Miracles_ which encompasses the “Times” office, that the scene which
it and the Square present becomes more interesting. For early in the
evening that giant steam-engine begins to throb, and, as the hour
advances, the monster is fed with reams on reams of stout white paper,
which he devours as though they were so many wafers.[1] It gets late at
Printing House Square; the sub-editors have been for some time in their
rooms; the ineffable mysteries of the “Times”—editors, proprietors,
cabinet ministers, lord chancellors, generals of the Jesuits, for aught I
know, have arrived from their clubs in broughams and in cabs. Who shall
tell? That stout good-humoured looking gentleman with the umbrella and
the ecclesiastical neckcloth, may be the writer of the comic leading
articles, just arrived with his copy. No; he has vainly tried the door
of the advertisement office, which is closed. Perhaps he is only X.
Y. Z., who, in the second column, entreats P. Q. R. to return to his
disconsolate parents; or the inventor of some new tooth-powder with a
Greek name, or the discoverer of the “fourteen shilling trousers.” It is
getting later, and the windows of the great office are all blazing with
gas. The steam-engine not only throbs; it pants, it groans, it puffs, it
snorts, it bursts into a wild, clanging pæan of printing. Sub-editors
are now hard at work cutting down “flimsy,” ramming sheets of “copy” on
files, endlessly conferring with perspiring foremen. Ineffable mysteries
(I presume) are writing terribly slaughtering articles in carpeted rooms,
by the light of Argand lamps. Do they have cake and wine, I wonder,
in those rooms? Sherry and sandwiches, perhaps, and on field-nights
lobsters. It is getting later, but there is no sign of diminution yet in
the stream of cabs that drive into the Square. Every one who is in debt,
and every one who is in difficulties, and everybody who fancies that he,
or any friend, relation, or connection of his, has a grievance, and can
put pen to paper, four letters together in orthography and four words in
syntax, must needs write a letter to the “Times;” and of the metropolitan
correspondents of that journal, the immense majority themselves bring
their letters down to the office, thinking, haply, that they might
meet the editor standing “promiscuous” on the door-step, and after
some five minutes’ button-holding, secure, irrevocably, the insertion
of their communications. I don’t at all envy the gentleman whose duty
it is to open and read (do they read them all?) the letters addressed
to the editor of the “Times”. What quires of insane complaints, on
matters running from the misdelivery of a letter to the misgovernment
of India, from the iniquities of the income-tax to an overcharge for a
sandwich in a country inn, that editor must have to wade through; what
reams of silly compliments about “your influential journal,” and “your
world-known paper,” he must have to read, and grin in his sleeve at! What
a multitudinous army, what a Persian host, these correspondents must be!
Who are they?—the anonymous ones—what are they like? Who is “Verax?” who
“Paterfamilias?” who “Indophilus?” who “The London Scoundrel?” who “A
Thirsty Soul?” When will Mr. Herbert Watkins photograph me a collection
of portraits of “Constant Readers,” “Englishmen,” and “Hertfordshire
Incumbents?” Where is the incumbency of that brilliant writer? Who is
“_Habitans in Sicco_,” and how came he first to date from the “Broad
Phylactery?” and where does “Jacob Omnium” live when he is at home? I
should like to study the physiognomy of these inveterate letter writers;
to be acquainted with the circumstances which first led them to put pen
to paper in correspondence with the “Times;” to know how they like to
see themselves in print, and also how they feel, when, as happens with
lamentable frequency, their lucubrations don’t get printed at all.
[Illustration: PUBLICATION OF THE “TIMES” NEWSPAPER: INSIDE THE OFFICE.]
[Illustration: PUBLICATION OF THE “TIMES” NEWSPAPER: OUTSIDE THE OFFICE.]
It is getting later and later, oh! anxious waiters for to-morrow’s
news. The “Times” has its secrets by this time. State secrets, literary
secrets, secrets artistic and dramatic; secrets of robbery, and fire,
and murder—it holds them all fast now, admitting none to its confidence
but the Ineffables, the printers, and the ever-throbbing steam-engine;
but it will divulge its secrets to millions at five o’clock to-morrow
morning. Later and later still. The last report from the late debate
in the Commons has come in; the last paragraph of interesting news,
dropped into the box by a stealthy penny-a-liner, has been eliminated
from a mass of flimsy on its probation, and for the most part rejected;
the foreign telegrams are in type; the slaughtering leaders glare in
their “chases,” presaging woe and disaster to ministers to-morrow; the
last critic, in a white neckcloth, has hurried down with his column
and a-half on the last new spectacle at the Princess’s; or has, which
very frequently happens, despatched that manuscript from the box at the
“Albion,” where he has been snugly supping, bidding the messenger hasten,
and giving him to procure a cab the sum of one extra shilling, which that
messenger never by any chance expends in vehicular conveyance, but runs
instead with the art-criticism, swift as the timid roe, so swift indeed,
that policemen are only deterred through chronic laziness from pursuing
and asking whether he hasn’t been stealing anything. By this time the
“Times” has become tight and replete with matter, as one who has dined
well and copiously. Nothing is wanting: city correspondence, sporting
intelligence, markets, state of the weather, prices of stocks and railway
shares, parliamentary summary, law and police reports, mysterious
advertisements, and births, deaths, and marriages. Now let the nations
wonder, and the conductors of the mangy little continental fly-sheets
of newspapers hide their heads in shame, for the “Times”—the mighty
“Times”—has “gone to bed.” The “forms,” or iron-framed and wedged-up
masses of type, are, in other words, on the machine; and, at the rate of
twelve thousand an hour, the damp broad sheets roll from the grim iron
instrument of the dissemination of light throughout the world.
At five o’clock a.m., the first phase of the publication of the “Times”
newspaper commences. In a large bare room—something like the receiving
ward of an hospital—with a pay counter at one end, and lined throughout
with parallel rows of bare deal tables, the “leading journal” first
sees the light of publicity. The tables are covered with huge piles
of newspapers spread out the full size of the sheet. These are, with
dazzling celerity, folded by legions of stout porters, and straightway
carried to the door, where cabs, and carts, and light express phæton-like
vehicles, are in readiness to convey them to the railway stations.
The quantity of papers borne to the carriages outside by the stout
porters seems, and truly is, prodigious; but your astonishment will
be increased when I tell you that this only forms the stock purchased
every morning by those gigantic newsagents, Messrs. Smith and Son, of
the Strand. As the largest consumers, the “Times” naturally allows them
a priority of supply, and it is not for a considerable period after
they have received their orders that the great body of newsagents and
newsvenders—the “trade,” as they are generically termed—are admitted,
grumbling intensely, to buy the number of quires or copies which they
expect to sell or lend that day. The scene outside then becomes one of
baffling noise and confusion. There is a cobweb of wheeled vehicles
of all sorts, from a cab to a hybrid construction something between a
wheelbarrow and a costermonger’s shallow. There is much bawling and
flinging, shoving, hoisting, pulling and dragging of parcels; all the
horses’ heads seem to be turned the wrong way; everybody’s off-wheel
seems locked in somebody else’s; but the proceedings on the whole are
characterised by much good-humour and some fun. The mob of boys—all
engaged in the news-trade—is something wonderful: fat boys, lean boys,
sandy-haired and red-haired boys, tall boys and short boys, boys with red
comforters (though it is summer), and boys with sacks on their backs and
money-bags in their hands; boys with turn-down collars; and boys whose
extreme buttonedupness renders the fact of their having any shirts to put
collars to, turn-down or stuck-up, grievously problematical. Hard-working
boys are these juvenile Bashi-Bazouks of the newspaper trade. And I am
glad to observe, for the edification of social economists, with scarcely
an exception, very honest boys. I don’t exactly say that they are trusted
with untold gold, but of the gold that is told, to say nothing of the
silver and copper, they give a generally entirely satisfactory account.
At about half-past seven the cohorts of newsvenders, infantry and
cavalry, gradually disperse, and the “Times” is left to the agonies of
its second edition.
As you walk away from Printing House Square in the cool of the morning,
and reflect, I hope with salutary results, upon the busy scene you
have witnessed, just bestow one thought, and mingle with it a large
meed of admiration, for the man who, in his generation, truly made the
“Times” what it is now—John Walter, of Bearwood, Member of Parliament.
Foul-mouthed old Cobbett called him “Jack Walters,” and him and his
newspaper many ungenteel names, predicting that he should live to
see him “earthed,” and to “spit upon his grave;” but he survived the
vituperative old man’s coarse epithets. He put flesh on the dry bones of
an almost moribund newspaper. He, by untiring and indomitable energy and
perseverance, raised the circulation of the “Times” twenty-fold, and put
it in the way of attaining the gigantic publicity and popularity which it
has now achieved. It is true that Mr. Walter realised a princely fortune
by his connection with the “Times,” and left to his son, the present Mr.
John Walter, M.P., a lion’s share in the magnificent inheritance he had
created. But he did much solid good to others besides himself. This brave
old pressman, who, when an express came in from Paris—the French king’s
speech to the Chambers in 1835—and when there were neither contributors
nor compositors to be found at hand, bravely took off his coat, and in
his shirt-sleeves first translated, and then, taking “a turn at case,”
proceeded to set up in type his own manuscript. Mr. Walter was one of
the pioneers of liberal knowledge; and men like him do more to clear
the atmosphere of ignorance and prejudice, than whole colleges full of
scholiasts and dialecticians.
SIX O’CLOCK A.M.—COVENT GARDEN MARKET.
An Emperor will always be called Cæsar, and a dog “poor old fellow,”
in whatever country they may reign or bark, I suppose; and I should
be very much surprised if any men of Anglo-Saxon lineage, from this
time forward to the millennium, could build a new city in any part
of either hemisphere without a street or streets named after certain
London localities, dear and familiar to us all. There is a Pall Mall in
Liverpool, though but an unsavoury little thoroughfare, and a Piccadilly
in Manchester—a very murky, bricky street indeed, compared with that
unequalled hill of London, skirted on one side by the mansions of the
nobles, and on the other by the great green parks. Brighton has its
Bond Street—_mutatus ab ille_, certainly, being a fourth-rate skimping
little place, smelling of oyster-shells, sand, recently-washed linen, and
babies. I question not but in far-off Melbourne and Sydney, and scarcely
yet planned cities of the Bush, the dear old names are springing up,
like shoots from famous trees. Antipodean legislators have a refreshment
room they call “Bellamy’s;” merchants in far-off lands have their
“Lloyd’s;” there are coffee-houses and taverns, thousands of miles away,
christened “Joe’s,” and “Tom’s,” and “Sam’s,” though the original “Joe,”
the primeval “Tom,” the first “Sam,” most bald-headed and courteous of
old port-wine-wise waiters, have long since slept the sleep of the just
in quiet mouldy London graveyards, closed years ago by the Board of
Health. On very many names, and names alone, we stamp _esto perpetua_;
and English hearts would ill brook the alteration of their favourite
designations. Long, long may it be, I hope, before the great Lord Mayor
of London shall be called the Prefect of the Thames, or the Secretary of
State for the Home Department be known as the Minister of the Interior!
Foremost among names familiar to British mouths is Covent Garden. The
provincial knows it; the American knows it; Lord Macaulay’s New Zealander
will come to meditate among the moss-grown arcades, when he makes that
celebrated sketching excursion we have so long been promised. To the
play-goer Covent Garden is suggestive of the glories of Kemble and
Siddons; old book-a-bosom studious men, who live among musty volumes,
remember that Harry Fielding wrote the “Covent Garden Journal;” that
Mr. Wycherley lived in Bow Street; and that Mr. Dryden was cudgelled in
Rose Street hard by. Politicians remember the _fasti_ of the Westminster
election, and how Mr. Sheridan, beset by bailiffs on the hustings,
escaped through the churchyard. Artists know that Inigo Jones built that
same church of St. Paul, in compliance with the mandate of his patron,
the Earl of Bedford. “Build me a barn,” said the Earl. Quoth Inigo, “My
lord, I will build you the handsomest barn in England;” and the church is
in the market to this day, with its barn-like roof, to see. Old stagers
who have led jovial London lives, have yet chuckling memories of how in
Covent Garden they were wont to hear the chimes at midnight in the days
when they were eating their terms, and lay over against the “Windmill”
in Moorfields, and consorted with the Bona Robas. Those days, Sir John
Falstaff—those days, Justice Shallow, shall return no more to you. There
was the “Finish,”—a vulgar, noisy place enough; but stamped with undying
gentility by the patronage of his late Royal Highness the Prince of
Wales. Great George “finished” in Covent Garden purlieus; Major Hanger
told his stories, Captain Morris sang his songs, there. In a peaceable
gutter in front of the “Finish,” Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Esq., M.P.,
lay down overtaken in foreign wines, and told the guardian of the night
that his name was Wilberforce. A wild place, that “Finish;” yet a better
one than Great George’s other “Finish” at Windsor, with the actress to
read plays to him, the servants anxious for him to quit the stage, that
they might sell his frogged, furred coats, and white kid pantaloons:
the sorry end in a mean chair—unfriended, unloved, save by hirelings
deserted. When the Hope of England is old enough to wear on his fair
head the coronal and the three ostrich feathers, will _he_ patronise a
“Finish?” shall we have another wild young Prince and Poins, I wonder.
To be sure, Mr. Thackeray tells us that the young nobles of the present
age have “Spratts” and the “back kitchen” to finish up a night in; but,
pshaw! the Hope of England takes the chair at the Royal Institution to
hear Mr. Faraday lecture, and sits on the bench beside John Lord Campbell
to see rogues tried.
Covent Garden is a very chain, and its links are pleasant reminiscences.
They are somewhat dangerous to me, for my business is not antiquarian,
nor even topographical, just now; and I have but to do with the sixth
hour of the morning, and the vegetable market that is held in the monks’
old garden. I will dismiss the noble house of Bedford, though Covent
Garden, &c., are the richest appanage of that ducal entity—simply
recording a wish that you or I, my friend, had one tithe of the fat
revenues that ooze from between the bricks of the Bedford estate. You
should not dig, nor I delve, then. We would drink brown ale, and pay the
reckoning on the nail, and no man for debt should go to jail, that we
could help, from Garryowen to glory. I will say nothing to you of the
old theatre: how it was burnt again and again, and always re-appeared,
with great success on the part of Phœnix. Of Bow Street, even, will
I be silent, and proffer nought of Sir Richard Birnie, or that famed
runner, Townsend. Nor of the Garrick Club, in King Street, will I
discourse; indeed, I don’t know that I am qualified to say anything
pertinent respecting that establishment. I am not a member of the club;
and I am afraid of the men in plush, who, albeit aristocratic, have
yet a certain “Garrick” look about them, and must be, I surmise, the
prosperous brothers of the “green-coats” who sweep and water the stage,
and pick up Sir Anthony Absolute’s hat and crutch in the play. And
scant dissertations shall you have from me on those dim days of old,
when Covent Garden was in verity the garden of a convent; when matins
and vespers, complins and benedictions, were tinkled out in mellow
tintinnabulations through the leafy aisles of fruit trees; when my Lord
Abbot trod the green sward, stately, his signet-ring flashing in the
evening sun; and Brother Austin hated Friar Lawrence, and cursed him
softly as he paced the gravel walks demurely, his hands in his brown
sleeves, his eyes ever and anon cast up to count the peaches on the
wall. Solemn old conventual days, with shrill-voiced choir-boys singing
from breves and minims as big as latch-keys, scored in black and red on
brave parchment music-tomes. Lazy old conventual days, when the cellarer
brewed October that would give Messrs. Bass and Allsopp vertigo; when the
poor were fed with a manchet and stoup at the gate, without seeking the
relieving officer, or an order for the stoneyard. Comfortable old days,
when the Abbot’s _venator_ brought in a fat buck from Sheen or Chertsey,
the _piscator_ fresh salmon (the water-drops looked like pearls on their
silvery backs). Comfortable old days of softly-saddled palfreys, venison
pasties, and Malvoisie, sandalled feet, and shaven crowns, bead-telling,
and censor-swinging. These were the days of the lazy monks in their
Covent Garden. Lazy! They were lazy enough to illuminate the exquisitely
beautiful missals and books of hours you may see in the British Museum;
to feed, and tend, and comfort the poor, and heal them when they were
sick; to keep art and learning from decay and death in a dark age; to
build cathedrals, whose smallest buttress shall make your children’s
children, Sir Charles Barry, blush; but they were the lazy monks—so
let us cry havoc upon them. They were shavelings. They didn’t wash
their feet, they aided and abetted Guy Fawkes, Ignatius Loyola, and the
Cardinal Archbishop of ——.
It is six o’clock on a glorious summer’s morning; the lazy monks fade
away like the shadows of the night, and leave me in Covent Garden, and
in high market. Every morning during the summer may be called market
morning; but in the winter the special mornings are Tuesday, Thursday,
and Saturday. It is a strange sight then in the winter blackness to see
the gas glimmering among huge piles of vegetables hoisted high on carts,
and slowly moving like Birnam Woods coming to a Dunsinane of marketdom.
When the snow is on the ground, or when the rain it raineth, the glare of
lights and black shadows; the rushing figures of men with burdens; the
great heaving masses of baskets that are tumbled from steep heights; the
brilliantly-lighted shops in the grand arcade, where, winter or summer,
glow the oranges and the hot-house fruits and flowers; all these make up
a series of pictures, strange and sometimes almost terrible. There are
yawning cellars, that vomit green stuff; there are tall potato-sacks,
propped up in dark corners, that might contain corpses of murdered men;
there are wondrous masses of light and shade, and dazzling effects of
candlelight, enough to make old Schkalken’s ghost rise, crayon and
sketch-book in hand, and the _eidolon_ of Paul Rembrandt to take lodgings
in the Piazza, over against the market.
[Illustration: COVENT GARDEN MARKET: THE WEST END.]
But six o’clock in the glorious summer time! The London smoke is not out
of bed yet, and indeed Covent Garden market would at all times seem to
possess an exemption from over fumigation. If you consider the fronts
of the houses, and the arches of the Piazza, you will see that though
tinted by age, they have not that sooty grimness that degrades St. Paul’s
cathedral into the similitude of a temple dedicated to the worship of
the goddess of chimney-sweepers, and makes the East India House (what
will they do with the India House when the directors are demolished?)
look like the outside of the black-hole at Calcutta. Smoke has been
merciful to Covent Garden market, and its cornucopia is not as dingy as
a ramoneur’s sack. All night long the heavily-laden wagons—mountains
of cabbages, cauliflowers, brocoli, asparagus, carrots, turnips, and
seakale; Egyptian pyramids of red-huddled baskets full of apples and
pears, hecatombs of cherries, holocausts of strawberry pottles, chair
wicker bosoms crimsoned by sanguinolent spots; and above all, piles,
heaps—Pelions on Ossas, Atlases on Olympuses, Chimborazos on Himalayas,
Mount Aboras on Mont Blancs—of PEAS, have been creaking and rumbling and
heavily wheezing along suburban roads, and through the main streets of
the never-sleeping city. You heard those broad groaning wheels, perturbed
man, as your head tossed uneasily on the pillow, and you thought of the
bill that was to come due on the morrow. You too heard them, pretty
maiden, in the laced night cap, as you bedewed that delicate border
of dentelle with tears, coursing from the eyes which should have been
closed in sleep two hours since, tears evoked by the atrocious behaviour
of Edward (a monster and member of the Stock Exchange) towards Clara (a
designing, wicked, artful thing, whose papa lives in Torrington Square)
during the last _deux temps_. That dull heavy sound was distinct above
the sharp rattle of the night cabmen’s wheels; the steady revolving
clatter of the home-returning brougham: for the sound of wheels in
London are as the waves of a sea that is never still. The policemen met
the market wagons as they trudged along, and eyed them critically, as
though a neat case of lurking about with intent to commit a felony might
be concealed in a strawberry-pottle, or a drunk and incapable lying
perdu in a pea-basket. Roaring blades, addicted to asserting in chorus
that they would not go home till morning—a needless vaunt, for it was
morning already—hailed the bluff-visaged market carters, interchanged
lively jocularities with them bearing on the syrup giving rhubarb and
the succulent carrot, and lighted their pipes at the blackened calumets
of the vegetarians. Young Tom Buffalo, who had been out at a christening
party at Hammersmith, and had made the welkin ring (whatever and wherever
the welkin may be, and howsoever the process of making it ring be
effected) met a gigantic cabbage-chariot, as home returning, precisely
at that part of Knightsbridge where Old Padlock House used to stand,
and struck a bargain with the charioteer for conveyance to Charing
Cross, for fourpence, a libation of milk, qualified by some spirituous
admixture, and a pipeful of the best Bristol bird’s-eye. And so from all
outlying nursery-grounds and market-gardens about London: from Brompton,
Fulham, Brentford, Chiswick, Turnham Green, and Kew; from sober Hackney,
and Dalston, and Kingsland, bank-clerk beloved; from Tottenham, and
Edmonton, sacred to John Gilpin, his hat and wig; from saintly Clapham
and Brixton, equally interested in piety, sugar-baking, and the funds,
come, too heavy to gallop, too proud to trot, but sternly stalking in
elephantine dignity of progression, the great carts bound to Covent
Garden. One would think that all the vegetable-dishes in the world would
not be able to hold the cabbage, to say nothing of the other verdant
esculents.