would astonish old Hobson, not only with their press of ordinary
traffic, but with the vast number of railway lorries rattling and
thundering along, to and from the great Bishopsgate Goods Station of
the Great Eastern Railway; the railway that has supplanted the coaches
and the carriers' waggons along the whole length of this road. That
station, once the passenger terminus of Shoreditch, before the present
huge one at Liverpool Street was built, remains as a connecting-link
between the prosperous and popular "Great Eastern" of to-day and the
reviled and bankrupt "Eastern Counties" of fifty years ago. The history
of the Great Eastern Railway is a complicated story of amalgamations
of many lines with the original Eastern Counties Railway. The line
to Cambridge, with which we are principally concerned, was in the
first instance the project of an independent company calling itself
the Northern and Eastern Railway, opened after many difficulties as
far as Broxbourne in 1840, and thence, shortly afterwards, to Bishop
Stortford. Having reached that point and the end of its resources
simultaneously, it was taken over by the Eastern Counties and completed
in 1847, the line going, as the Cambridge expresses do nowadays, _viâ_
Audley End and Great Chesterford.
Having thus purchased and completed the scheme of that unfortunate
line, the Eastern Counties' own difficulties became acute. Locomotives
and rolling stock were seized for debt, and it fell into bankruptcy and
the Receiver's hands. How it emerged at last, a sound and prosperous
concern, this is not the place to tell, but many years passed before
any passenger whose business took him anywhere along the Eastern
Counties' "system" could rely upon being carried to his destination
without vexatious delays, not of minutes, but of hours. Often the
trains never completed their journeys at all, and came back whence
they had started. Little wonder that this was then described as "that
scapegoat of companies, that pariah of railways."
"On Wednesday last," said _Punch_ at this time, "a respectably-dressed
young man was seen to go to the Shoreditch terminus of the Eastern
Counties Railway and deliberately take a ticket for Cambridge. He has
not since been heard of. No motive has been assigned for the rash act."
The best among the Great Eastern Cambridge expresses of to-day does
the journey of 55¾ miles in 1 hour 13 minutes. Onward to Lynn, 97
miles, the best time made is 2 hours 25 minutes.
VIII
IT is a far cry from Shoreditch Church to the open country. Cobbett, in
1822, journeying from London to Royston, found the suburbs far-reaching
even then. "On this road," he says, "the enormous Wen" (a term of
contempt by which he indicated the Metropolis) "has swelled out to the
distance of above six or seven miles." But from the earliest times
London exhibited a tendency to expand more quickly in this direction
than in others, and Edmonton, Waltham Cross, and Ware lay within the
marches of Cockaigne long before places within a like radius at other
points of the compass began to lose their rural look. The reason is not
far to seek, and may be found in the fact that this, the great road to
the North, was much travelled always.
But where shall we set the limits of the Great Wen in recent times?
Even as these lines are written they are being pushed outwards. It is
not enough to put a finger on the map at Stamford Hill and to say,
"here, at the boundary of the London County Council's territory," or
"here at Edmonton, the limit of the 'N' division of the London Postal
Districts," or, again, "here, where the Metropolitan Police Area meets
the territories of the Hertfordshire and the Essex Constabulary at
Cheshunt"; for those are but arbitrary bounds, and, beyond their own
individual significances, tell us nothing. Have you ever, as a child,
looking, large-eyed and a little frightened it may be, out upon the
bigness of London, wondered where the houses ended and Gods own country
began, or asked where the last house of the last street looked out upon
the meadows, and the final flag-stone led on to the footpath of the
King's Highway?
I have asked, and there was none to tell, and if you in turn ask me
where the last house of the ultimate street stands on this way out of
London--I do not know! There are so many last houses, and they always
begin again; so that little romantic mental picture does not exist in
plain fact. The ending of London is a gradual and almost insensible
process. You may note it when, leaving Stoke Newington's continuous
streets behind, you rise Stamford Hill and perceive its detached and
semi-detached residences; and, pressing on, see the streets begin again
at Tottenham High Cross, continuing to Lower Edmonton. Here at last, in
the waste lands that stretch along the road, you think the object of
your search is found. As well seek that fabled pot of gold at the foot
of the rainbow. The pot and the gold may be there, but you will never,
never reach the rainbow.
The houses begin again, absurdly enough, at Ponder's End. You will come
to an end of them at last, but only gradually, and when, at fifteen and
three-quarter miles from Shoreditch Church, Broxbourne and the first
glimpse of "real country" are reached, the original quest is forgotten.
Very different was the aspect of these first miles out of London in the
days of Izaak Walton, Cowper, and Lamb. Cowper's Johnny Gilpin rode
to Edmonton and Ware, and Walton and Lamb--the inspired Fleet Street
draper and the thrall of the Leadenhall Street office--are literary
co-parceners in the valley of the Lea.
"You are well overtaken, gentlemen," says Piscator, in the _Compleat
Angler_, journeying from London; "a good morning to you both. I have
stretched my legs up Tottenham Hill to overtake you, hoping your
business may occasion you towards Ware, whither I am going this fine,
fresh May morning." He meant that suburban eminence known as Stamford
Hill, where, in the beginning of May 1603, the Lord Mayor and Sheriffs
of London, having ridden out in State for the purpose, met James the
First travelling to London to assume the Crown of England.
Stamford Hill still shadows forth a well-established prosperity. It
was the favoured suburban resort of City merchants in the first half
of the nineteenth century, and is still intensely respectable and
well-to-do, even though the merchants have risen with the swelling
of their bankers' pass-books to higher ambitions, and though many of
their solid, stolid, and prim mansions know them no more, and are
converted not infrequently into what we may bluntly call "boys' and
girls' schools," termed, however, by their respective Dr. Blimber's
and Miss Pinkerton's "scholastic establishments for young ladies and
young gentlemen." The old-time City merchant who resided at Stamford
Hill when the nineteenth century was young (a period when people began
to "reside" in "desirable residences" instead of merely living in
houses), used generally, if he were an active man, to go up to his
business in the City on horseback, and return in the same way. If not
so active, he came and went by the "short stage," a conveyance between
London and the adjacent towns, to all intents and purposes an ordinary
stage-coach, except that it was a two-horsed, instead of a four-horsed,
affair. The last City man who rode to London on horseback has probably
long since been gathered to his fathers, for the practice naturally was
discontinued when railways came and revolutionised manners and customs.
As you top Stamford Hill, you glimpse the valley of the Lea and its
factory-studded marshes, and come presently to Tottenham High Cross. No
need to linger nowadays over the scenery of this populous road, lined
with shops and villas and crowded with tramways and omnibuses; no need,
that is to say, except for association's sake, and to remark that it
was here Piscator called a halt to Venator and Auceps, on their way to
the Thatched House at Hoddesdon, now going on for two hundred and fifty
years ago. "Let us now" (he said) "rest ourselves in this sweet, shady
arbour, which Nature herself has woven with her own fine fingers; it is
such a contexture of woodbines, sweet briars, jessamine, and myrtle,
and so interwoven as will secure us both from the sun's violent heat
and from the approaching shower." And so they sat and discussed a
bottle of sack, with oranges and milk.
[Illustration: TOTTENHAM CROSS.]
So gracious a "contexture" is far to seek from Tottenham nowadays.
If you need shelter from the approaching shower you can, it is true,
obtain it more securely in the doorway of a shop than under a hedgerow
in May, when Nature has not nearly finished her weaving; but there is
something lacking in the exchange.
Tottenham High Cross that stands here by, over against the Green, is
a very dubious affair indeed; an impostor that would delude you if
possible into the idea that it is one of the Eleanor Crosses; with a
will-o'-wisp kind of history, from the time in 1466, when it is found
mentioned only as existing, to after ages, when it was new-built of
brick and thereafter horribly stuccoed, to the present, when it is
become a jibe and a jeer in its would-be Gothic.
[Illustration: A LONDON SUBURB IN 1816: TOTTENHAM.
[From a Drawing by Rowlandson.]]
Much of old Tottenham is gone. Gone are the "Seven Sisters," the seven
elms that stood here in a circle, with a walnut-tree in their midst,
marking, as tradition would have you believe, the resting-place of a
martyr; but in their stead is the beginning of the Seven Sisters' Road:
not a thoroughfare whose romance leaps to the eye. What these then
remote suburbs were like in 1816 may be seen in this charming sketch of
Rowlandson's, where he is found in his more sober mood. The milestone
in the sketch marks four and three-quarter miles from Shoreditch: this
is therefore a scene at Tottenham, where the tramway runs nowadays,
costermongers' barrows line the gutters, and crowds press, night and
day. Little enough traffic in Rowlandson's time, evidently, for the
fowls and the pigs are taking their ease in the very middle of the
footpath.
Yet there are still a few vestiges of the old and the picturesque here.
Bruce Grove, hard by, may be but a name, reminiscent of Robert Bruce
and other Scottish monarchs who once owned a manor and a castle where
suburban villas now cluster plentifully, and where the modern so-called
"Bruce Castle" is a school; but there are dignified old red-brick
mansions here still, lying back from the road behind strong walls and
grand gates of wrought iron. The builder has his eye on them, an Evil
Eye that has already blasted not a few, and with bulging money-bags he
tempts the owners of the others: even as I write they go down before
the pick and shovel.
[Illustration: BALTHAZAR SANCHEZ' ALMSHOUSES, TOTTENHAM.]
Old almshouses there are, too, with dedicatory tablet, complete. The
builder and his money-bags cannot prevail here, you think. Can he not?
My _good_ sirs, have you never heard of the Charity Commissioners,
whose business it is to sit in their snug quarters in Whitehall and
to propound "schemes" whereby such old buildings as these are torn
down, their sites sold for a mess of pottage, and the old pensioners
hustled off to some new settlement? "But look at the value of the
land," you say: "to sell it would admit of the scope of the charity
being doubled." No doubt; but what of the original testator's wishes?
I think, if it were proposed to remove these old almshouses, the shade
of Balthazar Sanchez, the founder, somewhere in the Beyond, would be
grieved.
One Bedwell, parson of Tottenham High Cross _circa_ 1631, and a most
diligent Smelfungus, tells us Balthazar was "a Spanyard born, the first
confectioner or comfit-maker, and the grand master of all that professe
that trade in this kingdome"; and the tablet before-mentioned, on the
front of the old almshouses themselves, tells us something on its own
account, as thus--
"1600
Balthazar Sanchez, Borne in Spayne
in the Cittie of Sherez in Estremadura,
is the Fownder of these Eyght
Almeshowses for the Releefe of
Eyght poor men and women of the
Towne of Tattenham High Crasse."
Long may the queer old houses, with their monumental chimney-stalks and
forecourt gardens remain: it were not well to vex the ghost of the good
comfit-maker.
"Scotland Green" is the name of an odd and haphazard collection of
cottages next these almshouses, looking down into Tottenham Marshes.
Its name derives from the far-off days when those Scottish monarchs had
their manor-house near by, and though the weather-boarded architecture
of the cottages by no means dates back to those times, it is a queer
survival of days before Tottenham had become a suburb; each humble
dwelling law to itself, facing in a direction different from those of
its neighbours, and generally approached by crazy wooden footbridges
over what was probably at one time a tributary of the Lea, now an
evil-smelling ditch where the children of the neighbourhood enjoy
themselves hugely in making mud-pies, and by dint of early and constant
familiarity become immune from the typhoid fever that would certainly
be the lot of a stranger.
IX
EDMONTON, to whose long street we now come, has many titles to fame.
John Gilpin may not afford the oldest of these, and he may be no more
than the purely imaginary figure of a humorous ballad, but beside the
celebrity of that worthy citizen and execrable horseman everything else
at Edmonton sinks into obscurity.
"John Gilpin was a citizen
Of credit and renown,
A train-band captain eke was he
Of famous London town."
Izaak Walton himself, of indubitable flesh and blood, forsaking his
yard-measure and Fleet Street counter and tramping through Edmonton
to the fishful Lea, has not made so great a mark as his fictitious
fellow-tradesman, the draper of Cheapside.
Who has not read of John Gilpin's ride to Edmonton, in Cowper's
deathless verse? Cowper, most melancholy of poets, made the whole
English-speaking world laugh with the story of Gilpin's adventures. How
he came to write the ballad it may not be amiss to tell. The idea was
suggested to him at Olney, in 1782, by Lady Austen, who, to rouse him
from one of his blackest moods, related a merry tale she had heard of
a London citizen's adventures, identical with the verses into which he
afterwards cast the story. He lay awake all that night, and the next
morning, with the idea of amusing himself and his friends, wrote the
famous lines. He had no intention of publishing them, but his friend,
Mrs. Unwin, sent a copy to the _Public Advertiser_. Strange to say, it
did not attract much attention in those columns, and it was not until
three years later, when an actor, Henderson by name, recited the ballad
at Freemasons' Hall that (as modern slang would put it) it "caught
on." It then became instantly popular. Every ballad-printer printed,
and every artist illustrated it; but the author remained unknown until
Cowper included it in a collection of his works.
There are almost as many originals of John Gilpin as there are of
Sam Weller. There used to be numbers of respectable and ordinarily
dependable people who were convinced they knew the original of Sam
Weller, in dozens of different persons and in widely-sundered towns,
and the literary world is even now debating as to who sat as the model
for Squeers. So far back as the reign of Henry the Eighth the ludicrous
idea of a London citizen trying to ride horseback to Edmonton made
people laugh, and on it Sir Thomas More based his metrical "Merry Jest
of the Serjeant and the Frère." It would be no surprise to discover
that Aristophanes or another waggish ancient Greek had used the same
idea to poke fun at some clumsy Athenian, and that, even so, it was
stolen from the Egyptians. Indeed, I have no doubt that the germ of the
story is to be found in the awkwardness of one of Noah's sons in trying
to ride an unaccustomed animal into the Ark.
The immediate supposititious originals of John Gilpin were many. Some
identified him with a Mr. Beger, a Cheapside draper, who died in 1791,
aged one hundred. Others found him in Commodore Trunnion, in _Peregrine
Pickle_, and a John Gilpin lies in Westminster Abbey. The _Gentleman's
Magazine_ in 1790, five years after Cowper's poem became the rage,
records the death at Bath of a Mr. Jonathan Gilpin, "the gentleman who
was so severely ridiculed for bad horsemanship under the title of 'John
Gilpin.'" All accidental resemblances and odd coincidences, without
doubt.
But if John had no corporeal existence, the Bell at Edmonton--at Upper
Edmonton, to be precise--was a very real place, and, in an altered
form, still is. Who could doubt of the man who ever saw the house?
Is not the present Bell real enough, and, for that matter, ugly
enough? and is not the picture of John, wigless and breathless, and
his coat-tails flying, sufficiently prominent on the sign? The present
building is the third since Cowper's time, and is just an ordinary
vulgar London "public," standing at the corner of a shabby street
(where there are _no_ trees), called, with horrible alliteration,
"Gilpin Grove."
Proceed we onwards, having said sufficient of Gilpin. Off to the right
hand turned old Izaak, to Cook's Ferry and the Bleak Hall Inn by the
Lea, that "honest ale-house, where might be found a cleanly room,
lavender in the windows, and twenty ballads stuck about the wall."
Ill questing it would be that should seek nowadays for the old inn.
Instead, down by Angel Road Station and the Lea marshes, you find only
factories and odours of the Pit, horrent and obscene. We have yet to
come to the kernel, the nucleus of this Edmonton. Here it is, at Lower
Edmonton, at the end of many houses, in a left-hand turning--Edmonton
Green; the green a little shorn, perhaps, of its old proportions, and
certainly by no means rural. On it they burnt the unhappy Elizabeth
Sawyer, the Witch of Edmonton, in 1621, with the full approval of
king and council: Ahriman perhaps founding one of his claims to Jamie
for that wicked deed. It was well for Peter Fabell, who at Edmonton
deceived the devil himself, that he practised his conjuring arts before
Jamie came to rule over us, else he had gone the way of that unhappy
Elizabeth; for James was of a logical turn of mind, and would have
argued the worst of one who could beat the Father of Lies at his own
game. Peter flourished, happily for him, in the less pragmatical days
of Henry the Seventh. We should call him in these matter-of-fact days a
master of legerdemain, and he would dare pretend to no more; but he was
honoured and feared in his own time, and lies somewhere in the parish
church, his monument clean gone. On his exploits Elizabethan dramatists
founded the play of the _Merry Devil of Edmonton_.
The railway and the tramway have between them played the very mischief
with Edmonton Green and the Wash--
"... the Wash
Of Edmonton so gay"--
that here used to flow athwart the road, and does actually still so
flow, or trickle, or stagnate; if not always visible to the eye, at
least making its presence obvious at all seasons to the nose. In the
first instance, the railway planted a station and a level crossing on
the highway, practically in the Wash; and then the Tramway Company, in
order to carry its line along the road to Ponders End, constructed a
very steeply rising road over the railway. Add to these objectionable
details, that of another railway crossing over the by-road where Lamb's
Cottage and the church are to be found, and enough will have been
said to prove that the Edmonton of old is sorely overlaid with sordid
modernity.
Charles Lamb would scarce recognise his Edmonton if it were possible
he could revisit the spot, and it seems--the present suburban aspect
of the road before us--a curious ideal of happiness he set himself:
retirement at Edmonton or Ponder's End, "toddling about it, between
it and Cheshunt, anon stretching on some fine Izaak Walton morning to
Hoddesdon or Amwell, careless as a beggar, but walking, walking ever,
till I fairly walked myself off my legs, dying walking."
Everyone to his taste, of course, but it does not seem a particularly
desirable end. It is curious, however, to note that this aspiration
was, in a sense, realised, for it was in his sixtieth year that, taking
his customary walk along the London road one day in December 1834, he
stumbled against a stone and fell, cutting his face. It seemed at the
time a slight injury, but erysipelas set in a few days later, and on
the twenty-seventh of the same month he died. It was but a fortnight
before, that he had pointed out to his sister the spot in Edmonton
churchyard where he wished to be buried.
Lamb's last retreat--"Bay Cottage" as it was named, and "Lamb's
Cottage" as it has since been re-christened, "the prettiest, compactest
house I ever saw," says he--stands in the lane leading to the church;
squeezed in between old mansions, and lying back from the road at
the end of a long narrow strip of garden. It is a stuccoed little
house, curiously like Lamb himself, when you come to consider it:
rather mean-looking, undersized, and unkempt, and overshadowed by
its big neighbours, just as Lamb's little talents were thrown into
insignificance by his really great contemporaries. The big neighbours
of the little cottage are even now on the verge of being demolished,
and the lane itself, the last retreat of old-world Edmonton, is being
modernised; so that those who cultivate their Lamb will not long be
able to trace these, his last landmarks. Already, as we have seen, the
Bell has gone, where Lamb, "seeing off" his visitors on their way back
to London, took a parting glass with them, stutteringly bidding them
hurry when the c-cu-coach c-came in.