announcements relative to charity dinners, and youths who have absconded
from their friends. Within that eternally-gaslit office is the place
of business of the Eumenides of finance, whose grim duty it is to
pursue forgers and bank-robbers through the world. There dwell, for
thief-catching purposes, the terrible Forresters. Not by that door in
Charlotte Row. Don’t you see the handsome carriage, with the fat, brown,
gaudily harnessed horses drawn up before it, and the superb powdered
footmen sucking their bamboo-cane tops? How odd it is that you can always
tell the difference between a footman appertaining to one of the high
civic dignitaries, and the flunkey of a real patrician. The liveries, on
a drawing-room day, for instance, are equally rich, equally extravagant
in decoration, and absurd in fashion; both servitors sport equally large
cocked-hats, equally long canes, and have an equal amount of powder
dredged over their heads; yet, on either flunkey’s brow are the stigmata
“East” or “West” of Temple Bar, stamped as legibly as the brand of Cain.
The door in Charlotte Row is his Lordship’s private entrance; and her
Ladyship is very probably at this moment preparing to go out for an
airing. Not by that other lateral door in George Street—that low-browed,
forbidding-looking portal. That is the prisoners’ entrance. There the
grim cellular van brings and waits for the victims of Themis. There it
sets down and takes up, if not the chief actors, at least those who are
most deeply interested in the moving drama which is every day enacted in
the police tribunal of the Mansion House.
[Illustration: NOON: THE JUSTICE-ROOM AT THE MANSION HOUSE.]
So—up this broad, roomy flight of granite steps on the Lombard Street
side of the Mansion House frontage—on through a double barrier of
swing-doors at the corresponding angle beneath the portico; and in less
time than it would take to accept a bill (an operation in comparison to
the celerity of which a pig’s whisper is an age, and the pronunciation
of the mystic words “Jack Robinson” a life-long task), we are within
the sanctuary of municipal justice. The first thing that strikes the
stranger, accustomed as he may be to frequenting other police-courts,
is the unwonted courtesy of the officials, and their gorgeous costumes.
About Bow Street, Lambeth, Westminster, there hangs an indefinable but
pervading miasma of meanness and squalor. A settled mildew seems to
infest the walls and ceiling, a chronic dust to mantle the furniture
and flooring. No one connected with the court, officially or otherwise,
with the single exception of the Magistrate—who, always smug and clean
shaven, and in a checked morning neckerchief and a high shirt collar,
looks like a judicial edition of Major Pendennis—seems to have had his
clothes brushed for a week or his boots blacked for a month. A dreadful
jail-bird odour ascends from the ill-favoured auditory. The policemen
are shabby in attire and morose in manner. The buckles of their belts
are dull, and their buttons tarnished. They hustle you hither and
thither, and order you in or out in a manner most distressing to your
nerves; and the gloomy usher thrusts a ragged Testament into your hands,
and swears you as though he were swearing _at_ you. But at the Mansion
House there is a bluff, easy-going, turtle-and-venison-fed politeness
generally manifest. You enter and you emerge from the court without being
elbowed or shoved. The city policemen are more substantial-looking,
well to do, and better natured men than their metropolitan _confrères_.
Some of them have the appearance of small freeholders, and others, I am
sure, have snug sums in the savings’ banks. As to the jailers, ushers,
court-keepers, warrant-officers, marshalmen, and other multifarious
hangers-on of civic justice, they are mostly men of mature age, rosy,
bald and white-headed sages, who remember Sir John Key and the great
Sir Claudius Hunter, and mind the time when Mr. Alderman Wood rode on
horseback at the side of Queen Caroline’s hearse, on the occasion of
the passage of that injured lady’s funeral procession through the city.
As to their attire, it is positively—if I may be allowed the use of a
barbarism—“splendiferous.” Stout broadcloth, bright gilt buttons, with
elaborate chasings of civic heraldry, scarlet collars, with deep gold
lace: none of your paltry blue blanketing, horn buttons, and worsted
gloves. No doubt, when in full uniform, the “splendiferous” functionaries
all wear cocked-hats. Maybe, feathers. There is one weazened creature who
flits in and out of a side door, to the left of the Lord Mayor’s chair,
and is perpetually handing up printed forms to his Lordship or to the
chief clerk. I don’t know exactly what he is, whether the Lord Mayor’s
butler, or the sword-bearer’s uncle, or the city-marshal’s grandfather,
or the water-bailiff’s son-in-law; but the front of his coat is profusely
ornamented with bars of gold braid, like pokers from Crœsus’s kitchen,
and on his shoulders he wears a pair of state epaulettes, the which give
him somewhat of a military appearance, and, contrasting with his civilian
spectacles and white neckcloth, would produce an effect positively
sublime if it were not irresistibly ludicrous. The home of Beadledom—its
last home, I am afraid, after the exhaustion of the Windsor uniform, and
that of the Elder Brethren of the Trinity House—will be at the Mansion
House.
The architect who has contrived the new Justice-room in this stately
edifice must have been, if not a man of genius, at least one of original
conceptions. The old police-court—sacred to the manes of Mr. Hobler—was
simply a Cave of Trophonius and Den of Despair. There was no light in
it—“only darkness visible;” and when you peered at the misty prisoner
in the dock, you were always reminded of Captain Macheath in his cell,
when the inhuman Mr. Lockit wouldn’t allow him any more candles, and
threatened to clap on extra fetters in default of an immediate supply on
the captain’s part of “garnish” or jail fees. But the Palladio who has
arisen to remedy these defects has contrived to introduce a considerable
amount of light—only it labours under the trifling disadvantage of being
all in the wrong place. The Lord Mayor, with his back to the window,
sits in a reflected light, just as does Wilkie’s portrait of the Duke of
York; and the fine effect of the city arms carved on his chair, to say
nothing of his Lordship’s gold chain and furred robe, is thereby totally
lost. Mr. Goodman and the clerks, who are all very gentlemanly-looking
individuals, much given to all-round collars and parting their hair down
the middle, fill up commitments and make out summonses in a puzzling
haze of chiaro oscuro; the reporters are compelled to pore over their
“Times” with their noses close to the paper (for no one ever saw a police
reporter do anything save read the newspaper, though we are sure to read
a verbatim narrative of the case in which we are interested next day),
and the general audience is lost in a Cimmerian gloom. To make amends,
there is plenty of light on the ceiling, and some liberal patches of
it on the walls, and a generous distribution of its bounty on the bald
heads, golden epaulettes, and scarlet collars of the marshalmen. We can’t
have everything we want, not even in the way of Light. Let us be thankful
that there is some of it about, even as it behoves us to be exceedingly
grateful that there is such a vast amount of wealth in the world. Other
people possess it—only, we don’t.
This, then, is the justice-room of the Mansion House. I have not given
you, _seriatim_, a George Robins’s catalogue of its contents, but by bits
and bits I trust you will have been enabled to form a tolerably correct
mind-picture of its contents. My Lord Mayor in the chair, clerks before
him, reporters to the right, marshalmen left; spectacled official at the
desk in the left-hand corner—the summoning officer, I think—audience not
too tightly packed into a neat pen at the back of the court; dock in the
centre, and the prisoner—Ah! the prisoner!
Did it never strike you, in a criminal court of assize—“the judges all
ranged, a terrible show,” the solemn clerk of the arraigns gazing over
the indictment, the spectators almost breathless with excited curiosity,
rays from opera glasses refracted from the gallery, Regent Street bonnets
and artificial flowers relieving the dark mass of the menfolk’s dress,
the bar bewigged, the eloquent advocate for the defence thundering forth
genteel philippics against the eloquent counsel for the prosecution—did
it never strike you, I say, what a terrible fuss and bother, and calling
on Jupiter to lift a wagon wheel out of a rut, what a waste of words,
and show, and ceremonial all this became, when its object, the End to
all these imposing means, was one miserable creature in the dock, with
spikes, and rue, and rosemary before him, accused of having purloined
a quart pot? As for the prisoner who is this day arraigned before the
mighty Lord Mayor—but first stand on tiptoe. There he is, God help him
and us all! a miserable, weazened, ragged, unkempt child, whose head, the
police reports will tell us to-morrow, “scarcely reached to the railing
of the dock.” He has been caught picking pockets. It is not his first,
his second, his third offence. He is an incorrigible thief. The great
Lord Mayor tells him so with a shake of his fine head of hair. He must
go to jail. To jail with him. He has been there before. It is the only
home he ever had. It is his preparatory school for the hulks. The jail
nursing-mother to thousands, and not so stony-hearted a step-mother as
the streets. He is nobody’s child, nobody save the police knows anything
about him, he lives nowhere; but in the eyes of the law he is somebody.
He is a figure in a tabular statement, a neat item to finish a column in
a report, withal. He is somebody to Colonel Jebb and Mr. Capper of the
Home Office, and, in the end, the Ordinary of Newgate, the sheriffs, and,
especially, somebody to CALCRAFT. He is somebody to whip, somebody to
put to the crank, and into “punishment jackets,” and to “deprive of his
bed and gas,” and gag, and drench with water, and choke with salt, and
otherwise torture _à la mode de_ Birmingham (Austin’s improved method),
somebody to build castellated jails for, somebody to transport, somebody
to hang.
There are reformatories, you say, for such as these. Yes, those admirable
institutions do exist; but do you know, O easily-satisfied optimist!
that police magistrates every day deplore that reformatories, niggardly
subsidised by a State grudging in every thing but jails, and gyves, and
gibbets, are nine tenths of them full, and can receive no more inmates,
even though recommended to them by “the proper authorities?” But the
streets are fuller still of strayed lambs, and though wolves devour them
by the score each day, the tainted flock of lost ones still increases and
increases.
I must tell you, that before the “case of wipes,” as an irreverent
bystander called the _procès_ of the pickpocket, was gone into (a
good-for-nothing rascal that _filou_, deservedly punished, of course),
what are called the night charges were disposed of. As I shall have
something to say of the manners and customs of these night charges
at another hour in the morning and in another place, I will content
myself with informing you now, that a blue bonnet and black silk velvet
mantle, charged with being drunk and disorderly in Cheapside the night
before, were set at liberty without pecuniary mulct, it being her, or
their, first offence; but a white hat with a black band, surmounting
a rough coat, cord trousers, and Balbriggan boots, who had fought
four omnibus conductors, broken eighteen panes of glass, demolished
sundry waiters, and seriously damaged the beadle of the Royal Exchange
(off duty, and enjoying the _dulce deripere in loco_ in the shape of
cold whiskey-and-water in a shady tavern somewhere up a court of the
Poultry)—all in consequence of their (or his) refusal to pay for a bottle
of soda-water, was fined in heavy sums—the aggregate cost of his whistle
being about six pounds. The white hat was very penitent, and looked (the
face under it likewise) very haggard and tired, and, in addition to his,
or its, or their penalty, munificently contributed half a sovereign to
the poor box. My Lord Mayor was severe but paternal, and hoped with
benignant austerity that he might never see the white hat there again;
in which hope, and on his part, I daresay the white hat most cordially
joined.
I never could make out what they are always doing with paupers at the
Mansion House. I never pay his Lordship a visit without finding a bevy
of the poor things pottering about in a corner under the care of some
workhouse official, and being ultimately called up to be exorcised or
excommunicated, or, at all events, to have something done to them, under
the New Poor Law Act. This morning there are at least a dozen of them,
forlorn, decrepit, shame-faced, little old men, cowering and shivering,
although the day is warm enough, in their uncomfortable-looking gray
suits. Pauper females seem to be at a discount at the Mansion House,
save when, brazen-faced, blear-eyed, and dishevelled, they are dragged
in droves to the bar to be committed to Holloway prison, for a month’s
hard labour, for shivering innumerable panes of glass, throwing cataracts
of gruel about, and expressing an earnest desire to lacerate with sharp
cutlery the abdominal economy of the master of the City of London Union.
Of incarnations of male impecuniosity, there is a lamentable plenty and
to spare.
The pickpocket is succeeded by a distinguished burglar, well known
in political—I beg pardon, in police—circles. There is no absolute
charge of felony against him at present, and the only cause for his
appearance to-day is his having been unfortunate enough to fall in
with an acquaintance, who knew him by sight, in the shape of a city
police-constable, who forthwith took him into custody for roaming about
with intent to commit a felony. My Lord having heard a brief biographical
sketch of his career, and being satisfied that he is a “man of mark”
in a felonious point of view, sends him to Holloway for three months,
which, considering that the fellow has committed, this time, at least,
no absolute crime, seems, at the first blush, something very like a
gross perversion of justice, and an unwarrantable interference with the
liberty of the subject. When subsequently, however, I gather that a few
inconsiderable trifles, such as a “jemmy,” a bunch of skeleton keys, a
“knuckle duster,” and a piece of wax candle, all articles sufficiently
indicative of the housebreaker’s stock-in-trade, have been found in his
possession, I cease to quarrel with the decision, and confess that my
burglarious friend’s incarceration, if not in strict accordance with law,
is based on very sound principles of equity. After the housebreaker,
there are two beggar women and a troop of ragged children—twenty-one
days; and a most pitiable sight to see and hear—beggar woman, children,
and sentence, and their state of life into which it has _not_ pleased
Heaven to call, but cruel and perverse man to send them. Then an Irish
tailor who has had a slight dispute with his wife the night before, and
has corporeally chastised her with a hot goose—a tailor’s goose, be it
understood—to the extent of all but fracturing her skull. He is sent for
four months’ hard labour, which is rather a pleasurable thing to hear,
although I should derive infinitely more delectation from the sentence if
it included a sound thrashing.
But, holloa! we have been here three-quarters of an hour, and it is
close upon one o’clock. Come, my red-whiskered friend, I think we have
had enough of the Mansion House Justice-room. Let us make a bow to his
Lordship, and evaporate. You want some lunch, you say—you are hungry now;
well, let us go and lunch accordingly; but where?
I mentioned Garraway’s and the Cock. There is the Anti-Gallican, famous
for soups. There is Birch’s, with real turtle, fit for Olympian deities
to regale upon. There is Joe’s in Finch Lane, if you feel disposed for
chop or steak, sausage or bacon, and like to see it cooked yourself
on a Brobdignagian gridiron. No: you want something simple, something
immediate; well, then, let us go to the Bay Tree.
I never knew exactly the name of the street in which the Bay Tree is
situated. I know you go down a narrow lane, and that you will suddenly
come upon it, as a jack-in-the-box suddenly comes upon you. The first
time I was taken there was by a friend, who, just prior to our arrival
at the house of refection, took me up a dark entry, showed me a small
court-yard, and, at its extremity, a handsome-looking stone building.
_That is Rothschild’s_, he said, and I thought I should have fainted. I
am not a City man, and when I come eastward, it is merely (of course) to
make a morning call on my friend the Governor of the Bank of England, or
the Secretary for India for the time being, at his palace in Leadenhall
Street. When I travel in foreign parts, my brougham (of course) takes
me to the London Bridge Terminus. Authors never come into the City
now-a-days, save to visit their bankers or their publishers. Authors ride
blood horses, dine with dukes, and earn ten thousand a year. Such, at
least, is the amount of their income surmised to be by the Commissioners
of Income Tax, when they assess them arbitrarily and at such a figure
their opposing creditors declare their revenue should be estimated, when
they petition the Court for the Relief of Insolvent Debtors.
I never sat down in the Bay Tree; though its premises include, I believe,
vast apartments for smoking and punch-bibbing purposes. I never looked
one of the innumerable assistants (are they barmen or barmaids?) in the
face. I was always in such a hurry. All I know of the establishment is,
that it is a capital place to lunch at, and that everything is very
excellent and very cheap; and that the thousands who resort to it between
eleven and three, always seem to be in as desperate a hurry as I am.
ONE P.M.—DOCK LONDON AND DINING LONDON.
This modest series of papers brought me, at the time of their
composition, into great trouble, which was very nearly resulting in my
complete discomfiture. Perhaps the severest of my trials was having to
write the book at all, possessing, as is my misfortune, of course, a
constitutional disinclination for the avocation to which I have devoted
myself (as a _gagne pain_, or bread-winning mean). I didn’t so much mind
the ladies and gentlemen, who, since the commencement of the periodical
in which these articles were originally published—ladies and gentlemen
personally quite unknown to me—who overwhelmed me with correspondence;
some denouncing, others upbraiding, many ridiculing, and a few—a
very few—eulogising yours to command. I didn’t so much object to the
attentions of those professional begging-letter writers, who are good
enough to include authors in their list of possible contributaries, and
who were profuse lately in passionate appeals (in bold, clerkly hands)
for pecuniary assistance; for though, like Bardolph, I have nothing, and
cannot even coin my nose for guineas, or my blood for drachmas, it is
not the less flattering to a man’s minor vanities to receive a begging
letter. I can imagine an old pauper out for a holiday, coming home to
the workhouse, quite elated at having been accosted in the street by a
mendicant, and asked for a halfpenny. I could bear with equanimity—nay,
could afford to smile at—the people who went about saying things (who
_are_ the people who go about saying things, I wonder!) who ingeniously
circulated reports that I was dead; that I wrote these papers under a
pseudonym; that they were plagiarisms from some others written twenty
years ago; and that I never wrote them at all. I disregarded such
insinuations serenely; for who among us is exempt from such bald chat?
The very stupidest have their Boswells—the very meanest have those to
envy them, as well as the Great and Learned! There are people at this
very moment, who are going about saying that Jones has pawned his plate,
that the bailiffs are in Thompson’s country house, that Robinson has
written himself out, that Brown has run away with Jenkins’s wife, that
Muggins has taken to brandy-and-water, that Simpkins murdered Eliza
Grimwood, that Larkins cut Thistlewood’s head off, and that Podgers
was tried at the Old Bailey, in the year ’thirty-five, for an attempt
to set the Thames on fire. But I was infinitely harassed while the
clock was ticking periodically—the efforts I had to make to keep it
from running down altogether!—by the great plague of “Suggesters.” From
the metropolitan and suburban postal districts, from all parts of the
United Kingdom—the United Kingdom, pshaw! from the Continent generally,
and from across the broad Atlantic (fortunately, the return mail from
Australia was not yet due)—suggestions poured in as thickly as letters of
congratulation on one who has just inherited a vast fortune. If there had
been five hundred in lieu of four-and-twenty hours in “Twice Round the
Clock,” the Great Suggestions I received had stomach for them all. The
Suggesters would take no denial: I was bound under terrific penalties to
adopt, endorse, carry out, their hints,—else would they play the dickens
with me. I _must_ have a sing-song meeting for nine p.m.; the committee
of a burial club at ten; the dissecting-room of an hospital at eleven; a
postal receiving-house, a lawyer’s office, a rag, bones, and bottle shop,
the tollgate of Waterloo Bridge, and the interior of a Hammersmith ’bus,
at some hour or other of the day or night. The Suggestions were oral as
well as written. Strange men darted up on me from by-streets, caught at
my button with trembling fingers, told me in husky tones of their vast
metropolitan experience, and impressed on me the necessity of a graphic
tableau of Joe Perks, the sporting barber’s, at one o’clock in the
morning. Low-browed merchants popped from shady shell-fish shops, and,
pointing to huge lobsters, asked where they could send the crustaceous
delicacies with their compliments, and how excellent a thing it would
be to give a view of the aristocracy supping at Whelks’s celebrated
oyster and kippered salmon warehouse after the play. And, finally, a shy
acquaintance of mine, with a face like an over-ripe Stilton cheese, and
remotely connected with the Corporation of London—he may be, for aught I
know, a ticket-porter in Doctors’ Commons, or a hanger-on to the water
bailiff—favoured me with an occult inuendo that a word-picture of the
Court of Common Council will be the very thing for four p.m., fluttering
before my dazzled eyes a phantom ticket for the Guildhall banquet. In
vain I endeavoured to convince these respectable Suggesters, that the
papers in question were not commenced without a definite plan of action;
that such plan, sketched forth years since, duly weighed, adjusted,
and settled, after mature study and deliberation, not only so far as
I am concerned, but by “parties” deeply learned in the mysteries of
London Life, and versed in the recondite secret of pleasing the public
taste, had at length been put into operation, and was no more capable
of alteration than were the laws of the Medes and Persians. But all to
no purpose did I make these representations. The Suggesters wouldn’t be
convinced; their letters continued to flow in. They found out my address
at last (they have lost it now, ha, ha!), and knocked my door down;
bringing me peremptory letters of introduction from people I didn’t know,
or didn’t care five farthings about, or else introducing themselves
boldly, in the “Bottle Imp” manner, with an implied “You must learn to
love me;” they nosed me in the lobby, and saw me dancing in the hall, and
my only refuge at last was to go away. Yes; the pulsations of time had to
beat behind the dial of a clock in the rural districts; and these lines
were written among the hay and the ripening corn, laughing a bitter laugh
to think that the postman was toiling up the quiet street in London with
piles of additional suggestions, and that the Suggesters themselves were
waiting for me in my usual haunts, in the fond expectation of a button to
hold, or an ear to gloze suggestions within.