The buildings form an irregular cluster spread over a prodigal area, and
isolated by a wall of brick and stone which many London fogs and long
days of yellow weather have reduced to the dismalest of colors. None of
them are lofty; some of them are of granite, and others of brick, upon
which age has cast a smoky mantle. They are separated by wide courts and
winding passages; and when I was there in the Easter vacation these open
spaces were vacant, and the brisk twittering of the sparrows was the only
sound that came from them. The quiet seemed all the greater, inasmuch as
all around the walls is a busy neighbourhood, full of traffic and voices.
The courts are for the most part paved with small cobblestones, and are
cleanly swept; but some of them are grassy—grassy in the dingy and feeble
way of London vegetation. These buildings look as sad as they are old;
to the juvenile imagination the high walls and the severe architecture
must be sharply distressing, and many a boy has felt his heart sink with
misgiving as, for the first time, he has been driven through the old
gate-way, to be placed as a scholar on Thomas Sutton’s {15} famous
foundation.
At this old gate-way, one day, I saw a very feeble old gentleman,
strangely dressed in a scarlet waistcoat and bright blue trowsers, a
brass-buttoned coat, and a high silk hat. He was very small and very
weak, moving slowly with the help of a stick, and coughing painfully
behind his pocket handkerchief. To my question as to the admission of
strangers, he said, quaveringly: “If you are a patron, you may see the
buildings, but you had better ask the janitor; there he is. I,” he
added, with some hesitation, “I am one of the poor brethren.”
The old head bowed down with years and sorrow, the white hair, the
troublesome cough, the courteous amiability of manner, reminded me of
Colonel Newcome—Codd Newcome, as the boys began to call him; and, indeed,
this old gentleman had been a captain in the Queen’s service, as the
janitor afterward told us, though he was not as stately nor as handsome
as the dear old Colonel was. None of the celebrities of Charterhouse
possesses the same vivid interest, the same hold upon our sympathies, the
same command of the affections, as the brave, high-minded, large-hearted
old soldier, who sacrificed all he had in the world to keep his honour
spotless, and to shield others from misery.
As the janitor took us from hall to hall in the dark, monastic buildings,
Colonel Newcome was constantly before us, and his figure, even more than
that of Thackeray himself, filled our minds, and made us feel kindly to
the old pensioners who were sunning themselves at the doors of their
rooms, or were gathered in a quiet corner of one of the courts, chatting
or reading.
The pensioners, of whom there are eighty, remain in the old buildings, in
which each of them has a sitting-room and a bed-room, with a servant to
wait upon him. Their table is a common one, in a grand old dining-hall,
and twice a day they don their gowns to go to service in the little
chapel, to thank God for his manifold blessings and mercies. But the
boys have been removed since 1870 to a magnificent new-school at
Godalming, Surrey, thirty-four miles away from London fogs and the crowds
of Smithfield, and they have taken nearly all the relics of Thackeray
with them, including the little bed in which he slept while a scholar.
Their part of the buildings is now occupied by the Merchant Taylors’
School, which has added a large new schoolroom to the square. The ground
is immensely valuable, and from an economic point of view it seems a
waste to devote it to the obsolete buildings which fill the greater part
of it. Soon, no doubt, another home will be found for the poor brethren,
and when commerce takes possession of Charterhouse Square, one of the
most interesting piles in London town will disappear. {19}
The cleanliness and orderliness which leave no scrap of waste or wisp of
straw or ridge of dust visible in the approach have also swept up every
part of the interior; and though the smoke and dust have taken a
tenacious hold, the charwoman’s besom and scrubbing-brush have been
vigorously applied. The buildings look quite as old as they are. The
oaken wainscoting is the deepest brown; the balusters and groining are
massive and carved; the tapestries are indistinct and phantasmal, like
faded pictures, and the walls are like those of a fortress. It is easy
in these surroundings to conjure up visions of the middle ages.
The site of the dormitories of the Charterhouse boys is now occupied by
the new school-room of the Merchant Taylors; but looking upon it is a
dusky cloister, once given to the prayerful meditations of the friars,
which in Thackeray’s time and later was used for games of ball; the gloom
is everywhere. The ghosts of the silent brothers seem fitter tenants
than the boys with shining faces and ringing voices. There are narrow,
suspicious-looking passages, and heavily-barred, irresistible oaken
doors. But these corridors and barriers against the unwelcome lead into
several apartments of truly magnificent size and faded splendour. The
dining-hall of the poor brethren has wainscoting from twelve to twenty
feet high, a massively groined roof, a musicians’ gallery with a carved
balustrade, and a large fire-place framed in ornamental oak, over which
the Sutton arms are emblazoned; while at the end of the room is a
portrait of the founder, dressed in a flowing gown and the suffocatingly
frilled collar of his time. Parallel to this, and accessible by a low
door, is the dining-hall of the gown boys, a long, narrow room, with a
very low ceiling, high wainscoting, a knotty floor, insufficient windows,
and another large fire-place inclosed by an elaborate mantel-piece of
oak. Here almost side by side, these boys with life untried before them
and the old men well-nigh at their journey’s end, ate the bread provided
for them by their common benefactor, and joined voices in thanksgiving;
here still the old pensioners assemble, and in trembling voices murmur
grace over the provision made for them. Upstairs there is a
banqueting-hall, which is not inferior in sombre grandeur to that of the
poor brothers, and was once honoured by the presence of Queen Elizabeth.
It also is wainscoted and groined, and hung with tapestries, out of which
the pictures have nearly vanished. The fire-place is the finest of all,
and above it some hazy paintings are lost in the shadow.
Thackeray was one of the foundation scholars, and lived in the school,
and wore a gown. He was, from all accounts, an average boy,
undistinguished by industry or precocious ability. He was very much like
many of Dr. Birch’s little friends: a simple honest, and sometimes
mischievous lad. Though he was never elected orator or poet, he wrote
parodies, and was clever with a pencil, which he used with no little
fancy and humour. The margins of books and scraps of paper of all kinds
were covered with sketches, most of them caricatures; and it is said to
have been a familiar thing to see the artist surrounded by an admiring
crowd of his school-fellows, while he developed, with grotesque
extravagance and never-failing effect, the outlines of some juvenile hero
or some notability of history. The head master of the school was severe,
and as Thackeray was very sensitive, it is supposed that his school days
were not of the happiest. But he bore the old foundation no ill-will;
who, indeed, shall ever do it more honor than he has done?
Only a few weeks before his death, Thackeray was present on Founder’s
Day. He sat in his usual back seat in the old chapel. He went thence to
hear the oration in the governor’s room, and, as he walked up to the
orator with his contribution, was received with hearty applause. At the
banquet afterward, he sat at the side of his old friend and school-mate
John Leech; and Thackeray it was who, on that occasion proposed the toast
of “The Charterhouse.”
Taking us through the grounds by the way of Wash-house Court, a
quadrangle of very old and smoky buildings, which were attached to the
original monastery, the janitor conducted us into the cool and quiet
cloister which leads into the chapel. Here is the handsome memorial of
the Carthusians slain in the wars, and on the walls is a commemorative
tablet to Thackeray. Next to Thackeray’s is a similar tablet to the
memory of Leech.
The little chapel is much as it was in their time and long before. The
founders’ tomb, with its grotesque carvings, monsters, heraldries, still
darkles and shines with the most wonderful shadows and lights, as
Thackeray described it. There, in marble effigy, lies Fundator Noster in
his ruff and gown, awaiting the great examination day. Just in front of
this elaborate monument, Thackeray himself used to sit when a boy. The
children are present no more; but yonder, twice a day, sit the pensioners
of the hospital, listening to the prayers and the psalms,—four-score of
the old reverend black gowns. The custom of the school was that, on the
twelfth of December, the head gown boy should recite a Latin oration;
and, though the scholars are removed to Godalming, the ceremony is
perpetuated. Many old Carthusians attend this oration; after which they
go to chapel and hear a sermon, which is followed by a dinner, at which
old condisciples meet, old toasts are given, and speeches are made. The
reader has surely not forgotten how Pendennis, himself a Grayfriars boy,
came to the festival one day quite unaware of his friend’s presence.
“The pensioners were in their benches, the boys in their places, with
young fresh faces and shining white collars. We oldsters, be we ever so
old,” Pendennis has written, “become boys again as we look at that old
familiar tomb, and think how the seats are altered since we were here,
and how our doctor—not the present doctor, the doctor of _our_ time—used
to sit yonder, and his awful eye used to frighten us shuddering boys on
whom it lighted; and how the boy next us _would_ kick our shins during
service time, and how the monitor would cane us afterwards, because our
shins were kicked. Yonder sit forty cherry-cheeked boys, thinking about
home and holidays to-morrow. Yonder sit the pensioners coughing feebly
in the twilight. Is Codd Ajax alive you wonder?—the Cistercian lads
called these old gentlemen Codds, I know not wherefore—but is old Codd
Ajax alive I wonder? or Codd soldier? or kind old Codd gentleman? or has
the grave closed over them?
“A plenty of candles light up this chapel, and this scene of age and
youth, and early memories, and pompous death. How solemn the
well-remembered prayers are, here uttered again in the place where in
childhood we used to listen to them. How beautiful and decorous the
rite, how noble the ancient words of the supplications which the priest
utters, and to which generations of fresh children, and troops of by-gone
seniors have cried Amen! under those arches! The service for Founder’s
Day is a special one; one of the Psalms selected being the
thirty-seventh, and we hear:—23. ‘The steps of a good man are ordered by
the LORD; and He delighteth in His way. 24. Though he fall, he shall not
be utterly cast down: for the LORD upholdeth him with his hand. 25. I
have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous
forsaken, nor his seed begging bread.’ As we came to this verse, I
chanced to look up from my book toward the swarm of black-coated
pensioners, and amongst them—amongst them—sat Thomas Newcome.” The noble
old man had come to end his days here, and we know of no chapter in
English literature more affecting than that in which his light is put
out, and he softly murmurs _Adsum_.
Tears often refuse to flow when manhood has blunted the sympathies, and
we are unmoved when we read again the books which summoned copious floods
in youth, but the pathos of Colonel Newcome’s death, never loses its
effect; it is so deep and genuine, that the description starts our grief
anew whenever we read it, and it leaves us with an acute sense of
profound bereavement. We feel a tender interest in the poor brothers,
and a high respect for them, because the Colonel was one of them, and
because Thackeray, in his imperishable prose, has made them
representative of honorable but unfortunate old age. {29}
Charterhouse is the centre of a neighbourhood which Dickens chose for
many of his scenes, as the reader of this knows. “Only a wall,” says
Thackeray, in _Mr. and Mrs. Frank Berry_, “separates the playground, or
‘green,’ as it was called in his time, from Wilderness Row and Goswell
street. Many a time have I seen Mr. Pickwick look out of his window in
that street, though we did not know him then.” Not only of Mr. Pickwick,
but of many other characters, do we find reminiscences in Smithfield.
The Sarah Son’s Head, as John Browdy called it, Snow Hill, Saffron Hill,
Fleet Lane, and Kingsgate street are not far away. The buildings with
the ancient fronts, the idlers at the corners, and the confusing little
alleys, which lead where no one would expect them to lead, all belong to
Dickens’s London. The miserable associations of his early life, his
interest in the poor, and his relish for the grotesque, drew him into the
shady and disreputable quarters of the city; and the student of his works
can track him with greater ease and ampler results in neighbourhoods like
Smithfield than in the West End. With Thackeray, the reverse is the
case; and, excepting Charter-house, the reader who desires to identify
his localities finds little to reward him in a search east of Pall Mall,
or south of Oxford street.