FROM COVENT GARDEN TO THE EEL-SOUP MAN IN THE BOROUGH.
Now and then, in the long search into the underlying causes of effects
which are plain to all men's eyes, one pauses till the rush of
impressions has ceased, and it is possible again to ignore this
many-sided, demanding London, which makes a claim unknown to any other
city of the earth save Rome. But there is a certain justification in
lingering at points where women and children congregate, since their
life also is part of the quest, and nowhere can it better be seen than
in and about Covent Garden Market,--a thousand thoughts arising as the
old square is entered from whatever point.
It is not alone the first days of the pilgrim's wanderings in London
that are filled with the curious sense of home coming that makes up the
consciousness of many an American. It is as if an old story were told
again, and the heir, stolen in childhood, returned, unrecognized by
those about him, but recalling with more and more freshness and
certainty the scenes of which he was once a part. The years slip away.
Two hundred and more of them lie between, it is true; but not two
hundred nor ten times two hundred can blot out the lines of a record in
which the struggle and the hope of all English-speaking people was one.
For past or present alike, London stands as the fountain-head; and thus,
whatever pain may come from the oppressive sense of crowded, swarming
life pent up in these dull gray walls, whatever conviction that such a
monster mass of human energy and human pain needs diffusion and not
concentration, London holds and will hold a fascination that is quite
apart from any outward aspect.
To go to a point determined upon beforehand is good. To lose oneself in
the labyrinth of lanes and alleys and come suddenly upon something quite
as desirable, is even better; and this losing is as inevitable as the
finding also becomes. The first perplexity arises from the fact that a
London street is "everything by turns and nothing long," and that a
solitary block of buildings owns often a name as long as itself. The
line of street which, on the map, appears continuous, gives a dozen
changes to the mile, and the pilgrim discovers quickly that he is always
somewhere else than at or on the point determined upon. Then the
temptation to add to this complication by sudden excursions into shadowy
courts and dark little passages is irresistible, not to mention the
desire, equally pressing, of discovering at once if Violet Lane and Hop
Vine Alley and Myrtle Court have really any relation to their names, or
are simply the reaching out of their inhabitants for some touch of
Nature's benefactions. Violet Lane may have had its hedgerows and
violets in a day long dead, precisely as hop vines may have flung their
pale green bells over cottage paling, for both are far outside the old
city limits; but to-day they are simply the narrowest of passages
between the grimiest of buildings, given over to trade in its most
sordid form, with never a green leaf even to recall the country
hedgerows long since only memory.
It is a matter of no surprise, then, to find that Covent Garden holds no
hint of its past save in name, though from the noisy Strand one has
passed into so many sheltered, quiet nooks unknown to nine tenths of the
hurrying throng in that great artery of London, that one half expects to
see the green trees and the box-bordered alleys of the old garden where
the monks once walked. Far back in the very beginning of the thirteenth
century it was the convent garden of Westminster, and its choice fruits
and flowers rejoiced the soul of the growers, who planted and pruned
with small thought of what the centuries were to bring. Through all
chances and changes it remained a garden up to 1621, when much of the
original ground had been swallowed up by royal grants, and one duke and
another had built his town-house amid the spreading trees; for this
"amorous and herbivorous parish," as Sidney Smith calls it, was one of
the most fashionable quarters of London. The Stuart kings and their
courts delighted in it, and the square was filled with houses designed
by Inigo Jones, the north and east side of the market having an arcade
called the "Portico Walk," but soon changed to the name which it has
long borne,--the "Piazza." The market went on behind these pillars, but
year by year, as London grew, pushed itself toward the centre of the
square, till now not a foot of vacant space remains. At one of its
stalls may still be found an ancient marketman, whose name, Anthony
Piazza, is a memory of a parish custom which named after this favorite
walk many of the foundling children born in the parish.
There is nothing more curious in all London than the transformations
known to this once quiet spot. Drury Lane is close at hand, and Covent
Garden Theatre is as well known as the market itself. The convent has
become a play-house. "Monks and nuns turn actors and actresses. The
garden, formal and quiet, where a salad was cut for a lady abbess, and
flowers were gathered to adorn images, becomes a market, noisy and full
of life, distributing its thousands of fruits and flowers to a vicious
metropolis." Two quaint old inns are still here; two great national
theatres, and a churchyard full of mouldy but still famous
celebrities,--the church itself, bare and big, rising above them. In the
days of the Stuarts, people prayed to be buried here hardly less than in
Westminster Abbey, and the lover of epitaph and monument will find
occupation for many an hour. This strange, squat old building, under the
shadow of the church, is the market, its hundred columns and
chapel-looking fronts always knee-deep and more in baskets and fruits
and vegetables, while its air still seems to breathe of old books, old
painters, and old authors.
"Night and morning are at meeting," for Covent Garden makes small
distinction between the two, and whether it is a late supper or an early
breakfast that the coffee-rooms and stalls are furnishing, can hardly be
determined by one who has elected to know how the market receives and
how it distributes its supplies. In November fog and mist, or the
blackness of early winter, with snow on the ground, or cold rain
falling, resolution is needed for such an expedition, and still more,
if one would see all that the deep night hides, and that comes to light
as the dawn struggles through. This business of feeding a city of four
million people seems the simplest and most natural of occupations; but
the facts involved are staggering, not alone in the mere matter of
quantities and the amazement at the first sight of them, but in the
thousands of lives tangled with them. Quantity is the first impression.
Every cellar runs over with green stuff, mountains of which come in on
enormous wagons and fill up all spaces left vacant, heaving masses of
basket stumbling from other wagons and filling with instant celerity. In
the great vans pour, from every market garden and outlying district of
London, from all England, from the United Kingdom, from all the world,
literally; for it is soon discovered that these enormous vehicles on
high springs and with immense wheels, drawn by Normandy horses of size
and strength to match, are chiefly from the railway stations, and that
the drivers, who seem to be built on the same plan as the horses and
vans, have big limbs and big voices and a high color, and that the
bulging pockets of their velveteen suits show invoices and receipt
books.
Not alone from railway stations and trains, from which tons of cabbages,
carrots, onions, and all the vegetable tribe issue, but from the docks
where steamers from Rotterdam and Antwerp and India and America, and all
that lie between, come the contributions, ranged presently in due order
in stall and arcade. There is no hint of anything grosser than the great
cabbages, which appear to be London's favorite vegetable. Meat has its
place at Smithfield, and fish at Billingsgate, but the old garden is, in
one sense, true to its name, and gives us only the kindly fruits of the
earth, with their transformations into butter and cheese.
In the central arcade fruit has the honors, and no prettier picture can
well be imagined. For once under these gray skies there is a sense of
color and light, and there is no surprise in hearing that Turner came
here to study both, and that even the artist of to-day does not disdain
the same method.
It is the flower-market, however, to which one turns with a certainty
gained at once that no disappointment follows intimate acquaintance
with English flowers. There are exotics for those who will, but it is
not with them that one lingers. It is to the hundreds upon hundreds of
flower-pots, in which grow roses and geraniums and mignonette and a
score with old-fashioned but forever beloved names. There are great
bunches of mignonette for a penny, and lesser bunches of sweet odors for
the same coin, while the violets have rows of baskets to themselves, as
indeed they need, for scores of buyers flock about them,--little buyers
chiefly, with tangled hair and bare feet and the purchase-money tied in
some corner of their rags; for they buy to sell again, and having
tramped miles it may be to this fountain-head, will tramp other miles
before night comes, making their way into court and alley and under
sunless doorways, crying "Violets! sweet violets!" as they were cried in
Herrick's time. A ha'penny will buy one of the tiny bunches which they
have made up with swift fingers, and they are bought even by the
poorest; how, heaven only knows. But, in cracked jug or battered tin,
the bunch of violets sweetens the foul air, or the bit of mignonette
grows and even thrives, where human kind cannot.
So, though Covent Garden has in winter "flowers at guineas apiece,
pineapples at guineas a pound, and peas at guineas a quart,"--these for
the rich only,--it has also its possibilities for the poor. They throng
about it at all times, for there is always a chance of some stray orange
or apple or rejected vegetable that will help out a meal. They throng
above all in these terrible days when the "unemployed" are huddling
under arches and in dark places where they lay their homeless heads, and
where, in the hours between night and morning, the cocoa-rooms open for
the hungry drivers of the big vans, who pour down great mugs of coffee
and cocoa, and make away with mountains of bread and butter. A penny
gives a small mug of cocoa and a slice of bread and butter, and the
owner of a penny is rich. Often it is shared, and the sharer, half drunk
still, it may be, and foul with the mud and refuse into which he
crawled, can hardly be known as human, save for this one gleam of
something beyond the human. Gaunt forms barely covered with rags,
hollow eyes fierce with hunger, meet one at every turn in this early
morning; and for many there is not even the penny, and they wait,
sometimes with appeal, but as often silently, the chance gift of the
buyer. Food for all the world, it would seem, and yet London is not fed;
and having once looked upon these waifs that are floated against the
pillars of the old market, one fancies almost a curse on the piles of
food that is not for them save as charity gives it, and the flowers that
even on graves will never be theirs.
Men and women huddle here, and under the arches, children skulk away
like young rats, feeding on offal, lying close in dark corners for
warmth, and hunted about also like rats. It is a poverty desperate and
horrible beyond that that any other civilized city can show; and who
shall say who is responsible, or what the end will be?
So the question lingers with one, as the market is left, and one passes
on and out to the Strand and its motley stream of life, lingering
through Fleet Street and the winding ways into the City, past St.
Paul's, and still on till London Bridge is reached and the Borough is
near. Fare as one may, north or south, west or east, there is no escape
from the sullen roar of the great city, a roar like the beat of a stormy
sea against cliffs. An hour and more ago, that perplexed and baffled
luminary the sun has struggled up through strange shapes and hues of
morning cloud, and for a few minutes asserted his right to rule. But the
gleam of gold and crimson brought with him has given way to the grays
and black which make up chiefly what the Londoners call sky, and over
London Bridge one passes on into the dim grayness merging into something
darker and more cheerless. On the Borough Road there should be some
escape,--that Borough Road on which the Canterbury Pilgrims rode out on
a morning less complicated, it is certain, by fog and mist and smoke and
soot than mornings that dawn for this generation. Every foot of the way
is history; the old Tower at one's back, and the past as alive as the
present. "Merrie England" was at its best, they say, when the pages we
know were making; but here as elsewhere, the name is a tradition,
belied by every fact of the present.
The old inns along the way still hold their promise of good cheer, and
the great kitchens and tap-rooms have seen wild revelry enough; but even
for them has been the sight of political or other martyr done to death
in their court-yards, while no foot of playground, no matter how much
the people's own, but has been steeped in blood and watered with tears
of English matron and maid. If "Merrie England" deserved its name, it
must have come from a determination as fixed as Mark Tapley's, to be
jolly under any and all circumstances, and certainly circumstances have
done their best to favor such resolution. The peasant of the past,
usually represented as dancing heavily about a Maypole, or gazing
contentedly at some procession of his lords and masters as it swept by,
has no counterpart to-day, nor will his like come again. For here about
the old Borough, where every stone means history and the "making of the
English people," there are faces of all types that England holds, but no
face yet seen carries any sense of merriment, or any good thing that
might bear its name. It is the burden of living that looks from dull
eyes and stolid faces, and a hopelessness, unconscious it may be but
always apparent, that better things may come. The typical Englishman, as
we know him, has but occasional place, and the mass, hurrying to and fro
in the midst of this roar of traffic, are thin and eager and restless of
countenance as any crowd of Americans in the same type of surroundings.
Innumerable little streets, each dingier and more sordid than the last,
open on either side. Hot coffee and cocoa cans are at every corner,
their shining brass presided over by men chiefly. Here, as throughout
East London, sellers of every sort of eatable and drinkable thing wander
up and down.
Paris is credited with living most of its life under all men's eyes, and
London certainly may share this reputation as far as eating goes. In
fact, working London, taking the poorest class both in pay and rank, has
small space at home for much cookery, and finds more satisfaction in the
flavor of food prepared outside. The throats, tanned and parched by much
beer, are sensitive only to something with the most distinct and
defined taste of its own; and so it is that whelks and winkles and
mussels and all forms of fish and flesh, that are to the American
uneatably strong and unpleasant, make the luxuries of the English poor.
They are conservative, also, like all the poor, and prefer old
acquaintances to new; and the costers and sellers of all sorts realize
this, and seldom go beyond an established list.
It is always "somethin' 'ot" that the workman craves; and small wonder,
when one has once tested London climate, and found that, nine months out
of twelve, fog and mist creep chill into bones and marrow, and that a
fire is comfortable even in July. November accents this fact sharply,
and by November the pea-soup and eel-soup men are at their posts, and
about market and dock, and in lane and alley, the trade is brisk. Near
Petticoat Lane, one of the oddest of London's odd corners, small
newsboys rush up and take a cupful as critically as I have seen them
take waffles from the old women purveyors of these delicacies about City
Hall Park and Park Row, while hungry costers and workmen appear to find
it the most satisfactory of meals.
One must have watched the eel baskets at Billingsgate, and then read the
annual consumption, before it is possible to understand how street after
street has its eel-pie house, and how the stacks of small pies in the
windows are always disappearing and always being renewed. It would seem
with eel pies as with oysters, of which Sam Weller stated his conviction
that the surprising number of shops and stalls came from the fact that
the moment a man found himself in difficulties he "rushed out and ate
oysters in reg'lar desperation." It is certain that some of the eaters
look desperate enough; but the seller is a middle-aged, quiet-looking
man, who eyes his customers sharply, but serves them with generous
cupfuls. The sharpness is evidently acquired, and not native, and he has
need of it, the London newsboys, who are his best patrons, being ready
to drive a bargain as keen as their fellows on the other side of the
sea. His stand is opposite a cat's-meat market, a sausage shop in
significant proximity, and he endures much chaffing as to the make-up
of his pea soup, which he sells in its season. But it is eels for which
the demand is heaviest and always certain, and the eel-soup man's day
begins early and ends late, on Saturdays lasting well into Sunday
morning. He is prosperous as such business goes, and buys four
"draughts" of eels on a Friday for the Saturday's work, a "draught"
being twenty pounds, while now and then he has been known to get rid of
a hundred pounds.
This stall, to which the newsboys flock as being more "stylish" than
most of its kind, is fitted with a cast-iron fireplace holding two large
kettles of four or five gallon capacity. A dozen pint bowls, or basins
as the Englishman prefers to call them, and an equal number of half-pint
cups, with spoons for all, constitute the outfit; and even for the
poorest establishment of the sort, a capital of not less than a pound is
required. This stall has four lamps with "Hot Eels" painted on them, and
one side of it is given to whelks, which are boiled at home and always
eaten cold with abundance of vinegar, of which the newsboy is prodigal.
At times fried fish are added to the stock, but eels lead, and mean the
largest profit on the amount invested.
Dutch eels are preferred, and the large buyer likes to go directly to
the eel boats at the Billingsgate Wharf and buy the squirming draughts,
fresh from the tanks in which they have been brought. To dress and
prepare a draught takes about three hours, and the daughter of the
stall-owner stands at one side engaged in this operation, cleaning,
washing, and cutting up the eels into small pieces from half an inch to
an inch long. These are boiled, the liquor being made smooth and thick
with flour, and flavored with chopped parsley and mixed spices,
principally allspice. For half a penny, from five to seven pieces may be
had, the cup being then filled up with the liquor, to which the buyer is
allowed to add vinegar at discretion. There is a tradition of one
customer so partial to hot eels that he used to come twice a day and
take eight cupfuls a day, four at noon and four as a night-cap.
The hot-eel season ends with early autumn, and pea soup takes its place,
though a small proportion of eels is always to be had. Split peas,
celery, and beef bones are needed for this, and it is here that the
cat's-meat man is supposed to be an active partner. In any case the
smell is savory, and the hot steam a constant invitation to the
shivering passers-by. This man has no cry of "Hot Eels!" like many of
the sellers.
"I touches up people's noses; 't ain't their heyes or their hears I'm
hafter," he says, though the neat stall makes its own claim on the
"heyes."
In another alley is another pea-soup man, one-legged, but not at all
depressed by this or any other circumstance of fate. He makes, or his
wife makes, the pea soup at home, and he keeps it hot by means of a
charcoal fire in two old tin saucepans.
"Hard work?" he says. "You wouldn't think so if you'd been on your back
seven months and four days in Middlesex Orspital. I was a coal heaver,
and going along easy and natural over the plank from one barge to
another, and there come the swell from some steamers and throwed up the
plank and chucked me off, and I broke my knee against the barge. It's
bad now. I'd ought to 'ad it hoff, an' so the surgeons said; but I
wouldn't, an' me wife wouldn't, and the bone keeps workin' out, and I've
'ad nineteen months all told in the 'orspital, and Lord knows how me
wife and the young uns got on. I was bad enough off, I was, till a
neighbor o' mine, a master butcher, told me there was a man up in Clare
Market, makin' a fortune at hot eels and pea soup, and he lent me ten
shillings to start in that line. He and me wife's the best friends I've
ever had in the world; for I've no memory of a mother, and me father
died at sea. My oldest daughter, she's a good un, goes for the eels and
cuts 'em up, and she an' me wife does all the hard work. I've only to
sit at the stall and sell, and they do make 'em tasty. There's no
better. But we're hard up. I'd do better if I'd a little more money to
buy with. I can't get a draught like some of the men, and them that gets
by the quantity can give more. The boys tells me there's one man gives
'em as much as eight pieces; that's what they calls a lumping
ha'p'worth. And the liquor's richer when you boils up so many eels.
What's my tin pot ag'in' his five-gallon one? There's even some that
boils the 'eads, and sells 'em for a farthing a cupful; but I've not
come to that. But we're badly off. The missus has a pair o' shoes, and
she offs with 'em when my daughter goes to market, and my boy the
youngest 's got no shoes; but we do very well, and would do better, only
the cheap pie shop takes off a lot o' trade. I wouldn't eat them pies.
It's the dead eels that goes into 'em, and we that handles eels knows
well enough that they're rank poison if they ain't cut up alive, and the
flesh of 'em squirming still when they goes into the boiling water. Them
pies is uncertain, anyway, whatever kind you buy. I've seen a man get
off a lot a week old, just with the dodge of hot spiced gravy poured out
of an oil can into a hole in the lid, and that gravy no more'n a little
brown flour and water; but the spice did it. The cat's-meat men knows;
oh, yes! they knows what becomes of what's left when Saturday night
comes, though I've naught to say ag'in' the cat's-meat men, for it's a
respectable business enough.
"I've thought of other ways. There's the baked-potato men, but the
'ansome can and fixin's for keeping 'em 'ot is what costs, you see.
Trotters is profitable, too, if you've a start, that is, though it's
women mostly that 'andles trotters, blest if I know why! I've a cousin
in the boiled pudding business--meat puddings and fruit, too;--but it's
all going out, along of the bakers that don't give poor folks a chance.
They has their big coppers, and boils up their puddings by the 'undred;
but I dare say there's no more need o' street-sellers, for folks go to
shops for most things now. She's in Leather Lane, this cousin o' mine,
and makes plum-duff as isn't to be beat; but she sells Saturday nights
mostly, and for Sunday dinners. Ginger nuts goes off well, but there
again the shops 'as you, and unless you can make a great show, with
brass things shining to put your eyes out, and a stall that looks as
well as a shop, you're nowhere. There's no chance for the poor anyhow,
it seems to me; for even if you get a start, there's always some one
with more money to do the thing better, and so take the bread out of
your mouth. But 'better' 's only more show often, and me wife can't be
beat for tastiness, whether it's hot eels or pea soup, and I'll say that
long as I stand."
So many small trades have been ruined by the larger shops taking them
up, that the street-seller's case becomes daily a more complicated one,
and the making a living by old-fashioned and time-honored methods almost
impossible. It is all part of the general problem of the day, and the
street-sellers, whether costers or those of lower degree, look forward
apprehensively to changes which seem on the way, and puzzle their
untaught minds as to why each avenue of livelihood seems more and more
barred against them. For the poorest there seems only a helpless, dumb
acquiescence in the order of things which they are powerless to change;
but the looker-on, who watches the mass of misery crowding London
streets or hiding away in attic and cellar, knows that out of such
conditions sudden fury and revolt is born, and that, if the prosperous
will not heed and help while they may, the time comes when help will be
with no choice of theirs. It is plain that even the most conservative
begin to feel this, and effort constantly takes more practical form;
but this is but the beginning of what must be,--the inauguration of a
social revolution in ideas, and one to which all civilization must come.