These fragmentary recollections of our childish days may have served to
suggest some hints of the changes which have made the London of the
present day almost--perhaps quite--as different from the London of the
second decade of this century as the latter was from “the town” in the
days of George the First. But it is difficult for middle-aged people of
the present day to form any vivid and sufficient conception of the
greatness of them. Of course the mere material ameliorations and
extensions have so metamorphosed the localities that I, on returning
after long years to the London I once knew, topographically at least, so
well, find myself in a new town of which the geography is in some parts
strange to me, with just so much of the old landmarks remaining as
serves to suggest false clues to the labyrinth and render the matter
more puzzling. But the changes in ways and habits and modes of living
and feeling and thinking are still greater and of much more profound
significance.
To say that there were in those days no omnibuses and no cabs, and of
course no railways, either under ground or over it, is a simple matter,
and very easily stated. But it is not easy to picture to oneself the
whole meaning and consequences of their non-existence. Let any Londoner,
with the exception of the comparatively small number of those who use
carriages of their own, think what his life would be, and the
transaction of his day’s work or of his day’s pleasure, without any
means of locomotion save his own legs or a hackney coach, which, at a
cost of about five times the cab hire of the present day, used to shut
him up in an atmosphere like that of a very dirty stable, and jolt him
over the uneven pavement at a pace of about four miles an hour. Dickens
has given in his own graphic way more than one sketch of the old hackney
coach. I do not think that I ever saw a hackney coach that had been
built for the work it was engaged in as such. They were heavy,
old-fashioned, rickety vehicles, which had become too heavy, too
old-fashioned, too rickety to be retained in the service of the families
to which they had once belonged. They were built for the most part with
hammer cloths, and many of them exhibited huge and gorgeously-painted
armorial bearings on the panels. (By the by, why did not the officials
of the Inland Revenue come down on the proprietors of these venerable
vehicles for the use of armorial bearings? I take it that the march of
modern intelligence, _acuens mortalia corda_, would impel their
successors of the present day to do so.) The drivers of those carriages
were “in a concatenation accordingly”--shabby, slow, stupid, dirty, and
often muddled with drink. We hear occasionally nowadays of a cabman
“driving furiously” when drunk. The wording of the charge smacks of
another era. Not all the gin in London could have stimulated the old
“Jarvey” to drive his skeletons of horses furiously. He was not often
incapacitated by drink, but very frequently muddled. If it was necessary
for him to descend from his hammer-cloth for the purpose of opening the
door of his carriage, which the presence of the “waterman” of the stand
for the most part rendered unnecessary, he was a long time about it, and
a longer in clambering back to his seat, loaded as he generally was in
all weathers with an immense greatcoat of many capes, weatherbeaten out
of all resemblance to its original colour. The “watermen,” so-called, as
we know from high authority, “because they opens the coach doors,” were
nevertheless surrounded by their half-a-dozen or so of little shallow
pails of water, as they stood by the side of the curbstone near a coach
stand. They were to the hackney-coachman what the bricklayer’s labourer
is to the bricklayer. And a more sorry sight can hardly be conceived
than the “stand” with its broken-down carriages, more broken-down
drivers, and most of all broken-down horses, which supplied us in the
days when we “called a coach, and let a coach be called, and he that
calls it, let him be the caller,” as it stands written in a page almost
as much (but far less deservedly) forgotten as the hackney coach.
Already in my boyhood “Oxford Road” was beginning to be called “Oxford
Street.” But my father and his contemporaries always used the former
phrase. At the end of Oxford Street was Tyburn turnpike; not a mere
name, but a veritable barrier closing not only the continuation of the
Oxford Road but also the Edgware Road, turning at right angles to the
north of it. And there stood _one_ turnpike-man to receive the toll and
give tickets in return for the whole of the Oxford Street traffic! I can
see him now, with his low-crowned hat, a straw in his mouth, his
vigilant eye, and the preternatural quickness and coolness, as it seemed
to me, with which, standing in the centre between his two gates, he took
the halfpence and delivered the tickets. He had always an irreproachably
clean white apron with pockets in the front of it, one for halfpence and
one for tickets.
I have spoken of my delight in the spectacle of the coaches starting
from and arriving at the White Horse Cellar in Piccadilly. But there
were many other aspects of London life in the days before railroads in
which the coaches made a leading feature. One of the sights of London
for country cousins was to see the mails starting at 8 P.M. from the
Post Office. To view it under the most favourable circumstances, one
went there on the anniversary of the king’s birthday, when all the
guards had their scarlet coats new, and the horses’ heads were all
decked with flowers. And truly the yard around the Post Office offered
on such an occasion a prettier sight than all the travelling
arrangements of the present day could supply. Of course I am speaking
of a time a little subsequent to my earliest recollections. For I can
remember when the huge edifice in Saint Martin’s le Grand was built; and
remember well, too, the ridicule and the outcry that was raised at the
size of the building, so enormously larger, it was supposed, than could
possibly be needed! But it has now long since been found altogether
insufficient for the needs of the service.
A journey on the box of the mail was a great delight to me in those
days--days somewhere in the third decade of the century; and faith! I
believe would be still, if there were any mails available for the
purpose. One journey frequently performed by me with infinite delight
was to Exeter. My business was to visit two old ladies living there,
Miss Mary and Miss Fanny Bent. The Rev. John Bent, rector of Crediton,
had married the sister of my grandmother, the Rev. William Milton’s
wife. Miss Mary Bent was his daughter by a second wife; but her
half-sister, Fanny Bent, as we and everybody else called her, was thus
my mother’s first cousin, and the tie between Fanny Milton and Fanny
Bent had always from their earliest years been a very close one.
And that is how I came on several occasions to find myself on the box of
the Exeter mail. A new and accelerated mail service had been recently
established under the title of the “Devonport Mail.” It was at that time
the fastest, I believe, in England. Its performances caused somewhat of
a sensation in the coaching world, and it was known in those circles as
“the Quicksilver Mail.” Its early days had chanced unfortunately to be
marked by two or three accidents, which naturally gave it an increased
celebrity. And truly, if it is considered what those men and horses were
required to perform, the wonder was, not that “the Quicksilver” should
have come to grief two or three times, but rather that it ever made its
journey without doing so. What does the railway traveller of the present
day, who sees a travelling post office, and its huge tender crammed with
postal matter, think of the idea of carrying all that mass on one, or
perhaps two, coaches? The guard, occupying his solitary post behind the
coach, on the top of the receptacle called, with reference to the
constructions of still earlier days, the hinder _boot_, sat on a little
seat made for one, with his pistols and blunderbuss in a box in front of
him. And the original notion of those who first planned the modern mail
coach was, that the bags containing the letters should be carried in
that “hinder boot.” The “fore boot,” beneath the driver’s box, was
considered to be appropriated to the baggage of the three outside and
four inside passengers, which was the mail’s entire complement. One of
the former shared the box with the driver, and two occupied the seat on
the roof behind him. The accommodation provided for these two was not of
a very comfortable description. They were not indeed crowded as the
four, who occupied a similar position on another coach, often were; but
they had a mere board to sit on, whereas the seats on the roof of an
ordinary stage coach were provided with cushions. The fares by the mail
were always somewhat higher than those by even equally fast, or in some
cases faster, coaches; and it seems unreasonable, therefore, that the
accommodation should be inferior. I can only suppose that the patrons of
“the mail” were understood to be compensated for its material
imperfections by the superior dignity of their position. The box seat,
however, was well cushioned.
But if the despatches, which it was the mail’s business to carry, could
once upon a time be contained in that hinder boot, such had ceased to be
the case before my day. The bulk of postal matter which had to be
carried was continually and rapidly increasing, and I have often seen as
many as nine enormous sacks heaped on the coach roof. The length of
these sacks was just sufficient to reach from one side of the coach to
the other, and the huge heap of them, three or even four tiers high, was
piled to a height which was sufficient to prevent the guard, even when
standing, from seeing or communicating with the coachman. If to the
consideration of all this the reader will add (if he can) a remembrance
of the Somersetshire and Devonshire roads, over which this top-heavy
load had to be carried at about twelve miles an hour, it will not seem
strange to him that accidents should have occurred. Not that the roads
were bad; they were, thanks to Macadam, good, hard, and smooth; but the
hills are numerous, and in many cases very steep.
But the journey, especially on the box seat, was a very pleasant thing.
The whole of the service was so well done, and in every detail so
admirable. It need hardly be said that the men selected for the drivers
of such a coach were masters of their profession. The work was hard, but
the remuneration was very good. There were fewer passengers by the mail
to “remember the coachman,” but it was more uniformly full, and somewhat
more was expected from a traveller by the mail. It was a beautiful thing
to see a splendid team going over their short stage at twelve miles an
hour! Of course none but good cattle in first-rate condition could do
the work. A _mot_ of old Mrs. Mountain, for many years the well-known
proprietress of one of the large coaching inns in London, used to be
quoted as having been addressed by her to one of her drivers: “You find
whipcord, John, and I’ll find oats!” And, as it used to be said, the
measure of the corn supplied to a coach-horse was his stomach.
It was a pretty thing to see the changing of the horses. There stood the
fresh team, two on the off side, two on the near side, and the coach was
drawn up with the utmost exactitude between them. Four ostlers jump to
the splinter-bars and loose the traces; the reins have already been
thrown down. The driver retains his seat, and within the minute (more
than once within fifty seconds by the watch in my hand) the coach is
again on its onward journey.
Then how welcome was breakfast at an excellent old-world country
inn--twenty minutes allowed. The hot tea, after your night’s drive, the
fresh cream, butter, eggs, hot toast, and cold beef, and then, with
cigar alight, back to the box and off again!
I once witnessed on that road--not quite _that_ road, for the
Quicksilver took a somewhat different line--the stage of four miles
between Ilchester and Ilminster done in twenty minutes, and a trace
broken and mended on the road! The mending was effected by the guard
almost before the coach stopped. It is a level bit of road, four miles
only for the entire stage, and was performed at a full gallop. That was
done by a coach called the Telegraph, which was started some years after
the Quicksilver, to do the distance from Exeter to London in the day. We
left Exeter at 5 A.M., and reached London between nine and ten, with
time for both breakfast and dinner on the road. I think the performance
of the Exeter Telegraph was about the _ne plus ultra_ of coach
travelling. One man drove fifty miles, and then meeting the other coach
on the road, changed from one box to the other and drove back again. It
was tremendously hard work! I once remarked to him as I sat beside him,
that there was not much work for his whip arm. “Not much, sir,” he
replied; “but just put your hand on my left arm!” I did, and felt the
muscle swollen to its utmost, and hard as iron. “Many people think,” he
said, “that it is easier work to drive such a coach and such a team as
this, than to have to flog a dull team up to eight miles an hour. Nobody
would think so that had ever tried both!”
I once persuaded my mother, who was returning with me from Exeter to
London, to make the journey on the box of the Telegraph, while I sat
behind her. She had been a good deal afraid of the experiment, but
admitted that she had never enjoyed a journey more.
But having been led by my coaching reminiscences to speak of my visits
to Exeter and to Fanny Bent, I must not turn that page of the past
without dedicating a few lines to one to whom I had great cause to be
gratefully attached, and whose character both in its high worth and its
originality and singularity was a product of that day hardly likely to
be reproduced in this.
Very plain in feature, and dressed with Quaker-like simplicity and utter
disregard for appearance, her figure was as well known in Exeter as the
cathedral towers. She held a position and enjoyed an amount of respect
which was really singular in the case of a very homely-featured old maid
of very small fortune. She affected, like some other persons I have
known both in the far west and the far north of England, to speak the
dialect of her country. Though without any pretension to literary tastes
or pursuits, she was a fairly well-read woman, and was perfectly able to
speak better English than many a Londoner. But she chose _when in
Devonshire_ to speak as Devonshire folks spoke. She was a thoroughgoing
Churchwoman and Conservative, though too universally popular with all
classes to confine her sympathies within any party bounds. She had a
strong native sense of humour, and despite the traditions and principles
which taught her to consider “Peter Pindar” as a reprobate, she could
not resist the enjoyment of his description of the king’s visit to
Exeter. It was a treat to hear her read the verses in her own Devon
vernacular. And I shall never forget her whispering to me as we walked
up the nave of the cathedral, “_Nate, nate! Clane, clane!_ Do ye mop it,
mop it, Mister _Dane_?” And how _Dane_ Buller replied, “In all our
Ex’ter shops we do not meet with such long mops. Our mops don’t reach so
high!” I quote possibly incorrectly from the recollections of some sixty
years ago; and I have never studied Mr. Woolcott’s works since. But the
very tones of the dear old lady’s voice, as she whispered the words,
bursting the while with suppressed laughter, remain in my ears.
A pious Churchwoman of these improved days would not, I take it, select
such a place and such a time for such whisperings. But I am sure it
would be difficult to find a better or more sincere Christian than dear
old Fanny Bent. And the anecdote may be accepted as one more
illustration of change in manners, feeling, and decencies.
Then there were strawberry and cream parties at a place called, it I
remember right, Hoopern Bowers, always with a bevy of pretty girls, for
attracting whom my plain old spinster cousin seemed to possess a special
secret; and excursions to Marypole Head, and drives over Haldon Down.
When I revisited Exeter some months ago Hoopern Bowers seemed to have
passed from the memory of man! And whether any one of the laughing girls
I had known there was still extant as a grey-headed crone, I could not
learn! Marypole Head too has been nearly swallowed up by the advancing
tide of “villas” surging up the hill, though the look-down on the other
side over Upton Pynes and the valley of the Exe is lovely as ever. And
Haldon Down at all events is as breezy as of yore!
Dr. Bowring--subsequently Sir John--was at that time resident in Exeter
with his two daughters. The doctor was hardly likely to be intimate with
Fanny Bent’s Conservative and mainly clerical friends, but, knowing
everybody, she knew him too, and rather specially liked his girls, who
used to be of our Hoopern Bower parties. Lucy Bowring was some years my
senior, but I remember thinking her very charming; she was a tall,
handsome, dark-eyed girl, decidedly clever, and a little more inclined
to be _emancipée_ in matters ecclesiastical than were the others of the
little world around her. Then there was gentle Rachel Hutchinson! How
strangely names that have not been in my mind for half a century or more
come back to me! Rachel was the daughter of a retired physician, a
widower, whom I recognised as a man of elegant and refined culture,
somewhat superior to the majority of the local clergy among whom he
lived. I can see him now, a slender, somewhat daintily dressed figure,
punctiliously courteous, with a pleasant old-world flavour in his
manner; with carefully arranged grey hair, double gold eye-glass, a blue
swallow-tailed coat, nankin trousers and polished shoes. But he did not
come to Hoopern Bowers. His daughter Rachel did; and was curiously
contrasted with Lucy Bowring in every respect. She was a small
sylph-like little figure, with blue eyes, blond hair, very pretty and
very like an angel. She was also very, very religious after the
evangelical fashion of that day, and gave me a volume of Low Church
literature, which I preserved many years with much sentiment, but, I
fear, no further profit. I think that the talks which Lucy and Rachel
and I had together over our strawberries and cream must have had some
flavour of originality about them. I do not imagine that Lucy thought or
cared much about my soul; but I fancy that Rachel felt herself to be
contending for it.
And now, all gone! Probably not one of all those who made those little
festivities so pleasant to me remains on the face of the earth! At all
events every one of them has many many years ago passed out of the
circle of light projected by my magic lanthorn!
And how many others have passed like phantasmagoric shadows across that
little circle of light! It is one of the results of such a
rolling-stone life as mine has been, that the number of persons I have
known, and even made friends of for the time, has been immense; but they
all pass like a phantom procession! How many! How many! They have
trooped on into the outer darkness and been lost!
I suppose that during the half century, or nearly that time--from 1840
to 1886--that I knew little or nothing of England, the change that has
come upon all English life has been nearly as great in one part of the
country as another. But on visiting Exeter a few months ago I was much
struck at its altered aspect, because I had known it well in my youth.
It was not so much that the new rows of houses and detached villas
seemed to have nearly doubled the extent of the city, and obliterated
many of the old features of it, as that the character of the population
seemed changed. It was less provincial--a term which cockneys naturally
use in a disparaging sense, but which in truth implies quite as much
that is pleasant, as the reverse. It seemed to have been infected by
much of the ways and spirit of London, without of course having anything
of the special advantages of London to offer. People no longer walked
down the High Street along a pavement abundantly ample for the traffic,
nodding right and left to acquaintances. Everybody knew everybody no
longer. The leisurely gossiping ways of the shopkeepers had been
exchanged for the short and sharp promptitude of London habits. I
recognised indeed the well-remembered tone of the cathedral bells. But
the cathedral and its associations and influences did not seem to hold
the same place in the city life as it did in the olden time of my young
days. There was an impalpable and very indescribable but yet
unmistakably sensible something which seemed to shut off the
ecclesiastical life on one side of the close precincts from the town
life on the other, in a manner which was new to me. I have little doubt
that if I had casually asked in any large--say--grocer’s shop in the
High Street, who was the canon in residence, I should have received a
reply indicating that the person inquired of had not an idea of what I
was talking about; and am very sure that half a century ago the reply to
the same question would have been everywhere a prompt one.
The lovely garden close under the city wall on the northern
side,--perhaps the prettiest city garden in England--with its remarkably
beautiful view of the cathedral (which used to belong to old Edmund
Granger, an especial crony of Fanny Bent’s) exists still, somewhat more
closely shut in by buildings. We were indeed permitted to walk there the
other day by the kindness of the present proprietor, merely as members
of “the public,” which would not have been dreamed of in those old days
when “the public” was less thought of than at present. But I could not
help thinking that “the public” and I, as a portion and representative
of it, must be a terrible nuisance to the owner of that beautiful and
tranquil spot, so great as seriously to diminish the value of it.
Another small difference occurs to me as illustrative of the changes
that time and _the rail_ have brought about. I heard very little of the
once familiar Devonshire dialect. Something of intonation there may yet
linger, but of the old idioms and phraseology little or nothing.
But I have been beguiled into all these reminiscences of the fair
capital of the west and my early days there, by the quicksilver mail,
itself a most compendious and almost complete illustration of the nature
of the differences between its own day and that of its successor, the
rail!
To the rail is due principally much of the changed appearance of London.
Certainly the domestic architecture of the Georgian period has little
enough of beauty to recommend it. It is insignificant, mean and prosaic
to an extraordinary degree, as we all know. But it is not marked by the
audacious, ostentatious, nightmare-hideousness of the railway arches and
viaducts and stations of modern London. It is difficult to say whether
the greatest change in the daily life and habits of a Londoner has been
produced by gas, by Peel’s police, electric telegraphy, modern postal
arrangements, or the underground railway. Can the present generation
picture to itself what London was and looked like when lighted only by
the few twinkling oil lamps which seemed to serve no other purpose save
to make darkness visible? Can it conceive a London policeless by day,
and protected at night only by a few heavily great-coated watchmen, very
generally asleep in their “boxes,” and equipped with a huge rattle in
one hand and a large stable lanthorn in the other? The twopenny post was
considered an immense boon to Londoners and their needs of quick
communication between the different districts of their even then
overgrown town. But what would they have thought of an almost hourly
postal delivery, and of the insufficient quickness of that being
supplemented by telegraphic messages, to be outstripped in their turn by
telephony? And what would the modern Londoner think of doing without all
these things?
But perhaps the underground railways have most of all revolutionised the
London habits of the present day. Why, even to me, who knew cabless
London, they seem to have become indispensable. I loathe them! The
hurry-scurry! The necessity of “looking sharp!” The difficulty of
ascertaining which carriage you are to take, and of knowing when you
have arrived at your journey’s end! The horrible atmosphere! All strong
against the deed! And yet the necessities of time and place in the huge
overgrown monster of a town seem to compel me to pass a large portion of
my hours among the sewers, when I find myself a dazed and puzzled
stranger in the town I once knew so well.
Another very striking change in the appearance of London in the jubilee
year of Queen Victoria as contrasted with the London of George the Third
and the Regency, is caused by the preposterous excess of the system of
advertising. Of course the practice is deeply rooted in causes which
profoundly affect all the developments of social life and modes of
thought, as Carlyle well understood. But I am now speaking merely of the
exterior and surface effect of the ubiquitous sheets of paper of all
colours of the rainbow, with their monstrous pictorial illustrations. I
know that to say that it vulgarises the town to a quite infinite degree
may be thought to be mere meaningless cant, or illiberal affectation,
itself truly vulgar. Yet surely the accusation must be allowed to be a
just one. If brazen-faced self-assertion, frantically eager competition
in the struggle for profit, and the persuasion that this can best be
attained by the sort of assertions and inducements with which the walls
are covered, be not vulgar, what is? And what of the public which is
attracted by the devices which the experience of those who cater for it,
teach them to employ? I miss in the London of the present day a kind of
shop which was not uncommon in the days when I first knew the
town--shops at which one description of article only was sold, and where
that one was to be had notoriously of the best possible quality; shops
that appeared to despise all the finery of glass and brass and mahogany;
where prices were not cut down to the lowest possible figure by the
competitive necessity of underselling, but where every article could be
trusted to be what it pretended to be. Shops of this kind never
advertised at all, but were content to trust for business to the
reputation they had made for themselves. I am told that everything is a
great deal cheaper than it used to be, and truly find that such is the
case. But I am not at all persuaded that I get better value for my
money. To tell the truth, it seems to my old-fashioned notions and
habits that in commercial matters we have arrived at the cheap and nasty
stage of development. I am a poor man--far too poor a man to drink
Lafitte Bordeaux. But that need not compel me to drink cheap claret or
any abomination of the kind! Good ale is far better than bad wine, and
good water better than bad beer! At least that is what the experience of
well nigh four score years has taught me!
One of my earliest strolls in London revisited lately, was to the old
haunts I had once known so well at Lincoln’s Inn. I had walked along the
new embankment lost in wonder and admiration. The most incorrigible
_laudator temporis acti_ cannot but admit that nineteenth century London
has there done something and possesses something which any city on this
earth may well be proud of! And so I came to the Temple, and rambling
through its renovated gardens and courts thought how infinitely more
inviting they looked than anything in Belgrave Square, or Mayfair!
_Templa quam dilecta!_ Why, if only a wall could be built around the
precincts high enough and strong enough to shut out London sounds and
London smells and London atmosphere, one might be almost as well there
as in Magdalen at Oxford!
And Alsatia too, its next door neighbour to the eastward, all ravaged
and routed out, its mysterious courts and light-abhorring alleys exposed
to the flouting glare of a sunshine baking a barren extent, devoted
apparently to dead cats and potsherds! That Whitefriars district used to
be a favourite exploring ground of mine after the publication of _The
Fortunes of Nigel_. How the copper captains, if condemned to walk their
former haunts, would slink away in search of the cover of darksome nooks
no longer to be found! What would Miss Trapbois’s ghost, wandering in
the unsheltered publicity of the new embankment, think of the cataclysm
which has overwhelmed the world she knew!
Then, marvelling at the ubiquitous railway bridges and arches, which
seem to return again and again like the recurring horrors of a nightmare
dream, I passed westward, where the Fleet Prison is not, and where even
Temple Bar is no more, till I came to Chancery Lane, which seemed to
retain much of its old dinginess, and passed thence under the unchanged
old gateway into Lincoln’s Inn Old Square, where my father’s chambers
were, and where I used to go to him with my nonsense verses.
Old Square looks much as it used to look, I think. And the recollection
darted across my mind--who shall say why?--of a queer-looking shambling
figure, whom my father pointed out to me one day from the window of his
chambers. “That,” said he, “is Jockey Bell, perhaps the first
conveyancer in England. He probably knows more of the law of real
property than any man breathing.” He was a rather short, squab-looking,
and very shabby figure, who walked, I think, a little lame. He came, I
was told, from the north country, and spoke with a strong Northumbrian
accent. “It is a dreadful thing to have to decipher an opinion of his,”
said my father; “he is said to have three handwritings--one when he is
sober, which he can read himself; one when he is drunk, which his clerk
can read; and one next morning after being drunk, which no human being
can read!”
And I looked for the little shabby stuffy court, in which I had so often
watched Eldon’s lowering brow, as he doubted over some knotty point. My
father had the highest opinion of his intellectual power and legal
knowledge. But he did not like him. He used to say that his mind was an
instrument of admirable precision, but his soul the soul of a pedlar. I
take it Eldon’s quintessential Toryism was obnoxious to my father’s
Liberalism. He used to repeat the following “report” of a case in the
Court of Chancery:--
“Mr. Leech[A] made a speech;
’Twas learned, terse, and strong.
Mr. Hart on the other part,
Was neat and glib, but wrong.
Mr. Parker made it darker;
’Twas dark enough without!
Mr. Cook cited a book;
And the Chancellor said, I doubt.”
_Una omnes premit nox!_
Of course among the other changes of sixty years language had changed.
There had been a change especially in pronunciation, a little before my
time. Only very old and old-fashioned people continued in my earliest
years to say _Room_ for Rome; _gould_ for gold; _obleege_ for oblige;
_Jeames_ for James (one of our chaplains at Winchester, I remember,
always used to speak of St. _Jeames_); a beef-_steek_ for a beef-steak;
or to pronounce the “a” in danger, stranger, and the like, as it is in
“man.” But it is a singular fact, that despite the spread, and supposed
improvement of education, the literary--or perhaps it would be better to
say the printed--language of the earlier decades of the nineteenth
century was much more correct than that of the latter part of it. I
constantly find passages in books and newspapers written with the
sublimest indifference to all grammatical rules, and all proprieties of
construction. A popular writer of fiction says that her hero “rose his
head”! And another tells her readers that something happened when “the
brunt of the edge had worn off”! There are certain words, such as
“idiosyncrasy,” “type,” “momentary,” and many others which I cannot
while writing recollect, which are constantly used, not by one writer
only, but by many, to express meanings wholly different from those which
they really bear. There is another word which is worth mentioning,
because the misuse of it is rapidly becoming endemic. I mean the verb
trouble; which it seems to me all the world before the birth of the
present generation very well knew to be an active not a neuter verb. Now
scarcely a day passes without my meeting with such phrases as “he did
not trouble,” meaning, trouble himself; “I hope you won’t trouble,”
instead of trouble yourself. To old-fashioned ears it seems a detestable
vulgarism. But as far as I can gather from observing books that have a
greater, and books that have a lesser degree, of success, and from the
remarks of the critical journals, a book is in these latter days deemed
none the worse, nor is at all less likely to find favour with the
public, because it is full of grammatical or linguistic solecisms. Now
certainly this is an instance and indication of changed ideas; for it
assuredly was not the case when George the Third was king.
Another difference between that day and this of very considerable social
significance may be observed in the character and development of the
slang in use. There was at the former period very little slang of the
kind that may be considered universal. Different classes had different
phrases and locutions that were peculiar to them, and served more or
less as a bond of union and exclusiveness as regarded outsiders. The
criminal classes had their slang. The Universities had theirs. There was
costermongers’ slang. And there was a slang peculiar to the inner
circles of the fashionable world, together with many other special
dialects that might be named. But the specialities of these various
idioms were not interchangeable, nor for the most part intelligible
outside the world to which they belonged. Nor--and this difference is a
very notable one--did slang phrases grow into acceptance with the
rapidity or universality which now characterises their advent--a notable
difference, because it, of course, arises from the increased rapidity of
communication and from the much greater degree in which all classes and
all provincial and town populations are mixed together and rubbed
against each other. It used to be said, and is still said by some old
world folks, that the use of slang is vulgar. And the younger
generation, which uses it universally, ridicules much the old fogey
narrowness which so considers it. But the truth is, that there was in
the older time nothing really vulgar in the use of the slang which then
prevailed. Why should not every class and every profession have its own
shibboleths and its own phrases? And is there not real vulgarity in the
mind which considers a man vulgar for using the language of the class to
which he really belongs? But the modern use of slang is truly vulgar for
a very different reason. It is vulgar because it arises from one of the
most intrinsically vulgar of all the vulgar tendencies of a vulgar
mind--imitation. There are slang phrases, which, because they vividly or
graphically express a conception, or clothe it with humour, are
admirable. But they are admirable only in the mouths of their inventors.
Of course it is an abuse of language to say that the beauty of a pretty
girl strikes you with awe. But he who _first_ said of some girl that she
was “awfully” pretty, was abundantly justified by the half humorous half
serious consideration of all the effects such loveliness may produce.
But then, because this was felt to be the case, and the _mot_ was
accepted, all the tens of thousands of idiotic cretins who have been
rubbed down into exact similarity to each other by excessive locomotion
and the “spread” of education--spread indeed after the fashion in which
a gold-beater spreads his metal--imitate each other in the senseless use
of it. They are just like the man in the _Joe Miller_ story, who,
because a laugh followed when a host, whose servant let fall a dish with
a boiled tongue in it, said it was only a _lapsus linguæ_, ordered his
own servant to throw down a leg of mutton, and then made the same
remark!
There was an old gentleman who had a very tolerable notion of what is
vulgar and what is not, and who characterised “imitators” as a “servile
herd.” And surely, if, as we are often told, this is a vulgar age, the
fact is due to the prevalence of this very tap-root of vulgarity,
imitation. Of course I am not speaking of imitation in any of the
various cases in which there is an end in view outside the fact of the
imitation. The child in order to speak must imitate those whom it hears
speaking. If you would make a pudding, you must imitate the cook; if a
coat, the tailor. But the imitation which is essentially vulgar, the
very tap-root, as I have said, of vulgarity, is imitation for
imitation’s sake. And that is why I think modern slang is essentially
vulgar. If it is your real opinion--right or wrong matters not--that any
slang phrase expresses any idea with peculiar accuracy, vividness, or
humour, use it by all means; and he is a narrow blockhead who sees any
vulgarity in your doing so. But for heaven’s sake, my dear Dick, don’t
use it merely because you heard Bob use it!
Yet there is something pathetically humble too about a man so conscious
of his own worthlessness as to be ever anxious to look like somebody
else. And surely a man must have a painful consciousness of his
inability to utter any word of his own with either wit or wisdom or
sense in it, who habitually strives to borrow the wit of the last
retailer of the current slang whom he has heard.
In some respects, however, this is, I think, a less vulgar age than that
of my youth. Vulgar exclusiveness on grounds essentially illiberal was
far more common. It will perhaps seem hardly credible at the present day
that middle-class professional society, such as that of barristers,
physicians, rectors, and vicars, should sixty years ago have deemed
attorneys and general medical practitioners (or apothecaries, as the
usual, and somewhat depreciatory term was) inadmissible to social
equality. But such was the case. My reminiscences of half a century or
more ago seem to indicate also that professional etiquette has been
relaxed in various other particulars. I hear of physicians being in
partnership with others of the same profession--an arrangement which has
a commercial savour in it that would have been thought quite _infra
dig._ in my younger day. I hear also of their accepting, if not perhaps
exacting, payments of a smaller amount than the traditional guinea.
This was unheard of in the old days. An English physician is a member of
the most generously liberal profession that exists or ever existed on
earth. And it was an every-day occurrence for a physician to think more
of the purse of his patient than of the value of his own services. But
he did this either by refusing to accept any fee whatever, or by
declining it on the occasion of subsequent visits: never by diminishing
the amount of it. In some other cases professional dignity had to be
maintained under circumstances that entailed considerable sacrifices on
those who were called upon to maintain it. It was not etiquette, for
instance, for a barrister going on circuit to travel otherwise than by a
private conveyance. He might hire a post chaise, or he might ride his
own horse, or even a hired one, but he must not travel by a stage coach,
or put up at an hotel. I have heard it said that this rule originated in
the notion that a barrister travelling to an assize town by the public
coach might fall in with some attorney bound on a similar errand, and
might so be led, if not into the sin, at least into temptation to the
sin of “huggery.” I dare say many a young barrister of the present day
does not know what huggery means or meant!
Among the sights and sounds which were familiar to the eye and ear in
the London of my youth, and which are so no longer, may be mentioned the
twopenny postman. Not many probably of the rising generation are aware,
that in their fathers’ days the London postal service was dual The
“twopenny postman,” who delivered letters sent from one part of London
to another, was a different person from the “general postman,” who
delivered those which came from the country. The latter wore a scarlet,
the former a blue livery. And the two administrations were entirely
distinct. In those days, when a letter from York to London cost a
shilling, or not much less, the weight of a single letter was limited
solely by the condition that it must be written on one sheet or piece of
paper only. Two pieces of paper, however small, or however light,
incurred a double postage. I have sent for a single postage an enormous
sheet of double folio outweighing some ten sheets of ordinary post
paper. Of course envelopes were unknown. Every sheet had to be folded so
that it could be sealed and the address written on the back of it.
Another notable London change which occurs to me is that which has come
to the Haymarket. In my day it was really such. The whole right hand
side of the street going downwards, from the Piccadilly end to the Opera
House, used to be lined with loads of hay. The carts were arranged in
close order side by side with their back parts towards the foot
pavement, which was crowded by the salesmen and their customers.
I might say a good deal too about the changes in the theatrical London
world and habits, but the subject is a large one, and has been
abundantly illustrated. It is moreover one which in its details is not
of an edifying nature. And it must suffice, therefore, to bear my
testimony to the greatness of the purifying change which has been
brought about in all the habits of playgoers and playhouses mainly and
firstly by the exertions of my mother’s old and valued friend Mr.
Macready.