of taverns in leading thoroughfares, and then fall to rubbing the
pewter pots till they assume a transcendent sheen. Within, the young
ladies who officiate in the bar, and who look very drowsy in their
curl-papers and cotton-print dresses, are rubbing the pewter counters
and the brass-work of the beer-engines, the funnels and the whisky
noggins, washing the glasses, polishing up the mahogany, cutting up
the pork pies which Mr. Watling’s man has just left, displaying the
Banbury cakes and Epping sausages under crystal canopies. The early
customers—matutinal _habitués_—drop in for small measures of cordials or
glasses of peculiarly mild ale; and the freshest news of last night’s
fire in Holborn, or last night’s division in the House, or last night’s
opera at Her Majesty’s, are fished up from the columns of the “Morning
Advertiser.” By intercommunication with the early customers, who all
have a paternal and respectful fondness for her, the barmaid becomes
_au courant_ with the news of the day. As a rule, the barmaid does not
read the newspaper. On the second day of publication, she lends it to
the dissenting washerwoman or the radical tailor in the court round the
corner, who send small children, whose heads scarcely reach to the top
of the counter, for it. When it is returned, she cuts it up for tobacco
screws and for curl papers. I like the barmaid, for she is often pretty,
always civil, works about fourteen hours a day for her keep and from
eighteen to twenty pounds a year, is frequently a kinless orphan out of
that admirable Licensed Victuallers’ School, and is, in nine cases out of
ten, as chaste as Diana.
I should be grossly misleading you, were I to attempt to inculcate
the supposition that at seven o’clock in the morning only the humbler
classes, or those who have stopped up all night, are again up and
doing. The Prime Minister is dressed, and poring over a savage leader
in the “Times,” denouncing his policy, sneering at his latest measure,
and insulting him personally in a facetious manner. The noble officers
told off for duty of her Majesty’s regiment of Guards are up and fully
equipped, though perchance they have spent the small hours in amusements
not wholly dissimilar from those employed by the daring Flybynight
and the intrepid Keepitup to kill time, and have devoted their vast
energies to the absorbing requirements of morning parade. Many of the
infant and juvenile scions of the aristocracy have left their downy
couches ere this, and are undergoing a lavatory purgatory in the
nursery. Many meek-faced, plainly-dressed young ladies, of native and
foreign extraction, attached as governesses to the aristocratic families
in question, are already in the school-room, sorting their pupils’
copy-books, or preparing for the early repetition of the music lesson,
which is drummed and thrummed over in the morning pending the arrival
of Signor Papadaggi or Herr Hammerer, who comes for an hour and earns a
guinea. The governess, Miss Grissel, does not work more than twelve hours
a day, and she earns perhaps fifty guineas a year against Papadaggi’s
fifteen hundred and Hammerer’s two thousand. But then she is only a
governess. Her life is somewhat hard, and lonely, and miserable, and
might afford, to an ill-regulated mind, some cause for grumbling; but it
is her duty to be patient, and not to repine. What says the pleasing poet?
“O! let us love our occupations,
Bless the squire and his relations,
Live upon our daily rations,
And always know our proper stations.”[2]
Let us trust Miss Grissel knows her proper station, and is satisfied.
Seven o’clock in the morning; but there are more governesses, and
governesses out of bed, than Miss Grissel and her companions in woe,
in the mansions of the nobility. Doctor Wackerbarth’s young gentlemen,
from Towellem House, New Road, are gone to bathe at Peerless Pool, under
escort of the writing-master. The Misses Gimps’ establishment for young
ladies, at Bayswater, is already in full activity; and the eight and
thirty boarders (among whom there are at present, and have been for
the last ten years, two, and positively only two, vacancies. N.B.—The
daughters of gentlemen only are received)—the eight and thirty boarders,
in curl papers and brown Holland pinafores, are floundering through
sloughs of despond in the endeavour to convey, in the English language,
the fact that Calypso was unable to console herself for the departure of
Ulysses; and into the French vernacular, the information that, in order
to be disabused respecting the phantoms of hope and the whisperings of
fancy, it is desirable to listen to the history of Rasselas, Prince of
Abyssinia. In Charterhouse and Merchant Taylors’ and St. Paul’s, the
boys are already at their lessons, and the cruel anger of Juno towards
Æneas, together with the shameful conduct of Clytemnestra to Agamemnon,
are matters of public (though unwilling) discussion; some private
conversations going on surreptitiously, meanwhile, touching the price of
alleytaws as compared with agates, and the relative merits of almond-rock
and candied horehound. After all, the poor have their privileges—their
immunities; and the couch of the rich is not altogether a bed of roses.
Polly Rabbets, the charity girl, lies snugly in bed, while the honourable
Clementina St. Maur is standing in the stocks, or is having her knuckles
rapped for speaking English instead of French. Polly has a run in the
Dials before breakfast, an expedition to buy a red herring for father,
and perchance a penny for disbursement at the apple-stall. She is not
wanted at school till nine. The most noble the Marquis of Millefleurs,
aged ten, at Eton, has to rise at six; he is fag to Tom Tucker, the army
clothier’s son. He has to clean his master’s boots, fry bacon, and toast
bread for his breakfast. If he doesn’t know his lesson in school, the
most noble the Marquis of Millefleurs is liable to be birched; but no
such danger menaces Jemmy Allbones at the National, or Tommy Grimes at
the Ragged School. If the schoolmaster were to beat them, their parents
would have the _plagosus Orbilius_ up at the police-court in a trice, and
the Sunday newspapers would be full of details of the “atrocious cruelty
of a schoolmaster.”
One more peep at seven o’clock doings, and we will move further afield.
Though sundry are up and doing, the great mass of London is yet sleeping.
Sleeps the cosy tradesman, sleeps the linendraper’s shopman (till eight),
sleeps the merchant, the dandy, the actor, the author, the _petite
maitresse_. Hold fast while I wheel in my flight and hover over Pimlico.
There is Millbank, where the boarders and lodgers, clad in hodden gray,
with masks on their faces and numbers on their backs, have been up and
stirring since six. And there, north-west of Millbank, is the palace,
almost as ugly as the prison, where dwells the Great Governess of the
Land. She is there, for you may see the standard floating in the morning
breeze; and at seven in the morning, she, too, is up and doing. If she
were at Osborne she would be strolling very likely on the white-beached
shore, listening to the sea murmuring “your gracious Majesty,” and “your
Majesty’s ever faithful subject and servant,” and “your petitioner
will ever pray;” for it is thus doubtless that the obsequious sea has
addressed sovereigns since Xerxes’ time. Or if the Imperial Governess
were at Windsor, she might, at this very time, be walking on those
mysterious Slopes on which it is a standing marvel that Royalty can
preserve its equilibrium. When I speak of our gracious lady being awake
and up at seven o’clock, I know that I am venturing into the realms of
pure supposition; but remember I am Asmodeus, and can unroof palaces
and hovels at will. Is it not, besides, a matter of public report that
the Queen rises early? Does not the Court newsman (I wonder whether
that occult functionary gets up early too) know it? Does not everybody
know it—everybody say it? And what everybody says must be true. There
are despatches to be read; private and confidential letters to foreign
sovereigns to be written; the breakfasts, perchance, of the little
princes and princesses to be superintended; the proofs, probably, of the
last Royal etching or princely photograph to be inspected; a new pony
to be tried in the riding-house; a new dog to be taught tricks: a host
of things to do. Who shall say? What do we know about the daily life
of royalty, save that it must be infinitely more laborious than that
of a convict drudging through his penal servitude in Portland Prison?
I met the carriage of H.R.H. the Prince Consort, with H.R.H. inside
it, prowling about Pedlar’s Acre very early the other morning, going
to or coming from, I presume, the South-Western Railway Terminus. When
I read of her Majesty’s “arriving with her accustomed punctuality” at
some rendezvous at nine o’clock in the morning, I can but think of and
marvel at the amount of business she must have despatched before she
entered her carriage. If there were to be (which heaven forfend!) a
coronation to-morrow, the sovereign would be sure to arrive with his or
her “accustomed punctuality;” yet how many hours it must take to try on
the crown, to study the proper sweep of the imperial purple, to learn by
heart that coronation oath which is never, never broken! For my part, I
often wonder how kings and queens and emperors find time to go to bed at
all.
So now, reader, not wholly, I trust, unedified by the cursory view we
have taken of Babylon the Great in its seven-o’clock-in-the-morning
phase, we have arrived at the end of our journey—to another stage
thereof, at least. We have flown from Knightsbridge to Bermondsey,
not exactly as the crow flies, nor yet as straight as an arrow from a
Tartar’s bow; but still we have gyrated and skimmed and wheeled along
somehow, even as a sparrow seeking knowledge on the housetops and corn in
the street kennels. And now we will go out of town.
Whithersoever you choose; but by what means of conveyance? By water?
The penny steamboats have not commenced their journeys yet. The _Pride
of the Thames_ is snugly moored at Essex Pier, and _Waterman_, No. 2,
still keeps her head under her wing—or under her funnel, if you will.
The omnibuses have not yet begun to roll in any perceptible numbers,
and the few stage coaches that are still left (how they linger, those
cheerful institutions, bidding yet a blithe defiance to the monopolising
and all-devouring rail!) have not put in an appearance at the White
Horse Cellar in Piccadilly, the Flower Pot in Bishopsgate Street, or the
Catherine Wheel in the Borough. So we must needs quit Babylon by railway.
Toss up for a terminus with me. Shall it be London Bridge, Briarean
station with arms stretching to Brighton the well-beloved, Gravesend
the chalky and periwinkley, Rochester the martial, Chatham the naval,
Hastings the saline, Dover the castellated, Tunbridge Wells the genteel,
Margate the shrimpy, Ramsgate the asinine, Canterbury the ecclesiastical,
or Herne Bay the desolate? Shall it be the Great Northern, hard by
Battle Bridge and Pentonville’s frowning bastille? No; the fens of
Lincolnshire nor the moors of Yorkshire like me not. Shall it be the
Great Western, with its vast, quiet station, its Palladio-Vitruvian
hotel, and its promise of travel through the rich meadows of Berkshire
and by the sparkling waters of Isis, into smiling Somerset and blooming
Devon? No; cab fares to Paddington are ruinously expensive, and I
have prejudices against the broad gauge. Shall it be the Eastern
Counties? Avaunt! evil-smelling Shoreditch, bad neighbourhood of worse
melodramas, and cheap grocers’ shops where there is sand in the sugar and
birch-brooms in the tea. No Eastern Counties carriage shall bear me to
the pestiferous marshes of Essex or the dismal flats of Norfolk. There is
the South-Western. Hum! The Hampton Court line is pleasant; the Staines,
Slough, and Windsor delicious; but I fancy not the Waterloo Road on a
fine morning. I am undecided. Toss up again. Heads for the Great Western;
tails for the London and North-Western. Tails it is; and abandoning our
aërial flight, let us cast ourselves into yonder Hansom, and bid the
driver drive like mad to Euston Square, else we shall miss the seven
o’clock train.
This Hansom is a most dissipated vehicle, and has evidently been up all
night. One of its little silk window-curtains has been torn from its
fastenings and flutters in irregular festoons on the inward wall. The
cushions are powdered with cigar ashes; there is a theatrical pass-check,
and the thumb of a white kid glove, very dirty, lying at the back.
The long-legged horse with his ill-groomed coat, all hairs on end like
the fretful porcupine his quills, and his tail whisking with derisive
defiance in the face of the fare, carries his head on one side, foams at
the mouth, and is evidently a dissipated quadruped, guilty, I am afraid,
of every vice except hypocrisy. Of the last, certainly, he cannot be
accused, for he makes not the slightest secret of his propensity for
kicking, biting, gibbing, rearing, and plunging, a succession of which
gymnastic operations brings us, in an astonishingly brief space of time,
to George Street, Euston Square; where the cabman, who looks like a
livery-stable edition of Don Cæsar de Bazan, with a horse-cloth instead
of a mantle, tosses the coin given him into the air, catches it again,
informs me contemptuously that money will grow warm in my pocket if I
keep it there so long, and suddenly espying the remote possibility of a
fare in the extreme distance of the Hampstead Road, drives off—“tools”
off, as he calls it—as though the Powers of Darkness, with Lucifer and
Damagorgon at their head, were after him.
I think the Euston Square Terminus is, for its purpose, the handsomest
building I have ever seen, and I have seen a few railway stations. There
is nothing to compare to it in Paris, where the termini are garish,
stuccoed, flimsy-looking structures, half booths and half barracks.
Not Brussels, not Berlin, not Vienna, can show so stately a structure,
for a railway station, _bien entendu_; and it is only, perhaps, in St.
Petersburg, which seems to have been built with a direct reference to
the assumption of the Imperial crown at some future period by the King
of Brobdignag, that a building can be found—the Moscow Railway Terminus,
in fact—to equal in grandeur of appearance our columniated palace of the
iron road. But the Russian station, like all else in that “Empire of
Façades,” is deceptive: a magnificent delusion, a vast and splendid sham.
Of seeming marble without it is; within, but bad bricks and lath and
plaster.
[Illustration: PARLIAMENTARY TRAIN: PLATFORM OF THE LONDON AND
NORTH-WESTERN RAILWAY.]
_Open sesame!_ Let us pass the crowds of railway porters, who have not
much to do just now, and are inclined to lounge about with their hands
in their pockets, and to lean—in attitudes reminding the spectator of
the Grecian statues clad in green velveteen, and with white letters on
their collars—on their luggage trucks, for the passengers by the seven
o’clock train are not much addicted to arriving in cabs or carriages
which require to be unloaded, and there are very few shilling or sixpenny
gratuities to be earned by the porters, for the securing of a comfortable
corner seat with your back to the engine, or that inestimable comfort,
a place in a first-class carriage whose door the guard is good enough
to keep locked, and in which you can make yourself quite at home with a
bottle of sherry, some walnuts, and a quiet game at _écarté_ or _vingt
un_. The seven o’clock trainbands are not exactly of the class who drink
sherry and play cards; they are more given to selling walnuts than to
eating them. They are, for the most part, hard-faced, hard-handed,
poorly-clad creatures; men in patched, time-worn garments; women in
pinched bonnets and coarse shawls, carrying a plenitude of baskets and
bundles, but very slightly troubled with trunks or portmanteaus. You
might count a hundred heads and not one hat-box; of two hundred crowding
round the pay-place to purchase their third-class tickets for Manchester,
or Liverpool, or even further north, you would have to look and look
again, and perhaps vainly after all, for the possessor of a railway rug,
or even an extra overcoat. Umbrellas, indeed, are somewhat plentiful;
but they are not the slim, aristocratic trifles with ivory handles and
varnished covers—enchanter’s wands to ward off the spells of St. Swithin,
which moustached dandies daintily insert between the roof and the
hat-straps of first-class carriages. Third-class umbrellas are dubious
in colour, frequently patched, bulgy in the body, broken in the ribs,
and much given to absence from the nozzle. Swarming about the pay-place,
which their parents are anxiously investing, thirteen-and-fourpence or
sixteen-and-ninepence in hand, are crowds of third-class children. I am
constrained to acknowledge that the majority of these juvenile travellers
cannot be called handsome children, well-dressed children, even tolerably
good-looking children. Poor little wan faces you see here, overshadowed
by mis-shapen caps, and bonnets nine bauble square; poor little thin
hands, feebly clutching the scant gowns of their mothers; weazened little
bodies, shrunken little limbs, distorted often by early hardship, by the
penury which pounced on them—not in their cradles—they never had any—but
in the baker’s jacket in which they were wrapped when they were born,
and which will keep by them, their only faithful friend, until they die,
and are buried by the parish—poor ailing little children are these, and
among them who shall tell how many hungry little bellies! Ah! judges
of Amontillado sherry; crushers of walnuts with silver nut-crackers;
connoisseurs who prefer French to Spanish olives, and are curious
about the yellow seal; gay riders in padded chariots; proud cavaliers
of blood-horses, you don’t know how painfully and slowly, almost
agonisingly, the poor have to scrape, and save, and deny themselves the
necessaries of life, to gather together the penny-a-mile fare. It is a
long way to Liverpool, a long way to Manchester; the only passengers by
the seven o’clock train who can afford to treat the distance jauntily,
are the Irish paupers, who are in process of being passed to their
parish, and who will travel free. O! marvels of eleemosynary locomotion
from Euston Square to Ballyragget or Carrighmadhioul!
But hark! the train bell rings; there is a rush, and a trampling of feet,
and in a few seconds the vast hall is almost deserted. This spectacle
has made me somewhat melancholy, and I think, after all, that I will
patronise the nine o’clock express instead of the PARLIAMENTARY TRAIN.
Let us follow the crowd of third-class passengers on to the vast
platform. There the train awaits them, puffing, and snorting, and
champing its adamantine bit, like some great iron horse of Troy suddenly
gifted with life and power of locomotion. By the way, I wonder how that
same wooden horse we are supposed to read about in Homer, but study
far more frequently in the pages of Lemprière, or in the agreeable
metrical romance of Mr. Alexander Pope, really effected its entrance
into Ilium. Was it propelled on castors, on rollers, or on those
humble wooden wheels that quickened the march of the toy horse of our
nonage—the ligneous charger from Mr. Farley’s shop in Fleet Street,
painted bright cream-colour, with spots resembling red wafers stuck all
over him, a perpendicular mane, and a bushy tail? Very few first or even
second-class carriages are attached to the great morning train. The rare
exceptions seem to be placed there more as a graceful concession to the
gentilities, or the respectabilities, or the “gigabilities,” as Mr.
Carlyle would call them, than with any reference to their real utility
in a journey to the north. Who, indeed, among the bustling Anglo-Saxons,
almost breathless in their eagerness to travel the longest possible
distance in the shortest possible time, would care to pay first-class
fare for a trip to Manchester, which consumes ten mortal hours, when,
by the space-scorning express, the distance may be accomplished, at a
not unreasonable augmentation of fare, in something like five hours? So
the roomy six-seated chariots, with their arm-rests and head-rests, are
well nigh abandoned; and the wooden boxes, which appear to have been
specially designed by railway directors to teach second-class travellers,
who can afford to pay more than third-class fare, that they had much
better pay first-class, and go the entire animal (which, indeed, seeing
how abominable are our second-class carriages in England, is a far
preferable proceeding), are not much better tenanted. Some misanthropic
men, in Welsh wigs and fur caps with flaps turned down over the ears,
peer at us as we pass, pull up the window-frames captiously, as though
they suspected us of a design to intrude on their solitude, and, watch in
hand, call out in hoarse voices to the guard to warn him it is time the
train had started. What is the use of being in a hurry, gentlemen? you
will have plenty of breathing-time at Tring, and Watford, and Weedon, and
some five-and-twenty other stations, besides opportunities for observing
the beauties of nature at remote localities, where you will be quietly
shunted off on to a siding to allow the express to pass you by.
But what a contrast to the quietude of the scarcely-patronised first and
second-class _wagons_ are the great hearse-like caravans in which travel
the teeming hundreds who can afford to pay but a penny a mile! Enter
one of these human menageries where the occupants are stowed away with
little more courtesy or regard to their comfort than might be exemplified
by the master of the ceremonies of one of Mr. Wombwell’s vans. What a
hurly-burly; what a seething mass; what a scrambling for places; what a
shrill turmoil of women’s voices and children’s wailings, relieved, as
in the _Gospodin Pomilaïou_ (the Kyrie Eleison of the Russian churches),
by the deep bass voices of gruff men! What a motley assemblage of men,
women, and children, belonging to callings multifariously varied, yet
all marked with the homogeneous penny-a-mile stamp of poverty! Sailors
with bronzed faces and tarry hands, and those marvellous tarpaulin
pancake hats, stuck, in defiance of all the laws of gravity, at the
back of their heads; squat, squarely-built fellows, using strange and
occasionally not very polite language, much given to “skylarking” with
one another, but full of a simple, manly courtesy to all the females,
and marvellously kind to the babies and little children; gaunt American
sailors in red worsted shirts, with case-knives suspended to their belts,
taciturn men expectorating freely, and when they do condescend to address
themselves to speech, using the most astounding combination of adjective
adjurations, relating chiefly to their limbs and their organs of vision;
railway navvies going to work at some place down the line, and obligingly
franked thither for that purpose by the company; pretty servant-maids
going to see their relatives; Jew pedlars; Irish labourers in swarms;
soldiers on furlough, with the breast of their scarlet coatees open, and
disclosing beneath linen of an elaborate coarseness of texture—one might
fancy so many military penitents wearing hair tunics; other soldiers in
full uniform, with their knapsacks laid across their knees, and their
muskets—prudently divested of the transfixing bayonets—which the old
women in the carriage are marvellously afraid will “go off,” disposed
beside them, proceeding to Weedon barracks under the command of a staid
Scotch corporal, who reads a tract, “Grace for Grenadiers” or “Powder and
Piety,” and takes snuff; journeymen mechanics with their tool-baskets;
charwomen, servants out of place, stablemen, bricklayers’ labourers, and
shopboys.
[Illustration: PARLIAMENTARY TRAIN: INTERIOR OF A THIRD CLASS CARRIAGE.]