germination of selfishness, exclusiveness, and isolation; that they are
productive of neglect of home duties in married men, and of irrevocable
celibacy in bachelors. Reserving my own private opinion on this knotty
point, I may say that it is a subject for sincere congratulation that
there are no ladies’ clubs. We have been threatened with them sometimes,
but they have always been nipped in the bud. It is curious to see how
fiercely this tolerant, liberal, large-headed creature, Man, has waged
war against the slightest attempt to establish a club on the part of the
gentler sex. From the Parisian malecontents of the first revolution, who
broke into the lady assemblies of the _Jacobines_ and _Tricoteuses_, and
broke up the clubs in question by the very expeditious process of turning
the fair members into the street, after subjecting them to a castigation
whose use is ordinarily confined to the nursery; from those ungallant
anti-clubbists (they all belonged to clubs themselves, you may be sure)
to Mr. Mark Lemon, who, in a _petite comédie_, brought the guns of satire
to bear with terrible effect on an incipient agitation for lady clubbism,
such institutions, on the part of the ladies, have always been put down,
either by violence or by ridicule. The Tyrant Man is even, I am informed,
disposed to look with jealousy on the “committees of ladies” which
exist in connection with some deserving charities, and on the “Dorcas
societies” and “sewing circles” of provincial towns; and all meetings to
advocate the rights of woman, he utterly abhors.
I daresay that you would very much like to know the name of the
particular club, the tableau of which adorns this sheet, and would feel
obliged if I would point out the portraits of individual members: you
would be very much pleased to be told whether it is the Carlton, the
Reform, the Travellers’, the Athenæum, the Union, the United Service
Senior or Junior, the Guards, the Oriental, the Oxford and Cambridge, the
Parthenon, the Erectheum, the Wyndham, Whyte’s, Boodle’s, or the Army
and Navy. No, Fatima; no, Sister Anne. You shall not be told. Clubbism
is a great mystery, and its adepts must be cautious how they explain its
shibboleth to the outer barbarians. Men have been expelled from clubs ere
now for talking or writing about another member’s whiskers, about the cut
of his coat, and the manner in which he eats asparagus. I have no desire
for such club-ostracism; for though, Heaven help me, I am not of Pall
Mall or St. James’s, I, too, have a club whose institutes I revere. “_Non
me tua fervida terrent, dicta, Ferox_:” I fear not Jawkins, nor all the
Borekins in Borekindom; but “_Dii me terrent, et Jupiter hostis_:” I fear
the awful committee that, with a dread complacency, can unclub a man for
a few idle words inadvertently spoken, and blast his social position for
an act of harmless indiscretion.
Clubs, after all, are rather pleasant institutions than otherwise, yet
they have not escaped the lash of the moralist. Turning over, as I
dismiss the subject, the leaves of my little old book, I come on the
following passage: “Though the Promotion of Trade, and the Benefits that
arise from Conversation, are the Specious Pretences that every Club or
Society are apt to assign as a Reasonable Plea for their Unprofitable
Meetings, yet more Considerate Men have found by Experience that the End
thereof is a Promiscuous Encouragement of Vice, Faction, and Folly, and
the Unnecessary Expense of that Time and Money which might much better be
Employed in their own Business, or spent with much more Comfort in their
Several Families.” I don’t say what the ladies’ verdict will be on this
opinion, though I can divine it; but I take off my hat to the moralist,
capital letters and all, and, leaving him to grumble, will be off to the
club.
Stay, stay, _siste viator_: I have an appointment. When have I not? I
begin to think that I am the Wandering Jew, and there is decidedly no
rest for the soles of my feet. Still the cry is “onward.” Wherever that
club of mine may be situated, it is clear that I must bend my course
towards Bow Street, Covent Garden.
And why to Bow Street, an’t please you? To gaze upon the resuscitated
glories of the Royal Italian Opera? To dine at Nokes’s succulent
restaurant, where erst was the “Garrick’s Head?” To obtain an order for
admission to the workhouse from the relieving officer of the Strand Union
Office? To hire theatrical costumes at Mr. May’s? or to bail a friend
out of the station-house? Not so. And yet my business has something to
do with the metropolitan police. I wish to witness the departure of the
PRISONERS’ VAN.
About five p.m. the ladies and gentlemen who, through the arbitration
of Mr. Hall, Mr. Jardine, or Mr. Henry, stipendiary magistrates, have
settled their little differences with Justice, are conveyed to those
suburban residences, in which, for the benefit of their health, and in
the interests of society, it is judged necessary, _par qui de droit_,
they shall for a stated term abide. The vehicle which bears them to
their temporary seclusion enjoys different names; some technical,
others simply humorous. By some it is called “Her Majesty’s Carriage,”
from the fact that the crown and the initials “V. R.” are painted on the
panels. More far-fetched wags call it “Long Tom’s Coffin.” The police
and the reporters, for shortness, call it “The Van.” In this vehicle the
malefactors who have in the course of the day been arraigned before the
tribunal of the Bow Street Police-court, are conveyed to the various
jails and houses of correction in and about the metropolis, there to
undergo the several terms of imprisonment and hard labour, as the case
may be, to which they have been sentenced. Sometimes the court sits late,
and the van does not take its departure before half-past five; but five
is the ordinary time when the great black, shining, cellular omnibus,
drawn by two strong horses, with its policeman driver, and policeman
conductor in a snug little watch-box, rolls away from Bow Street. It
is a prison on wheels, a peripatetic penitentiary, a locomotive hulk.
Criminals both in and out of prison regard it with a species of terror,
not unmixed with admiration, and, as is their wont, they have celebrated
it in that peculiar strain of ballad poetry for which London roguery has
been so long distinguished. In that celebrated collection of dishonest
epics, the “Drury Lane Garland,” in fit companionship with “Sam Hall,”
“County Jail,” “Seven years I got for priggin’,” and the “Leary Man,” I
find a ballad on the subject of the Bow Street chariot of disgrace, of
which the refrain is—
“Sing Wentilator, separate cell,
Its long, and dark, and hot as well.
Sing locked-up doors—git out if you can,
_There’s a crusher outside the prisoners’ wan!_”
A “crusher,” or policeman, there is indeed, not only in the little
watch-box on the exterior, to which I have alluded, but in the narrow
corridor between the cells into which the carriage is divided in the
interior. It is the former functionary’s duty to keep the outer door
securely locked; the latter to take care that no communication takes
place between the passengers confined in this penal omnibus, either
through the ventilators on the roof, or by talismanic tappings at the
panels which divide them.
[Illustration: FIVE O’CLOCK P.M.: THE PRISONERS’ VAN.]
When the hour of departure arrives, you see the pavement and carriage-way
of Bow Street studded with a choice assemblage of the raggedry,
ruffianry, felonry, misery, drunkardry, and drabbery, whom the infamous
hundred of Drury, and the scarcely less infamous tithing of Covent, have
cast out into a thoroughfare which, two hours hence, will be re-echoing
to the wheels of carriages bearing noble lords and ladies to listen to
the delicious Bosio (alas!) in the “Traviata,” or the enchanting notes
of Tamberlik in “Otello.” London is full of violent contrasts; but this
is the grimmest in the whole strange catalogue. See, the warder in the
watch-box has descended from his perch, and with a patent key opened
the portal of the van, revealing a second janitor inside. And now the
passengers destined for the lugubrious journey come tumbling out of
the court door, and down the steps towards the van. Some handcuffed,
some with their arms folded, or their hands thrust in their pockets in
sullen defiance; some hiding their faces in their grimy palms for very
shame. There are women as well as men, starved sempstresses, and brazen
courtezans in tawdry finery. There are wicked graybeards, and children
on whose angel faces the devil has already set his indelible brand.
There are ragged losels rejoicing to go to jail as to a place where
they shall at least have bread to eat and a bed to lie on; there are
dashing pickpockets in shiny hats and pegtop trousers braided down the
seams. There are some going to prison for the first, and some for the
fiftieth time. One by one they are thrust rather than handed into the
van. The shabby crowd gives a faint, derisive cheer, the door bangs,
the policeman-conductor ensconces himself in his watch-box, and the
Prisoners’ Van drives off.
The Pharisee thanked Heaven that he was not “as that Publican.” Down
on your knees, well-nurtured, well-instructed youth, and thank Heaven
for the parents and friends, for the pastors and masters, to whose
unremitting care and tenderness, from your cradle upwards, you owe it
that you are not like one of these miserable Publicans just gone away
in the prisoners’ van. But thank Heaven humbly, not pharisaically. A
change at nurse, the death of a parent—one out of the fifty thousand
accidents that beset life—might have thrown you into the sink of misery
and want, foulness and crime, in which these creatures were reared,
and you might have been here to-day, not gazing on the spectacle with
a complacent pity, but trundled with manacles on your wrists into this
moving pest-house, whose half-way house is the jail, and whose bourne is
the gallows.
SIX P.M.—A CHARITY DINNER, AND THE NEWSPAPER WINDOW AT THE GENERAL
POST-OFFICE.
Some years ago, at the cozy little dining club held in my friend
Madame Basque’s back-parlour, in the Rue de la Michodière, and the
city of Paris, I had the advantage of the friendship of one of the
most intelligent and humorous of the American gentlemen. There is
such a personage—the vulgar, drawling, swearing, black-satin-vested,
stove-pipe-hatted, whittling, smoking, expectorating, and dram-drinking
Yankee loafers, who infest the Continent, notwithstanding; and a very
excellent sample of the accomplished and unpretending gentleman was the
American in question. He had paid a visit to England, in which country
his sojourn had been of about three months’ duration; but he frankly
confessed to me that having come purposely unprovided with those usually
tiresome and worthless figments, letters of introduction—the very
Dead-Sea apples of hospitality, goodly on the exterior, and all dust and
ashes within—he had not, with the exception of his banker, who asked him
to dinner once as a courteous acknowledgment of the ponderosity of his
letter of credit, possessed one single acquaintance, male or female,
during his stay in the metropolis of the world. I asked him whether he
had not felt very lonely and miserable, and sufficiently inclined, at
the end of the first week, to cast himself over any given bridge into
the river Thames. Not in the slightest degree, he replied. I politely
hinted that perhaps, as an American, he possessed the genial facility,
common to his countrymen, of making himself at home wheresoever he
went, and of forming agreeable travelling acquaintances, occasionally
ripening into fast friends, by the simple process of saying “Fine day,
stranger.” Not at all, he replied. He kept himself to himself, and
indeed he was of a disposition, save in casual moments of unbending,
quite surprising for its saturnine taciturnity. At all events, I urged,
he could not have amused himself much by prowling about the streets,
sleeping at hotels, dining in coffee-rooms, frequenting theatres and
singing-rooms, and wandering in and out of museums; but I was wrong
again, he said. He had seldom been so jolly in his life. I began to think
either that he was quizzing me—“gumming” is the proper Transatlantic
colloquialism, I think—or else that he was the Happy Man described in
the Eastern apologue. But then, the Happy Man had, as it turned out,
no shirt; and my American was remarkable for displaying a vast amount
of fine linen, both at breast and wristbands, profusely decorated with
studs, chains, and sleeve-buttons. How was it, then, I asked, giving the
enigma up in sheer bewilderment. “Wall,” answered my friend with his own
peculiar dry chuckle, “I used to ride about all day on the tops of the
omnibuses; and very fine institutions for seeing life in a philosophical
spirit, those omnibuses of yours are, sir.” He said Sir—not “Sirree,”
as Anglo-Americans are ordinarily assumed to pronounce that title of
courtesy. I understood him at once; saw through him; had done the same
thing myself; and admired his penetrative and observant aptitude.
Never ride inside an omnibus—I apostrophise, of course, the men folks;
for till arrangements are made (and why should they _not_ be made?) for
hoisting ladies in an easy-chair to the breezy roof—they can manage such
things on board a man-of-war—the vehicular ascent is incommodious, not
to say indecorous, for the fair sex. But Ho, ye men, don’t ride inside.
A friend of mine had once his tibia fractured by the diagonal brass rod
that crosses the door; the door itself being violently slammed to, as
is the usual custom, by the conductor. Another of my acquaintance was
pitched head foremost from the interior, on the mockingly fallacious cry
of “all right” being given—was thrown on his head, and killed. Inside
an omnibus you are subjected to innumerable vexations and annoyances.
Sticks or parasols are poked in your chest and in the back of your neck,
as a polite reminder that somebody wants to get out, and that you must
seize the conductor by the skirt of his coat, or pinch him in the calf
of the leg, as an equally polite request for him to stop; you are half
suffocated by the steam of damp umbrellas; your toes are crushed to
atoms as the passengers alight or ascend; you are very probably the next
neighbour to persons suffering under vexatious ailments, such as asthma,
simple cold in the head, or St. Vitus’s dance; it is ten to one but that
you suffer under the plague of babies; and, five days out of the seven,
you will have a pickpocket, male or female, for a fellow-passenger. The
rumbling, the jumbling, the jolting, and the concussions—the lurking ague
in the straw when it is wet, and the peculiar omnibus fleas that lurk in
it when it is dry, make the interior of one of these vehicles a place of
terror and discomfort; whereas outside all is peace. You have room for
your legs; you have the fresh air; you have the lively if not improving
conversation of the driver and the conductor, and especially of the
right-hand box-seat, who is invariably in some way mysteriously connected
with dogs and horses, and a great authority thereupon. Finally, you have
the inestimable advantage of surveying the world in its workings as you
pass along: of being your own Asmodeus, and unroofing London in a ride
from the White Horse Cellar to Hammersmith Gate. The things I have seen
from the top of an omnibus!—more markedly in the narrow streets through
which, from the main thoroughfare being blocked up by the incessant
paving, lighting, sewerage, or electric telegraph communications of
underground London, one is compelled to pass. Now a married couple
enjoying an animated wrangle in a first-floor front; now a servant-maid
entertaining a policeman, or a Life Guardsman, with a heart’s devotion
and cold shoulder of mutton, in a far-down area; now a demure maiden
lacing her virgin bodice before a cracked triangle of a looking-glass, at
an attic window; now lords and ladies walking with parasols and lapdogs,
and children in the private gardens of noble mansions, screened from the
inquisitive pedestrians by sullen brick walls; now domestics hanging out
the clothes in back-yards (seen over the roofs of one-storey houses),
malicious birds of prey waiting, doubtless, round the corner for the
fell purpose of pecking off their noses, while the astute King is in
his counting-house on the second floor counting out his money, and the
Queen, with the true gentleness of womanhood, is in the front kitchen,
eating bread and honey in confident security, recking little of the
four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie, or of the song of sixpence—or
rather of five shillings—which I am this day singing about them all, in
consideration of an adequate pocketful of rye. So shall you look down
and see those things; but chiefly shall you enjoy delectation and gather
experience from the sight of the men and women who are continually
passing beneath you in carriages and in cabs; yea, and in carts and
barrows. Varied life, troubled life, busy, restless, chameleon life.
The philosopher may learn much by reading the tradesmen’s names over
the shop-fronts, which—he will never read them as he passes along the
pavement—will give him quite a new insight into nomenclature. But only
let him consider the carriages and the cabs, and he may learn wisdom in
the ways of mankind in every rood of ground he traverses.
Sweethearting in cabs and carriages; passionate appeals for mercy; men
brawling and fighting; lunatics being borne away to captivity; felons,
shackled and manacled to the chin, being taken to jail, and perhaps
to death, by stern policemen and jailers; frantic women kneeling on
carriage-floors, women with dishevelled hair, streaming eyes, clasped
hands raised to a Heaven which is never deaf but is sometimes stern, a
weeping child clinging to their disordered dress, and money and jewels
cast carelessly on the carriage cushions; gamblers carding and dicing;
knaves drugging fools; debtors in the charge of sheriff’s officers;
roysterers gone in drink; the “fatal accident” on its way to the
hospital, lying all bruised and bloody across the policeman’s knee; the
octogenarian in his last paralytic fit, and the mother suckling her first
infant. All these dramas on four wheels may be seen by him on the top of
the omnibus, who may, if of a caustic turn, rub his hands, and cry, “Aha!
little do you reck that a chiel is above you taking notes, and, faith,
that he’ll print them!”
You see, there are some elements of sadness, nay, of deep and terrible
tragedy, in these vehicular panoramas—the unconscious show-vans; but at
Six o’Clock in the Evening the cabs and carriages on which you look down
offer, mostly, a far pleasanter spectacle. They are full of people going
out to dinner. Some in broughams, coupés, double-bodied carriages, and
the occupants of these are ladies and gentlemen, attired in the full
panoply of evening costume, and whom, at the first blush, you might take
for members of the highest aristocracy. But they are not so. They simply
belong to the first-class genteel circles, the very superior middle
ranks; the dwellers in Lower Belgravia—Brompton, Kensington, and Pimlico;
or in Lesser Tyburnia—Bayswater and Notting Hill. They have all the
airs and graces, all the allurements, of the titled and the exclusive;
but they have not the genuine Hall-mark of nobility and fashion; they
are but Britannia metal, electro-gilt in a very superior manner. The
undeniable Patricians, the satraps of our modern Persian splendour, do
not dine (would not supper be a more appropriate term?) till half-past
seven, or even eight, post meridian. They can have, I should imagine, but
scant appetites for their dinner at that advanced period of the evening,
unless, indeed, they partake of it in the ancient Roman manner, lolling
on the _triclinium_, crowning themselves with flowers, and following,
between the courses, the swinish examples of Apicius and Lucullus.
Better, I take it, a mutton chop at the Cock, or the Cheshire Cheese,
than these nasty Ancient Roman repasts. It is true our moderns stay their
aristocratic stomachs early in the afternoon with a copious lunch of hot
meats and generous wines; and they say that her blessed Majesty herself,
like a good, sensible woman, makes her real dinner at two o’clock, with
her little children, in the nursery, and takes but a mere bite and sup at
the grand stall-fed feast of gold plate in the evening.
But there are plenty of good dinners going on at six o’clock in the
evening, and plenty of good diners-out to attend them. Masters in
Chancery, who are renowned judges of port-wine, dine at six. Six, for
half-past, is the dinner-hour for East India Directors. Let us hope that
their dinners will continue to be as good as of yore, though the new
India Bill leaves them nothing to direct. Members of Parliament, during
the session, dine whenever they can, and sometimes not at all; but on
“no House” days, six o’clock—always taken with a reservation for the
half-past, for “six o’clock sharp” is entirely gone out of fashion, save
with Muswell Hill stock-brokers, Manchester Square proctors, Bedford Row
solicitors, and people who live in Bloomsburia—is the great time for them
to drop into their clubs, sneer over the evening papers, gnash their
teeth because there may happen to be no leading articles eulogistic or
abusive of them therein, and _prendre des informations_, as the French
say (though why I could not just as well say it in English, save that
the cook at the club is a Frenchman, puzzles me), about what there
may be good for dinner. But I must not forget that I am on the top of
an omnibus, looking down on the people in the broughams and the cabs.
Admire that youthful exquisite, curled, and oiled, and scented into a
sufficient semblance of the “Nineveh Bull,” with whom Mr. Tennyson was so
angry in “Maud.” His glossy hair is faultlessly parted down the occiput
and down the cranium behind. White as the fleece of Clarimunda’s sheep
is his body linen. Stiff as the necks of the present generation is his
collar. Black as Erebus is his evening suit. Shining like mirrors are
the little varnished tips of his jean-boots. Severe as the late General
Picton is the tie of his cravat. This _gracilis puer_ is going to dine
in Thurlow Square, Brompton. That gold-rimmed lorgnon you see screwed
into his face, to the damaging distortion of his muscles, will not be
removed therefrom—nor during dinner, nor during wine-taking, nor during
the evening party which will follow the dinner, nor during the “little
music,” the dancing, the supper, the shawling, the departure, and the
drive home to his chambers. He will eat in his eyeglass, and drink in his
eyeglass, and flirt and polk in his eyeglass. I am almost persuaded that
he will sleep in his eyeglass (I knew a married lady who used to sleep
in her spectacles, which led to a divorce: _she_ alleged the cause to
be systematic cruelty, but what will not an enraged woman say?); and I
should not be in the least surprised if he were to die in his eyeglass,
and be buried in his eyeglass, and if the epitaph on his gravestone were
to be “_veluti in speculum_.”