IF I had an enemy whom I hated—which Heaven forbid!—and if I knew of
something which sat heavy on his conscience, I think I would introduce
that something into a Posting-Bill, and place a large impression in the
hands of an active sticker. I can scarcely imagine a more terrible
revenge. I should haunt him, by this means, night and day. I do not
mean to say that I would publish his secret, in red letters two feet
high, for all the town to read: I would darkly refer to it. It should be
between him, and me, and the Posting-Bill. Say, for example, that, at a
certain period of his life, my enemy had surreptitiously possessed
himself of a key. I would then embark my capital in the lock business,
and conduct that business on the advertising principle. In all my
placards and advertisements, I would throw up the line SECRET KEYS.
Thus, if my enemy passed an uninhabited house, he would see his
conscience glaring down on him from the parapets, and peeping up at him
from the cellars. If he took a dead wall in his walk, it would be alive
with reproaches. If he sought refuge in an omnibus, the panels thereof
would become Belshazzar’s palace to him. If he took boat, in a wild
endeavour to escape, he would see the fatal words lurking under the
arches of the bridges over the Thames. If he walked the streets with
downcast eyes, he would recoil from the very stones of the pavement, made
eloquent by lamp-black lithograph. If he drove or rode, his way would be
blocked up by enormous vans, each proclaiming the same words over and
over again from its whole extent of surface. Until, having gradually
grown thinner and paler, and having at last totally rejected food, he
would miserably perish, and I should be revenged. This conclusion I
should, no doubt, celebrate by laughing a hoarse laugh in three
syllables, and folding my arms tight upon my chest agreeably to most of
the examples of glutted animosity that I have had an opportunity of
observing in connexion with the Drama—which, by-the-by, as involving a
good deal of noise, appears to me to be occasionally confounded with the
Drummer.
The foregoing reflections presented themselves to my mind, the other day,
as I contemplated (being newly come to London from the East Riding of
Yorkshire, on a house-hunting expedition for next May), an old warehouse
which rotting paste and rotting paper had brought down to the condition
of an old cheese. It would have been impossible to say, on the most
conscientious survey, how much of its front was brick and mortar, and how
much decaying and decayed plaster. It was so thickly encrusted with
fragments of bills, that no ship’s keel after a long voyage could be half
so foul. All traces of the broken windows were billed out, the doors
were billed across, the water-spout was billed over. The building was
shored up to prevent its tumbling into the street; and the very beams
erected against it were less wood than paste and paper, they had been so
continually posted and reposted. The forlorn dregs of old posters so
encumbered this wreck, that there was no hold for new posters, and the
stickers had abandoned the place in despair, except one enterprising man
who had hoisted the last masquerade to a clear spot near the level of the
stack of chimneys where it waved and drooped like a shattered flag.
Below the rusty cellar-grating, crumpled remnants of old bills torn down,
rotted away in wasting heaps of fallen leaves. Here and there, some of
the thick rind of the house had peeled off in strips, and fluttered
heavily down, littering the street; but, still, below these rents and
gashes, layers of decomposing posters showed themselves, as if they were
interminable. I thought the building could never even be pulled down,
but in one adhesive heap of rottenness and poster. As to getting in—I
don’t believe that if the Sleeping Beauty and her Court had been so
billed up, the young Prince could have done it.
Knowing all the posters that were yet legible, intimately, and pondering
on their ubiquitous nature, I was led into the reflections with which I
began this paper, by considering what an awful thing it would be, ever to
have wronged—say M. JULLIEN for example—and to have his avenging name in
characters of fire incessantly before my eyes. Or to have injured MADAME
TUSSAUD, and undergo a similar retribution. Has any man a
self-reproachful thought associated with pills, or ointment? What an
avenging spirit to that man is PROFESSOR HOLLOWAY! Have I sinned in oil?
CABBURN pursues me. Have I a dark remembrance associated with any
gentlemanly garments, bespoke or ready made? MOSES and SON are on my
track. Did I ever aim a blow at a defenceless fellow-creature’s head?
That head eternally being measured for a wig, or that worse head which
was bald before it used the balsam, and hirsute afterwards—enforcing the
benevolent moral, ‘Better to be bald as a Dutch cheese than come to
this,’—undoes me. Have I no sore places in my mind which MECHI
touches—which NICOLL probes—which no registered article whatever
lacerates? Does no discordant note within me thrill responsive to
mysterious watchwords, as ‘Revalenta Arabica,’ or ‘Number One St. Paul’s
Churchyard’? Then may I enjoy life, and be happy.
Lifting up my eyes, as I was musing to this effect, I beheld advancing
towards me (I was then on Cornhill, near to the Royal Exchange), a solemn
procession of three advertising vans, of first-class dimensions, each
drawn by a very little horse. As the cavalcade approached, I was at a
loss to reconcile the careless deportment of the drivers of these
vehicles, with the terrific announcements they conducted through the
city, which being a summary of the contents of a Sunday newspaper, were
of the most thrilling kind. Robbery, fire, murder, and the ruin of the
United Kingdom—each discharged in a line by itself, like a separate
broad-side of red-hot shot—were among the least of the warnings addressed
to an unthinking people. Yet, the Ministers of Fate who drove the awful
cars, leaned forward with their arms upon their knees in a state of
extreme lassitude, for want of any subject of interest. The first man,
whose hair I might naturally have expected to see standing on end,
scratched his head—one of the smoothest I ever beheld—with profound
indifference. The second whistled. The third yawned.
Pausing to dwell upon this apathy, it appeared to me, as the fatal cars
came by me, that I descried in the second car, through the portal in
which the charioteer was seated, a figure stretched upon the floor. At
the same time, I thought I smelt tobacco. The latter impression passed
quickly from me; the former remained. Curious to know whether this
prostrate figure was the one impressible man of the whole capital who had
been stricken insensible by the terrors revealed to him, and whose form
had been placed in the car by the charioteer, from motives of humanity, I
followed the procession. It turned into Leadenhall-market, and halted at
a public-house. Each driver dismounted. I then distinctly heard,
proceeding from the second car, where I had dimly seen the prostrate
form, the words:
‘And a pipe!’
The driver entering the public-house with his fellows, apparently for
purposes of refreshment, I could not refrain from mounting on the shaft
of the second vehicle, and looking in at the portal. I then beheld,
reclining on his back upon the floor, on a kind of mattress or divan, a
little man in a shooting-coat. The exclamation ‘Dear me’ which
irresistibly escaped my lips caused him to sit upright, and survey me. I
found him to be a good-looking little man of about fifty, with a shining
face, a tight head, a bright eye, a moist wink, a quick speech, and a
ready air. He had something of a sporting way with him.
He looked at me, and I looked at him, until the driver displaced me by
handing in a pint of beer, a pipe, and what I understand is called ‘a
screw’ of tobacco—an object which has the appearance of a curl-paper
taken off the barmaid’s head, with the curl in it.
‘I beg your pardon,’ said I, when the removed person of the driver again
admitted of my presenting my face at the portal. ‘But—excuse my
curiosity, which I inherit from my mother—do you live here?’
‘That’s good, too!’ returned the little man, composedly laying aside a
pipe he had smoked out, and filling the pipe just brought to him.
‘Oh, you _don’t_ live here then?’ said I.
He shook his head, as he calmly lighted his pipe by means of a German
tinder-box, and replied, ‘This is my carriage. When things are flat, I
take a ride sometimes, and enjoy myself. I am the inventor of these
wans.’
His pipe was now alight. He drank his beer all at once, and he smoked
and he smiled at me.
‘It was a great idea!’ said I.
‘Not so bad,’ returned the little man, with the modesty of merit.
‘Might I be permitted to inscribe your name upon the tablets of my
memory?’ I asked.
‘There’s not much odds in the name,’ returned the little man, ‘—no name
particular—I am the King of the Bill-Stickers.’
‘Good gracious!’ said I.
The monarch informed me, with a smile, that he had never been crowned or
installed with any public ceremonies, but that he was peaceably
acknowledged as King of the Bill-Stickers in right of being the oldest
and most respected member of ‘the old school of bill-sticking.’ He
likewise gave me to understand that there was a Lord Mayor of the
Bill-Stickers, whose genius was chiefly exercised within the limits of
the city. He made some allusion, also, to an inferior potentate, called
‘Turkey-legs;’ but I did not understand that this gentleman was invested
with much power. I rather inferred that he derived his title from some
peculiarity of gait, and that it was of an honorary character.
‘My father,’ pursued the King of the Bill-Stickers, ‘was Engineer,
Beadle, and Bill-Sticker to the parish of St. Andrew’s, Holborn, in the
year one thousand seven hundred and eighty. My father stuck bills at the
time of the riots of London.’
‘You must be acquainted with the whole subject of bill-sticking, from
that time to the present!’ said I.
‘Pretty well so,’ was the answer.
‘Excuse me,’ said I; ‘but I am a sort of collector—’
‘‘Not Income-tax?’ cried His Majesty, hastily removing his pipe from his
lips.
‘No, no,’ said I.
‘Water-rate?’ said His Majesty.
‘No, no,’ I returned.
‘Gas? Assessed? Sewers?’ said His Majesty.
‘You misunderstand me,’ I replied, soothingly. ‘Not that sort of
collector at all: a collector of facts.’
‘Oh, if it’s only facts,’ cried the King of the Bill-Stickers, recovering
his good-humour, and banishing the great mistrust that had suddenly
fallen upon him, ‘come in and welcome! If it had been income, or
winders, I think I should have pitched you out of the wan, upon my soul!’
Readily complying with the invitation, I squeezed myself in at the small
aperture. His Majesty, graciously handing me a little three-legged stool
on which I took my seat in a corner, inquired if I smoked.
‘I do;—that is, I can,’ I answered.
‘Pipe and a screw!’ said His Majesty to the attendant charioteer. ‘Do
you prefer a dry smoke, or do you moisten it?’
As unmitigated tobacco produces most disturbing effects upon my system
(indeed, if I had perfect moral courage, I doubt if I should smoke at
all, under any circumstances), I advocated moisture, and begged the
Sovereign of the Bill-Stickers to name his usual liquor, and to concede
to me the privilege of paying for it. After some delicate reluctance on
his part, we were provided, through the instrumentality of the attendant
charioteer, with a can of cold rum-and-water, flavoured with sugar and
lemon. We were also furnished with a tumbler, and I was provided with a
pipe. His Majesty, then observing that we might combine business with
conversation, gave the word for the car to proceed; and, to my great
delight, we jogged away at a foot pace.
I say to my great delight, because I am very fond of novelty, and it was
a new sensation to be jolting through the tumult of the city in that
secluded Temple, partly open to the sky, surrounded by the roar without,
and seeing nothing but the clouds. Occasionally, blows from whips fell
heavily on the Temple’s walls, when by stopping up the road longer than
usual, we irritated carters and coachmen to madness; but they fell
harmless upon us within and disturbed not the serenity of our peaceful
retreat. As I looked upward, I felt, I should imagine, like the
Astronomer Royal. I was enchanted by the contrast between the freezing
nature of our external mission on the blood of the populace, and the
perfect composure reigning within those sacred precincts: where His
Majesty, reclining easily on his left arm, smoked his pipe and drank his
rum-and-water from his own side of the tumbler, which stood impartially
between us. As I looked down from the clouds and caught his royal eye,
he understood my reflections. ‘I have an idea,’ he observed, with an
upward glance, ‘of training scarlet runners across in the season,—making
a arbour of it,—and sometimes taking tea in the same, according to the
song.’