We have always entertained a particular attachment towards
Monmouth-street, as the only true and real emporium for second-hand
wearing apparel. Monmouth-street is venerable from its antiquity, and
respectable from its usefulness. Holywell-street we despise; the
red-headed and red-whiskered Jews who forcibly haul you into their
squalid houses, and thrust you into a suit of clothes, whether you will
or not, we detest.
The inhabitants of Monmouth-street are a distinct class; a peaceable
and retiring race, who immure themselves for the most part in deep
cellars, or small back parlours, and who seldom come forth into the
world, except in the dusk and coolness of the evening, when they may be
seen seated, in chairs on the pavement, smoking their pipes, or
watching the gambols of their engaging children as they revel in the
gutter, a happy troop of infantine scavengers. Their countenances bear
a thoughtful and a dirty cast, certain indications of their love of
traffic; and their habitations are distinguished by that disregard of
outward appearance and neglect of personal comfort, so common among
people who are constantly immersed in profound speculations, and deeply
engaged in sedentary pursuits.
We have hinted at the antiquity of our favourite spot. ‘A
Monmouth-street laced coat’ was a by-word a century ago; and still we
find Monmouth-street the same. Pilot great-coats with wooden buttons,
have usurped the place of the ponderous laced coats with full skirts;
embroidered waistcoats with large flaps, have yielded to
double-breasted checks with roll-collars; and three-cornered hats of
quaint appearance, have given place to the low crowns and broad brims
of the coachman school; but it is the times that have changed, not
Monmouth-street. Through every alteration and every change,
Monmouth-street has still remained the burial-place of the fashions;
and such, to judge from all present appearances, it will remain until
there are no more fashions to bury.
We love to walk among these extensive groves of the illustrious dead,
and to indulge in the speculations to which they give rise; now fitting
a deceased coat, then a dead pair of trousers, and anon the mortal
remains of a gaudy waistcoat, upon some being of our own conjuring up,
and endeavouring, from the shape and fashion of the garment itself, to
bring its former owner before our mind’s eye. We have gone on
speculating in this way, until whole rows of coats have started from
their pegs, and buttoned up, of their own accord, round the waists of
imaginary wearers; lines of trousers have jumped down to meet them;
waistcoats have almost burst with anxiety to put themselves on; and
half an acre of shoes have suddenly found feet to fit them, and gone
stumping down the street with a noise which has fairly awakened us from
our pleasant reverie, and driven us slowly away, with a bewildered
stare, an object of astonishment to the good people of Monmouth-street,
and of no slight suspicion to the policemen at the opposite street
corner.
We were occupied in this manner the other day, endeavouring to fit a
pair of lace-up half-boots on an ideal personage, for whom, to say the
truth, they were full a couple of sizes too small, when our eyes
happened to alight on a few suits of clothes ranged outside a
shop-window, which it immediately struck us, must at different periods
have all belonged to, and been worn by, the same individual, and had
now, by one of those strange conjunctions of circumstances which will
occur sometimes, come to be exposed together for sale in the same shop.
The idea seemed a fantastic one, and we looked at the clothes again
with a firm determination not to be easily led away. No, we were right;
the more we looked, the more we were convinced of the accuracy of our
previous impression. There was the man’s whole life written as legibly
on those clothes, as if we had his autobiography engrossed on parchment
before us.
The first was a patched and much-soiled skeleton suit; one of those
straight blue cloth cases in which small boys used to be confined,
before belts and tunics had come in, and old notions had gone out: an
ingenious contrivance for displaying the full symmetry of a boy’s
figure, by fastening him into a very tight jacket, with an ornamental
row of buttons over each shoulder, and then buttoning his trousers over
it, so as to give his legs the appearance of being hooked on, just
under the armpits. This was the boy’s dress. It had belonged to a town
boy, we could see; there was a shortness about the legs and arms of the
suit; and a bagging at the knees, peculiar to the rising youth of
London streets. A small day-school he had been at, evidently. If it had
been a regular boys’ school they wouldn’t have let him play on the
floor so much, and rub his knees so white. He had an indulgent mother
too, and plenty of halfpence, as the numerous smears of some sticky
substance about the pockets, and just below the chin, which even the
salesman’s skill could not succeed in disguising, sufficiently
betokened. They were decent people, but not overburdened with riches,
or he would not have so far outgrown the suit when he passed into those
corduroys with the round jacket; in which he went to a boys’ school,
however, and learnt to write—and in ink of pretty tolerable blackness,
too, if the place where he used to wipe his pen might be taken as
evidence.
A black suit and the jacket changed into a diminutive coat. His father
had died, and the mother had got the boy a message-lad’s place in some
office. A long-worn suit that one; rusty and threadbare before it was
laid aside, but clean and free from soil to the last. Poor woman! We
could imagine her assumed cheerfulness over the scanty meal, and the
refusal of her own small portion, that her hungry boy might have
enough. Her constant anxiety for his welfare, her pride in his growth
mingled sometimes with the thought, almost too acute to bear, that as
he grew to be a man his old affection might cool, old kindnesses fade
from his mind, and old promises be forgotten—the sharp pain that even
then a careless word or a cold look would give her—all crowded on our
thoughts as vividly as if the very scene were passing before us.
These things happen every hour, and we all know it; and yet we felt as
much sorrow when we saw, or fancied we saw—it makes no difference
which—the change that began to take place now, as if we had just
conceived the bare possibility of such a thing for the first time. The
next suit, smart but slovenly; meant to be gay, and yet not half so
decent as the threadbare apparel; redolent of the idle lounge, and the
blackguard companions, told us, we thought, that the widow’s comfort
had rapidly faded away. We could imagine that coat—imagine! we could
see it; we _had_ seen it a hundred times—sauntering in company with
three or four other coats of the same cut, about some place of
profligate resort at night.
We dressed, from the same shop-window in an instant, half a dozen boys
of from fifteen to twenty; and putting cigars into their mouths, and
their hands into their pockets, watched them as they sauntered down the
street, and lingered at the corner, with the obscene jest, and the
oft-repeated oath. We never lost sight of them, till they had cocked
their hats a little more on one side, and swaggered into the
public-house; and then we entered the desolate home, where the mother
sat late in the night, alone; we watched her, as she paced the room in
feverish anxiety, and every now and then opened the door, looked
wistfully into the dark and empty street, and again returned, to be
again and again disappointed. We beheld the look of patience with which
she bore the brutish threat, nay, even the drunken blow; and we heard
the agony of tears that gushed from her very heart, as she sank upon
her knees in her solitary and wretched apartment.
A long period had elapsed, and a greater change had taken place, by the
time of casting off the suit that hung above. It was that of a stout,
broad-shouldered, sturdy-chested man; and we knew at once, as anybody
would, who glanced at that broad-skirted green coat, with the large
metal buttons, that its wearer seldom walked forth without a dog at his
heels, and some idle ruffian, the very counterpart of himself, at his
side. The vices of the boy had grown with the man, and we fancied his
home then—if such a place deserve the name.
We saw the bare and miserable room, destitute of furniture, crowded
with his wife and children, pale, hungry, and emaciated; the man
cursing their lamentations, staggering to the tap-room, from whence he
had just returned, followed by his wife and a sickly infant, clamouring
for bread; and heard the street-wrangle and noisy recrimination that
his striking her occasioned. And then imagination led us to some
metropolitan workhouse, situated in the midst of crowded streets and
alleys, filled with noxious vapours, and ringing with boisterous cries,
where an old and feeble woman, imploring pardon for her son, lay dying
in a close dark room, with no child to clasp her hand, and no pure air
from heaven to fan her brow. A stranger closed the eyes that settled
into a cold unmeaning glare, and strange ears received the words that
murmured from the white and half-closed lips.
A coarse round frock, with a worn cotton neckerchief, and other
articles of clothing of the commonest description, completed the
history. A prison, and the sentence—banishment or the gallows. What
would the man have given then, to be once again the contented humble
drudge of his boyish years; to have been restored to life, but for a
week, a day, an hour, a minute, only for so long a time as would enable
him to say one word of passionate regret to, and hear one sound of
heartfelt forgiveness from, the cold and ghastly form that lay rotting
in the pauper’s grave! The children wild in the streets, the mother a
destitute widow; both deeply tainted with the deep disgrace of the
husband and father’s name, and impelled by sheer necessity, down the
precipice that had led him to a lingering death, possibly of many
years’ duration, thousands of miles away. We had no clue to the end of
the tale; but it was easy to guess its termination.
We took a step or two further on, and by way of restoring the naturally
cheerful tone of our thoughts, began fitting visionary feet and legs
into a cellar-board full of boots and shoes, with a speed and accuracy
that would have astonished the most expert artist in leather, living.
There was one pair of boots in particular—a jolly, good-tempered,
hearty-looking pair of tops, that excited our warmest regard; and we
had got a fine, red-faced, jovial fellow of a market-gardener into
them, before we had made their acquaintance half a minute. They were
just the very thing for him. There was his huge fat legs bulging over
the tops, and fitting them too tight to admit of his tucking in the
loops he had pulled them on by; and his knee-cords with an interval of
stocking; and his blue apron tucked up round his waist; and his red
neckerchief and blue coat, and a white hat stuck on one side of his
head; and there he stood with a broad grin on his great red face,
whistling away, as if any other idea but that of being happy and
comfortable had never entered his brain.
This was the very man after our own heart; we knew all about him; we
had seen him coming up to Covent-garden in his green chaise-cart, with
the fat, tubby little horse, half a thousand times; and even while we
cast an affectionate look upon his boots, at that instant, the form of
a coquettish servant-maid suddenly sprung into a pair of Denmark satin
shoes that stood beside them, and we at once recognised the very girl
who accepted his offer of a ride, just on this side the Hammersmith
suspension-bridge, the very last Tuesday morning we rode into town from
Richmond.
A very smart female, in a showy bonnet, stepped into a pair of grey
cloth boots, with black fringe and binding, that were studiously
pointing out their toes on the other side of the top-boots, and seemed
very anxious to engage his attention, but we didn’t observe that our
friend the market-gardener appeared at all captivated with these
blandishments; for beyond giving a knowing wink when they first began,
as if to imply that he quite understood their end and object, he took
no further notice of them. His indifference, however, was amply
recompensed by the excessive gallantry of a very old gentleman with a
silver-headed stick, who tottered into a pair of large list shoes, that
were standing in one corner of the board, and indulged in a variety of
gestures expressive of his admiration of the lady in the cloth boots,
to the immeasurable amusement of a young fellow we put into a pair of
long-quartered pumps, who we thought would have split the coat that
slid down to meet him, with laughing.
We had been looking on at this little pantomime with great satisfaction
for some time, when, to our unspeakable astonishment, we perceived that
the whole of the characters, including a numerous _corps de ballet_ of
boots and shoes in the background, into which we had been hastily
thrusting as many feet as we could press into the service, were
arranging themselves in order for dancing; and some music striking up
at the moment, to it they went without delay. It was perfectly
delightful to witness the agility of the market-gardener. Out went the
boots, first on one side, then on the other, then cutting, then
shuffling, then setting to the Denmark satins, then advancing, then
retreating, then going round, and then repeating the whole of the
evolutions again, without appearing to suffer in the least from the
violence of the exercise.
Nor were the Denmark satins a bit behindhand, for they jumped and
bounded about, in all directions; and though they were neither so
regular, nor so true to the time as the cloth boots, still, as they
seemed to do it from the heart, and to enjoy it more, we candidly
confess that we preferred their style of dancing to the other. But the
old gentleman in the list shoes was the most amusing object in the
whole party; for, besides his grotesque attempts to appear youthful,
and amorous, which were sufficiently entertaining in themselves, the
young fellow in the pumps managed so artfully that every time the old
gentleman advanced to salute the lady in the cloth boots, he trod with
his whole weight on the old fellow’s toes, which made him roar with
anguish, and rendered all the others like to die of laughing.
We were in the full enjoyment of these festivities when we heard a
shrill, and by no means musical voice, exclaim, ‘Hope you’ll know me
agin, imperence!’ and on looking intently forward to see from whence
the sound came, we found that it proceeded, not from the young lady in
the cloth boots, as we had at first been inclined to suppose, but from
a bulky lady of elderly appearance who was seated in a chair at the
head of the cellar-steps, apparently for the purpose of superintending
the sale of the articles arranged there.
A barrel-organ, which had been in full force close behind us, ceased
playing; the people we had been fitting into the shoes and boots took
to flight at the interruption; and as we were conscious that in the
depth of our meditations we might have been rudely staring at the old
lady for half an hour without knowing it, we took to flight too, and
were soon immersed in the deepest obscurity of the adjacent ‘Dials.’