THE COUNTY TOWN.
[Illustration]
Does the reader know one of the most fascinating books of a most
fascinating of our old writers, _Belford Regis_, by Miss Mary Russell
Mitford? If not, and he or she desires to be carried back on the broad,
sweeping, somewhat sad-coloured wings of fancy to the past, to a time
before railways, then let _Belford Regis_ be procured, and read, and
smiled, and perhaps a little sighed over. As in _Our Village_ the
authoress sketched the country, so in _Belford Regis_ did she sketch
the little county town at the beginning of the present century.
[Illustration: South Gate Launceston]
"About three miles to the north of our village stands the good town
of Belford Regis. The approach to it, straight as a dart, runs along
a wide and populous turnpike road, all alive with carts and coaches,
waggons and phaetons, horse-people and foot-people, sweeping rapidly
or creeping lazily up and down the gentle undulations with which the
surface of the country is varied; and the borders, checkered by patches
of common, rich with hedgerow timber, and sprinkled with cottages, and,
I grieve to say, with that cottage pest, the beer-house,--and here and
there enlivened by dwellings of more pretension and gentility,--become
more thickly inhabited as we draw nearer the metropolis of the county,
to say nothing of the three cottages all in a row, with two small
houses attached, which a board affixed to one of them informs the
passer-by is Two-mile Cross; or of these opposite neighbours, the
wheelwrights and the blacksmiths, about half a mile further; or the
little farm close by the pound; or the series of buildings called the
Long Row, terminating at the end next the road with an old-fashioned
and most picturesque public-house, with painted roofs, and benches at
the door and round the large elm before it--benches which are generally
filled by thirsty wayfarers and waggoners watering their horses, and
partaking of a more generous liquor themselves.
[Illustration: Cottages at Woking:
Cottages at the entrance to a Town.]
"Leaving these objects undescribed, no sooner do we get within a
mile of the town, than our approach is indicated by successive
market-gardens on either side, crowned, as we ascend the long hill on
which the turnpike-gate stands, by an extensive nursery-ground, gay
with long beds of flowers, with trellised walks covered with creepers,
with whole acres of flowering shrubs, and ranges of green-houses, the
glass glittering in the southern sun. Then the turnpike gate, with its
civil keeper, then another public-house, then the clear bright pond on
the top of the hill, and then the rows of small tenements, with here
and there a more ambitious single cottage standing in its own pretty
garden, which forms the usual gradation from the country to the town.
"About this point, where one road, skirting the great pond and edged by
small houses, diverges from the great southern entrance, and where two
streets, meeting or parting, lead by separate ways down the steep
hill to the centre of the town, stands a handsome mansion, surrounded
by orchards and pleasure-grounds, across which is perhaps to be seen
the very best view of Belford, with its long ranges of modern buildings
in the outskirts, mingled with picturesque old streets, the venerable
towers of St. Stephen's and St. Nicholas', the light and tapering spire
of St. John's, the huge monastic ruins of the abbey, the massive walls
of the county gaol, the great river winding along like a thread of
silver, trees and gardens mingling amongst all, and the whole landscape
environed and lightened by the drooping elms of the foreground, adding
an illusive beauty to the picture by breaking the too formal outline,
and veiling just exactly those parts which most require concealment.
"Nobody can look at Belford from this point without feeling that it
is a very English and very charming scene, and the impression does
not diminish on farther acquaintance. We see at once the history of
the place, that it is an antique borough town, which has recently
been extended to nearly double its former size; so that it unites in
no common degree the old romantic, irregular structures in which our
ancestors delighted, with the handsome and uniform buildings which
are the fashion now-a-days. I suppose that people are right in their
taste, and that the modern houses are pleasantest to live in, but,
beyond all question, those antique streets are the prettiest to look
at. The occasional blending too is good. Witness the striking piece of
street scenery which was once accidentally forced upon my attention as
I took shelter from a shower of rain in a shop about ten doors up the
right-hand side of Friar Street--the old vicarage-house of St. Nicholas
embowered in greens, the lofty town-hall, and the handsome modern house
of my friend Mr. Beauchamp, the fine church tower of St. Nicholas, the
picturesque piazza underneath, the jutting corner of Friar Street, the
old irregular shops in the market-place, and the trees of the Forbury
just peeping between, with all their varieties of light and shadow.
I went to the door to see if the shower was over, was caught by its
beauty, and stood looking at it in the sunshine long after the rain had
ceased."
I make no apology for this long extract. Miss Mitford is not much read
now, and those who read her are always glad to re-read a passage from
her fresh and graphic pen.
[Illustration: London Inn Launceston:
Street in Launceston.]
That there may be more picturesqueness in an old German, Italian,
and French town may be admitted, but it is of a more salient,
obtrusive character than that which exists in our old county towns.
The continental architects aimed at bold effects. I do not say that
they were wrong. They achieved great success. Our architects built
what was wanted, in a quiet, undemonstrative manner, and left effect
to chance, and chance gave what they did not seek. The charms of an
old English county town do not force themselves on our notice, are
missed altogether by the hasty visitor; they have to be found out, they
come by surprises, they depend on certain lights and plays of shadow,
on the bursting into leaf of certain trees, on the setting up of
certain hucksters' stalls. That a great deal of their picturesqueness
is passing away is, alas! only too true. The tradesmen want huge
window spaces for the display of their goods, so away is knocked the
quaint old frontage of the house, and is replaced by something that
can be sustained on iron supports between wide sheets of plate-glass.
The suburbs are being made hideous with rows of model cottages, all
precisely alike, roofed with blue slate. Nevertheless a great deal
remains, and it is fortunately now something like a fashion to give
us Queen Anne (so-called) gables in the streets, which at all events
afford a pretty broken sky-line, and a play of light and shade on the
frontage.
Then how different are the outskirts of a foreign town to an English
country town. In Italy there are miles of lanes between high stone
walls, over which indeed lemons show their glorious fruit and blaze in
the sun; nevertheless, the sorry fact remains, that for as far as one
cares to walk there is no prospect save by favour through a gate.
At Florence, for instance, it is wall, wall, on the right hand and on
the left, all the way to Fiesole; and to the south, beyond S. Miniato,
up and down the hills, wall, wall, on the right hand and on the left.
At Genoa the city is engirded with hills, indeed the town lies in a
crater, broken down to the west to the sea. Climb near two thousand
feet to the encircling fortresses, and you go between wall, wall, all
the way. Escape along the sea to Sampierdarema on one side, on the
other to St. Fruttuoso, and it is a way between wall and house, house
and wall. And a French town, or a German town, or a Belgian town,
starts up suddenly out of bare fields, without trees, without hedges,
with a suburb of tall, hideous, stuccoed, badly-built houses, all
precisely alike and equally ugly. There are no cottages. Come back
to England, and at once you discover that the cottage is that which
gives charm to the approach of a town, it is the moss, the lichen that
adheres to the wall, a softening, beautiful feature in itself. Then
there are our hedges and hedgerow trees, and how different from the
stiff avenues of poplar, and the boulevards of set planes, exactly ten
paces apart.
Every foreign city was fortified, and outside the fortifications
the glacis had to be kept clear of trees and buildings, so as not
to give cover to the enemy. This fact has influenced the approach
to all continental towns, they are not led up to as in England; and
the poor are lodged differently--they occupy big houses, which they
delight in making untidy, and exposing the dishevelled condition of
their dwellings to every passer-by. The very lanes between walls are
untidy--every possible scrap of refuse collects in them, the stray
feathers of fowls that have been plucked throughout the year eddy
there, old rags--discarded only when dropping off--rot there, scraps
of tin canister are kicked about there, old boots get sodden there.
But there is always an effort after tidiness about English cottages;
and somehow the approaches to our towns are not offensive to eye and
nose, but quite the reverse; the pretty cottages, their well-cared-for
gardens, the villas with bosquets of seringa and lilac, combine in
making the approach full of studies for the painter--reposeful pictures
of general comfort and happiness.
[Illustration: Dockacre: Launceston:
Old Town House, Launceston.]
In a foreign town the palace jostles with the gaunt house in which the
poor herd. In England there are no palaces in our country towns, but
there are excellent middle-class mansions, the Queen Anne red brick
tall house, with stone quoins, where lives the substantial solicitor,
who makes the wills and draws up the leases for all the squires of the
neighbourhood, who is clerk of the Petty Sessions, and is consulted by
every one more as a confidential friend than as a professional man.
There is the prim house, with exactly as many windows on one side of
the door as on the other, and a round-headed window over it, where
three old ladies keep a school for girls. There is the many-gabled
house inhabited by the late rector's widow. There is the quaint slated
house with its bow-windows, within rich with beautiful plaster work
and carved wood, supposed to be by Grinling Gibbons. It has a garden
in terraces descending to the river, with vases on the balustrade of
the terraces full of scarlet geraniums. Then there comes the modern
county bank of cut stone, and of inconceivable incongruity and
ugliness; then an old inn frequented by the Tory squires in past days.
There is the old grammar school with its pedimented door and ivy
creeping over the red-brick walls, fought with every year, and forced
back from overrunning the windows, as it has overrun the walls. There
is the doctor's house, with a portico supported by slim Corinthian
pillars, and with a lead above, on which the doctor's wife sets out
her flowers, that make a blaze of colour up and down the street. There
is the stuccoed wine merchant's house--always painted drab every third
year--that has red blinds, through which the lamps at night diffuse a
ruby glow into the street. There is that long wall with an elaborately
wrought iron gate, with link extinguishers to the side posts, and a
small but overgrown garden of shrubs, behind which lurks a thatched
cottage where lives a widow--Lady This or That, the mother of the
present baronet who resides three miles off at the park. There is the
rectory, with its back to the street, and windows so low that the
passers-by can see in--or could till they were furnished with twisted
cane screens. But then the other side of the parsonage looks into the
most charming of gardens, on what was the city wall, whence a glorious
view is obtained. But the space would fail me were I to describe,
or merely indicate, the various houses of people, some professional,
some retired gentry, some retired tradespeople, in a country town, all
speaking of comfort, ease, and peace.
Thus wrote Horace Walpole in 1741, on his return to England from
Italy--"The country-town (and you will believe me, who you know am not
prejudiced) delights me; the populousness, the ease, the gaiety, the
well-dressed everybody amaze me. Canterbury--which on my setting out I
thought deplorable--is a paradise to Modena, Reggio, Parma, etc. I had
before discovered that there was nowhere but in England the distinction
of _middling people_; I perceive now that there is peculiar to us
_middling houses_;--how snug they are!"
[Illustration: House at Launceston:
Queen Anne Town House.]
How sleepy the dear old country town is on all days of the week save
market-day. The shopkeepers do not think it necessary to remain
behind their counters, but run across the street or the square to
have a chat with each other, and should a purchaser appear, it
interrupts a gossip where two or three tradesmen are together; or if
the purchaser goes into a deserted shop, he has to wait whilst the
owner is fetched from some neighbour's, whither he has gone to discuss
the new scheme for water supply, or the bad quality of the gas.
Every squire's carriage, every parson's trap of the neighbourhood is
known to every one in the town; and should one come in on a day that
is not market-day, the reason of its appearance is a subject of much
conjecture and discussion.
But how the town wakes up on market-day; how all the tradesmen
recover from somnolence, and are nimble on their feet, and full of
promises to get this bit of ironmongery attended to at once, such
lamp-chimneys fitted, to write to London to order such a lace or such
a silk matched--out of stock only yesterday, and to get this watch
cleaned, or to reset a stone in that ring, or to alter the stuffing of
such a lady's saddle that galls, or to provide so many pounds of cake
for a school-treat; and the milliner is hard at work all day fitting
gowns, or trying on hats; and the hairdresser's fingers are never
resting from snip, snip, snip, and the boy from working the treadmill
that sets the rotary-brush in motion; and the ostler is engaged in
taking his shillings; and the fishmonger in serving up his baskets of
soles and mackerel; and the nursery-gardener in making up bouquets;
and the oil-man in filling cans with benzoline, which have to go
back under the coachman's feet, as has also a crate with plates from
the crockery-shop--that tiresome kitchen-maid does bang the plates
about so that she has not left one unsnipped; and the photographer is
occupied the whole day setting heads into an apparatus for holding them
steady, and pulling down or drawing up blinds; and the dentist is also
engaged in relieving persons with swollen cheeks; and in the workhouse
congregate the Board of Guardians, and talk over the merits of such and
such a case, and the allowance to be made per week.
There are notices about on all the walls that amateur theatricals will
be given in the new Town Hall in behalf of the local Hunt; and the
neighbours are bringing in their fox's brushes and masks wherewith
to decorate the proscenium and the walls of the hall. The poor old
Assembly Room, something like a Grecian temple, but copied--and
badly copied--in stucco, is now given up to a dealer in antiquities,
second-hand furniture, and old china. That Assembly Room in which our
grandmothers danced is now piled up with beds, large oil-paintings,
chiffoniers, fire-irons and fenders, staircase clocks, and an
endless amount of rubbish for which no one, one would suppose, could
be found to be purchaser. The assembly balls, the hunt balls, the
bachelors' balls, the concerts, and, as we have seen, the dramatical
entertainments, now take place in the new Town Hall.
The old county town is thriving. It is a place to which all the
neighbourhood gravitates. There is now a setting of the tide into
towns, and ebb in the country places. Servants will not go to the
country. Meat, dairy produce, fowls, are as dear in the country as in
the towns. In the towns it is not necessary to keep a pony carriage;
in the towns there is escape from those village parasites who fall on
and eat up those who settle in the country; and in the towns there is
more going on. In the towns educational advantages are to be had which
are lacking in the country. So, not only do old ladies go to towns, but
also families fairly well off; and the country is becoming deserted.
Small, pretty houses do not let well there; great houses not at all. So
the country towns are eating up the country.
"Clean, airy, and affluent; well paved, well lighted, well watched;
abounding in wide and spacious streets, filled with excellent shops
and handsome houses;--such is the outward appearance, the bodily form,
of our market town," says Miss Mitford concerning Belford; and the
description applies to every other county town in England. As for the
vital-spark, the life-blood that glows and circulates through the dead
mass of mortar and masonry, that I have neither space to describe, nor
would one description apply to every other.
[Illustration]
_December, 1889._
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Transcriber's Notes
Minor punctuation errors have been corrected.
Some inconsistencies in spelling and hyphenation have been left as printed.
p 18. "seventeeth century" to "seventeenth century."
p. 46. "old and risty". may be a typo for rusty. Left as printed.
p. 71. "plate glass" to "plate-glass"
p. 161. "Mrs Chowne" to "Mrs. Chowne"
p. 184. "peform" to "perform"
p. 186. "brauls" to "braules"
p. 187. "Duke of Monmoth" to "Duke of Monmouth"
p. 228. The decade of the marriage date of AB is unclear in this
edition,
but visible as 1638 in an alternate source.
p. 312. "Wipe you shoes" to "Wipe your shoes"
End pages (publications). "finger's en" to "finger's end"
In the text both teetotaller and teetotaler used and have been left as
printed.