Nonconformists we must not forget Mrs. Barbauld. Her husband, Rougemont
Barbauld, of French descent, was Unitarian minister at Newington Green.
Unfortunately, his mental powers declined, and in a fit of insanity he
threw himself, or fell, into the New River. Mrs. Barbauld’s brother, Dr.
Aikin, lived also at this time at Stoke Newington. Mrs. Barbauld removed
to his house and died there. She is buried in the churchyard of the old
church. There are many better poets than Mrs. Barbauld, but her memory
should survive for one little scrap in which for once she is inspired,
and speaks, as a poet should, out of the fullness of heart common to all
humanity.
“Life! we have been long together
Through pleasant and through cloudy weather;
’T is hard to part when friends are dear,—
Perhaps ’t will cost a sigh, a tear;
Then steal away, give little warning,
Choose thine own time;
Say not ‘Good night,’ but in some brighter clime
Bid me ‘Good morning.’”
Also in Church Street, Stoke Newington, lived Isaac Disraeli, author of
the “Curiosities of Literature” and the “Quarrels and Calamities of
Authors.” This estimable and amiable writer died in 1848. His son, Lord
Beaconsfield, born here in 1805, was educated in a private school in the
neighborhood until he was articled to a lawyer. He belonged, therefore,
essentially to a middle-class family; he was not wealthy by birth, but
he was not poor; he had the advantage, or the reverse, of being a Jew by
descent and a Christian by conviction. To the former fact he owed much
of his intellectual powers, to the latter the possibility of rising to
the highest distinction and responsibility that the state has to offer,
because at the outset of his career even the beginning would have been
impossible to one of the ancient Hebrew faith.
The philanthropist John Howard was also a native of Hackney. He
belonged, like so many others of the place, to the Nonconformists. His
father was an upholsterer in the City, and he himself was at first made
apprentice to a wholesale grocer. He was, however, unfitted for that
kind of work, and as soon as he could he bought himself out. This is not
the place to enlarge upon the work accomplished by this extraordinary
man. After being a prisoner of war in France he became wholly possessed
with one resolution—to reform the management of prisons. How he traveled
through Great Britain first and the continent afterward, how he
published reports which revealed the plague spots called prisons all
over Europe, is matter of common fame and history.
I think that my claim for these suburbs, that they were a stronghold of
Nonconformity, has been proved by these associations. There are,
however, more. Everybody has read “Sandford and Merton,” both that of
Mr. Thomas Day and the other, equally instructive, of Mr. Burnand.
Thomas Day belonged by residence to Stoke Newington. His house is still
pointed out. In Clapton, on the other side of the high road, lived and
died an amiable and accomplished novelist, Grace Aguilar. Here was born
a philanthropist, also among the Nonconformist ranks, the late Samuel
Morley. Here was born another Nonconformist, the late Sir William Smith,
editor of so many classical and antiquarian dictionaries and other aids
to learning.
[Illustration: House in Stoke Newington in which Edgar Allan Poe Lived.]
Enough of Nonconformists. Let us turn to other associations. Stoke
Newington is connected with the name of Edgar Allan Poe. It was here
that he was at school, where he was brought over by the Allans as a
child. The house still stands; it is at the corner of Edward’s Lane,
which runs out of Church Street. Let us hope that the eccentricities of
this wayward poet were not due to the influences of Nonconformist
Newington.
In the churchyard of Hackney may be seen the tombs and monuments of
certain members of the André family. The unfortunate Major André was
born at Hackney. His history is well known; our American visitors have
been taught to think that Washington’s act, severe indeed, was just and
warranted by the facts of the case. That will not stifle the regret that
a soldier of so much promise should have met with such a death. The time
has gone by, or should have gone by, when the name of André called forth
bitterness and recrimination.
One more note to connect suburban East London with America. In the year
1709 a great number of refugees—Palatines, Swabians, and others—came
over to England, being driven out of their own country by the desolation
of war. There were between six and seven thousand of them, all, or
nearly all, being quite destitute. The Queen ordered a daily allowance
of food to be bestowed upon these unfortunates, and tents were put up
for them in various parts round London. The parish of Stoke Newington
possessed at that time a small piece of ground, which was lying
unoccupied. The parishioners undertook to build four houses on this
field, and to receive twenty persons from the refugees. Other parishes
offered to do the same. Finally, however, the government disposed of
them. The Roman Catholics were sent back to their own country; the
Protestants were settled, some in Ireland and the rest in the American
colonies. A few went to Carolina; the rest, twenty-seven hundred in
number, were shipped to New York, where they arrived in June, 1710. They
were allotted ten acres of land to each family. Most of them, however,
for reasons of some dissatisfaction, removed to Pennsylvania, where they
settled, and where their descendants, it is said, still preserve the
history of their misfortunes and their emigration.
The history of these suburbs is unlike that of any other part of London.
From the middle of the seventeenth century until far in the nineteenth
they were rural retreats; a few houses were clustered about a church; a
meeting-house stood here and there; upon the whole place, on the faces
of the residents, was the stamp of grave and serious religious thought
and conviction; grave and serious Nonconformist divines or grave and
serious merchants of the City professing Nonconformity walked about its
lanes and among its gardens. As recently as the thirties they retained
this character. The map of 1834 shows fields and pasture and garden
where there is now a waste of brick and mortar; the little stream known
as Hackney Brook meandered pleasantly through these fields; Stoke
Newington, though it could boast so many distinguished natives and
residents, consisted of one long street, mostly with houses on one side
only, and a church. The place is now entirely built upon; a few of the
old houses remain, but not many, and the old atmosphere only survives in
places which I have indicated, such as Sutton Place, High Street,
Homerton, and Church Street, Stoke Newington. And I fear that to the
visitor, to whom these associations are not familiar, there is no
dignity about these streets other than is conferred by the few surviving
mansions.
We have seen that the suburb of Hackney is connected with Queen Victoria
by the early residence there of Darnley, husband of Mary Queen of Scots.
There is, strangely, another house connecting this suburb with the Queen
by another ancestress. Darnley was the father of James I; the Princess
Elizabeth, known afterward as the Queen of Bohemia, was the daughter of
James. Elizabeth had twelve children; the youngest, Sophia, was the
mother of George I. Elizabeth lived for a time at Hackney, in a house
called the Black and White House near the church—it is now destroyed;
the house had formerly been the residence of Sir Thomas Vyner, Lord
Mayor of London.
There are still more associations. Hackney is, in fact, richer in
memories of this kind than any other suburb of London. Sir Walter
Raleigh and Sir Thomas More belong to American as well as English
history, both of them because they precede the colonial time and the
former because he foresaw the boundless possibilities of America and
attempted to found a colony there. Tradition—a vague tradition
only—assigns to Sir Walter a residence in Hackney. History points with
certainty to Sir Thomas More’s connection with the place. His daughter
Cecilia married one George Heron, son of Mr. Thomas Heron, Master of the
jewel house to Henry VIII. The family house was a mansion, long since
pulled down, on Shacklewell Green, and hither Sir Thomas must have come
to visit his daughter.
All Americans who visit London go to see the Charter House. It is one of
the really ancient and beautiful things still left standing. One can
make out the disposition of the buildings, the cloisters, refectory,
chapel, and cells of the Carthusian monks. One can also study the more
recent buildings which converted the monastery into an almshouse and a
school. The transformation was effected by Thomas Sutton.
This excellent person, the son of a country gentleman, filled many
offices during a long life of over eighty years. He was Master of the
Ordnance to Queen Elizabeth; he became, at the advanced age of fifty, a
citizen of London, joining the Girdlers’ Company, and married the widow
of one John Dudley, lord of the manor of Stoke Newington. On her death
he removed to Hackney, living in a great house which you may still see
standing at the present day, one of the very few old houses remaining.
It is a house with a center and two wings; formerly there was a large
garden behind it. Sutton died in 1614, only a few weeks after signing
deeds by which he endowed the Charter House with his estates for the
maintenance of eighty almsmen and a school of boys. The foundation still
exists; they have foolishly removed the school; the almsmen remain,
though reduced in numbers. Colonel Newcome, as of course you remember,
became one of them.
Enough of great men. Let us speak of smaller folk who have distinguished
themselves each in his own way.
It is given to few to achieve distinction by ways petty and mean and
miserable, or bold and villainous. These suburbs can point to one or two
such examples, adduced here on account of their rarity. Perhaps the most
illustrious of the former was a certain hermit. His name was Lucas; he
belonged to a West Indian family; he became a man of Hackney only when
he was buried in the churchyard. His house was about thirty miles north
of London; on the death of his mother he became suddenly morose; he shut
himself up alone in the house; he refused all society; he barricaded his
room with timber and lived by himself in the kitchen, where he kept a
fire burning night and day, wrapped himself in a blanket, slept upon a
bed of cinders, and neither washed nor cut his hair nor shaved, but
remained in this neglected condition, which he seems to have enjoyed
greatly, after the manner of hermits, for twenty-five years, when he
died. He lived on bread, milk, and eggs, which were brought to him fresh
every day. He was an object of great curiosity; people came from all
parts to gaze upon the hermit; he was very proud of a notoriety which he
would probably have failed to acquire by any legitimate efforts; and he
conversed courteously with everyone. He was found in a fit one morning,
after this long seclusion, and was removed to a farmhouse, where he died
the next day.
We may revive the memory of John Ward, formerly of Hackney, as a
specimen of the villainous resident.
His career was chequered with coloring of dark, very dark, and black
shade. He began life in some small manufactory; he wriggled up, and
became a member of Parliament; he was prosecuted for forgery, he was
pilloried, he was imprisoned, and he was expelled the House of Commons.
He was also prosecuted by the South Sea Company for feloniously
concealing the sum of £50,000. He suffered imprisonment for this crime.
He is held up to execration by Pope:
“there was no grace of Heaven
Given to the fool, the mad, the vain, the evil;
To Ward, to Waters, Charters and the Devil.”
He added to his villainies a kind of pinchbeck piety, that perverted
piety which manifests itself in beseeching the Lord to be on his side in
his money-getting. The following is, I imagine, almost unique as a
prayer.
“O Lord, thou knowest that I have nine estates in the City of
London and likewise that I have lately purchased an estate in
fee simple in the county of Essex: I beseech thee to preserve
the two counties of Middlesex and Essex from fire and
earthquakes: and as I have a mortgage in Hertfordshire, I beg of
Thee likewise to have an eye of compassion on that county and
for the rest of the counties Thou mayest deal with them as Thou
art pleased. O Lord, enable the bank to answer all their bills,
and make all my debtors good men.
“Give prosperous voyage to the _Mermaid_ sloop, because I have
insured it: and as Thou hast said that the days of the wicked
are but short, I trust in Thee that Thou wait not forget Thy
promise, as I have purchased an estate in reversion, which will
be mine on the death of that profligate young man Sir J. L.”
Such a prayer would seem to argue some mental twist; but strange are the
vagaries of the pinchbeck pious.
Two more villains, and we make an end. The first of them was the bold
Dick Turpin. Have the achievements of Dick Turpin crossed the ocean?
Surely they have, if only in the pages of the “Pickwick Papers,” where
Sam Weller sings part of a song written in praise of the highwayman. The
verses are generally believed to be by Charles Dickens himself, but that
is not so. They are by James or Horace Smith, or both, the authors of
the “Rejected Addresses,” and are the two opening stanzas of a long
poem. Dick Turpin lived for a time at a house in Hackney Marsh, near a
tavern and a cockpit, and passed for a sporting gentleman free with his
money. Few highwaymen were so successful as the gallant rider of Black
Bess, and very, very few arrived, as he did, at the age of thirty-four
before undertaking that drive to Tyburn Tree, which was the concluding
act in his profession. Indeed, the grand climacteric for a highwayman
seems to have been twenty-four.
The other villain for whom Hackney blushes was a native of Homerton.
This was none other than the famous “Jack the Painter,” who formed the
bold design of setting fire to all the dockyards in the country. The
story of his attempt in Portsmouth Dockyard, and of his failure and
trial, forms one of the most singular chapters in the criminal history
of the last century. He was executed in 1776, and his body hung in
chains on the shore near Portsmouth for a great many years. I have
myself conversed with persons who could remember the gibbet of Jack the
Painter, and his blackened, tarred remains dangling in chains. But they
were old men, and they were seafaring men. And when the mariner grows
old his memory lengthens and strengthens and spreads.
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XI
ON SPORTS AND PASTIMES
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XI
ON SPORTS AND PASTIMES
WE have dwelt so long on the melancholy pictures of the houseless and
the starving that there is danger of falling hastily into the conclusion
that East London is the favorite residence of Poverty, Misery, and
Necessity—those Furies three. We must not think this. East London is, as
I have said before, above all things the city of the working-man—the
greatest city of the respectable working-man in the whole world.
Fortunately he is, for the most part, in good and steady work. Those are
not his daughters who march arm in arm down Brook Street, lifting the
hymn, which has no words, of irrepressible youth; nor are those his sons
who hang about the corners of the streets near the public house; nor has
he any connection with the shuffling, ragged outcasts whom we call the
submerged.
The great mass of the population consists of the steady craftsmen, with
the foremen, and the managers of departments, and the clerks employed in
the factories and the works. I am about to point out some of the ways in
which these people brighten and enliven their days.
A certain joyousness has always been the keynote of London life. A
volume might be written on the cheerfulness of London; it is not
gaiety—Paris or Vienna is a city of gaiety; it is a more valuable
possession; the citizen of London is not light-hearted; he is always, in
fact, possessed with a wholesome sense of individual responsibility; but
he is cheerful, and he loves those amusements which belong to the
cheerful temperament. It must also be acknowledged that he loves sport,
and everything connected with sport. Now this cheerfulness of London a
hundred years ago seemed well-nigh destroyed. The old social life of the
City was broken up by the abandonment of the City; the suburban life,
without centers of attraction, such as the little City parish, or the
ward, or the City company was wont to offer, was dull and monotonous;
the working-men, long left to themselves without schools, or leaders, or
masters, or discipline of any kind, were sunk deep in a drunken slough,
and the industrial side of London had hardly yet sprung into existence.
In another place I have considered the suburban life; here let me speak
only of the people who make up the crowds of East London. Without
apparent centers round which they could group themselves, the people, by
instinct, when they found themselves thus massed together, revived the
old cheerfulness of their ancestors. East London, for its sports and
pastimes, when we look into them, reminds us of London of the twelfth
century as described by Fitzstephen—a city always in good spirits,
joyous, and given to every kind of sport. Not quite in the same way; the
houses are no longer decked with flowers—it would be too ridiculous to
decorate a street leading out of the Commercial Road with flowers; nor
do we see any longer the old procession where the minstrels went
before,—if it was only the tabor and the pipe,—while the lads and lasses
followed after. Yet in its own way this new city is full of
cheerfulness; it contains so many Hooligans and casuals and outcasts
that it ought to go about with a face of dismal lines; but there were
outcasts and casuals even in the twelfth century; quite another note
will be struck by one who investigates; there is no city more cheerful
and more addicted to enjoyment than East London.
Like all industrial cities—you may note the fact especially in
Brussels—the young seem out of all proportion to the old; this is of
course partly because the young people come out more; they crowd the
leading streets and the boulevards; they seem to have nothing to do, and
to want nothing but to amuse themselves every evening.
I have already twice called attention to the very remarkable change that
has gradually transformed the life of the modern craftsman. We have
given him his evenings—all his evenings; we have postponed his going to
work by an hour at least, and in many cases by two hours; this means a
corresponding extension of the evening, because when a man had to
present himself at the workshop at 5:30 or 6 A.M. he had to get up an
hour before that time, therefore he had to be in bed by an early hour in
the evening. This point is of vital importance; it is affecting the
national character for good or evil; it is full of possibilities and it
is full of dangers.
Our young people, who are those most to be considered, for obvious
reasons, are now in possession of the whole evening. From seven o’clock
till bedtime, which may be eleven or twelve, they are free to do what
they please; the paternal authority is no longer exercised; they are, in
every sense, their own masters. In addition, we give them the Saturday
afternoon and the whole of Sunday free from the former obligations of
church. We also give them the bank-holidays, with Christmas Day and Good
Friday. In other words, we give them, if you will take the trouble to
calculate, more than a quarter of the solid year, reckoned by days of
twenty-four hours. If we reckon by days of sixteen hours we give them
more than one third of the whole year, and we say to them, “Go; do what
you please with one third of your lives.” This is a very serious gift;
it should be accompanied by admonition as to responsibilities and
possibilities. Anything may be done for good or for ill, with a whole
third part of the working year to work at it. The gift, so far, and with
certain exceptions, as of the ambitious lad who means to rise, and will
rise, though it means hours of labor when others are at play, has been,
so far, generally interpreted to mean, “Go and do nothing, except look
for present enjoyment.”
The winter, by universal consent, comes to an end on Easter Sunday,
which may fall as early as the fourth week in March or as late as the
fourth week in April. The breath of the English spring is chill, but the
snow and the cold rains and the fogs have gone; if the east wind is keen
it dries the roads; the bicycles can come out; there is not yet much
promise of leaf and flower, but the catkins hang upon the trees and the
hedges are turning green, and the days are long and the evenings are
light. I think that Easter Monday is the greatest holiday of the year to
East London.
It has replaced the old May-day. Formerly, when by the old style May-day
fell on what is now the 14th, it came very happily at the real
commencement of the English spring. We are liable to east winds and to
cold and frost till about the middle of May, after which it is seldom
that the east wind returns. On that day the whole City turned out to
welcome summer. Think what they had gone through; the streets unpaved,
mere morasses of mud and melting snow; the houses with their unglazed
windows boarded up with shutters; the long evenings spent crouching
round the fire or in bed; no fresh meat, no vegetables, only salted meat
and birds, and, to finish with, the forty days of fasting on dried fish,
mostly so stale that it would not now be allowed to be offered for sale.
And here was summer coming again! Out of the City gates poured the young
men and the maidens to gather the branches and blossoms of the
white-thorn, to come back laden with the greenery and to dance and sing
around the May-pole.
May-day has long ceased to be a popular festival. The Puritans killed
it. Yet there still linger some of the old signs of rejoicing. To this
day the carmen deck their horses with ribbons and artificial flowers on
May-day. Until quite recently there were one or two May-day processions
still to be seen in the streets. The chimney-sweeps kept up the custom
longest. They came out in force, dressed up with fantastic hats and
colored ribbons. In the midst was a moving arbor of green branches and
flowers, called Jack in the Green. Beside him ran and danced a girl in
gay colors, who was Maid Marian. Before him went a fife and drum or a
fiddler, and they stopped at certain points to dance round Jack in the
Green. Another procession, discontinued before that of the
chimney-sweeps, was that of the milkmaids. The dairy women, dressed in
bright colors and having flowers in their hair or in their hats, led
along a milch cow covered with garlands. After the cow came a man inside
a frame which bore a kind of trophy consisting of silver dishes and
silver goblets, lent for the occasion and set in flowers. Of course they
had a fiddler, always represented in the pictures as one-legged, but
perhaps the absence of a leg was not an essential.
May-day is gone. Its place is taken, and more than taken, by Easter
Monday. It is the fourth and last day of the longest holiday in the
whole year. From Good Friday to Monday, both inclusive, no work is done,
no workshops are opened. The first day, the Day of Tenebræ, the day of
fasting and humiliation, is observed by East London as a day of great
joy; it is a day on which the men seek their amusements without the
women; on this day there are sports, with wrestling and boxing, with
foot-ball and athletics; the women, I think, mostly stay at home. On the
Saturday little is done but to rest, yet there are railway excursions;
many places of amusement, such as the Crystal Palace and the Aquarium
(they offer a long round of shows lasting all through the day), are
open. Easter Sunday is exactly like any other Sunday. But Monday—Monday
is the holiday for all alike, men, women, and children. Poor and
miserable must that man be who cannot find something for Easter Monday.