would term it—presents a medley of merchandise for sale; for I suppose
the host of the three balls buys-in sundry articles at the quarterly
sales of unredeemed pledges, of whose aspect you have already had an
inkling in these pages, which he thinks are likely to sell in his
particular neighbourhood. Of course, the nature and quality of the
articles exhibited vary according to the locality. In fashionable
districts (for even Fashion cannot dispense with its pawnbrokers) you
may see enamels and miniatures, copies of the Italian masters, porcelain
vases, bronze statuettes, buhl clocks, diamond rings, bracelets, watches,
cashmere shawls, elegantly-bound books, and cases of mathematical
instruments; but we are now in an emphatically low neighbourhood,
and such articles as I have alluded to are likely to attract but few
purchasers. Rather would there seem a chance of a ready sale for the
bundles of shirts, and women’s gear, and cheap printed shawls; for the
saws, and planes, adzes, gimlets, and chisels; for the cotton umbrellas;
for the heavy silver watches that working men wear (though they, even,
are not plentiful); for the infinity of small cheap wares, for sale at an
alarming reduction of prices.
Let us enter. Behold the Bezesteen of borrowed money. This, too, might be
compared, with a grim mockery, to the theatre; for hath it not private
boxes and a capacious stage, on which is continually being performed the
drama of the “Rent Day,” and the tragi-comedy of “Lend me Five Shillings?”
See the pawners, so numerous that the boxes can no longer remain private,
and two or three parties, total strangers to one another, are all crowded
into the same aperture. It is Saturday night, and they are deliriously
anxious to redeem their poor little remnants of wearing apparel for
that blessed Sunday that comes to-morrow, to be followed, however, by
a Black Monday, when father’s coat, and Polly’s merino frock, nay the
extra petticoat, nay the Lilliputian boots of the toddling child, will
have to be pawned again. Certain wise men, political economists and
pseudo-philanthropists, point at the plethora of pawnbrokers’ shops as
melancholy proofs of the poor’s improvidence. But the poor are _so_ poor,
they have at the best of times so very little money, that pawning with
them is an absolute necessity; and the pawnbroker’s shop, that equitable
mortgage on a small scale, is to them rather a blessing than a curse.
Without that fourpence on the flat-iron, there would be very frequently
no bread in the cupboard.
It is Saturday night, and my uncle, who on other days of the week shuts
at six o’clock in winter and eight in summer time, does not close his
doors, and drives a roaring trade till midnight. The half-pence rattle,
shillings are tested, huge bundles rumble down the spout, and the little
black calico bags, containing the tickets having reference to the goods
desired to be redeemed, and which the assistant will look out in the
warehouse, fly rapidly upwards. It is time now for us to redeem that
trifling little matter which we pawned last Tuesday, on purpose to have
an excuse for visiting the pawnbroker’s shop to-night; and, casting
glances in which curiosity is not unmixed with compassion, go back to
Signor Verdi and her Majesty’s Theatre. Thou, at least, my friend, may
do this—I will leave thee in the vestibule for awhile; for, between the
hours of nine and ten, I have other clock matters to which I must attend.
NINE O’CLOCK P.M.—HALF-PRICE IN THE NEW CUT, AND A DANCING ACADEMY.
An inedited anecdote of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.,—an anecdote passed over or
ignored by Boswell, Croker, Piozzi, and Hawkins,—an anecdote to allude
to which, perhaps, Lord Macaulay might disdain, while Mr. Carlyle might
stigmatise it as an “unutterable sham of mud-volcano gigability,” but in
which I have, nevertheless, under correction, the most implicit faith,
relates that the Sage’s opinion was once asked by Oliver Goldsmith
(Mr. Boswell of Auchinlech being present, of course) as to whether he
approved, or did not approve, of the theatrical institution known as
“half-price?” The Doctor was against it. “Sir,” he reasoned, or rather
decided, “a man has no right to see half an entertainment. He should
either enjoy all or none.” “But, sir,” objected Goldsmith deferentially,
“supposing the entertainment to be divided into equal halves, both
complete in themselves, has not a man a right to suit his pocket and his
convenience, and see only one half?” “Sir, you are frivolous,” thundered
the Doctor; “the man has but Hobson’s choice: the second moiety of the
entertainment. If he go at first price, he must pay whole price.” “But,
sir,” suggested Bozzy with a simper, “how would it stand, if the man
coming at half-price promised the doorkeeper to go away punctually at
nine o’clock, when the second price commenced?” “Hold _your_ tongue,
sir,” said Doctor Johnson, whereat Mr. Boswell of Auchinlech was abashed,
and spake no more till the kindly old Doctor invited him to tea, with
blind Miss Williams and Mr. Levett the apothecary.
I am sure that it must be a matter of lamentation for any man with a
well-regulated mind to be under the necessity of disagreeing with so
eminent an authority as Doctor Johnson—with the rough, genial, old bear,
who had had so many sorrows of his own when young; had danced upon so
many hot plates, and to the very ungenteelest of tunes; had been so
pitilessly muzzled and baited by mangy curs, that he yet made it his
delight in age and comparative affluence to take the young bears under
his protection, to assuage their ursine sorrows, and lick them with a
lumbering pity into shape. I am equally certain that few would even
_dare_ to differ from the scholar, critic, poet, dramatist, essayist,
moralist, philosopher, and Christian gentleman, whose pure life and
death in an unbelieving age are an answer for all time to the ephemeral
brilliance of the fribble Chesterfield, the icicle Hume, the stalactite
Gibbon, and the flashy Bristol-diamond Voltaire. Still, in the interests
of the British drama (and assuming my anecdote to be otherwise than
apocryphal), I must, perforce, dissent from the Doctor, and pin my
faith to half-price. The absence of a second price is suitable enough
for such exotic exhibitions as the Italian operas and the French plays;
but I deplored the suspension of that dramatic _habeas corpus_ in the
palmy Lyceum days of Madame Vestris’s management. There is something
supercilious, pragmatical, maccaronyish, un-English, in the announcement,
“No half-price.” How immeasurably superior is the fine old British
placard, now, alas! so seldom seen, “Pit full: standing-room only in the
upper boxes!”
There is a transpontine theatre, situated laterally towards the Waterloo
Road, and having a northern front towards an anomalous thoroughfare
that runs from Lambeth to Blackfriars, for which I have had, during a
long period of years, a great esteem and admiration. This is the Royal
Victoria Theatre. To the neophyte in London I frequently point out a
brick erection, above the cornice of the pediment, and say, “My friend,
in the days when the ‘Vic.’ (it is popularly termed the ‘Vic.’) was known
as the ‘Coburg,’ that brick slip was built to contain at its rise—for it
could not be rolled up—the famous ‘Crystal curtain,’ which ruined one
management to construct, and half ruined another to demolish. The grand
melodramas the Coburg used to give us—real horses, real armour, real
blood, almost real water!” Those were the days of “Ginevra the Impaled
One” and “Manfroni the One-handed Monk.” There are famous dramatists,
actors, scene-painters, who would look rather shame-faced (though I
cannot see why they should be ashamed) were they reminded, now, of
their achievements in the service of transpontine melodrama at the
Coburg. How stupidly absurd people are in repudiating their beginnings!
Buffel, the millionaire contractor, denies stoutly that he ever carried
a hod, although hundreds of us remember him on the ladder. Linning,
the fashionable tailor, would poison any one who told him he once kept
a beer-shop in Lambeth Walk, and afterwards failed as a tea-dealer in
Shoreditch. One of the most accomplished comedians of the day makes a
point of cutting me dead, because I can recollect the time, and knew
him, when he used to colour prints for a livelihood; and I daresay that
Baron Rothschild—with all the philosophy his unbounded wealth should
properly give him—would not ask me to dinner, if I reminded him that his
grandfather was a pedlar in the Juden-Grasse, at Frankfort. The next
Tamworth baronet, I suppose, will strike the beehive and “_Industriâ_”
out of the family escutcheon, and assume the three leeches sable on a
field gules _semée_ or, of his ancestors the De la Pills, who came over
with the Conqueror as barber-chirurgeons to the ducal body. And yet a
certain Emperor and King was not ashamed to talk of the period when he
was a “lieutenant in the Regiment of Lafère;” and the present writer, who
is, on one side (the wrong), of the _sangre azul_ of Spain, is not above
confessing the existence of a tradition in his family, hinting that his
maternal grandmother danced on the tight rope.
Although I am a devotee of the opera, and am always glad when Drury
Lane doors are open, and mourn over the decadence of the Lyceum, and
wish that the Strand would succeed,[10] and longed for the day when
the resuscitated Adelphi should open its doors, and rejoice at the
prosperity of the Olympic, and think that one of the most rational and
delightful night’s amusements in Europe, may be attained by the sight
of the “Merchant of Venice” at the now closed (so far as Charles Kean
is concerned) Princess’s, I have yet a tenderness, a predilection, an
almost preference, for the Vic. There is a sturdy honesty of purpose,
unity of action, sledge-hammer morality about the rubbishing melodramas,
which are nightly yelled and ranted through on the Victoria stage, that
are productive, I believe, of an intellectual tone, highly healthful and
beneficial. Burkins, the garotter, who is now in hold in Pentonville for
his sins, and is so promising a pupil of the chaplain, (having nearly
learnt the Gunpowder Plot service and the prohibitions of consanguinity
by heart,) has confidentially informed his reverend instructor that to
the melodramas at the Victoria must be ascribed his ruin. It was the
“Lonely Man of the Ocean” that led him to fall on Mr. Jabez Cheddar,
cheesemonger, in Westminster Broadway, at two o’clock in the morning,
split his skull open with a life-preserver, jump upon him, and rob him of
eight pounds twelve, a silver hunting-watch, and a brass tobacco-box; at
which confession the chaplain orders him more beef and books, and puts
him down in the front rank for his next recommendatory report to the
visiting magistrates. Partaking, in company with some other persons, of
the opinion that Burkins adds to the characteristics of a ruffian and
a blockhead, those of a hypocrite and a Liar, I do not necessarily set
much store by the expression of _his_ opinions on the British drama. But
when I find shrewd police-inspectors and astute stipendiary magistrates
moralising over the dreadful effects of cheap theatres, attended as
they are by the “youth of both sexes,” I deem them foemen worthy of my
steel. Good Mr. Inspector, worthy Master Justice, where are the youth
and the adults of both sexes to go in quest of that amusement, which I
suppose you will concede to them, of some nature, the necessity? Are
the churches open on week nights, and to such as they? and would you
yourselves like to sit under Doctor Cumming, or even Mr. Spurgeon, from
Saturday to Saturday? Are they to go to the Opera, to Almack’s, to the
Carlton Club, or to the conversaziones of the Geological Society? You
object, you say, to the nature of the entertainments provided for them.
Come with me, and sit on the coarse deal benches in the coarsely and
tawdrily-decorated cheap theatre, and listen to the sorrily-dressed
actors and actresses—periwigged-pated fellows and slatternly wenches,
if you like—tearing their passion to tatters, mouthing and ranting,
and splitting the ears of the groundlings. But in what description of
pieces? In dramas, I declare and maintain, in which, for all the jargon,
silliness, and buffoonery, the immutable principles of right and justice
are asserted; in which virtue, in the end, is always triumphant, and
vice is punished; in which cowardice and falsehood are hissed, and
bravery and integrity vehemently applauded; in which, were we to sift
away the bad grammar, and the extravagant action, we should find the
dictates of the purest and highest morality. These poor people can’t help
misplacing their h’s, and fighting combats of six with tin broadswords.
They haven’t been to the university of Cambridge; they can’t compete for
the middle-class examinations; they don’t subscribe to the “Saturday
Review;” they have never taken dancing lessons from Madame Michau; they
have never read Lord Chesterfield’s Letters; they can’t even afford to
purchase a “Shilling Handbook of Etiquette.” Which is best? That they
should gamble in low coffee-shops, break each other’s heads with pewter
pots in public-houses, fight and wrangle at street corners, or lie in
wait in doorways and blind alleys to rob and murder, or that they should
pay their threepence for admission into the gallery of the “Vic.”—witness
the triumph of a single British sailor over twelve armed ruffians, who
are about to carry off the Lady Maud to outrage worse than death; see
the discomfiture of the dissolute young nobleman, and the restitution
of the family estates (through the timely intervention of a ghost in a
table-cloth) to the oppressed orphan? And of this nature are the vast
mass of transpontine melodramas. The very “blood-and-murder” pieces, as
they are termed, always end with the detection of the assassin and his
condign punishment. George Cruikshank’s admirable moral story of “The
Bottle” was dramatised at the “Vic.,” and had an immense run. They are
performing “Never Too Late to Mend,” now, over the water, to crowded
houses. If we want genteel improprieties, sparkling immoral repartees,
decorously scandalous intrigues, and artful cobwebs of _double entendre_,
touching on the seventh commandment, we must cross the bridges and
visit the high-priced, fashionably-attended theatres of the West-end.
At a West-end theatre, was produced the only immoral version of an
immoral (and imbecile) “Jack Sheppard,” which is, even now, vauntingly
announced as being the “authorised version”—the only one licensed by
the Lord Chamberlain; and in that “authorised version” occurs the line,
“Jack Sheppard is a thief, but he never told a lie,” a declaration than
which the worst dictum of howling Tom Paine or rabid Mary Wolstoncraft
was not more subversive of the balance of moral ethics. And, at a
West-end theatre, likewise, his Lordship the Chamberlain authorised the
production of a play, whose story, regarded either as a melodrama or
as the libretto of a trashy Italian opera, has not been equalled for
systematic immorality: no, not by Wilkes; no, not by Aphra Behn: no, not
by Crebillon the younger: no, not by Voltaire in the scandalous “Pucelle.”
And have I brought you all the way over Waterloo Bridge in the evening
only to sermonise you! I deserve to be mulcted in three times the
halfpenny toll; and I must make amends by saying nothing whatsoever
about the shot towers, or the Lion Brewery, the London and South-Western
Terminus, and Hawkstone Hall. Here we are, at the corner of the New Cut.
It is Nine o’Clock precisely (I must have flown rather than walked from
the pawnbroker’s in that lane on the Middlesex side), and while the
half-price is pouring into the Victoria Theatre, the whole-price (there
is no half-price to the gallery, mind, the charge for the evening’s
entertainment being only threepence) is pouring out with equal and
continuous persistence, and are deluging the New Cut. Whither, you may
ask, are they bound? They are in quest of their Beer.
The English have been a beer-loving people for very many ages. It gives
them their masculine, sturdy, truculent character. Beer and beef, it
has been before remarked, make boys. Beer and beef won the battle of
Waterloo. Beer and beef have built railways all over the world. Our
troops in the Crimea languished, even on beef (it was but hard corned
junk, to be sure) till the authorities sent them beer. There is a _lex
non scripta_ among the labouring English, much more potent than many Acts
of Parliament, and called the “Strong Beer Act.” They have songs about
beer with lusty “nipperkin, pipperkin, and the brown beer” choruses; and
in village parlours you may hear stentorian baritones, of agricultural
extraction, shouting out that “Feayther likes his beer, he does;” that
“Sarah’s passionately fond of her beer, she is;” and denouncing awful
vengeance upon those enemies of the people who would “rob a poor man
of his beer.” Our fingers were brought to the very hair-trigger of a
revolution by the attempted interference of an otherwise well-meaning
nobleman, with the people’s beer; and did not William Hogarth strike
the right nail on the head when he drew those two terrible pictures of
Beer Street and Gin Lane? The authorities of the Victoria Theatre have
preserved, I am glad to say, a wholesome reverence for the provisions of
the Strong Beer Act, and it is, I believe, a clause in the Magna Charta
of the management, that the performances on Saturday evenings shall
invariably terminate within a few minutes of midnight, in order to afford
the audience due and sufficient time to pour out their final libations at
the shrine of Beer, before the law compels the licensed victuallers to
close.
There are not many gradations of rank among the frequenters of the
Victoria Theatre. Many of the occupants of the boxes sat last night
in the pit, and will sit to-morrow in the gallery, according to the
fluctuation of their finances; nay, spirited denizens of the New Cut will
not unfrequently, say on a Monday evening, when the week’s wages have
not been irremediably dipped into, pay their half-crown like men, and
occupy seats in the private box next the stage. And the same equality and
fraternity are manifest when the audience pour forth at half-price to
take their beer. There may be a few cheap dandies, indeed—Cornwall Road
exquisites and Elephant-and-Castle bucks—who prefer to do the “grand” in
the saloon attached to the theatre; there may be some dozens of couples
sweethearting, who are content to consume oranges, ginger beer, and
Abernethy biscuits within the walls of the house; but the great pressure
is outwards, and the great gulf stream of this human ocean flows towards
a gigantic “public” opposite the Victoria, and which continually drives a
roaring trade.
I wish that I had a more savoury locality to take you to than the New
Cut. I acknowledge frankly that I don’t like it. We have visited many
queer places in London together, of which, it may be, the fashionables
of the West-end have never heard; but they all had some out-of-the-way
scraps of Bohemianism to recommend them. I can’t say the same for the
New Cut. It isn’t picturesque, it isn’t quaint, it isn’t curious. It
has not even the questionable merit of being old. It is simply Low. It
is sordid, squalid, and, the truth must out, disreputable. The broad
thoroughfare, which, bordered with fitting houses, would make one of the
handsomest streets in London, is gorged with vile, rotten tenements,
occupied by merchants who oft-times pursue the very contrary to innocent
callings. Everything is second-hand, except the leviathan gin-shops,
which are ghastly in their newness and richness of decoration. The broad
pavement presents a mixture of Vanity Fair and Rag Fair. It is the
paradise of the lowest of costermongers, and often the saturnalia of the
most emerited thieves. Women appear there in their most unlovely aspect:
brazen, slovenly, dishevelled, brawling, muddled with beer or fractious
with gin. The howling of beaten children and kicked dogs, the yells of
ballad-singers, “death and fire-hunters,” and reciters of sham murders
and elopements; the bawling recitations of professional denunciators of
the Queen, the Royal family, and the ministry; the monotonous _jödels_
of the itinerant hucksters; the fumes of the vilest tobacco, of stale
corduroy suits, of oilskin caps, of mildewed umbrellas, of decaying
vegetables, of escaping (and frequently surreptitiously tapped) gas, of
deceased cats, of ancient fish, of cagmag meat, of dubious mutton pies,
and of unwashed, soddened, unkempt, reckless humanity: all these make
the night hideous and the heart sick. The New Cut is one of the most
unpleasant samples of London that you could offer to a foreigner. Bethnal
Green is ragged, squalid, woe-begone, but it is quiet and industrious.
Here, there is mingled with the poverty a flaunting, idle, vagabond,
beggarly-fine don’t-care-a-centishness. Burkins in hold in Pentonville
for his sins assures the chaplain that the wickedness of the New Cut is
due solely to the proximity of the “Wictoriar Theayter, that ‘aunt of
disypashion and the wust of karackters.” For my part, I think that if
there were no such safety-valve as a theatre for the inhabitants of
the “Cut,” it would become a mere Devil’s Acre, a Cour des Miracles, a
modern edition of the Whitefriars Alsatia; and that the Cutites would
fall to plundering, quarrelling, and fighting, through sheer _ennui_.
It is horrible, dreadful, we know, to have such a place; but then,
consider—the population of London is fast advancing towards three
millions, and the wicked people must live somewhere—under a strictly
constitutional government. There is a despot, now, over the water, who
would make very short work of the New Cut. He would see, at a glance,
the capacities of the place; in the twinkling of a decree the rotten
tenements would be doomed to destruction; houses and shops like palaces
would line the thoroughfare; trees would be planted along the pavement;
and the Boulevard de Lambeth would be one of the stateliest avenues in
the metropolis. But Britons never will be slaves, and we must submit to
thorns (known as “vested interests”) in the constitutional rose, and pay
somewhat dear for our liberty as well as for our whistle.