In the bleak, timbery city of Copenhagen, so terribly maltreated at the
commencement of the century by Admiral Lord Nelson, K.C.B.; in that
anything-but-agreeable capital of Denmark, where raw turnips sliced
in brandy form a favourite whet before dinner,—where they blacklead
(apparently) the stairs in the houses, and three-fourths of every
apartment are sacrificed to the preposterous exigencies of the Stove;
where the churches are mostly of wood, and the streets are paved with a
substance nearly resembling petrified kidney potatoes; in Copenhagen,
then, I formed, some thirty months since, a transient acquaintance with
an old gentleman in green spectacles. He was a Dane, formerly commercial,
now retired from business. He came every day, and with unvarying
regularity, to take his post-prandial coffee and _petit verre_ in the
_speise saal_ of the hotel then afflicted with my custom: he generally
indulged in the refreshment by dipping a large lump of sugar in the hot
liquid, sucking it, replenishing it, occasionally replacing the lump,
till the cup was emptied; and he snuffed eternally. These are not such
peculiar characteristics of a foreign gentleman that I have any special
cause to dwell upon them here; but as the hotel was very empty, and I
was very dull, I made this old gentleman—as my incorrigible habit is—a
study and a theme. I converted him into a mental clothes-prop, and hung
an infinity of fantastic notions, theories, and speculations upon him.
We soon became, thanks to the French language and constant proximity,
tolerably good friends. Of course the old gentleman did not delay long
in asking me why I had come to Copenhagen. _That_ question is invariably
asked you—_ad nauseam_, too—throughout the North of Europe. They begin
at Hamburg, continue at Berlin, return to it in Denmark and Sweden, and
end at St. Petersburg. If a man be not a commercial traveller, or a
diplomatist, a spy, or a negotiator of forged bank-notes, these Northern
people seem utterly bewildered as to his object in coming to such
latitudes. The Rhine, the Mediterranean, the Bosphorus, the Holy Land,
Switzerland, the Tyrol, good; but the North: _que diable!_ what does he
want in that galley? I confess that I was somewhat at a loss to give a
straightforward answer to the old gentleman in green spectacles. I might
have told him that I had come to see the birthplace of Hans Christian
Anderson; but then I was not quite certain as to whether that delightful
Danish writer first drew breath in Copenhagen. It would have been equally
disingenuous to have adduced a wish to see the famous Thorwaldsen’s
Museum as the reason for my visit; for with shame I acknowledge that,
having no guide-book with me, I had entirely forgotten that the Danish
metropolis contained that triumph of plastic art. It is true that, by
attentive study of the glorious museum, I subsequently atoned for my
mnemonic shortcomings. So, being on the horns of a dilemma, I elected to
tell the truth—not a bad plan under any circumstances—and said that I had
come to Copenhagen for the simple reason that I did not know what to do
with myself, and would have gone with equal alacrity to Nova Zembla or to
Katamandu; which candid avowal placed me on a most confidential footing
with the old gentleman in green spectacles, and materially assisted the
progress of our intercourse.
Now, whatever can this Danish old gentleman and his verdant spectacles
have to do with One o’Clock in the morning, and Evans’s Supper-rooms?
You must have patience, and you shall hear. In subsequent chatty
interviews, it came out that the old gentleman had once upon a time—a
very long while ago, more than a quarter of a century—been in England.
His reminiscences of our country were very dim and indistinct by this
time. His knowledge of the English language, I take it, had not at any
time been very extensive, and it was reduced now to a few phrases and
interjections; some trifling oaths, a few facetious party-cries, current,
I presume, at the time of his visit, and having, mainly, reference to
Catholic Emancipation and the Reform Bill; these, with some odds and
ends of tattered conversation, formed his philological stock in trade.
But, even as “single-speech Hamilton” had his solitary oration, Mrs.
Dubsy’s hen her one chick, and Major Panton his unique run of luck at the
card-table, so my old gentleman had his one story which he persisted in
delivering in English. It was a mysterious and almost incomprehensible
legend; and began thus: “’Ackney Rod! Aha!” Then he would snuff and suck
his lump of sugar, and I would look on wonderingly. Then he would explain
matters a little. “’Ackney Rod. I live there so long time ago. Aha!” This
would lead to a renewed series of snuffings and suckings, and he would
proceed—“Vontleroy he not ’ang. He rich man, banquier in America. He ’ang
in a sospender basket. Aha!” For the life of me, I could not for a long
time understand the drift about “Vontleroy” and the “sospender basket;”
but at length a light broke in upon me, and I began to comprehend that
this wondrous legend related to Henry Fauntleroy, the banker, who was
hanged at Newgate for forgery, and concerning whose apocryphal rescue
from strangulation—by the means, according to some, of a silver tube in
his windpipe, and, according to others, of an apparatus of wicker-work,
which, suspending him from the waist, so took the strain off his
neck—rumours were current at the time of his death and for a considerable
period afterwards. This cock-and-bull story was well-nigh all the poor
man could recollect about England, and he decidedly made the most of it.
And, after all, I have only introduced him as a species of
gentleman-usher to another foreign acquaintance—with whom my intercourse
was even more transient, for I met him but once in my life, and then
had only about seven minutes’ conversation with him on the deck of a
steamer—whose knowledge of English and recollection of England were even
more limited. “Ver fine place,” he remarked, referring to my native land.
“Moch night plaisir, London. Sing-song ver good. Ev’ns magnifique.”
There, the secret of my digression is out now, and I land you—somewhat
wearied with the journey, it may be—under the Piazza of Covent Garden
Market.
Mr. Charles Dickens once declared in print that were he to start a horse
for the Derby, he would call that horse Fortnum and Mason: the delightful
hampers of edibles and drinkables vended by that eminent firm about the
period of Epsom Races being connected with the most pleasurable of his
impressions concerning that exciting sporting event. I have no doubt
that my steamboat acquaintance was not by any means solitary in his
enthusiastic estimate of the “magnifique” nature of Ev’ns, or EVANS’S,
and its “sing-song;” and his opinion is, I have reason to believe,
shared by many hundreds of English country gentlemen who patronise the
Bedford, the Tavistock, the Hummums, and other kindred Covent Garden
hotels, and who at Evans’s find their heartiest welcome and their most
inexhaustible fund of amusement. Nor can I see myself, exactly, how this
great town of ours could manage to get on without the time-honoured Cave
of Harmony; for be it known to all men—at least to so many as do not know
it already—Evans’s, though Captain Costigan is no longer permitted to
sing his songs there, and even Colonel Newcome, were he to volunteer to
oblige the company with a song, would be politely requested to desist by
a waiter—is the “Cave,” and the “Cave” is Evans’s. It is not without a
certain sly chuckle of gratulation that I record this fact. Those friends
of mine who have adopted the highly honourable pursuit of hiding round
corners in order to throw, with the greater security, jagged stones at
me as I pass, those precious purists and immaculate precisians who cry
hard upon a writer on London life in the nineteenth century, because he
describes things and places which every man knows to exist, and whose
existence he for one has not the hypocrisy to deny—these good gentlemen
will scarcely be angry with their poor servant, Scriblerus, for giving a
word-picture of a place of amusement which is immortalised in the first
chapter of “The Newcomes.” And please to observe, gentlemen, that I am
not about to venture on the very delicate ground with respect to the
quality of the songs once sung at Evans’s, and so boldly trodden by Mr.
Thackeray. I have the less need to do so, as that delicate or indelicate
ground has long since—and to the honour of the present proprietor, Mr.
Green—been ploughed up and sown with salt, and the musical programme
rendered as innocuous as the bill of fare of a festival in a cathedral
town.
And now for the place itself. About a century since, when the shadowy
hero of the “Virginians” was beating the town with my Lords Castlewood
and March, and Parson Sampson, and his black man Gumbo was flirting with
Colonel Lambert’s servant-maids; about a century since, when in reality
Johnson—not so long since emancipated from sleeping on bulks with that
other homeless wretch, and man of genius, Savage—was painfully finishing
his gigantic work, the “Dictionary;” when Goldsmith was “living in Axe
Lane among the beggars,” or starving in Green Arbour Court; when honest
Hogarth dwelt at the sign of the Golden Head, in Leicester Fields (he
had set up his coach by this time, worthy man, was Serjeant-painter to
the King, and had his country-house at Chiswick); when the wicked, witty
Wilkes was carousing with other “choice spirits” as wicked and as witty
as he, at Medmenham Abbey; when the furious Churchill was astonishing
the town with his talent and his excesses; when Lawrence Sterne was yet
fiddling, and painting, and preaching, while his friend Hall indited the
“Crazy Tales;” when George II., hitherto considered as a heavy, morose
German king, who did not like “boetry and bainting,” and could not see
the fun of the “March to Finchley,” but now for the first time revealed
to us by Mr. Carlyle as a dapper, consequential little coxcomb—the “_mein
bruder der comödiant_,” “my brother the playactor” of Friedrich-Wilhelm,
was Sovereign of Great Britain, by the grace of the Act of Settlement
and the madness of the Stuarts—this town of London was full of choice
holes and corners, known under the generic name of “night cellars.” You
may see in Liverpool to this day—and I am told, also, in New York—some
flourishing specimens of these inviting localities, but they have
almost died out in London. The White Horse Cellar in Piccadilly is now
a booking-office; the Shades in Leicester Square (underneath Saville
House), once Pennant’s “pouting house for princes,” is a _restaurant_;
the cellar of the Ship at Charing Cross is yet a tavern, but is used
more as a waiting-room for passengers by the Kent Road and Deptford
omnibuses; and a whole nest of cellars were swept away by the Adamses
when the Adelphi Terrace, with a worse range of cellars beneath, as
it afterwards turned out, was constructed. But the night cellars of a
hundred years ago! What dens, what sinks, what roaring saturnalia of
very town scoundrelism they must have been! We have but two reliable
authorities extant as to their manners and appearance: Hogarth’s prints,
and the pages of the Old Bailey Sessions Papers. The former are the
engraven testimony of a man to whose honest nature it was utterly
abhorrent and intolerable to bear false witness; the latter is a record
that _cannot lie_. I don’t mean by these Sessions Papers the collection
of trials known as the “Newgate Calendar.” In these, crimes are dressed
up with all manner of romantic and adventitious details, and occasionally
spiced with moral reflections by the ordinary of Newgate. I mean the
real Sessions Papers, the _verbatim_ reports of the trials—from murder
to pot-stealing—taken officially in short-hand by the Gurneys and their
predecessors, and which, in their matchless _extenso_, remain, to the
inestimable advantage of our historians and our painters of manners. They
date from the time of Judge Jeffreys, to the last session of the Central
Criminal Court—it may have been the day before yesterday.
The cellars come out with a perfectly livid radiance in the reports of
these trials. You see the “brimstone” woman, whom Hogarth pointed out
to his friend and sketched upon his thumbnail, spurting brandy from her
mouth at the enraged virago her companion. You see Kate Hackabout passing
the stolen watch to Tom Idle, who is under the unseen surveillance of
one of Justice de Veil or Harry Fielding’s runners, and the luckless
Thomas will be laid by the heels by daybreak to-morrow. Kate will go to
Bridewell, there to be whipped and to pick oakum. Foote’s Mother Cole
is here, you may be sure; and Tom Rakewell, spending his last guineas
among the gamblers and ruffians. Who else are there? Ferdinand Count
Fathom, you may sure; poets and hack-writers—for Grub Street existed then
in spirit and in truth—making my lord’s gold pieces, which he gave for
that last foolishly-fulsome dedication, fly. Yes; Mr. Peregrine Pickle,
and you are spending your night in the cellar. And Mr. Thomas Jones,
fresh from the western counties,—you, too, are here, with a laced coat
bought out of my Lady Bellaston’s last bank-note. Ah! Thomas! Thomas!
if pure-minded Sophy Western could but see you in this bad place, among
these ruffianly companions!—among horse-jockeys, highwaymen-captains,
unfrocked parsons; deboshed adventurers, redolent of twopenny ordinaries
and Mount Scoundrel in the Fleet; disbanded lieutenants of phantom
regiments; scriveners struck off the rolls, ruined spendthrifts,
Irish desperadoes enthusiastic for the Pretender and other men’s
pence, bankrupt traders, French and Italian rascals flagrant from the
galleys of foreign seaports, and all, according to their own showing,
distressed patriots; German swindlers and card-sharpers, who declare
themselves to be Counts of the Holy Roman Empire, Jew coin-clippers and
diamond-slicers, riverside vagabonds in the pay of the commanders of
press-gangs on the look-out for benighted journeymen, or dissolute lads
who have run away from their apprenticeship or quarrelled with their
parents, recruiting crimps for both sexes, usurers looking for prodigals
who have yet money to lose, bailiffs’ followers looking for prodigals
who have lost all and owe more; and, scattered among all this scum of
frantic knavery and ragabosh, some gay young sprigs of aristocracy, some
officers in the regiment of Guards, some noisy young country squires of
the Western type. This, all garnished with dirt and spilt liquors, with
the fumes of mum, Geneva, punch, wine, and tobacco smoke, with oaths
and shrieks and horrid songs, with the clatter of glasses and tankards,
the clash of rapiers and verberations of bludgeons—is the London night
cellar of a hundred years ago. Round Covent Garden such places positively
swarmed. The Strand, the neighbourhood of Exeter ’Change, Long Acre, and
Drury Lane, reeked with dens of this description. For hereabouts were
the playhouses, and in their purlieus, as in those of cathedrals, you
must expect to find, and do find, in every age, the haunts of vice and
dissipation. It may be profane to say _ubi apis ibi mel_: but such is the
sorry fact.
I am to give you notice that this article was originally intended
to be intensely topographical—nay, _sant soit peu_, antiquarian and
archæological. It was my desire to give you a minute description of the
hostelry called Evans’s Hotel, and whose basement contains the saloon
known as Evans’s supper-room, from the earliest period of authentic
research to the present time. How it emerged from a state of brawling
night-cellarhood, to the dignity of a harmonic meeting; who first ordered
“chops to follow,” and what ingenious spirit originally suggested the
curious principle now in practice, of paying for your refreshment at
the door on quitting the establishment; who instituted the glee-choir,
introduced books of the words, and discovered that baked potatoes are
necessarily associated with bumpers of stout, poached eggs, and liberally
cayenned kidneys; who formed the gallery of portraits which now graces
the walls of the ante-saloon, and who first dreamed of such an Arabian
Night’s succedaneum as a ladies’ gallery. All these things it was my
firm intention to record, in Roman type, for your amusement, if not
your edification. “Who knows,” I asked myself enthusiastically, “if I
take sweet counsel (hot and strong as well as sweet, sometimes) of Mr.
Paddy Green, most urbane of nocturnal Bonifaces, and sit reverentially
at the feet of Mr. Peter Cunningham, who, it is rumoured, in the matter
of London localities, could, an he chose, rival the marvellous feat
of memory ascribed to old Fuller of the ‘Worthies,’ who could repeat
backwards, and without book, the names of all the tavern signs on both
sides of the way from Temple Bar to Ludgate: who knows,” I repeated,
“but that I shall be able to submit to the readers of ‘Twice Round the
Clock,’ a copy of an unpaid score left by Oliver Goldsmith at some
Evans’s of the past; or put it upon record that Sir Thomas Lawrence and
Major Hanger had claret-cup together here, on the night that Thurtell was
hanged, or that on the fatal evening when the Catholic Bill passed the
Lords, a live bishop—a hackney coachman’s many-caped coat over his apron
and shorts—descended Evans’s well-worn stairs, ordered a Welsh rabbit,
partook of two ‘stouts,’ and, the tears coursing down his right reverend
cheeks, murmured—‘Britain! oh my country! _Delenda est Carthago!_’ by
way of chorus to Captain Costigan’s favourite ditty of ‘The Night before
Larry was stretched?’”
In the famous gardens of the Villa Pallavicini, near Genoa, there is an
artificial piece of water winding between rocks, at the extremity of
which the mimic river seems to lose itself in the blue waters of the
Mediterranean. Nothing of the sort is the case: the sea is, in reality,
more than three hundred yards distant; but the intervening ground has
been so dexterously sloped and masked with groups of plants, that the
optical delusion is marvellous. Of such are the aspirations of mankind.
In such disappointment ended my castles in the air with respect to
Evans’s. It was from across the ocean that I had to respond to the
printers’ wail for “copy:” this article was commenced in view of the
Castle of Rolandseck, on board a Rhine steamer, whose worn-out engines
throbbed as irregularly as though they had palpitation of the heart. It
is being continued now at the sea-side, in bed, gruel on the one side,
sweet spirits of nitre on the other: and where it will be finished,
who can tell? Old Æsop told the soldiers, when they asked him whither
he was going, that he did not know, whereupon they arrested him for an
impertinent. “Was I not right?” he cried; “did I know that I was going
to jail?” “_Sait on où l’on va?_” echoes Diderot. How do I, how do you,
how does your lordship, how does your grace, how does your majesty,
know what will happen the moment after this? Therefore, take heed of the
present time, and make your wills: the best will, in my humble thinking,
that a man can make, being that strong will and determination to act as
justly as he can in each moment in the which he is permitted to live.
So you understand, now, why I was compelled to dispense with the
assistance of Mr. Paddy Green and Mr. Peter Cunningham, and why I am
reduced to a dependence on my own personal reminiscences with respect
to Evans’s, without the adventitious aid of recondite anecdote and
historical data. Here is the place as I remember it.
One o’clock in the morning. Of course we are supposed to be spending
just a fortnight in town, and putting up at the Bedford, or it would
never do to be so early-late abroad. We have been to the play, and have
consumed a few oysters in the Haymarket; but the principal effect of
that refreshment seems to have been to make us ten times hungrier. The
delicate bivalves of Colchester have failed in appeasing our bucolic
stomachs. We require meat. So, says the friend most learned in the ways
of the town to his companion—“Meat at our hotel we eschew, for we shall
find the entertainment of the dearest and dullest. We will go sup at
Evans’s, for there we can have good meat and good liquor at fair rates,
and hear a good song besides.” Whereupon we walk, till the piazza, about
which I have kept you so long lingering, looms in sight. A low doorway,
brilliantly lit with gas, greets our view. We descend a flight of some
steps, pass through a vestibule, and enter the “Cave of Harmony.”
Push further on, if you please. You are not to linger in this
ante-chamber, thickly hung with pictures, and otherwise, with its
circular marble tables, much resembling a Parisian _café_, minus the
mirrors and the rattle of the dominoes. This ante-chamber will be treated
of anon; but your present business is with chops and harmony.
Passing, then, through this _atrium_, the visitor finds himself in a
vast music-hall, of really noble proportions, and decorated not only
with admirable taste, but with something nearly akin to splendour. You
see I am at a loss for authorities again, and I cannot tell you how much
of the hall is Corinthian, and how much composite; whether the columns
are fluted, the cornices gilt or the soffits carved, and whether the
Renaissance or the Arabesque style most prevails in the decorations
employed. All I know is, that it is a lofty, handsome, comfortable room,
whose acoustic properties, by the way, are far superior to those enjoyed
by some establishments with loftier philharmonic pretensions. At the
northern extremity of the hall is a spacious proscenium and stage, with
the grand pianoforte _de rigueur_, the whole veiled by a curtain in
the intervals of performance. As for the huge area stretching from the
proscenium to a row of columns which separate it from the ante-chamber
_café_, it is occupied by parallel lines of tables, which, if they do not
groan beneath the weight of good eatables and drinkables piled upon them,
might certainly be excused for groaning—to say nothing of shrieking,
yelling, and uttering other lamentable noises, evoked by the unmerciful
thumping and hammering they undergo at the conclusion of every fresh
exercitation of harmony.