meritorious class of human ants begin their prandial repasts. With just
one thought at the vast number of merchants’, brokers’, shipping-agents’,
warehousemen’s, wholesale dealers’ counting-houses that exist in London
city, you will be able to form an idea of the legions of clerks, juniors
and seniors, who, invariably early-breakfasting men, must get seriously
hungry at one p.m. Some I know are too proud to dine at this patriarchal
hour. They dine, after office hours, at Simpson’s, at the Albion, at the
London, or, save us, at the Wellington. They go even further west, and
patronise Feetum’s, or the Scotch Stores in Regent Street, merely skating
out, as it were, for a few minutes at noon, for a snack at that Bay Tree
to which I have already alluded. Many, and they are the married clerks,
bring neat parcels with them, containing sandwiches or bread-and-cheese,
consuming those refreshments in the counting-house. In the very great
houses, it is not considered etiquette to dine during office-hours,
save on foreign-post nights. As to the extremely junior clerks, or
office-boys, as they are irreverently termed, they eat whatever they
can get, and whenever they can get it, very frequently getting nothing
at all. But there are yet hundreds upon hundreds of clerks who consume
an orthodox dinner of meat, vegetables, and cheese—and on high days
and holidays pudding—at one p.m. Their numbers are sufficient to cram
almost to suffocation the eating-houses of Cheapside, the Poultry, Mark
Lane, Cornhill, and especially Bucklersbury. Of late years there has
been an attempt to change the eating-houses of Cheapside into pseudo
“restaurants.” Seductive announcements, brilliantly emblazoned, and
showily framed and glazed, have been hung up, relating to “turtle” and
“venison;” salmon, with wide waddling mouths, have gasped in the windows;
and insinuating mural inscriptions have hinted at the existence of
“Private dining-rooms for ladies.” Now, whatever can ladies—though I have
the authority of Mr. Charles Dibdin and my own lips for declaring that
there are fine ones in the city—want to come and dine in Cheapside for?
At these restaurants they give you things with French names, charge you a
stated sum for attendance, provide the pale ale in silver tankards, and
take care of your hat and coat; but I like them not—neither, I believe,
do my friends, the one-o’clock-dining clerks. Either let me go to
Birch’s or the Anti-Gallican, or let me take my modest cut of roast and
boiled, my “one o’ taters,” my “cheese and sallary,” at an eating-house
in Bucklersbury—such a one as my _alter ego_, Mr. M’Connell, has here
presented for your edification. And his pictured morals must eke out my
written apophthegms—for this sheet is full.
TWO P.M.—FROM REGENT STREET TO HIGH CHANGE.
I breathe again. I see before me, broad-spread, a vista of gentility. I
have done, for many hours to come, with shabby subjects. No more dams
I’ll make for fish—in Billingsgate; nor scrape trencher, nor wash dish,
at second-rate eating-houses; nor fetch firing at requiring in Covent
Garden or the Docks. Prospero must get a new man, for Caliban has got a
new master: Fashion, in Regent Street.
I declare that when I approach this solemnly-genteel theme, my frame
dilates, my eyes kindle, my heart dances. I experience an intense desire
to array myself in purple and fine linen, knee shorts, lace ruffles,
pink silk stockings, diamond buckles, and a silver-hilted sword; to
have my hair powdered, and my jewelled _tabatière_ filled with scented
rappee; to sit with my feet on a Turkey carpet, before a table inlaid
with _marqueterie_, wax candles in silver sconces (the candles all
green, with fillagree _bobeches_) on either side; and then—while my
Dulcinea in a hoop petticoat, a point lace apron, red-heeled _mules_, a
_toupet_ and a _mouche_ on the left cheek, her feathered fan, painted by
Fragonard on the finest chicken-skin, lying beside her—plays the minuet
from “Ariadne” in an adjoining and gilded _salon_, decorated in the
_Style Pompadour_, on the harpsichord; and on pink scented note-paper,
with a diamond pointed pen and violet ink—the golden pounce-box at my
elbow—then under these circumstances and with these luxurious appliances
around me, I think I could manage to devote myself to the task of
inditing matter concerning Regent Street in the smoothest dythrambics.
This is rather a violent contrast to the dry skittle-ground, the cows,
and the depraved sow which inspired me in the last chapter; but only
take my subject into consideration: only permit me to inoculate you
with one drop of the ethereal nectar which should be quaffed by every
writer who would look upon Regent Street from a proper point of view.
Ladies and gentlemen moving in the polite circles have—but that is long
ago—accused me of being of Bohemia, and to that manner born; of writing a
great deal too much about the Virginian weed in its manufactured state,
and the fermented infusion of malt and hops; publishers have refused
to purchase my novels because they contained too many descriptions of
“low life;” because my heroes and heroines were too frequently ragged
and forlorn creatures, who didn’t go into “society,” who didn’t go to
church, who were never seen at the May meetings in Exeter Hall, but who
went to public-houses and penny-gaffs instead. Oh, lords and ladies! oh,
brilliant butterflies of society! oh, respectable people of every degree!
whose ear coarse language wounds, but who would have, believe me, to
undergo much coarser deeds from the ragged ones you despise, were it not
for the humble efforts of us poor pen-and-ink missionaries; O salt ones
of the earth! think that you are but hundreds among the millions of the
tattered and torn, who have never studied the “Handbook to Etiquette,”
nor heard of Burke and Debrett, and who would eat peas with their knives
if they had any peas to eat—Heaven help them! They are around and about
you always. I have no greed of gain in advocating their cause, for I am
unknown to them, and am of your middle class, and am as liable to be
stoned by the ragged ones for having a better coat than they any day. But
woe be to you, respectables, if you shut your ears to their plaints and
your eyes to their condition. For the stones may fly thick and fast some
day; there may be none to help you, and it may be too late to cry for
help.
I have heard Regent Street compared to the Boulevard des Italiens, to
Unter-den-Linden at Berlin, to Broadway at New York, to the Montagne
de la Cour at Brussels, to the Corso de’ Servi at Milan, to the Toledo
at Naples, to George Street, Sydney, and to the Nevskoi Perspective at
Petersburg. In my opinion, Regent Street is an amalgamation of all these
streets, and surpasses them all. Their elements are strained, filtered,
refined, condensed, sublimated, to make up one glorious thoroughfare.
Add to this, the unique and almost indescribable _cachet_ which the
presence of English aristocracy lends to every place it chooses for
its frequentation, and the result is Regent Street. Of the many cities
I have wandered into and about, there is but one possessing a street
that can challenge comparison with—and that, I must confess, well nigh
equals—the street that Nash, prince of architects, built for the fourth
George. At a right angle from the pleasant waters of the river Liffey,
there runs a street, wide in dimensions, magnificent in the proportions
of its edifices, splendid in its temples and its palaces, though many of
the latter, alas! are converted now into hotels, now into linen-drapers’
shops; but on a golden summer’s afternoon, when you see, speeding towards
the column of Nelson in the distance, the glittering equipages of the
rich and noble, who yet have their dwelling in Eblana; the clattering
orderlies, on sleek-groomed horses, and with burnished accoutrements,
spurring from the Castle towards the Post Office—and, beauty of beauties,
the side walks on either hand converted into parterres of living flowers,
the grand and glorious Irish girls, with their bright raiment and
brighter eyes; you will acknowledge that Regent Street has a rival, that
beyond St. George’s Channel is a street that the triumphal procession of
a Zenobia or a Semiramis might pass down, and that the queen of streets
is Sackville Street, Dublin.
Do you know, youth of the present generation—for I fondly hope that I
have good store of juveniles among my readers—that Regent Street has its
antiquities, its archæologia, its topographical curiosities? Mr. Peter
Cunningham knows them all by heart; I am not about to steal from the
“Handbook of London” of our modern Camden; but will just tell you, in
my desultory way, that, in the days when the Mews reared their head, an
unsightly mass of brick buildings, in the area which is now Trafalgar
Square; when Carlton House loomed at the eastern end of Pall Mall,
instead of the ugly post erected as a monument of national gratitude to
the Royal Duke who paid nobody; when the Golden Cross, Charing Cross,
was hemmed in by a cobweb mass of dirty tenements, and Hungerford Market
was yet a mass of fishy hovels ungraced by Hungerford Hall and Mr.
Gatti’s penny-ice shop; when the old “Courier” newspaper office stood
(over-against Mr. Cross’s older Exeter ’Change, with the elephant’s tusks
displayed outside, the shops beneath, and Chunee and the wild beasts all
alive and roaring upstairs) in the space that now forms the approach
to Waterloo Bridge; and when the vicinity of Temple Bar was blocked up
by a brick-and-mortar _cloaca_, since swept away to form what is now
termed Picket Place. Are you at all aware, neophytes in topographical
lore, that the area of Regent Street the superb, was occupied by mean
and shambling tenth-rate avenues, among which the chiefest was a large,
dirty highway, called Great Swallow Street? Old Fuller (I don’t know why
he should be called “old” so persistently, for he did not attain anything
like a venerable age) was in the habit of collecting information for the
“Worthies of England” from the tottering crones who sat spinning by the
ingle-nook, and from the white-headed grand-sires sunning themselves
on the bench by the almshouse door. In like manner, I owe much of the
information I possess on the aspect of London streets, at the time just
previous to my nonage, to communing with nurses and nurses’ female
friends. The good folks who tend children, seldom deem that the little
pitchers they say jestingly have long ears, will suck their lore in so
greedily, or retain it so long.
My personal acquaintance with Regent Street dates from the year
’thirty-two, when I remember a great scrambling procession of operatives,
with parti-coloured flags, emblazoned with devices I could not read,
passing down it. Mrs. Esner, who was then attached to my person in a
domestic capacity (she often calls upon me now, and, saying that she
“nussed” me, expatiates on the benefits of a pound of green tea), told
me that these operatives belonged to the “Trades Union.” She said—though
the good woman must have exaggerated—that they were half a million in
number, and I recollect her portending, in a grave low voice, that there
would be riots that night. I don’t think that any occurred; but long
after, whenever I saw a crowd I used to ask whether “there would be any
riots” that night, just as I might have inquired whether there would be
any bread-and-butter for tea. This was about the time that they used to
call the great Duke of Wellington “Nosey,” and “Sawbones,” and to break
his windows. I was too young to know then, that the Athenians grew tired
of hearing Aristides called “The Just;” and that a nation once grumbled
at having to pay for the palace it had bestowed upon that John Churchill,
Duke of Marlborough, who won the battle of Blenheim. I think, too, there
must have been something about the Cholera in my earliest recollections
of Regent Street; yet, no: I lived in North Audley Street at that time,
and opposite the mansion of the great Earl of Clarendon; for, as clearly
as though it were yesterday, I see now in the eye to which the attention
of Horatio, friend of Hamlet Prince of Denmark, was directed—a hot autumn
afternoon. I am at the nursery-window in sad disgrace, and pouting
because I have wrenched the sprightly wooden hussar from the horse
which had the semi-circle of wire with the bullet at the end fixed in
his stomach, and who used, with that impetus, to swing so deftly. There
is much commotion in the great earl’s mansion; for one of the servants
partook too plentifully last night of gooseberry-fool after a rout his
lordship gave—where are the “routs” and the “gooseberry-fools” now?—and
she is dead this morning of cholera morbus. My female _entourage_ are
unanimously exacting in calling it cholera “morbus.” The undertaker’s men
bring the body out; the shell gleams white in the afternoon’s sunshine,
and it is begirt with cords; “for,” says the domestic oracles behind
me, “it was so mortal swole that it would ’ave bust else.” A horrible
rumour runs about, that the coffin has been “pitched and sealed.” What
can “pitching and sealing” mean? There is a great crowd before the
earl’s door, who are violent and clamorous, because rumour—a servant’s
hall, an area gate, a coachman from-the-house-to-his-wife-in-the-mews
rumour—bruits it about that the body has not been washed. My nurse says
that they will have to send for the “padroll” with “cut-lashes.” All
these things sink into my little mind; and then the whole sequel, with
a train of years behind it, fade away, leaving me with but one more
recollection—that we had a twopenny cottage-loaf boiled in milk that day
for dinner, which was consequently swollen to twice its natural size; and
which the Eumenides of the nursery authoritatively assured me was, with
brown sugar, the “best puddin’ out.” I know now that congested loaf to
have been an insipid swindle.
I am again in Regent Street, but at another window, and in another
house. There is no nurse now, but a genteel young woman, aged about
thirty—she asked me once, for fun, how old she was, and I guessed, in
all youthful seriousness, fifty, whereupon she slapped me—to take care
of me. Her name is Sprackmore, she has long corkscrew ringlets, and is
very pious, and beneath her auspices I first study the “Loss of the
_Kent_ East Indiaman,” and the “Dairyman’s Daughter.” She has fits,
too, occasionally. I am just of that age to be a hollow-eyed little boy
in a tunic, with a frill and a belt, and to be dreadfully afraid of
the parent I used a year before to love and caress with such fearless
confidence. They say I am a clever child, and my cleverness is encouraged
by being told that I am not to ask questions, and that I had much better
go and play with my toys than mope over that big volume of Lyttelton’s
“History of England,” lent to me by Mr. Somebody, the lawyer—I see him
now, very stout and gray, at the funeral whenever any of us dies: of
which volume—it is in very shabby condition—I break the top-cover off
by letting it fall from the chair, which is my reading-desk. I suffer
agonies of terror and remorse for months, lest the fracture should be
discovered, though I have temporarily repaired it by means of a gimlet
and a piece of twine. Then, one bright day, my cousin Sarah gives me a
bright five-shilling piece—I take her to the opera now, but she always
remembers my childish dependence upon her, and insists upon paying the
cab home—and take Lyttelton’s “History,” still with great fear and
trembling, to a bookbinder’s in Broad Street, Golden Square, who tells me
that the “hends is jagged,” and that there must be a new back, lettering,
and gilding to the book. He works his will with it, and charges me four
shillings and sixpence out of the five shilling-piece for working it; but
to tell of the joyful relief I feel when I bring Lyttelton’s “History”
back safe and sound! I do not get rid of my perturbation entirely,
however, till I have rubbed the back against the carpet a little to
soil it, in order that it may not look too new. Oh! the agonies, the
Laocoon-like conscience windings, the Promethean tortures, that children
suffer through these accidental breakages! Oh! the unreasoning cruelty
of parents, who punish children for such mischances! So I am the little
boy in a tunic; and I daresay that, with my inquisitiveness, and my
moping over books, I am an intolerable little nuisance. I am at the
Regent Street window, and much speculation is rife as to whether the
King, who is lying mortally sick at Windsor, is dead. For it is within
a few minutes of eleven, and at that time the well-known troop of Horse
Guards pass on their way to St. James’s; and it is reasonably inferred
that, if King William be gathered to his fathers, the standard will be
furled. The Guards pass; they wore helmets, with plumes above them shaped
like black mutton chops—not the casques with the flowing horse-hair they
wear now; and to be sure the standard is furled, in a species of drab
umbrella case. The King is dead for sure; nay, he does not die for a full
week afterwards; the flag was merely furled because the day was dark and
lowering, presaging rain.
[Illustration: TWO O’CLOCK P.M.: REGENT STREET.]
I told you hours since that I lived in the house in Regent Street
in which the Marquis de Bourbel forged his letters of credit.[5] I
think that I am qualified to speak of the place, for, walking down it
the other day, I counted no less than eleven houses, between the two
circuses, in which I had at one time dwelt. But they were all early,
those remembrances, and connected with the time when the colonnade of
the Quadrant existed—“_La ville de Londres_,” as the foreign engravers
of pictorial note-paper used grandiloquently to call it. Whatever
could have possessed our Commissioner of Woods and Forests to allow
those unrivalled arcades to be demolished! The stupid tradesmen, whose
purblind, shop-till avarice led them to petition for the removal of the
columns, gained nothing by the change, for the Quadrant, as a lounge in
wet weather, was at once destroyed; and I see now many of the houses,
once let out in superior apartments, occupied as billiard-rooms and
photographic studios, and many of the shops invaded and conquered by
cheap tailors. The Quadrant colonnade afforded not only a convenient
shelter beneath, but it was a capital promenade for the dwellers in the
first-floors above. The _entresols_ certainly were slightly gloomy; and
moustached foreigners, together with some gaily-dressed company still
naughtier, could with difficulty be restrained from prowling backwards
and forwards between Glasshouse Street and the County Fire Office. But,
perambulating Regent Street at all hours of the day and night, as I do
now frequently, I see no diminution in the number of moustached, or
rouged, or naughty faces, whose prototypes were familiar to me, years
agone, in the brilliant Quadrant. As to the purlieus of the County Fire
Office, they are confusion, and a scandal to London and its police.
The first-floor balconies above were in my childhood most glorious
playgrounds. There I kept preserves of broken bottles and flowerpots; on
those leads I inscribed fantastic devices in chalk and with penknives,
drawing silver diagrams through the cake of dust and dried refrain that
covered the metal; and often have I come to domestic grief through an
irresistible propensity for poaching on the balconies of the neighbours
on either side. Still in a state of tunic-hood, I remember a very tall,
handsome gentleman, with a crimson velvet under-waistcoat—I saw his
grave in Perè la Chaise last winter—who was my great aider and abettor
in these juvenile escapades. He had a wondrous weapon of offence called
a “sabar-cane,” a delightful thing (to me then), half walking-stick,
half pea-shooter, from which he used to discharge clay pellets at the
vagrant cats on the adjoining balconies. He it was who was wont to lean
over the balcony, and fish for people’s hats with a salmon-hook affixed
to the extremity of a tandem-whip; he it was who came home from the Derby
(quite in a friendly manner) to see us one evening, all white—white hat,
white coat, white trousers, white waistcoat, white neckerchief, white
boots, to say nothing of the dust and the flour with which he had been
plentifully besprinkled at Kennington Gate. He had won heavily on some
horse long since gone to grass for ever, was very merry, and insisted
upon winding-up our new French clock with the snuffers. He it was who
made nocturnal excursions from parapet to parapet along the leads,
returning with bewildering accounts of bearded men who were gambling
with dice at No. 92; of the tenor of the Italian Opera, who, knife in
hand, was pursuing his wife (in her nightdress) about the balcony, at
No. 74; and of Mademoiselle Follejambes, the _premier sujet_ of the same
establishment, who was practising _pirouettes_ before a cheval glass at
the open window of No. 86, while Mademoiselle Follejambe’s mamma, with
a red cotton pocket-handkerchief tied round her old head, was drinking
_anisette_ out of a tea-cup. You must be forbearing with me, if, while I
speak of Regent Street, I interlard my speech with foreign languages a
little. For, from its first erection, the Quadrant end of Regent Street
has been the home of the artistic foreigners who are attracted to London
during the musical and operatic season, less by inclination for the
climate and respect for the institutions of England, than by a profound
admiration for the circular effigies, in gold, (with neatly milled edges)
of her Majesty the Queen, which John Bull so liberally bestows on those
who squall or fiddle for him, provided they be of foreign extraction.
Let me not be too unjust, however, to Bull. Find him but a real English
tenor, and J. B. will smother him in bank-notes, and deafen him with
plaudits. From the balconies of Regent Street, I have seen the greatest
_cantatrici_ and _ballerine_ of this age. The Grand Cham of tenors,
who has _never_ been replaced—no signor Mario, no Signor Giuglini, no
Signor Mongini, no Signor Tamberlik, no Mr. Sims Reeves, no Mr. George
Perren—the incomparable Rubini, had lodgings opposite, once, to where
we dwelt, at a shawl shop. I have watched the sedulous care which that
eminent man took of his health, marvelled at the multitudinous folds
of silk or woollen stuff, like the turban of an Asiatic, with which he
encircled his invaluable throat when he took out-door exercise. I have
seen, through his open window, the basso of basso’s, Papa Lablache, the
man with the lion’s head, the Falstaffian abdomen, and the ten times
stentorian lungs, eat maccaroni for twenty-seven consecutive minutes,
till he seemed determined to outdo all the ribbon-swallowing conjurors
who had ever lived. We used to say that he was practising for Leporello.
He had a kindly heart, Papa Lablache, and preserved a kindly remembrance
of the hearty English people, among whom he made his fortune. Though he
would sometimes facetiously declare, that when his voice was no longer
fit to be heard in a Continental city, he would come to England to
settle, and sing “_Fra questi sordi_” among these deaf ones—for whom
he would still be quite good enough—his heart never cooled towards the
old country; and, moribund at Naples, when the supreme Hour was fast
arriving, he raised himself on his couch, and essayed to sing a song he
loved very well—“Home! sweet Home!” But, as the silver cord loosened, he
murmured, “_Mi manca la voce_”—“My voice fails me;” and so died.
To say nothing of a dreadful German basso, one of the regular
line-of-battle ship voices, with 56-pounders on the first deck, who was
once a next-door neighbour in the Quadrant, and when he used to call for
his servant thus,“PAOOLO!” shook the flower-pots on our own balcony;
or of an egregious fiddler, with long hair, who, in imitation of his
predecessor, Paganini, gave out that he had sold himself to the devil,
but who was, I believe, an arrant humbug with a mania for practising in
the open air—it may have been as a medium of advertisement—and used to
attract large crowds in the street beneath listening to his complicated
fiddlements. Yet I must spare a word for Madame—I really forget whom, but
it ended with “heim,” I think—who had the six-and-thirty Austro-Sclavonic
children who used to perform the mirror dance and other terpsichorean
feats at her Majesty’s Theatre and whom she used to drill on the balcony
like soldiers. They made a tremendous noise, these tiny _figurantes_,
and in the hours of recreation were not unaccustomed to fight among
themselves. Then Madame Somethingheim would sally forth on the balcony
and cut savagely into their poor young bodies with a switch, and after
much howling on their part, and chasing to and fro on hers, restore peace.