bring, or the suburban market-gardens furnish, a sufficient quantity of
green meat for the great, insatiable, hungry, ravenous monster that men
call (and none know why) London. Stand here with me in Covent Garden
market-place, and let your eyes follow whither my finger points. Do you
see those great vans, long, heavily-built, hoisted on high springs, and
with immense wheels—vans drawn by horses of tremendous size and strength,
but which, for all their bulk and weight, seem to move at a lightning
pace compared with the snail crawl of the ancient market-carts? Their
drivers are robust men, fresh-coloured, full-whiskered, strong-limbed,
clad in corduroy shining at the seams, with bulging pockets, from
which peep blotting-paper, interleaved books of invoices, and parcels
receipts. They are always wiping their hot foreheads with red cotton
pocket-handkerchiefs. They are always in such a hurry. They never
can wait. Alert in movement, strong in action, hardy in speech, curt
and quick in reply, setting not much store by policemen, and bidding
the wealthiest potatoe salesman “look sharp;” these vigorous mortals
discharge from their vans such a shower of vegetable missiles that you
might almost fancy the bombardment of a new Sebastopol. “Troy,” the old
ballad tells us, “had a breed of stout bold men;” but these seem stouter
and bolder. And they drive away, these stalwart, bold-spoken varlets,
standing erect in their huge vans, and adjuring, by the name of “slow
coach,” seemingly immoveable market-carts to “mind their eye;” wearing
out the London macadam with their fierce wheels, to the despair of the
commissioners of paving (though my private opinion is, that the paving
commissioners like to see the paving worn out, in order that they may
have the “street up” again); threading their way in a surprisingly
dexterous though apparently reckless manner through the maze of vehicles,
and finding themselves, in an astonishingly short space of time, in
Tottenham Court Road, and Union Street, Borough. What gives these men
their almost superhuman velocity, strength, confidence? They do but carry
cabbages, like other market-folk; but look on the legends inscribed on
these vans, and the mystery is at once explained. “Chaplin and Home,”
“Pickford and Co.,” railway carriers. These vegetable Titans are of
the rail, and raily. They have brought their horns of plenty from the
termini of the great iron roads. Carts and carts, trucks and trucks
have journeyed through the dense night, laden with vegetable produce;
locomotives have shrieked over Chatmoss, dragging cabbages and carrots
after them; the most distant counties have poured the fatness of their
lands at the feet of the Queen-city; but she, like the daughter of the
horse-leech, still cryeth, “Give! give!” and, like Oliver Twist, “asks
for more.” So they send her more, even from strange countries beyond the
sea. Black steamers from Rotterdam and Antwerp belch forth volumes of
smoke at the Tower stairs, and discharge cargoes of peas and potatoes.
The Queen-city is an hungered, and must be fed; and it is no joke, I need
scarcely tell you, to feed London. When the King of Siam has resolved
upon the ruin of a courtier, he makes him a present of a white elephant.
As the animal is thrice sacred in Siamese eyes, the luckless baillee,
or garnishee, or possessor of the brute, dare neither sell, kill, nor
neglect it; and the daily ration of rice, hay, and sugar which the albino
monster devours, soon reduces the courtier to irremediable bankruptcy.
Moral: avoid courts. If this were a despotic country, and her Majesty
the Empress of Britain should take it into her head to ruin Baron
Rothschild or the Marquis of Westminster (and indeed I have heard that
the impoverished nobleman last mentioned is haunted by the fear of dying
in a workhouse), I don’t think she could more easily effect her purpose
than by giving him LONDON and bidding him feed it for a week.
[Illustration: COVENT GARDEN MARKET: EARLY BREAKFAST STALL.]
Very sweet is the smell of the green peas this summer morning; and very
picturesque is it to see the market-women ranged in circles, and busily
employed in shelling those delicious edibles. Some fastidious persons
might perhaps object that the fingers of the shellers are somewhat
coarse, and that the vessels into which the peas fall are rudely
fashioned. What does it matter? If we took this fastidiousness with us
into an analysis of all the things we eat and drink, we should soon fill
up the measure of the title of Dr. Culverwell’s book, by “avoiding”
eating and drinking altogether. The delicate Havannah cigar has been
rolled between the hot palms of oleaginous niggers; nay, some travellers
declare, upon the bare thighs of sable wenches. The snowy lump-sugar has
been refined by means of unutterable nastinesses of a sanguineous nature;
the very daily bread we eat has, in a state of dough, formed the flooring
for a vigorous polka, performed by journeymen bakers with bare feet.
Food is a gift from heaven’s free bounty: take Sancho Panza’s advice,
and don’t look the gift-horse in the mouth. He may have false teeth.
We ought to be very much obliged, of course, to those disinterested
medical gentlemen who formed themselves into a sanitary commission, and
analysing our dinners under a microscope, found that one-half was poison,
and the other half rubbish; but, for my part, I like anchovies to be
red and pickles green, and I think that coffee without chicory in it
is exceedingly nasty. As for the peas, I have so fond a love for those
delicious pulse that I could partake of them even if I knew they had been
shelled by Miss Julia Pastrana. I could eat the shucks; I have eaten them
indeed in Russia, where they stew pea-shells in a sweet sauce, and make
them amazingly relishing.
But sweeter even than the smell of the peas, and more delightful than the
odour of the strawberries, is the delicious perfume of the innumerable
flowers which crowd the north-western angle of the market, from the
corner of King Street to the entrance of the grand avenue. These are
not hot-house plants, not rare exotics; such do not arrive so soon, and
their aristocratic purchasers will not be out of bed for hours. These are
simply hundreds upon hundreds of flower-pots, blooming with roses and
geraniums, with pinks and lilacs, with heartsease and fuschias. There are
long boxes full of mignionette and jessamine; there are little pet vases
full of peculiar roses with strange names; there are rose-trees, roots
and all, reft from the earth by some floral Milo who cared not for the
rebound. The cut flowers, too, in every variety of dazzling hue, in every
gradation of sweet odour, are here, jewelling wooden boards, and making
humble wicker-baskets iridescent. The violets have whole rows of baskets
to themselves. Who is it that calls the violet humble, modest? He (I will
call him he) is nothing of the sort. He is as bold as brass. He comes
the earliest and goes away the latest of all his lovely companions; like
a guest who is determined to make the most of a banquet. When the last
rose of summer, tired of blooming alone, takes his hat and skulks home,
the modest violet, who has been under the table for a great part of the
evening, wakes up, and calls for another bottle of dew—and the right sort.
It seems early for so many persons to be abroad, not only to sell but
to purchase flowers, yet there is no lack of buyers for the perfumed
stores which meet the eye, and well nigh impede the footsteps. Young
sempstresses and milliner’s girls, barmaids and shopwomen, pent up all
day in a hot and close atmosphere, have risen an hour or two earlier, and
make a party of pleasure to come to Covent Garden market to buy flowers.
It is one of heaven’s mercies that the very poorest manage somehow to buy
these treasures; and he who is steeped to the lips in misery will have a
morsel of mignionette in his window, or a bunch of violets in a cracked
jug on his mantelshelf, even as the great lady has rich, savage, blooming
plants in her conservatory, and camelias and magnolias in porphyry
vases on marble slabs. It is a thin, a very thin, line that divides the
independent poor from the pauper in his hideous whitewashed union ward:
the power of buying flowers and of keeping a dog. How the halfpence are
scraped together to procure the violets or mignionette, whence comes
the coin that purchases the scrap of paunch, it puzzles me to say: but
go where you will among the _pauperum tabernas_ and you will find the
dog and the flowers. Crowds more of purchasers are there yet around the
violet baskets; but these are buyers to sell again. Wretched-looking
little buyers are they, half-starved Bedouin children, mostly Irish, in
faded and tattered garments, with ragged hair and bare feet. They have
tramped miles with their scanty stock-money laid up in a corner of their
patched shawls, daring not to think of breakfast till their purchases
be made; and then they will tramp miles again through the cruel streets
of London town, penetrating into courts and alleys where the sun never
shines, peering into doorways, selling their wares to creatures almost
as ragged and forlorn as themselves. They cry violets! They cried
violets in good Master Herrick’s time. There are some worthy gentlemen,
householders and ratepayers, who would put all such street-cries down by
Act of Parliament. Indeed, it must an intolerable sin, this piping little
voice of an eight-years old child, wheezing out a supplication to buy a
ha’porth of violets. But then mouthy gentlemen are all Sir Oracles; and
where they are, no dogs must bark nor violets be cried.
It is past six o’clock, and high ’Change in the market. What gabbling!
what shouting! what rushing and pushing! what confusion of tongues
and men and horses and carts! The roadway of the adjacent streets is
littered with fragments of vegetables. You need pick your way with care
and circumspection through the crowd, for it is by no means pleasant
to be tripped up by a porter staggering under a load of baskets, that
look like a Leaning Tower of Pisa. Bow Street is blocked up by a triple
line of costermongers’ “shallows,” drawn by woe-begone donkies; their
masters are in the market purchasing that “sparrergrass” which they
will so sonorously cry throughout the suburbs in the afternoon. They
are also, I believe, to be put down by the worthy gentlemen who do not
like noise. I wish they could put down, while they are about it, the
chaffering of the money-changers in the temple, and the noise of the
Pharisees’ brushes as they whiten those sepulchres of theirs, and the
clanging of the bells that summon men to thank Heaven that they are not
“as that publican,” and to burn their neighbour because he objects to
shovel hats. King Street, Southampton Street, Russell Street, are full of
carts and men. Early coffee-shops and taverns are gorged with customers,
for the Covent Gardeners are essentially jolly gardeners, and besides,
being stalwart men, are naturally hungry and athirst after their nights’
labour. There are public-houses in the market itself, where they give you
hot shoulder of mutton for breakfast at seven o’clock in the morning! Hot
coffee and gigantic piles of bread-and-butter disappear with astounding
rapidity. Foaming tankards are quaffed, “nips” of alcohol “to keep the
cold out” (though it is May) are tossed off; and among the hale, hearty,
fresh-coloured market-people, you may see, here and there, some tardy
lingerer at “the halls of dazzling light,” who has just crawled away from
the enchanted scene, and, cooling his fevered throat with soda-water, or
whipping up his jaded nerves with brandy and milk, fancies, because he is
abroad at six o’clock in the morning, that he is “seeing life.” Crouching
and lurking about, too, for anything they can beg, or anything they can
borrow, or, I am afraid, for anything they can steal, are some homeless,
shirtless vagabonds, who have slept all night under baskets or tarpaulins
in the market, and now prowl in and out of the coffee-shops and taverns,
with red eyes and unshaven chins. I grieve to have to notice such
unsightly blots upon the Arcadia I have endeavoured to depict; but, alas!
these things ARE! You have seen a caterpillar crawling on the fairest
rose; and this glorious summer sun must have spots on its face. There are
worse on London’s brow at six o’clock in the morning.
SEVEN O’CLOCK A.M.—A PARLIAMENTARY TRAIN.
I know that the part which I have proposed to myself in these papers is
that of a chronological Asmodeus; you, reader, I have enlisted, _nolens
volens_, to accompany me in my flights about town, at all hours of the
day and night; and you must, perforce, hold on by the skirts of my cloak
as I wing my way from quarter to quarter of the immense city, to which
the Madrid which the lame fiend showed his friend was but a nut-shell.
And yet, when I look my self-appointed task in the face, I am astounded,
humiliated, almost disheartened, by its magnitude. How can I hope to
complete it within the compass of this book, within the time allotted
for daily literary labour? For work ever so hard as we penmen may, and
rob ever so many hours from sleep as you may choose to compute—as we are
forced to do sometimes—that you may have your pabulum of printed matter,
more or less amusing and instructive, at breakfast time, or at afternoon
club reading hour, we must yet eat, and drink, and sleep, and go into
the world soliciting bread or favours, we must quarrel with our wives,
if married, and look out the things for the wash, if single—all of which
are operations requiring a certain expenditure of time. We must, we
authors, even have time, an’t please you, to grow ambitious, and to save
money, stand for the borough, attend the board-room, and be appointed
consuls-general to the Baratarian Islands. The old Grub Street tradition
of the author is defunct. The man of letters is no longer supposed to
write moral essays from Mount Scoundrel in the Fleet, to dine at twopenny
ordinaries, and pass his leisure hours in night-cellars. Translators
of Herodotus no longer lie three in a bed; nor is the gentleman who is
correcting the proof-sheets of the Sanscrit dictionary to be found in a
hay-loft over a tripe shop in Little Britain, or to be heard of at the
bar of the Green Dragon. Another, and as erroneous, an idea of the author
has sprung up in the minds of burgesses. He wears, according to some
wiseacres, a shawl dressing-gown, and lies all day on a sofa, puffing a
perfumed _narghilè_, penning paragraphs in violet ink on cream-laid paper
at intervals; or he is a lettered Intriguer, who merely courts the Muses
as the shortest way to the Treasury bench, and writes May Fair novels or
Della Cruscan tragedies that he may the sooner become Prime Minister.
There is another literary idea that may with greater reason become
prevalent—that of the author-manufacturer, who produces such an amount of
merchandise, takes it into the market, and sells it according to demand
and the latest quotations, and the smoke of whose short cutty pipe, as
he spins his literary yarn, is as natural a consequence of manufacture
as the black cloud which gusts from Mr. Billyroller’s hundred-feet-high
brick chimney as he spins _his_ yarns for madapolams and “domestics.” The
author-manufacturer has to keep his books, to pay his men, to watch the
course of the market, and to suit his wares to the prevailing caprice.
And, like the cotton-spinner, he sometimes goes into the “Gazette,”
paying but an infinitesimal dividend in the pound.
Did I not struggle midway into a phrase, some page or so since, and did
it not waltz away from me on the nimble feet of a parenthesis? I fear
that such was the case. How can I hope, I reiterate, to give you anything
like a complete picture of the doings in London while still the clock
goes round? I might take one house and unroof it, one street and unpave
it, one man and disclose to you the secrets of twenty-four hours of his
daily and nightly life; but it is London, in its entirety, that I have
presumed to “time”—forgetting, oh! egregious and inconsistent!—that every
minute over which the clock hand passes is as the shake of the wrist
applied to a kaleidoscope, and that the whole aspect of the city changes
with as magical rapidity.
I should be Briareus multiplied by ten thousand, and not Asmodeus at all,
if I could set down in writing a tithe of London’s sayings and doings,
acts and deeds, seemings and aspects, at seven o’clock in the morning.
Only consider. Drumming with your finger on a map of the metropolis;
just measure a few palms’ lengths, say from Camberwell Gate to the
“Mother Redcap,” on the one hand—from Limehouse Church to Kensington
Gravel Pits, on the other. Take the cubic dimensions, my dear sir; think
of the mean area; rub up those mathematics, for proficiency in whose
more recondite branches you so narrowly escaped being second wrangler,
twenty years since; out with your logarithms, your conic sections, your
fluxions, and calculate the thousands upon thousands of little dramas
that must be taking place in London as the clock strikes seven. Let me
glance at a few, as I travel with you towards that railway terminus
which is our destination. Camberwell Gate: tollbar-keeper, who has been
up all night, going to bed, very cross; tollbar-keeper’s wife gets up
to mind the gate, also very cross. Woodendesk Grove, Grosvenor Park,
Camberwell: Mr. Dockett, wharfage clerk in Messrs. Charter Party and
Co.’s shipping house, Lower Thames Street, is shaving. He breakfasts at
half-past seven, and has to be in the city by nine. Precisely at the
same time that he is passing Mr. Mappin’s razor over his commercial
countenance, Mr. Flybynight, aged twenty-two, also a clerk, but attached
to the Lost-Monkey-and-Mislaid-Poodle-Department (Inland Revenue),
Somerset House, lets himself into No. 7, Woodendesk Grove, next door to
Mr. Dockett’s, by means of a Chubb’s key. Mr. Flybynight is in evening
costume, considerably the worst for the concussion of pale ale bottle
corks. On his elegant tie are the stains of the dressing of some lobster
salad, and about half-a-pint of the crimson stream of life, formerly
the joint property of Mr. Flybynight’s nose and of a cabman’s upper
lip, both injured during a “knock-down and drag-out” fight, supervening
on the disputed question of the right of a passenger to carry a live
turkey (purchased in Leadenhall market) with him in a hackney cab. Mr.
Flybynight has been to two evening parties, a public ball (admission
sixpence), where he created a great sensation among the ladies and
gentlemen present, by appearing with a lady’s cap on his head, a raw
shoulder of mutton in one hand, and a pound of rushlights in the other;
and to two suppers—one of roasted potatoes in Whitechapel High Street,
the second of scolloped oysters in the Haymarket. He paid a visit to
the Vine Street station-house, too, to clear up a misunderstanding as
to a bell which was rung by accident, and a policeman’s hat which was
knocked off by mistake. The inspector on duty was so charmed with Mr.
Flybynight’s engaging demeanour and affable manners, that it was with
difficulty that he was dissuaded from keeping him by him all night, and
assigning him as a sleeping apartment a private parlour with a very
strong lock, and remarkably well ventilated. He only consented to tear
himself away from Mr. Flybynight’s society on the undertaking that
the latter would convey home his friend Mr. Keepitup, who, though he
persistently repeated to all comers that he was “all right,” appeared,
if unsteadiness of gait and thickness of utterance were to be accepted
as evidence, to be altogether wrong. Mr. Flybynight, faithful to his
promise, took Mr. Keepitup (who was in the Customs) home; at least
he took him as far as he would go—his own doorstep, namely, on which
somewhat frigid pedestal he sat, informing the “milk,” a passing
dustman, and a lady in pink, who had lost her way, and seemed to think
that the best way to find it was to consult the pavement by falling
prone thereupon every dozen yards or so—that though circumstances had
compelled him to serve his country in a civil capacity, he was at heart
and by predilection a soldier. In proof of which Mr. Keepitup struck
his breast, volunteered a choice of martial airs, beginning with the
“Death of Nelson,” and ending with a long howl, intermingled with
passionate tears and ejaculations bearing reference to the infidelity
of a certain Caroline, surname unknown, through whose cruelty he
“would never be the same man again.” Mr. Flybynight, safely arrived
at Woodendesk Grove, after these varied peripatetics, is due at the
Lost-Monkey-and-Mislaid-Poodle Office at ten; but he will have a violent
attack of lumbago this morning, which will unavoidably prevent him
from reaching Somerset House before noon. His name will show somewhat
unfavourably in the official book, and the Commissioners will look him
up sharply, and shortly too, if he doesn’t take care. Mr. Keepitup,
who, however eccentric may have been his previous nocturnal vagaries,
possesses the faculty of appearing at the Custom-house gates as the
clock strikes the half-hour after nine, with a very large and stiff
shirt-collar, a microscopically shaven face, and the most irreproachable
shirt, will go to work at his desk in the Long Room, with a steady hand
and the countenance of a candidate for the Wesleyan ministry; but Mr.
Flybynight will require a good deal of soda-water and sal-volatile, and
perhaps a little tincture of opium, before he is equal to the resumption
of his arduous duties. Wild lads, these clerks; and yet they don’t do
such a vast amount of harm, Flybynight and Keepitup! They are very young;
they don’t beat the town every night; they are honest lads at bottom,
and have a contempt for meanness and are not lost to shame. They have
not grown so vicious as to be ashamed and remorseful without any good
resulting therefrom; and you will be astonished five years hence to see
Keepitup high up in the Customs, and Flybynight married to a pretty
girl, to whom he is the most exemplary of husbands. Let me edge in this
little morsel of morality at seven o’clock in the morning. I know the
virtue of steadiness, lectures, tracts, latch-key-prohibitions, strict
parents, young men’s Christian associations, serious tea-parties and
electrifying machines; but I have seen the world in my time, and its
ways. Youth _will_ be youth, and youthful blood _will_ run riot. There is
no morality so false as that which ignores the existence of immorality.
Let us keep on preaching to the prodigals, and point with grim menace
to the draff and husks, and the fatted calf which never shall be theirs
if they do not reform; let us thunder against their dissipation, their
late hours, their vain “larks,” their unseemly “sprees.” It is our duty;
youth must be reproved, admonished, restrained by its elders. It has
been so ever since the world began; but do not let us in our own hearts
think every wild young man is bound hopelessly to perdition. Some there
are, indeed, (and they are in evil case,) who have come to irremediable
grief, and must sit aloof—spirits fallen never to rise again—and watch
the struggling souls. But it must rejoice even those callous ones to see
how many pecks of wild oats are sown every day, and what goodly harvests
of home virtues and domestic joys are reaped on all sides, from the most
unpromising soil. Let us not despair of the tendencies of the age. Young
men will be young men, but they should be taught and led with gentle and
wise counsels, with forbearance and moderation, to abandon the follies of
youth, and to become staid and decorous. Flybynight, with such counsels,
and good examples from his elders—ah, ye seniors! what examples are not
due from you!—will leave off sack and live cleanly like a gentleman; and
Keepitup will not bring his parents’ gray hairs with sorrow to the grave.
Seven o’clock in the morning! I have already ventured a passing
allusion to the “milk.” The poor little children who sell violets and
water-cresses debouch from the great thoroughfares, and ply their humble
trade in by-streets full of private houses. The newsvenders’ shops in
the Strand, Holywell Street, and Fleet Street, are all in full activity.
Legions of assistants crowd behind the broad counters, folding the still
damp sheets of the morning newspapers, and, with fingers moving in swift
legerdemain, tell off “quires” and “dozens” of cheap periodicals. If it
happen to be seven o’clock, and a Friday morning, not only the doors of
the great newsvenders—such as Messrs. Smith and Son and Mr. Vickers—but
the portals of all the newspaper offices, will be crowded with newsmen’s
carts and newsmen’s trucks; and from the gaping gates themselves will
issue hordes of newsmen and flying cohorts of newsboys—boys with
parcels, boys with bags, boys with satchels, men staggering under the
weight of great piles of printed paper. Mercy on us! what a plethora of
brainwork is about, and what a poor criterion of its quality the quantity
manifestly affords! Yon tiny urchin with the red comforter has but
half-a-dozen copies tucked beneath his arm of a journal sparkling with
wit, and radiant in learning, and scathing in its satire, and Titanic in
its vigour; yet, treading on his heels, comes a colossus in corduroy,
eclipsed by a quadrangular mountain of closely-packed paper, quires—nay,
whole reams—of some ragamuffin print, full of details of the last murder
and abuse of some wise and good statesman because he happens to be a lord.