of Tooley Street—Mr. Toole, the
toast-master of arts and buttered toast; and—he is asleep!
FIVE O’CLOCK A.M.—THE PUBLICATION OF THE “TIMES” NEWSPAPER.
“There she is—the great engine—she never sleeps. She has her
ambassadors in every quarter of the world—her couriers upon
every road. Her officers march along with armies, and her
envoys walk into statesmen’s cabinets. They are ubiquitous.
Yonder Journal has an agent at this minute giving bribes at
Madrid; and another inspecting the price of potatoes at Covent
Garden.”
“PENDENNIS.”
If you have no objection to the statement of the fact, I would beg to
observe that our present station on the clock face, twice round which
we have to go, is now five in the morning; and that at five a.m. the
publication of the “Times” newspaper is, to use a north-country mining
expression, in “full blast.” You abhor the politics of the journal
in question, you say: you consider the “Times” and “Evening Mail” to
be the organ of a company, with limited liability, composed of the
Emperor Alexander, Cardinal Wiseman, Baron Rothschild, Prince Aali
Pacha, Metternich, Doctor Cumming, Baring Brothers, Lord Palmerston,
Mr. Disraeli, Mr. W. J. Fox, and Miss Martineau. You are offended with
the “Times” because the editor declined to insert that last six-paged
letter from you against organ grinding. Never mind, you must come all
the same to see the paper published. For the publication of the “Times”
is a great, an enormous, a marvellous fact: none the less wonderful for
being repeated three hundred and thirteen times a-year. It is a pulsation
of London’s mighty heart, that should not be neglected. It is the daily
booming of a tocsin, which, year after year, proclaims progress, and
still progress to the nations; which is the joy bell to the good, the
passing bell to the bad, the world is blessed or cursed with; which rings
out ignorance and prejudice and superstition, and rings in knowledge
and enlightenment and truth. The “Times” is not alone in the possession
of a peal of bells of this kind; and many daily, more weekly, papers
ring out, loud and clear, to eager listeners; were your vassal not one
of the modestest of men, he would hint that for the last dozen years he
has been agitating daily and weekly a little tintinnabulum with what
lustiness his nerveless arm will let him. But hard by St. Paul’s, the
cathedral of Anglicanism, is Printing House Square, the cathedral of
Journalism, and in it hangs a bell to which Great Tom of Lincoln, Peter
of York, the Kolokol of Moscow, and our own defunct “Big Ben,” are but
as tinkling muffineers. For though the sides of the bell are only paper,
the clapper is the great public tongue; the booming sound that fills the
city every morning, and, to use the words of Mr. Walter Whitman, “utters
its barbaric youp over the house-tops of creation,” is the great Public
Voice. Bottle up your animosities, then, stifle your prejudices, and come
and hear the voice’s first faint murmur at five o’clock in the morning.
The office of the “Times” and “Evening Mail” is, as all civilised men
should know, situated in Printing House Square and Playhouse Yard, in the
parish of St. Ann’s, Blackfriars, in the city of London. Now this is very
pleasant and comfortable information, and is fit matter for a studious
man to lay to heart; and there exists but one little drawback to mar the
felicity which one must naturally feel at having the style and title of
the press’s great champions’ _habitat_ so patly at one’s fingers’ ends.
The drawback—the kink in the cable, the hyssop in the wine-cup, the thorn
to the rose—is that, with the exception of Honey Lane market and Little
Chester Street, Pimlico, Printing House Square is the most difficult
locality to find in all London. It is not much use asking your way to
it; a map of London, however elaborate, would not be of the slightest
assistance to you in discovering it: it will avail you little even to be
told that it is close to Apothecaries’ Hall, for where, I should like
to know, is that huge musty caravanserai of drugs, and who is to find
it at a short notice? And the intimation that Printing House Square is
not far from Puddle Dock, would not, I opine, render you great service,
intimate as might be your acquaintance with the shores of the river, both
above and below bridge, and would be scarcely more lucid a direction
than the intimation that the London terminus of the South-Western
Railway was close to Pedlars’ Acre. The “Times” newspaper is somewhere
near all these places; and it is likewise within a stone’s throw from
Ludgate Hill, and not far from St. Paul’s, and within a minute’s walk of
Fleet Street, and contiguous to Blackfriars Bridge, close handy to Earl
Street, and no great distance from Chatham Place. Yet, for all this,
the “Times” office might be, to the uninitiated, just as well placed in
the centre of the Cretan labyrinth, or the maze at Hampton Court, or
the budget of a Chancellor of the Exchequer. The best way to reach the
office is to take any turning to the south side of London Bridge, or
the east of Bridge Street, Blackfriars, and then trust to chance. The
probabilities are varied. Very likely you will find yourself entangled
in a seemingly hopeless net-work of narrow streets; you will be jostled
into chandlers’ shops, vilified by boys unctuous, black, and reeking
from the printing-machine; pursued by costermongers importuning you to
purchase small parcels of vegetables; and, particularly after sundown,
your life will be placed in jeopardy by a Hansom cab bouncing up or down
the narrow thoroughfare, of course on its way to the “Times” office,
and on an errand of life and death; the excited politician inside,
frantically offering the cabman (he, even, doesn’t know the way to the
“Times,” and has just asked it of a grimy cynic, smoking a pipe in front
of a coal and potato shed) extra shillings for speed. The grimy cynic,
perhaps from sheer malevolence of disposition, perhaps from the ruffling
of his temper naturally incidental to his being asked the same question
about five hundred times every day, answers morosely that he believes
the Hoffice is in Bummondsey, but he’s blest if he knows hanything more
about it. He will have bad times of it, that grimy cynic, I perpend,
for telling such fibs. Still struggle on manfully, always like the
nautical gentleman in the blue pilot jacket who had had so many domestic
afflictions, and exhorted the passenger to “go down, go down.” Never mind
the regiments of gallinacea that board in the gutter and lodge in the
adjacent coal-cellars, and peck at your feet as though they could relish
your corns. Never mind the infants of tender years who come tumbling
between your legs, sprawl, howling, at your feet, and cast around
appealing glances, which draw cries of “shame!” from vengeful family-men
who have never set eyes on you before, but who evidently regard you as a
peripatetic ogre, going about, of malice prepense, to trip up children.
Never mind the suffocating odour of second-hand fish, vegetables, fruit,
coal-dust, potato sacks, the adjacent gasworks, gum-benzoin, hartshorn,
opium, and other medicaments from Apothecaries’ Hall. Never mind the
noises of dogs barking, of children that are smacked by their parents
or guardians for crying, and then, of course, roar louder; of boys
yelling the insufferable “Old Dog Tray,” the abominable “Keemo Kimo,” the
hideous “Hoomtoomdoodendoo,” and rattling those abhorrent instruments
of discord, the “bones;” of women scolding, quarrelling, or shrieking
domestic calumnies of Mrs. Armstrong in connection with Bill Boosker,
nicknamed the “Lively Flea,” from garret-windows across the street; of
men growling, and wagon-wheels rumbling, and from distant forges the
yell of the indignant anvil as the ruthless hammer smites it, and the
great bar of iron is beaten flat, the sparks flying up, rejoicing in a
red “ha-ha!” at the ferruginous defeat. Never mind the dangers of hoop,
“hopscotch,” “fly-the-garter,” “thread-the-needle,” “trip-the-baker,”
“tipcat,” and “shove-halfpenny,” for the carrying out of which exciting
and amusing games the juvenile population entirely monopolise what spare
strips of pavement there are. Trust on, be not afraid, keep struggling;
and it is five hundred to one that you will eventually turn up Printing
House Square, over against the “Times” office. How ever the leviathan of
the press manages to breathe in this close, stifling, elbow-hampering
neighbourhood, has always puzzled me, and has puzzled, I daresay, a great
many wiser than I. How do the archbishops in their coaches and six (it
is well known that those gorgeous prelates write the leading articles,
carrying the necessary stationery in their mitres, and wiping their pens
on their black silk aprons—the B—p of O—x—d, however, always writes with
a pastoral crozier, dipped in milk and honey, or a lamb’s fleece—and
come down to the office at a quarter past nine every evening to correct
their proofs) contrive to squeeze their broad-shouldered equipages
through these bye-lanes? How can the sub-editor’s four-in-hand pass, the
city correspondent’s comfortable yellow chariot, nay, even the modest
broughams of the compositors? Why does not the “Times” burst forth from
the shell it has grown too large for, and plant its standard on the hill
of Ludgate, or by the side of Cheap,—if it must needs be in the city? The
area of Lincoln’s Inn Fields would be perhaps the most suitable locality
for a new office; but it is indubitable that unless the “leading journal”
retrogress and contract its operation, they will have, some day, to pull
down the choking little nests of back-streets which surround and hem it
in, even as they had to pull down the wall of the dock, bodily, in order
to let the _Great Britain_ steam-ship out.
What a contrast sequestered Printing House Square, with its old-fashioned
aspect, its quiet, dingy-looking houses, its clump of green trees within
a railing to the left, presents to the gurgling, gasping neighbourhood
which stands in such close propinquity to it! Here is the great brainpan
of journalism; the centre of newspaper activity, the prefecture of
police of the public press. Absolutely necessary is it that it should
be entirely a secret police, the “awful, shadowy, irresponsible, and
yet _puissant_ we” should dominate over the columns of the daily
journal. Will a time ever come, I wonder, when a man will sign his own
articles in a newspaper; receive his reward for honesty, his censure
for tergiversation, from the public? Will a strange day of revolution
ever arrive, when the mystic “we” shall be merged into the responsible,
tax-paying, tangible, palpable, shootable, suicidable, and kickable “I?”
Perhaps never; perhaps such a consummation would be disastrous. Old
Cobbett, in one of his screeds of passionate contempt in his “gridiron”
paper the “Register,” once said that he should like to have all the
newspaper editors and correspondents in London assembled in Hyde Park,
in order that from their personal appearance the public might judge
by what a disreputable-looking set of fellows they were hoodwinked
and nose-led. There would be no need to hold such a gathering in this
scene-painting age. Walk but into any fashionable photographic studio,
and you shall find all the “sommités” of the press neatly collectionised,
and stuck on pasteboard in the show-room portfolio; and if you entreat
the photographer’s pretty wife civilly, she will point out to you
Doctor Copperbolt of the “Thunderer,” and Bill Hornblower of the “Penny
Trumpet,” in their habit as they live.
Printing House Square is to me interesting at all times of the day and
night. In the afternoon, the dullest period of its existence, when the
compositors are gone away, the editors not come, the last number of the
last edition of the day’s sheet printed, and the mighty steam-engine
for a time hushed, I wander into its precincts often; make some small
pretexts of taking out a slip of paper, and wending my way towards the
advertising department; but soon retrace my steps, and, to tell the
truth, moon about the square in such a suspicious and prowling manner,
that if they kept any spoons on the premises, I should most probably be
ordered off by the compositor on duty. This was Playhouse Yard too, once,
was it—nay, is still; but where is the old playhouse—the Globe Theatre,
Blackfriars, if I mistake not? Not a vestige, not a particle remains.
The fourth estate has swallowed it all up. The Press Dragon of Wantley
has devoured everything; and the “Times” seems omnipotent in its home by
Puddle Dock. Look over the door of the advertisement office. Above that
portal is a handsome marble slab, a votive tablet, in commemoration of a
great victory the “Times” once gained, not a legal victory, but one of
power and influence with the people, and especially with the commercial
community, by its exposure, anent the trial of Bogle _v._ Lawson, of the
most extensive and remarkable fraudulent conspiracy ever brought to light
in the mercantile world. The “Times” refused to be reimbursed for the
heavy costs with which its proprietors had been saddled in defending the
action brought by Mr. Bogle, a banker at Florence, against the publisher
of the “Times,” Mr. Lawson. But a subscription, amounting to £2,700, had
been raised, and this handsome sum, which the “Times” proprietors refused
to accept, was at last laid out in the foundation of two scholarships
at Christ’s Hospital and the City of London School, for the benefit of
pupils of those institutions proceeding to the universities of Oxford
and Cambridge. Do you remember—are you old enough to remember—the famous
case of Bogle _versus_ Lawson, reader? It would take me five times the
space I can spare for this paper to give you even the outline of the
history of the monstrous fraud from which that action grew. Suffice
it now to say, that Mr. Bogle had been mixed up—it has been since
established innocently—in the great continental letter of credit forging
system, invented, carried out, and pursued with consummate success by an
accomplished scoundrel, the Marquis de Bourbel, who, when the felonious
bubble at length burst, and the fraud was detected, was in nowise cast
down or abashed by that discovery that had come, and the punishment that
seemed imminent, but with admirable strategy called in his outlying
pickets of countesses, actresses—_demi-monde_ adventuresses—couriers,
and sham English milords, who had been scouring the Continent changing
his forged letters of credit, and, after the unutterable impudence of
an appearance in court during the “Times” trial, gracefully retired
into private life. I, the scribe, _moi qui vous parle_, have lived in
the same house with this great man. It was at a hairdresser’s shop in
the Regent’s Quadrant, and in an upper chamber of the house in question
did the gallant marquis, assisted by a distinguished countess, who had
formerly danced on stilts, and an English copper-plate engraver, work
off the proofs of his wicked paper money from the counterfeited plates.
I should like to know what became eventually of the Marquis de Bourbel:
whether his lordship was, in the ripeness of his time, guillotined,
garotted, hanged, or knouted. I go for Siberia and the knout, for, from
the peculiar conformation of his lordship’s character, I don’t think it
possible that he could have refrained for long from forgery. We should
have heard of him, I think, had he come to grief in Western Europe;
but Russian bank-notes are very easy to forge, and Russian prisons and
prisoners are seldom brought before the public eye. They manage those
little things better, and keep them nice and cozy and quiet; and so I go
for Siberia and the knout.