Not the Great Mogul in Thibet, but the Mogul in Drury-lane, is an
increasingly popular place of public amusement. I was there a few years
since, and it was not more than half full. The other night I could
hardly get standing room, though I paid sixpence and went with the
operative swells into the gallery. In these days the test of everything
is success. We speak well of the tradesman who does the largest
business--of the writer whose books sell the most--of the actor or
preacher that draws the largest crowd. We do not stop to criticise the
manner in which that business is done, the influence of the writer, the
doctrine taught by the preacher, or the character of the acting. On the
ordinary principle, then, the Mogul is a creditable establishment, for it
is a successful one. Indeed, in the present state of society, it is
hardly possible to conceive how a place that combines entertainment and
drinking together can well be otherwise. In the course of last summer
Vauxhall was open a few nights; I was credibly informed that on each
night it was supposed not more than half the company paid for admission,
the other half having been admitted by means of orders. It is calculated
the sale of drink and refreshment to the crowd thus collected will yield
a profit sufficient to cover all expenses. Thus it is such places as the
Mogul pay. The entrance fee and the sale of intoxicating drinks must
amount to a sum out of which a proprietor can extract a handsome profit.
Thus at the Mogul you have a double attraction. Are you a gin-drinker,
you can go and get your quartern or half-quartern over the bar--or you
can lounge into the concert-room and quietly sit soaking the whole
evening; for, as the performance does not close till midnight, the time
admits of a man getting "fou" between the commencement and the close of
the entertainment. Drury-lane is what may be called a low neighbourhood,
devoted principally to butchers' and bakers' shops, pawnbrokers'
establishments, and gin-palaces. Pass these latter any hour of the day
you will, and you will find them crowded by laundresses, and charwomen,
and haggard old crones from the sister isle, and young wives whose
husbands, it may be, are hard at work. There they stand in the streets,
with babies in their arms and dirty children in rags by their side,
gossiping with women as ill-conditioned as themselves; and as gossiping
makes them thirsty, and as drinking makes people drunk, it is not
difficult to imagine the state in which many of these women are. In the
middle of the day it is very obvious that many of them have had more than
enough. How they can afford it always puzzles me--I cannot, I know, and
I believe my weekly earnings equal theirs. The pawnbrokers may help
them--but their material guarantees cannot be perpetually forthcoming.
These gin-drinkers live cheap, I grant. They herd in the horrid slums of
Drury-lane--and people say sometimes, Can you wonder that such poor
wretches drink? but they forget that it is the drink that makes them such
poor wretches. The money these women spend in drink would pay for decent
apartments and clothes that would be clean and comfortable, not ragged
and filthy, and stinking with every abomination. It is not poverty that
creates drunkenness, but drunkenness that creates poverty, and the
poverty thus created--the dreariest kind of all poverty--abounds in
Drury-lane. Well, then, exclaims one of the new school, who believes
mankind are to be regenerated by fiddling, does not such a place as the
Mogul have a beneficial influence? I will answer this by describing the
kind of amusement afforded at the Mogul. You are pent up in a room where
the air is ten times worse than in any theatre--any crowded chapel--or
worse than in the late Reading Room of the British Museum or the House of
Commons. You see a little of the worst acting in London--broad farce,
chiefly by artists, if I may term them such, who are more remarkable for
their weakness than their strength. "Speak the speech, I pray you, as I
pronounce it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as
many of our players do, I had as lief the town crier spoke my lines. Nor
do not saw the air too much with your hands," says Hamlet; but actors of
the class you meet in the Mogul never seem to have heard of the Prince of
Denmark. There are some people who doubt whether good acting has a
beneficial effect, but there are none who doubt that the effect of bad
acting is altogether bad. But the dramatical part of the entertainment
constitutes but a small part of the evening's amusement. There is a lady
who sings sentimental songs, and a gentleman who sings comic ones, and
another gent, with dismal voice and weary mien, who declares--
"The _gurls_ of dear Old England
Are the _gurls_ of _gurls_ for me-e-eh."
I am not aware that any of these performers sing songs of an
objectionable character; and if a sneer is now and then introduced at
what common decent people believe to be good, and true, and righteous,
and of beneficial tendency, it is only, perhaps, such as would be
approved of by the patrons of the Haymarket. You tell me that this is
better than sitting all night at a bar drinking; but, I ask, is not this
entertainment itself an excuse for drinking? You see the room is full of
men and women evidently belonging to the working classes; now of all men
working men can least afford to waste time in such places. All their
future emphatically depends upon themselves. More than most men are they
called upon to exercise self-denial and to cultivate their powers, if
they would achieve independence. But how can the working men who sit
night after night in such places as the Mogul ever hope to rise? yet any
night there must be a couple of hundred of such present, for they swarm
like bees. They come professedly for the entertainment, but all the
while it lasts they are doing a good deal in the drinking line. It is
not one glass or two that will satisfy them; and the worst of it is, that
many very clever fellows when once they begin drinking do not know when
to leave off. In this respect they are like Dr Johnson, who could either
feast or fast, but could never be a moderate drinker. They come to the
Mogul--perhaps they would never think of sitting all night in a
public-house--but they come to the Mogul for the entertainment, and they
finish by drinking as if they had come for the drink alone. The Mogul is
indeed an educational establishment, but unfortunately it educes the
wrong set of faculties. In Drury-lane, of all lanes in the world, there
is the least occasion to associate intoxicating drink with happiness.
Everywhere the idea is a mischievous delusion and a remnant of barbarism,
but there it is a positive curse. At the Mogul you will see the
sweetheart with her lover, the mother with her child,--it may be the
sucking babe,--till midnight, breathing an air of tobacco smoke, the
husband and the wife, all you say enjoying themselves in a social way,
but all, I say, encouraging an appetite which, if it gets the
mastery,--and in the majority of cases it does,--will destroy them
without mercy. Were the Mogul simply a gin-palace, it would have far
less patronage, it would merely have its share of the general trade; but
the fact that it provides musical and dramatic entertainments--that it
gives decent people an excuse for drinking--that it attracts those whom a
common gin-shop would repel--is that precisely which gives it its power
for danger. Such places are decoy shops, the more dangerous as drinking
in Drury-lane is really disgusting, and enough to make a man a
teetotaller for life. The neighbourhood is rich in warnings, but the
_habitue_ of the Mogul soon learns to heed them not.