level. As eight o’clock chimes from the smoky-faced clock of the Horse
Guards, I try in vain (I have dismissed my shadowy friends) to people
the Mall with aristocratic visitants. Alas and indeed! the magnificent
promenade of the park, on which look the stately mansions of the nobles,
is pervaded by figures very mean, very poor and forlorn in appearance.
Little troops of girls and young women are coming from the direction of
Buckingham Palace and the Birdcage Walk, but all converging towards the
Duke of York’s column: that beacon to the great shores of Vanity Fair.
These are sempstresses and milliners’ workwomen, and are bound for the
great Dress Factories of the West End. Pinched faces, pale faces, eager
faces, sullen faces, peer from under the bonnets as they pass along
and up the steps. There are faces with large mild eyes, that seem to
wonder at the world and at its strange doings, and at the existence of a
Necessity (it must be a Necessity, you know), for Jane or Ellen to work
twelve hours a day; nay, in the full London season, work at her needle
not unfrequently all night, in order that the Countess or the Marchioness
may have her ball dress ready.
* * * * *
[Illustration: EIGHT O’CLOCK; OPENING SHOP.]
There is another ceremony performed with much clattering solemnity of
wooden panels, and iron bars, and stanchions, which occurs at eight
o’clock in the morning. ’Tis then that the shop-shutters are taken
down. The great “stores” and “magazines” of the principal thoroughfares
gradually open their eyes; apprentices, light-porters, and where the
staff of assistants is not very numerous, the shopmen, release the
imprisoned wares, and bid the sun shine on good family “souchong,”
“fresh Epping sausages,” “Beaufort collars,” “guinea capes,” “Eureka
shirts,” and “Alexandre harmoniums.” In the smaller thoroughfares, the
proprietor often dispenses with the aid of apprentice, light-porter, and
shopman—for the simple reason that he never possessed the services of any
assistants at all—and unostentatiously takes down the shutters of his
own chandler’s, green-grocer’s, tripe, or small stationery shop. In the
magnificent linendrapery establishments of Oxford and Regent Streets, the
vast shop-fronts, museums of fashion in plate-glass cases, offer a series
of animated _tableaux_ of _poses plastiques_ in the shape of young ladies
in morning costume, and young gentlemen in whiskers and white neckcloths,
faultlessly complete as to costume, with the exception that they are
yet in their shirt sleeves, who are accomplishing the difficult and
mysterious feat known as “dressing” the shop window. By their nimble and
practised hands the rich piled velvet mantles are displayed, the _moire_
and _glacé_ silks arranged in artful folds, the laces and gauzes, the
innumerable whim-whams and fribble-frabble of fashion, elaborately shown,
and to their best advantage.
Now, all over London, the shops start into new life. Butchers and bakers,
and candlestick makers, grocers and cheesemongers, and pastrycooks,
tailors, linendrapers, and milliners, crop up with mushroom-like
rapidity. But I must leave them, to revisit them in all their glory a few
hours later. Leave, too, the Park and its Mall, with the cows giving milk
of a decidedly metropolitan flavour, and the children and the nursemaids,
and the dilapidated dramatic authors reading the manuscripts of their
five-act tragedies to themselves, and occasionally reciting favourite
passages in deep diapason on the benches under the trees. Leave, too, the
London sparrows, and—would that we could leave it altogether—the London
smoke, which already begins to curl over and cover up the city like a
blanket, and which will not keep clear of the Mall, even at eight o’clock
in the morning.
NINE O’CLOCK A.M.—THE CLERKS AT THE BANK, AND THE BOATS ON THE RIVER.
It is nine o’clock, and London has breakfasted. Some unconsidered tens
of thousands have, it is true, already enjoyed with what appetite they
might their præ-prandial meal; the upper fifty thousand, again, have not
yet left their luxurious couches, and will not breakfast till ten, eleven
o’clock, noon; nay, there shall be sundry listless, languid members of
fast military clubs, dwellers among the tents of Jermyn Street, and the
high-priced second floors of Little Ryder Street, St. James’s, upon whom
one, two, and three o’clock in the afternoon shall be but as dawn, and
whose broiled bones and devilled kidneys shall scarcely be laid on the
damask breakfast-cloth before Sol is red in the western horizon.
I wish that, in this age so enamoured of statistical information,
when we must needs know how many loads of manure go to every acre of
turnip-field, and how many jail-birds are thrust into the black hole
_per mensem_ for fracturing their pannikins, or tearing their convict
jackets, that some M’Culloch or Caird would tabulate for me the amount of
provisions, solid and liquid, consumed at the breakfasts of London every
morning. I want to know how many thousand eggs are daily chipped, how
many of those embryo chickens are poached, and how many fried; how many
tons of quartern loaves are cut up to make bread-and-butter, thick and
thin; how many porkers have been sacrificed to provide the bacon rashers,
fat and streaky; what rivers have been drained, what fuel consumed, what
mounds of salt employed, what volumes of smoke emitted, to catch and cure
the finny haddocks and the Yarmouth bloaters, that grace our morning
repast. Say, too, Crosse and Blackwell, what multitudinous demands
are matutinally made on thee for pots of anchovy paste and preserved
tongue, covered with that circular layer—abominable disc!—of oleaginous
nastiness, apparently composed of rancid pomatum, but technically known
as clarified butter, and yet not so nasty as that adipose horror that
surrounds the truffle bedecked _pâté de foie gras_. Say, Elizabeth
Lazenby, how many hundred bottles of thy sauce (none of which are genuine
unless signed by thee) are in request to give a relish to cold meat,
game, and fish. Mysteries upon mysteries are there connected with nine
o’clock breakfasts. Queries upon queries suggest themselves to the
inquisitive mind. Speculations upon speculations present themselves to
him who is observant. Are those eggs we see in the coffee-shop windows,
by the side of the lean chop with a curly tail, the teapot with the
broken spout, and the boulder-looking kidneys, ever eaten, and if so,
what secret do the coffee-shop proprietors possess of keeping them from
entire decomposition? For I have watched these eggs for weeks together,
and known them by bits of straw and flecks of dirt mucilaginously
adhering to their shells, to be the selfsame eggs; yet when I have
entered the unpretending house of refreshment, and ordered “tea and an
egg,” I have seen the agile but dingy handmaiden swiftly approach the
window, slide the glass panel back with nimble (though dusky) fingers,
convey an egg to the mysterious kitchen in the background, and in a few
minutes place the edible before me boiled, yet with sufficient marks of
the straw upon it to enable me to discern my ancient friend. Who, again,
invented muffins?—and what becomes of all the cold crossbuns after Good
Friday? I never saw a crossbun on Holy Saturday, and I believe the boy
most addicted to saccharine dainties would scorn one.
So hungry London breakfasts, but not uniformly well, at nine o’clock in
the morning. In quietly grim squares, in the semi-aristocratic North-West
End—I don’t mean Russell and Bloomsbury, but Gordon, Tavistock, Queen,
and Camden, on the one side, and Manchester and Portman on the other—the
nine o’clock breakfast takes place in the vast comfortless dining-room,
with the shining side-board (purchased at the sale of Sir Hector Ajacks,
the great Indian general’s, effects), and the portrait of the master of
the house (Debenham Storr, R.A., pinxit), crimson curtain and column in
foreground, dessert plate, cut orange, and—supposed—silver hand-bell in
front ditto. This is the sort of room where there is a Turkey carpet that
has been purchased at the East India Company’s sale rooms, in Billiter
Street, and which went cheap because there was a hole in one corner,
carefully darned subsequently by the mistress of the house. The master
comes down stairs gravely, with a bald head—the thin, gray hair carefully
brushed over the temples, and a duffel dressing-gown. He spends five
minutes in his “study,” behind the breakfast dining-room; not, goodness
knows, to consult the uncut books on the shelves—uncomfortable works,
like Helps’s “Friends in Council,” that scrap of rusty BACON, and Mr.
Harriet Martineau’s “India,” are among the number; but to break the seals
of the letters ranged for him on the leather-covered table—he reads
his correspondence at breakfast—to unlock, perchance, one drawer, take
out his cheque-book, and give it one hasty flutter, one loving glance,
and to catch up and snuggle beneath his arm the copy of the “Times”
newspaper, erst damped, but since aired at the kitchen fire, which the
newsvender’s boy dropped an hour since down the area. It may be, too,
that he goes into that uselessly (to him) book-furnished room, because
he thinks it a good, a grand, a respectable thing to have a “study” at
all. This is the sort of house where they keep a footman, single-handed—a
dull knave, who no more resembles the resplendent flunkey of Eaton Square
or Westbourne Terrace, than does the cotton-stockinged “greencoat” of
the minor theatres; who is told that he must wear a morning jacket, and
who accoutres himself in a striped jerkin, baggy in the back and soiled
at the elbows, that makes him look like an hostler, related, on the
mother’s side, to a Merry Andrew. The mistress of the house comes down
to nine o’clock breakfast, jingling the keys in her little basket, and
with anxious pre-occupation mantling from her _guipure_ collar to her
false front, for those fatal crimson housekeeping books are to be audited
this morning, and she is nervous. The girls come down in brown-holland
jackets and smartly dowdy skirts, dubious as to the state of their back
hair; the eldest daughter frowning after her last night’s course of
theology (intermingled with the last novel from Mr. Mudie’s). As a rule,
the young ladies are very ill-tempered; and, equally as a rule, there
is always one luckless young maiden in a family of grown-up daughters
who comes down to breakfast with her stockings down at heel, and is
sternly reprimanded during breakfast because one of her shoes comes off
under the table; he who denounces her being her younger brother, the
lout in the jacket, with the surreptitious peg-top in his pocket, who
attends the day-school of the London University, and cribs his sisters’
Berlin-wool canvas to mend his Serpentine yacht sails with. The children
too old to breakfast in the nursery come down gawky, awkward, tumbling,
and discontented, for they are as yet considered too young to partake
of the frizzled bits of bacon which are curling themselves in scorched
agony on the iron footman before the grate, the muffins, which sodden in
yellow butter-pools in the Minton plates on the severely-creased damask
table-cloth, or the dry toast which, shrivelled and forbidding, grins
from between the Sheffield-plated bars of the rack. The servants come
in, not to morning breakfast, but to morning prayers. The housemaid has
just concluded her morning flirtation with the baker; the cook has been
crying over “Fatherless Fanny.” The master of the house reads prayers
in a harsh, grating voice, and Miss Charlotte, aged thirteen, is sent
to her bed-room, with prospects of additional punishment, for eating
her curl-papers during matins. The first organ-grinder arrives in the
square during breakfast; and the master of the house grimly reproves the
children who are beginning to execute involuntary polkas on their chairs,
and glowers at the governess—she is such a meek young creature, marked
with the small-pox, that I did not think it worth while to mention her
before—who manifests symptoms of beating her sad head to the music. How
happy, at least how relieved, everybody is when the master exchanges
his duffel dressing-gown for a blue body-coat, takes his umbrella, and
drives off in his brougham to the city or Somerset House! The children
are glad to go to their lessons, though they hate _them_ at most times,
passably. Miss Meek, the governess, is glad to install herself in her
school-room, and grind “Mangnall’s Questions,” and “Blair’s Preceptor,”
till the children’s dinner, at one o’clock; though she would, perhaps,
prefer shutting herself up in her own room and having a good cry. The
mistress finds consolation, too, in going downstairs and quarrelling
with the cook, and then going upstairs and being quarrelled with by the
nurse. Besides, there will be plenty of time for shopping before Mr.
M. comes home. The girls are delighted that cross papa is away. Papa
always wants to know what the letters are about which they write at the
little walnut-tree tables with the twisted legs. Papa objects to the
time wasted in working the application collars. Papa calls novel reading
and pianoforte practice “stuff,” with a very naughty adjective prefixed
thereunto. This is the sort of house that is neatly, solidly furnished
from top to toe, with every modern convenience and improvement: with
bath-rooms, conservatories, ice cellars; with patent grates, patent
door-handles, dish-lifts, asbestos stoves, gas cooking ranges, and
excruciatingly complicated ventilatory contrivances; and this is also the
sort of house where, with all the conveniences I have mentioned, every
living soul who inhabits it is uncomfortable.
As the clock strikes nine, you see the last school-children flock in to
the narrow alley behind St. Martin’s Lane, hard by the Lowther Arcade,
and leading to the national schools. They have been romping and playing
in the street this half-hour; and it was but the iron tongue of St.
Martin that interrupted that impending fight between the young brothers
Puddicomb, from King Street, Long Acre, who are always fighting, and
that famous clapper-clawing match between Polly Briggs and Susey Wright.
At the last stroke of nine there hurries into the school corridor a
comely female teacher in a green plaid shawl: and, woe be unto her! nine
has struck full ten minutes, when the inevitable laggard of every school
appears, half skurrying, half crawling, her terror combating with her
sluggishness, from the direction of Leicester Square. She is a gaunt,
awkward girl, in a “flibberty-flobberty” hat, a skimping gray cape, with
thunder-and-lightning buttons, an absurdly short skirt, and lace-edged
trousers, that trail over her sandaled shoes. Add to this her slate
and satchel, and she is complete. When will parents cease, I wonder,
to attire their children in this ridiculous and preposterous manner.
Hannah (her name is Hannah, for certain!) left her home in Bear Street in
excellent time for school; but she has dawdled, and loitered, and gloated
over every sweetstuff and picture shop, and exchanged languid repartees
with rude boys. She will be kept in to a certainty this afternoon, will
Hannah!
Now is the matutinal occupation of the milkwoman nearly gone; her last
cries of “Milk, ho!” die away in faint echoes, and she might reasonably
be supposed to enjoy a holiday till the afternoon’s milk for tea were
required; but not so. To distant dairies she hies, and to all appearances
occupies herself in scrubbing her milk pails till three o’clock. I have
a great affection (platonic) for milkwomen. I should like to go down
to Wales and see them when they are at home. What clean white cotton
stockings they wear, on—no, not their legs—on the posts which support
their robust torsos! How strong they are! There are many I should be
happy to back, and for no inconsiderable trifle either, to thrash Ben
Gaunt. Did you ever know any one who courted a milkwoman? Was there ever
a milkwoman married, besides Madam Vestris, in the “Wonderful Woman?”
Yes; I love them—their burly forms; their mahogany faces, handsomely
veneered by wind and weather; their coarse straw bonnets flattened at
the top; their manly lace-up boots, and those wonderful mantles on
their shoulders, which are neither shawl, tippet, cape nor scarf, but a
compound of all, and are of equally puzzling colour and patterns.
The postman is breakfasting in the interval between the eight and the ten
o’clock delivery. Does he take his scarlet tunic off when he breakfasts?
Does he beguile the short hour of refreshment by reading, between snaps
of bread and butter and gulps of coffee, short extracts from “A Double
Knock at the Postman’s Conscience,” by the Reverend Mr. Davis, Ordinary
of Newgate? For if the postman reads not during breakfast-time, I am
wholly at a loss to know, dog-tired as he must be when he comes home from
his rounds at night, when he can find time for pursuing his literary
studies. By the way, where does the postman lodge? I have occupied
apartments in the same house with a policeman; I was once aware of the
private residence of a man who served writs; and I have taken tea in
the parlour of the Pandean pipes to a Punch-and-Judy; but I never knew
personally the abode of a postman. Mr. Sculthorpe and Mr. Peacock know
them but too frequently, to the postman’s cost.
Nine o’clock, and the _grande armée_ of “musicianers” debouches from
Spitalfields, and Leather Lane, Holborn, and far-off Clerkenwell, and,
in compact columns, move westward. Nine o’clock, and the sonorous cry
of “Old clo’!” is heard in sequestered streets chiefly inhabited by
bachelors. Nine o’clock, and another _grande armée_ veers through Temple
Bar, charges down Holborn Hill, escalades Finsbury, captures Cornhill by
a dexterous flank movement, and sits down and invests the Bank of England
in regular form. This is London going to business in the city.
[Illustration: NINE O’CLOCK A.M.: OMNIBUSES AT THE BANK.]
[Illustration: NINE O’CLOCK A.M.: PENNY STEAMBOATS ALONGSIDE THE PIER AT
LONDON BRIDGE.]
If the morning be fine, the pavement of the Strand and Fleet Street looks
quite radiant with the spruce clerks walking down to their offices,
governmental, financial, and commercial. Marvellous young bucks some
of them are. These are the customers, you see at a glance, whom the
resplendent wares in the hosiers’ shops attract, and in whom those wary
industrials find avid customers. These are the dashing young parties who
purchase the pea-green, the orange, and the rose-pink gloves; the crimson
braces, the kaleidoscopic shirt-studs, the shirts embroidered with
dahlias, deaths’ heads, race-horses, sun-flowers, and ballet-girls; the
horseshoe, fox-head, pewter-pot-and-crossed-pipes, willow-pattern-plate,
and knife-and-fork pins. These are the glasses of city fashion, and the
mould of city form, for whom the legions of fourteen, of fifteen, of
sixteen, and of seventeen shilling trousers, all unrivalled, patented,
and warranted, are made; for these ingenious youths coats with strange
names are devised, scarves and shawls of wondrous pattern and texture
despatched from distant Manchester and Paisley. For them the shiniest
of hats, the knobbiest of sticks, gleam through shop-windows; for them
the geniuses of “all-round collars” invent every week fresh yokes of
starched linen, pleasant instruments of torture, reminding us equally
of the English pillory, the Chinese cangue, the Spanish garotte, the
French _lucarne_ to the guillotine (that window from which the criminal
looks out into eternity), and the homely and cosmopolitan dog-collar!
There are some of these gay clerks who go down to their offices with
roses at their button-holes, and with cigars in their mouths; there are
some who wear peg-top trousers, chin-tufts, eye-glasses, and varnished
boots. These mostly turn off in the Strand, and are in the Admiralty or
Somerset House. As for the government clerks of the extreme West-end—the
patricians of the Home and Foreign Offices—the bureaucrats of the
Circumlocution Office, in a word—_they_ ride down to Whitehall or
Downing Street in broughams or on park hacks. Catch them in omnibuses,
or walking on the vulgar pavement, forsooth! The flags of Regent Street
they might indeed tread gingerly, at three o’clock in the afternoon; but
the Strand, and at nine o’clock in the morning! Forbid it, gentility! I
observe—to return to the clerks who are bending citywards—that the most
luxuriant whiskers belong to the Bank of England. I believe that there
are even whisker clubs in that great national institution, where prizes
are given for the best pair of _favoris_ grown without macassar. You may,
as a general rule, distinguish government from commercial clerks by the
stern repudiation of the razor, as applied to the beard and moustaches,
by the former; and again I may remark, that the prize for the thinnest
and most dandy-looking umbrellas must be awarded, as of right, to the
clerks in the East India House—mostly themselves slim, natty gentlemen,
of jaunty appearance, who are all supposed to have had tender affairs
with the widows of East India colonels. You may know the cashiers in the
private banking houses by their white hats and buff waistcoats; you may
know the stock-brokers by their careering up Ludgate Hill in dog-carts,
and occasionally tandems, and by the pervading sporting appearance of
their costume; you may know the Jewish commission agents by their flashy
broughams, with lapdogs and ladies in crinoline beside them; you may know
the sugar-bakers and the soap-boilers by the comfortable double-bodied
carriages with fat horses in which they roll along; you may know the
Manchester warehousemen by their wearing gaiters, always carrying their
hands in their pockets, and frequently slipping into recondite city
taverns up darksome alleys, on their way to Cheapside, to make a quiet
bet or so on the Chester Cup or the Liverpool Steeplechase; you may know,
finally, the men with a million of money, or thereabouts, by their being
ordinarily very shabby, and by their wearing shocking bad hats, which
have seemingly never been brushed, on the backs of their heads.
“Every road,” says the proverb, “leads to Rome;” every commercial
ways leads to the Bank of England. And there, in the midst of that
heterogeneous architectural jumble between the Bank of England itself,
the Royal Exchange, the Poultry, Cornhill, and the Globe Insurance
Office, the vast train of omnibuses, that have come from the West and
that have come from the East—that have been rumbling along the Macadam
while I was prosing on the pedestrians—with another great army of clerk
martyrs outside and inside, their knees drawn up to their chins, and
their chins resting on their umbrella handles, set down their loads of
cash-book and ledger fillers. What an incalculable mass of figures must
there be collected in those commercial heads! What legions of _£. s. d._!
What a chaos of cash debtor, contra creditor, bills payable, and bills
receivable; waste-books, day-books, cash-books, and journals; insurance
policies, brokerage, agio, tare and tret, dock warrants, and general
commercial bedevilment! They file off to their several avocations, to
spin money for others, often, poor fellows, while they themselves are
blest with but meagre stipends. They plod away to their gloomy wharves
and hard-hearted counting-houses, where the chains from great cranes wind
round their bodies, and they dance hornpipes in bill-file and cash-box
fetters, and the mahogany of the desks enters into their souls. Upon my
word, I think if I were doomed to clerkdom, that I should run away and
enlist; but that would avail me little, for I am equally certain that,
were I a grenadier, and my commanding officer made me mount guard, that I
should pop my musket into the sentry-box and run away too.