broiling, frying, fizzing, panting, in the sun—like Marseilles, minus the
evil odours—to such an extent, and so utterly destitute of shade, that I
was compelled to leave it. The paint was blistering on the bright green
doors; the shingly pavement seemed to cry out “Come and grill steaks on
me!” the pitch oozed from the seams of the fishing-boats; the surf hissed
as it came to kiss the pebbles on the beach; the dial on the pier-head
blazed with concentric rays; the chains of the suspension bridge were
red hot; the camera obscura glared white in the sunshine; the turf on
the Steyne was brown and parched, like a forgotten oasis in a desert;
the leaves on the trees in the pavilion gardens glittered and chinked in
the summer breeze, like new bright guineas; the fly-horses hung their
heads, their poor tongues protruding, their limbs flaccid, and their
scanty tails almost powerless to flap away the swarms of flies, which
alone were riotous and active of living creation, inebriating themselves
with saccharine suction in the grocers’ shops, and noisily buzzing their
scanmag in private parlours; the flymen dozed on their boxes; the pushers
of invalid perambulators slumbered peacefully beneath the hoods of
their own Bath chairs; the ladies in the round hats found it too hot to
promenade the cliff, and lolled instead at verandahed windows, arrayed
in the most ravishing of muslin morning wrappers, and conversed languidly
with exquisites, whose moustaches were dank with moisture, and who had
scarcely energy enough to yawn. The captivating amazons abandoned for the
day their plumed hats, their coquettish gauntlets, their wash-leather
sub-fusk garments with the straps and patent-leather boots, and deferred
their cavalcades on the skittish mares till the cool of the evening;
the showy dragoon officers confined themselves, of their own free will,
to the mess-room of their barracks on the Lewes road, where they sipped
sangaree, smoked fragrancias, read “Bell’s Life,” and made bets on every
imaginable topic. The hair of the little Skye terriers no longer curled,
but hung supine in wiry hanks; the little children made piteous appeals
to their parents and guardians to be permitted to run about without
anything on; the two clerks at the branch bank, who are sleepy enough in
the coldest weather, nodded at each other over the ledgers which had no
entries in them. The only sound that disturbed the drowsy stillness of
the streets was the popping of ginger-beer corks; and the very fleas in
the lodging-houses lost all their agility and vivacity. No longer did
they playfully leap—no longer archly gyrate; they crawled and crept,
like their low relatives the bugs, and were caught and crushed without
affording the slightest opportunity for sport. It was mortally hot at
London-super-Mare, and I left it. Then I tried that English paradise
of the west, Clifton; but woe is me! the Downs were so delightful;
the prospect so exquisitely lovely; the Avon winding hundreds of feet
beneath me, like a silver skein, yet bearing big three-masted ships on
its bosom; the rocks and underwood so full of matter for pleasant, lazy
cogitation, that I felt the only exertion of which I was capable, to be
writing sonnets on the Avon and its sedgy banks, or making lame attempts
at pre-Raphaelite sketches in water-colours; or thinking about doing
either, which amounts to pretty nearly the same thing. So I came away
from Clifton too, and hung out my sign HERE. (It is THERE now: swallows
have come and gone, snows have gathered and melted, babies prattle now
who were unborn and unthought of then.) Ye shall not know where Here was
situated, oh, ye incorrigible Suggesters. No more particular indices
of its whereabouts will I give, even to the general public, than that
close to my study was a dry skittle-ground, where every day—the hotter
the better—I exercised myself with the wooden “cheese” against the seven
and a-half pins which were all that the dry skittle-ground could furnish
forth towards the ordinary nine; that over-against this gymnastic course
was an _étable_, a “shippon,” as they call it in the north, where seven
cows gravely ruminated; and that, at the end of a yard crowded with
agricultural implements which old Pyne alone could draw, there was a
Stye, from which, looking over its palings,
“All start, like boys who, unaware,
Ranging the woods to find a hare,
Come to the mouth of some dark lair:
Where, growling low, a fierce old bear
Lies amid bones and blood.”
Not that any fierce or ancient member of the ursine tribe resided
therein; but that it was the residence of a horrific-looking old sow, a
dreadful creature, that farrowed unheard-of families of pigs, that lay
on her broadside starboard the live-long day, winking her cruel eye,
and grunting with a persistent sullenness. The chief swineherd proudly
declared her to be “the viciousest beast as ever was,” and hinted darkly
that she had killed a Man. The chief swineherd and I were friends. He was
my “putter-up” at skittles, and did me the honour to report among the
neighbouring peasantry, that “barrin’ the gent as cum here last autumn,
and was off his head” (insane, I presume); I was “the very wust hand at
knock-’em-downs he ever see.” It is something to be popular in the rural
districts; and yet I was not three miles distant from the Regent Circus.
* * * * *
My eyes are once again turned to the clock face. It is One o’Clock in
the Afternoon, and I must think of London. Come back, ye memories: open
Sesame, ye secret chambers of the brain, and let me transport myself away
from the dry skittle-ground, the seven grave cows and the vicious sow,
to plunge once more into the toil and trouble of the seething, eddying
Mistress City of the world.
There are so many things going on at one o’clock in the day; the steam of
life is by that time so thoroughly “up,” that I am embarrassed somewhat
to know which scenes would be the best to select from the plethora of
tableaux I find among my stereoscopic slides. One o’clock is the great
time for making business appointments. You meet your lawyer at one; you
walk down to the office of the newspaper you may happen to write for,
and settle the subject of your leading article, at one. One o’clock is a
capital hour to step round to your stockbroker, in Pope’s Head Alley,
Cornhill, and do a little business in stocks or shares. At one o’clock
the Prime Minister, or his colleagues, have resignation enough to listen
(with tolerable patience) to some half dozen deputations who come to
harangue them about nothing in particular; at one o’clock obliging
noblemen take the chair at public meetings at the Freemasons’, or the
London Tavern. At one o’clock—from one to two rather—the aristocracy
indulge in the sumptuous meal known as “lunch.” At one o’clock that vast,
yet to thousands unknown and unrecked of city, which I may call Dock
London, is in full activity after some twenty minutes’ suspension while
the workmen take _their_ lunch.
The ingenious and persevering artist who constructed that grand model of
Liverpool, which we all remember in the Exhibition of 1851, and which
is now in the Derby Museum of the city of the Liver, did very wisely in
making the Docks the most prominent feature in his model, and treating
the thoroughfares of the town merely as secondary adjuncts. For the Docks
are in reality Liverpool, even as the poet has said that love is of man’s
life a part, but woman’s whole existence. Our interest in the Queen of
the Mersey commences at Birkenhead, and ends at Bramley Moore Dock, on
the other side. I say Bramley Moore Dock, because that was the last
constructed when I was in Liverpool. Some dozens more may have been built
since I was there. Docks are like jealousy, and grow continually by what
they feed on. We can ill afford to surrender so noble a public building
as St. George’s Hall, so thronged and interesting a thoroughfare as Dale
Street; yet it must be confessed that the attention of the visitor to
Liverpool is concentrated and absorbed by the unrivalled and magnificent
docks. So he who visits Venice, ardent lover of art and architecture
as he may be, gives on his first sojourn but a cursory glance at the
churches and palaces; he is fascinated and engrossed by the canals and
the gondolas. So the stranger in Petersburg and Moscow has at first
but scant attention to bestow on the superb monuments, the picturesque
costumes; his senses are riveted upon the golden domes of Tzaaks and the
Kremlin. Liverpool is one huge dock; and from the landing-stage to West
Derby island, everything is of the docks and docky. The only wonder seems
to be that the ships do not sail up the streets, and discharge their
cargoes at the doors of the merchants’ counting-houses. But in London,
in the suburbs, in the West-end, in the heart of the city oft-times,
what do we know or care about the docks? There are scores of members of
the Stock Exchange, I will be bound, who never entered the dock gates,
and those few who have paid a visit to Dock London, may merely have gone
there with a tasting-order for wine. When we consider that in certain
aristocratic circles it is reckoned to be rather a breach of etiquette
than otherwise to know anything about the manners and customs of the
dwellers on the other side of Temple Bar, even as the by-gone snob-cynic
of fashion and literature professed entire ignorance as to the locality
of Russell Square, and wanted to know “where you changed horses” in a
journey to Bloomsbury—unless, indeed, my Lord Duke or my Lady Marchioness
happen to be a partner in a great brewing and banking firm, under which
circumstances he or she may roll down in her chariot to the city to
glance over the quarterly balance sheet of profit; when we consider that
this world of a town has cities upon cities within its bosom, that in the
course of a long life may never be visited; when we think of Bermondsey,
Bethnal Green, Somers Town, Clerkenwell, Hoxton, Hackney, Stepney, Bow,
Rotherhithe, Horsleydown—places of which the great and titled may read
every day in a newspaper, and ask, languidly, where they are,—we need no
longer be surprised if the Docks are ignored by thousands, and if old men
die every day who have never beheld their marvels.
Coming home from abroad often, with an intelligent foreigner, I persuade
him to renounce the Calais route and the South-Eastern Railway, and
even to abjure the expeditious run from Newhaven. I decoy him on board
one of the General Steam Navigation vessels at Boulogne, and when his
agonies of sea-sickness have, in the course of half a dozen hours or
so, subsided—when we have passed Margate, Gravesend, Erith, Woolwich,
Greenwich even—when I have got him past the Isle of Dogs, and we are
bearing swiftly on our way towards the Pool—I clap my intelligent
foreigner on the back, and cry, “Now look around (Eugène or Alphonse,
as the case may be); now look around, and see the glory of England.
Not in huge armies, bristling with bayonets, and followed by monstrous
guns; not in granite forts, grinning from the waters like ghoules from
graves; not in lines of circumvallation, miles and miles in extent; not
in earthworks, counter-scarps, bastions, ravelins, mamelons, casemates,
and gunpowder magazines—shall be found our pride and our strength. Behold
them, O intelligent person of foreign extraction! in yonder forest of
masts, in the flags of every nation that fly from those tapering spars
on the ships, in the great argosies of commerce that from every port in
the world have congregated to do honour to the monarch of marts, London,
and pour out the riches of the universe at her proud feet.” After this
flourishing exordium—the sense of which you may have heard on a former
occasion, for it forms part of my peroration on the grandeur of England,
and, if my friends and acquaintances are to be believed, I bore them
terribly with it sometimes—I enter into some rapid details concerning
the tonnage and import dues of the port of London; and then permit the
intelligent foreigner to dive down below again to his berth. Sometimes
the foreign fellow turns out to be a cynic, and declares that he cannot
see the forest of masts for the fog, if it be winter—for the smoke, if it
be summer.
But the docks of London—by which, let me be perfectly understood, (I do
not, by any means, intend to confine myself to the London Docks) I speak
of Dock London in its entirety: of the London and St. Katherine’s, of
the East and West India, and the Victoria Docks—what huge reservoirs are
they of wealth, and energy, and industry! See those bonding warehouses,
apoplectic with the produce of three worlds, congested with bales of
tobacco and barrels of spices; with serons of cochineal, and dusky,
vapid-smelling chests of opium from Turkey or India; with casks of
palm-oil, and packages of vile chemicals, ill-smelling oxides and
alkalis, dug from the bowels of mountains thousands of miles away, and
which, ere long, will be transformed into glowing pigments and exquisite
perfumes; with shapeless masses of india rubber, looking inconceivably
dirty and nasty, yet from which shall come delicate little cubes with
which ladies shall eraze faulty pencil marks from their landscape copies
after Rout and Harding—india rubber that shall be spread over our coats
and moulded into shoes, yea, and drawn out in elastic ductility, to
form little filaments in pink silk ligatures—I dare not mention their
English appellation, but in Italian they are called “_legaccie_”—which
shall encircle the bases of the femurs of the fairest creatures in
creation; with bags of rice and pepper, with ingots of chocolate and
nuggets and nibs of cocoa, and sacks of roasted chicory. The great hide
warehouses, where are packed the skins of South American cattle, of
which the horns, being left on the hides, distil anything but pleasant
odours, and which lie, prone to each other, thirsting for the tan-pit.
See the sugar warehouses, dripping, perspiring, crystallising with sugar
in casks, and bags, and boxes.[4] How many million cups of tea will be
sweetened with these cases when the sugar is refined! how many tomesful
of gossiping scandal will be talked to the relish of those saccharine
dainties! what stores of barley-sugar temples and Chantilly baskets for
the rich, of brandyballs and hardbake for the poor, will come from those
coarse canvas bags, those stained and sticky casks! And the huge tea
warehouses, where the other element of scandal, the flowery Pekoe or the
family Souchong, slumbers in tinfoiled chests. And the coffee warehouses,
redolent of bags of Mocha and Mountain, Texan and Barbadian berries.
And the multitudinous, almost uncataloguable, mass of other produce:
shellac, sulphur, gum-benzoin, ardebs of beans and pulse from Egypt,
yokes of copper from Asia Minor; sponge, gum-arabic, silk and muslin
from Smyrna; flour from the United States; hides, hams, hemp, rags, and
especially tallow in teeming casks, from Russia and the Baltic provinces;
mountains of timber from Canada and Sweden; fruit, Florence oil, tinder,
raw cotton (though the vast majority of that staple goes to Liverpool),
indigo, saffron, magnesia, leeches, basket-work, and wash-leather! The
ships vomit these on the dock quays, and the warehouses swallow them up
again like ogres. But there is in one dock, the London, an underground
store, that is the Aaron’s rod of dock warehouses, and devours all the
rest. For there, in a vast succession of vaults, roofed with cobwebs
many years old, are stored in pipes and hogsheads the wines that thirsty
London—thirsty England, Ireland, and Scotland—must needs drink. What
throats they have, these consumers! what oceans of good liquor their
Garagantuan appetites demand! Strange stories have been told about these
docks, and the thirsty souls who visit them with tasting-orders; how the
brawny coopers stride about with candles in cleft sticks, and, piercing
casks with gimlets, pour out the rich contents, upon the sawdust that
covers the floor, like water; how cases of champagne are treated as of
as little account as though they were cases of small beer; how plates of
cheese-crumbs are handed round to amateurs that they may chasten their
palates and keep them in good tone of taste; how the coopers are well
nigh infallible in detecting who are the tasters that visit these “wine
vaults” with a genuine intention of buying, and who the epicureans, whose
only object in visiting the London Docks is to drink, gratuitously on
the premises, as much good wine as they can conveniently carry. Strange,
very strange stories, too, are told of the occasional inconvenience into
which the “convenient carriage” degenerates; of respectable fathers of
families appearing in the open street, after they have run the tether of
the tasting-order, staggering and dishevelled, and with bloodshot eyes,
their cravats twisted round to the backs of their necks like bagwigs,
and incoherently declaring that cheese always disagreed with them. I am
candidly of opinion, however, that the majority of these legends are
apocryphal, or, in the rare cases when they have a foundation in fact,
belong to the history of the past, and that commercial sobriety, in the
highest order, is the rule in the wine vaults of the London Docks.
[Illustration: ONE O’CLOCK P.M.: DOCK-LABOURERS RETURNING TO WORK.]
But the Ships! Who shall describe those white-sailed camels? who shall
tell in graphic words of the fantastic interlacing of their masts and
rigging, of the pitchy burliness of their bulging sides; of the hives
of human ants who in barges and lighters surround them, or swarm about
their cargo-cumbered decks? Strange sight to see, these mariners from
every quarter of the globe; of every variety of stature and complexion,
from the swarthy Malay to the almost albino Finn; in every various
phase of picturesque costume, from the Suliote of the fruitship, in his
camise and capote, to the Yankee foremast-man in his red shirt, tarry
trousers, and case-knife hung by a strand of lanyards to his girdle. But
not alone of the maritime genus are the crowds who throng the docks.
There are lightermen, stovedores, bargees, and “lumpers;” there are
passengers flocking to their narrow berths on board emigrant ships; there
are entering and wharfingers’ clerks travelling about in ambulatory
counting-houses mounted on wheels; there are land rats and water rats,
ay, and some that may be called pirates of the long-shore, and over
whom it behoves the dock policemen and the dock watchmen to exercise a
somewhat rigid supervision—for they will pick and steal, these piratical
ne’er-do-weels, any trifle, unconsidered or not, that comes handy to
their knavish digits; and as they emerge from the dock-gates, it is
considered by no means a breach of etiquette for an official to satisfy
himself, by a personal inspection of their garments, that they don’t
happen to have concealed about them, of course by accident, such waifs
and strays as a bottle of Jamaica rum, a lump of gutta percha, a roll of
sheet copper, or a bundle of Havannah cigars.
But a clanging bell proclaims the hour of one, and the dock-labourers,
from Tower Hill to the far-off Isle of Dogs, are summoned back to their
toil. Goodness and their own deplenished pockets only know how they have
been lunching, or on what coarse viands they have fed since noon. Many
have not fed at all; for, of the motley herd of dock-labourers, hundreds,
especially in the London Docks—where no recommendation save strength is
needed, and they are taken on their good behaviour from day to day—are
of the Irish way of thinking; and, wonderfully economical, provident,
self-denying are those much maligned Hibernians when they are earning
money. They are only spendthrifts and indolent when they have nothing.
They will content themselves with a fragment of hard, dry bread, and the
bibulous solace of the nearest pump, and go home cheerfully at dusk to
the unsavoury den—be it in Whitechapel or in Bloomsbury or in far-off
Kensington, for they prefer strangely to live at the farthest possible
distance from their place of daily toil—where their ragged little robins
of children dwell like so many little pigs under a bed. And there they
will partake of a mess of potatoes, with one solitary red herring smashed
up therein, to “give it a relish.” They will half starve themselves, and
go as naked as the police will permit them to go; but they will be very
liberal to the priest, and will scrape money together to bring their
aged and infirm parents over from the “ould country.” That is folly and
superstition, people will say. Of course, what people say must be right.
Some dock-labourers lunch on too much beer and too little bread; for
they are held in thraldom by certain unrighteous publicans, who still
pursue, with great contentment and delectation to themselves, but to the
defrauding, ruin, and misery of their customers, the atrocious trade,
now well nigh rooted from the manufacturing and mining districts, known
as the “tommy-shop” system. I think I need scarcely explain what this
system is, for, under its twin denomination of “truck,” it has already
formed a subject for Parliamentary inquiry. Let it suffice to say, that
the chief feature in the amiable system consists in giving the labourer
a fallacious and delusive credit to the amount of his weekly wages, and
supplying him with victuals and drink (chiefly the latter) at an enormous
rate of profit. The labourer is paid by his foreman in tickets instead
of cash, and invariably finds himself at the end of the week victimised,
or, to use a more expressive, though not so genteel a term, diddled,
to a heart-rending extent. Dock-labourers who are in regular gangs and
regularly employed, are the greatest sufferers by this unjust mode of
payment. As to the casual toilers who crowd about the gates at early
morning in the hope of being engaged for a working day, they are paid
half a crown, and are free to squander or to hoard the thirty pence as
they list. That industrious and peaceable body of men, the coalwhippers,
groaned for a long period under the iniquities of the truck system; they
are now protected by a special Act of Parliament, renewed from time to
time; but the dock-labourers yet eat their bread leavened by a sense of
injustice. There are none to help them; for they have no organisation,
and very few friends. It is perfectly true that the dock-companies have
nothing whatsoever to do with the social servitude under which their
labourers groan; and that it is private speculators who work the system
for their own aggrandisement; but the result to the labourer is the same.
I don’t think it matters to Quashie, the negro slave, when he is beaten,
whether the cowhide be wielded by Mr. Simon Legree, the planter, or by
Quimbo, the black driver.
Look at these labourers, and wonder. For it is matter for astonishment to
know that among these meanly-clad, frequently ragged men, coarse, dirty,
and repulsive in aspect, there are very many who have been tenderly bred
and nurtured; who have been, save the mark, gentlemen! who have received
University educations and borne the Queen’s commission. And here also are
the draff and husks of foreign immigration; Polish, German, and Italian
exiles. They have come to this—down to this—up to this, if you choose;
come to the old, old level, as old as Gardener Adam’s time, of earning
the daily bread by the sweat of the brow. It were better so than to
starve; better so than to steal.
[Illustration: ONE O’CLOCK P.M.: DINING ROOMS IN BUCKLERSBURY.]