SOUTHWARK, OLD AND NEW
"The Thames marks the sharp division between what Lord
Beaconsfield called 'the two nations.' On one side we have
our nearest English approach to architectural magnificence;
on the other there is a long perspective of squalid
buildings--smoke-begrimed, half-ruinous, and yet not
altogether unlovely."--_Magazine of Art_, January, 1884.
"Befel, that in that season, on a day
In Southwark at the Tabard as I lay,
Ready to wenden on my pilgrimage
To Canterbury with ful devout courage,
At night was come into that hostelry
Well nine-and-twenty in a company
Of sundry folk, by adventure y-fall
In fellowship, and pilgrims were they all,
That toward Canterbury woulden ride."
--_Chaucer: Canterbury Tales._
Near to the fishy and noisy purlieus of the "Monument," London Bridge
crosses the river into Southwark.
London Bridge is the terminus for big ships; from its parapet is seen,
as far as the misty Tower Bridge, a vast city of masts, sails, and
wharves. Big steamers often make this their starting-point for
excursions, and sails of Venetian colour charm the eye. In cold
winters the sea-gulls, flying hither in myriads from the icy North
Seas, come to the Londoner's call, sure of food and welcome, filling
grey sky and silvery river with an ever-changing constellation of
white wings; "a blaze of comet splendour." Wild birds, like children,
know their friends. The sea-gull's wide, downward swoop, so powerful
and so graceful, may be watched here in January from early morn to
dusk; the creatures, poised in serried ranks on the barges and stone
piers, are just as much at home here as on their own northern
pinnacles, and after long sojourn, they become so tame that they will
almost feed from the stranger's hand. It is only, however, during the
severe weather that the sea-gulls' visit lasts; with the first warm
February days they are off again, speeding down the river to their
native haunts.
Close to the foot of London Bridge, on the Southwark side, is the fine
cruciform church of St. Saviour's, lately restored on the lines of the
ancient edifice. This church, which had formerly been much mutilated
by careless and tasteless "restorers," was in long past times the
Norman Priory of St. Mary Overy, and its old nave, of which the
fragments may yet be seen, was built in 1106 by Gifford, Bishop of
Winchester. A century later, another Bishop built the choir and Lady
Chapel, and altered the character of the nave from Norman to Early
English. Then, at the Dissolution, St. Mary Overy was made into a
parish church by Henry VIII., and since 1540, it has been known as
"St. Saviour's." The early Saxon dedication to "St. Mary Overy"
commemorates the romantic story of the rich old ferryman's lovely
daughter, of pre-Conquest times, who, losing her lover by a fall from
his horse, retired into a cloister for life, devoting her paternal
wealth to the founding of a priory. The story is charming, but
somewhat misty; it suggests, however, the advantages accruing to
ferrymen when there were no bridges on the Thames! An ancient,
nameless, ghoul-like figure, in St. Saviour's Church, is still pointed
out as the old ferryman, father of the foundress; but this is probably
traditional. Skeleton-like figures, not representing any one in
particular, were not infrequently placed about in mediaeval churches;
in order, perhaps, to bring the congregation to a sufficiently sober
frame of mind, as well as to recall to them their latter end.
St. Saviour's, as it is now, is one of the most striking churches in
London; its interior appeals at once to the eye and to the
imagination. The long aisles are restful and harmonious; the
Early-English architecture is severely pure; the fine effect of the
beautifully-restored nave and transepts is not, as too often in
Westminster Abbey, spoiled by the introduction of ornate tombs and
sprawling angels. The church, restored by Blomfield in 1890-96, is
already a collegiate church, and is worthy to become, as it probably
will, the cathedral for South London. Its level, as is the case with
many ancient buildings, is now considerably lower than the surrounding
ground; a fact testified by the steps necessary to descend into its
precincts from the street, and by the very unpoetic railway, carried
well above it and its adjoining vegetable market (the Borough Market).
For this is a strangely busy and noisy spot to have sheltered for so
long this relic of the Middle Age.
The tombs in the church are mainly in the transepts, and are nearly
all of them interesting. The finely-restored "Lady Chapel," behind the
altar, contains the tomb of Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop of Winchester,
with a long Latin inscription of 1626; a recumbent painted effigy, on
a black-and-white marble tomb. This Lady Chapel has tragic
associations; it was used in the time of "Bloody Mary" as the
Consistorial Court of Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester; and here those
sturdy martyrs, Bishop Hooper and John Rogers, Vicar of St.
Sepulchre's, were condemned to be burnt (the popular feeling for
Rogers being such as necessitated his removal by night secretly to
Newgate).
The most famous grave in St. Saviour's is that of John Gower, the
fourteenth-century poet, and friend of Chaucer. Here, near the east
end of the north wall of the nave, the effigy of the poet, painted,
like that of Lancelot Andrewes, a figure of striking beauty, lies on a
sarcophagus under a rich gabled canopy. Stow thus describes the
monument:
"He lieth under a tomb of stone, with his image, also of
stone, over him; the hair of his head, auburn, long to his
shoulders but curling up, and a small forked beard; on his
head a chaplet like a coronet of four roses; a habit of
purple, damasked down to his feet; a collar of esses gold
about his neck; under his head the likeness of three books
which he compiled."
Gower was a rich man for a poet, and gave large sums in his time for
the rebuilding of the church; hence was written the following epigram:
"This church was rebuilt by John Gower, the rhymer,
Who in Richard's gay court was a fortunate climber;
Should any one start, 'tis but right he should know it,
Our wight was a lawyer as well as a poet."
Gower's three chief works, on which his head rests, are his _Vox
Clamantis_, _Speculum Meditantis_, and _Confessio Amantis_.
Many other curious tombs and epitaphs are in this church. One,
especially, of the latter, a tablet to a little girl of ten, Susanna
Barford,--a child the "Non such of the world for piety and vertue in
soe tender yeares,"--tells how:
"Such grace the King of Kings bestow'd upon her
That now shee lives with him a maid of honour."
And in the north transept, there is a curious monument to Dr. Lionel
Lockyer, the pill inventor--a large bewigged, reclining figure of
Charles II.'s time--suffering, apparently, despite his infallible
nostrums, from terrible internal spasms. Perhaps, however, these may
bear some mystic reference to the long accompanying epitaph about
"undying Pills," showing that already in the seventeenth century
advertisement could be strong even in death! Close to Lockyer's tomb
are heaped up a number of strange wooden painted gargoyles or
"bosses," preserved and brought here from the fallen-in
fifteenth-century roof of the nave, some of them bearing most weird
devices. One, conceived apparently in the Dantesque spirit, represents
a giant, or devil, "champing" a half-eaten sinner,--the lower half of
whom, dressed in gaudy colours, projects from the large vermilion
mouth,--in great enjoyment. Other "bosses" show the curious painted
"rebuses" of the period, commemorating a prior's name. The
seventeenth-century monument to the Austin family, also in this
transept, is full of quaint imagery and symbolism. The figures of its
sleeping angels with winnowing-forks, waiting on each side for the
great final harvest, are full of beauty.
"Edmund Shakespear, player," and brother of the poet,--Fletcher,--and
Massinger,--are buried here; three stones in the choir bear their
names; the exact place of their graves is not known.
The church is now well-kept and carefully tended; it is open daily to
the visitor, who may walk about it without let or hindrance. Like so
many other London churches, it has in its time suffered less from the
depredations of the plunderer than from those of the more dangerous
"restorer." As usual, a long period of neglect and decay was followed
by iconoclastic cleaning and setting in order. Generally, for a
considerable time after the Dissolution, the convent churches and
others were left to the tender mercies of the parishioners, who,
naturally, could not always afford to keep them in proper condition;
then abuses crept in, thefts took place; and the disused churches, as
St. Paul's itself, were often degraded to stables, or used as storage
for litter. Then, after long years, the authorities, perhaps, came to
the rescue, and, turning out the encroaching and invading devils, let
in other devils far more wicked, in the shape of so-called
"restorers." Wonder, indeed, is it that so much is left to us! The
"restorers" usually began by whitewashing all the columns of dark
Purbeck marble, blackening the effigies into one uniform tint, and
covering the discoloured carvings of the walls with stucco, for the
better reception of which they even (as may be seen at St. Saviour's)
whittled away bits of fine stone sculpture.
To wander down the "Borough" High Street--that noisy and essentially
modern district,--in search of Chaucer's famous inns, is, alas! more
dispiriting than looking for traces of Dido among the ruins of
Carthage. Here, one can neither look for ghosts, nor feelings of the
past; all is hopelessly covered up and hidden by ugly modern inns,
more ugly modern shops, palaces of modern plate-glass public-houses,
triumphs of early nineteenth-century ugliness in architecture. What
chance, among such, have the poor wandering ghosts of a famous past?
And, since London Bridge, that natural dividing-line of peoples, was
passed, have not the very streets changed in some subtle and
unconscious manner, to a more sordid character; the shops to a more
blatant kind,--even the people to a different and lower type? It may
be partly fancy; yet, is not this often the effect produced by the
"Surrey side"? The big thoroughfare called the Borough High Street, or
more simply, the "Borough"--(this part of Southwark has fairly earned
the right to be called the "Borough," having returned two members to
Parliament for 500 years),--this was the great highway, even in Roman
times, between the city and the southern counties. East of the
Borough, the long, narrow, busy, dirty Tooley Street leads to
Bermondsey; this street is famous for its "three tailors" of the
political legend, according to which they addressed the House of
Commons as "We, the People of England." Here, from mediaeval days, was
the only bridge; here, therefore, were, naturally, stationed all the
mediaeval inns and hostelries. This way did the "Canterbury Pilgrims"
pass out of London; here they would stop and refresh themselves at the
"Tabard," the "White Hart," and their compeers.... What now remains of
these? The "Tabard," rebuilt in Charles II.'s time, and for long the
finest old house of its kind in London, was burnt down in 1873; it now
only exists in its name, still flaunted bravely above a commonplace
modern inn. The "Queen's Head," the "White Hart," the "King's Head,"
exist now only as hideous railway-yards or equally hideous modern
edifices; the only remaining relic of them all is the "George" Inn,
where a solitary fragment, a long block of ancient buildings, with
picturesque, sloping, dormer roofs, and balustraded wooden galleries,
is yet, by the mercy of the Great Northern Railway Company, spared to
us, to tell of its former glories. The present hosts of the
"George,"--two ladies,--are pleasant, hospitable people, and their
small, dark, panelled rooms are clean and comfortable. They seem,
however, to entertain a mild feeling of boredom for the constant
accession of reverent pilgrims who flock annually to their shrine.
"And it's only for the last few years," the younger lady remarks,
somewhat sadly, "only since the last inn, the 'Queen's Head,' you know
was pulled down, that so many people have come. A great many Americans
... oh, I suppose they come out of curiosity, like; one can't blame
'em. Do people stay here in the summer? Yes, a good few--some business
men, but mostly artists and tourists; it's just curiosity. Then, it's,
'Would you mind if I take a photograph?' or 'Have I your leave to sit
in the yard and sketch?' Do I let them do it?... oh, yes" (with a
sigh), "it doesn't matter to me. I suppose they may be going to put it
in some book or some article; but it's nothing to me.... I never read
the article!"
[Illustration: _Cricket in the Street. The lost Ball._]
If this lady be not a cynic, she at any rate embodies a great deal of
the philosophy of life!
What the other Inns were like, can be more or less seen from this
small portion of one. They have mostly vanished with the march of
progress of recent years, for fifty years ago Dickens could still
write:
"In the Borough there still remain some half-dozen old inns
which have preserved their external features unchanged.
Great rambling queer old places, with galleries and passages
and staircases wide enough and antiquated enough to furnish
materials for a hundred ghost stories."
At the old "White Hart," now destroyed, Dickens first introduced to
the world the immortal Sam Weller, as he appeared cleaning the
spinster aunt's boots after that sentimental lady's elopement with the
deceiving Mr. Jingle. These old inns, in the heyday of their prime,
were made still more famous by the open-air theatrical representations
that took place in their balconied courtyards. Toil and trouble, the
eternal struggle-for-life, may be the portion of "the Surrey Side"
to-day, but in Shakespeare's time it was principally noted for its
amusements and its junketings. Now, the chief buildings of Southwark
and Walworth are gaols and asylums, and its best-known localities are
the omnibus terminuses, dignified mysteriously by names of
public-houses,--such as the "Elephant," &c. Even the dramatic tastes
of the people "over the water" are now supposed to be primitive; and
"transpontine" is the adjective applied to melodrama that is too crude
for the superior taste of northern London. Yet here, in Shakespeare's
day, were all the most fashionable theatres--theatres, too, frequented
by all the literary and dramatic lights of the day. Here stood that
small martello-tower-like theatre, the "Globe," the "round wooden 'O'"
alluded to in _Henry V._, where Shakespeare and his companions played;
here also were the "Rose," the "Hope," and the "Swan." And below St.
Saviour's, and its neighbouring Bishops' Palace and park, were the
localities known as "Bankside" and "Paris Garden," the former famous
for its bull and bear-baiting ("a rude and nasty pleasure," says
Pepys), the latter for its theatre, and also for its somewhat
doubtful reputation. There were, of course, a few plague-spots,
inseparable from places of public amusement; but the Southwark of
Elizabeth's day was a centre of national jollity and merry-making.
Open gardens fringed the river-banks, by which flowed a clear and yet
unsullied Thames, and their salubrious walks were the favourite resort
of citizens. Certainly, Shakespeare and his associates would hardly
recognize Southwark now: Messrs. Barclay and Perkins's famous brewery
now covers the site of the Globe Theatre; the ancient gardens have
given place to wharves and warehouses; the fashionable promenade to
railway lines and goods offices; the green turfy banks to streets and
lanes of sticky Southwark mud. And Southwark mud is surely of a quite
peculiar stickiness! The big brewery, covering some twelve acres, is
not exactly an improvement on the landscape. It belonged, in 1758, to
Mr. Thrale, husband of the witty lady whom Johnson loved as a
daughter. And though some among us have, as Dr. Johnson prophesied at
the sale of the brewery in its early days, "grown rich beyond the
dreams of avarice," yet the source of riches is seldom in itself
beautifying.
Winchester House, the ancient palace of the Bishops of Winchester,
stood in Tudor days between St. Saviour's and the river; "a very fair
house, with a large wharf and a landing-place." Here Bishop Gardiner
lived in great state, and here, to please his patron the Duke of
Norfolk, he arranged "little banquets at which it was contrived that
Henry VIII. should meet the Duke's niece, Katherine Howard, then a
'lovely girl in her teens.'" Poor thing! in a short year or two her
head was destined to fall, by the headsman's axe, within the precincts
of the gloomy Tower, on the river's opposite bank! The extent of the
old palace is uncertain; its remains are now nearly all destroyed,
except an old window and arch, built up into the surrounding
warehouses. The name, however, of the "Clink," the prison used by the
Bishops for the punishment of heretics, still exists in the modern
Clink Street. In the same way, "Mint Street," Borough, recalls an
ancient and forgotten mint, established here by Henry VIII. for
coinage; and Lant Street--but Lant Street recalls nothing so much as
Dickens, and his creation Mr. Bob Sawyer. Dickens lived in Lant Street
himself as a boy, while his insolvent family were rusticating in the
neighbouring Marshalsea; hence he knew it well.
[Illustration: _A County Court._]
"A bed and bedding" (he writes) "were sent over for me"
(from the Marshalsea), "and made up on the floor. The little
window had a pleasant prospect of a timber-yard; and when I
took possession of my new abode, I thought it was a
Paradise."
"The Crown Revenues," Dickens further adds (in describing the abode
of Mr. Bob Sawyer), "are seldom collected in this happy valley; the
rents are dubious, and the water communication is very frequently cut
off."
If Southwark contained many doubtful characters in Shakespeare's time,
it contains, as Mr. Charles Booth's book shows us, some "black spots"
of crime still! The old Marshalsea and the King's Bench Prisons must
always have been a centre of drifting and shiftless population. All
parts of the "Borough" do not enjoy a thoroughly good reputation; bad
sanitation, overcrowding, all the worst sins of the much-abused "East
End," may here too be seen. "Is any one," asks a recent writer, "ever
young in the Borough? Is not carking care their birthright?" In
crowded Southwark and Walworth, round the "Elephant,"--the mysterious
"Elephant," to which all roads lead,--"aflare, seething, roaring with
multitudinous life," are miserable human rabbit-warrens, where they
even live ten in a room. "Pore, sir," cries Mrs. Pullen (one of the
submerged), "pore! why, the Mint, sir, the Mint, sir, is known for it;
you've 'erd on it your ways, ain't you?" Mrs. Pullen held up her hands
and laughed, as if she was really proud of "the Mint and its poverty."
But, though the Borough children--poor little wastrels--are still
wild,--Education, it seems, is slowly taming them.
Those who are interested in the children of the poor,--and who is
not?--should read Mr. Charles Morley's sympathetic "Studies in Board
Schools," a considerable portion of which refers to Walworth and the
Borough. The redeeming of the infant population of London is surely a
noble work, and nowhere are the parental methods of the Board Schools
so well set forth as in that delightful volume, real with the reality
of life, and, like life itself, something between laughter and tears.
Life has few mysteries for the Borough child, whose garments are
strange and weird, whose voice "soon loses any infantine sweetness it
may possess. Some of the ragged mites of girls of the Borough will
even rap out an oath which would shock your ears who live over the
water. But they mean nothing. It is like sailors' language, only sound
and a little temper. Why, even the chirrup of the Borough sparrow has
a minatory ring about it." Mr. Morley goes on to tell of a kindly
institution dubbed "the Farm House" (strange name in such
surroundings!), where, owing to Mr. G. R. Sims and the "Referee," six
or seven hundred hungry school-children are, like the sparrows and
sea-gulls, fed daily during the long winter:
"The Farm House" (he says), "is a strange mansion to find in
the heart of the Marshalsea--just over the way is the site
of the famous prison. The graveyard of St. George the Martyr
is now a public garden, grim enough, to be sure, with its
black tombstones and soot-laden balsam poplars. On one of
the walls is placed a board on which is printed the legend:
'This stands on the site of the Marshalsea Prison described
(or words to this effect) in Charles Dickens's well-known
novel, _Little Dorrit_.' The Farm House was once the town
dwelling of the Earls of Winchester. It has an ancient
time-worn front, a court, mysterious chambers, old oak
panels upon which you can just make out some of the old
Winchester ladies and gentlemen; a curious old staircase;
and I daresay a ghost or two if one went into the matter.
But for a long time past it has been a common lodging-house.
Beds in a haunted chamber may be had at fourpence a night.
Many a strange history could those white-washed walls tell
if they could speak, I dare say--of the good old days in
Henry the Eighth's time, and even of more recent years. Many
a man who began life with the hopefullest prospects has been
glad to hide his head in the old Farm House, down Marshalsea
way, Borough."
"Misery," continues this writer, "is strangely prolific; every hovel,
every court, every alley teems with children," "little mothers"
carrying heavy babies, like Miss Dorothy Tennant's tender picture, _A
Load of Care_ ... that heavy, heavy baby, weighing down that tiny,
tiny nurse.... _Nota Bene_: There always _is_ a baby. By the time a
little wool appears on the head of number one, number two appears, and
so on--well, nearly _ad infinitum_. There is no doubt whatever that
babies are the bugbears of the Borough ratepayers."
The Board Schools in these districts teach, it appears, not only "the
three R's," but also housewifery, house-cleaning, cooking, and other
most necessary accomplishments:
"Housewifery" (says Mr. Morley) "is the birthright of the
children of the poor.... Every mite of a girl down in the
East or South ... is a housewife by the time she is six....
Often enough when times are hard and funds very low--when
father is out o' work, and mother's bad in bed--does the
poor little mother set forth with scrubbing-brush in hand,
and clean the door-steps of the prosperous for twopence or
threepence, according to the size and number of the steps.
She probably lights the fire of a morning; it is her delight
to go shopping to the remarkable establishment where most of
the necessities of life are to be obtained by the
farthing's-worth; and with the mysteries of marketing she is
very well acquainted indeed. You should just see her in
Bermondsey, the Walworth Road, the Dials, the New Cut, or
Whitechapel on a Sunday morning, when these localities are
alive with poor people buying their dinners. Road and
footpath are blocked with stalls and barrows, and flesh,
fish, fowl and vegetables are all jumbled together in
confusion that is apparently inextricable. But little mother
knows her way about, and whether it is red meat or white
meat, beef, mutton or rabbit, trust her for getting a
bargain, for keeping a sharp eye on weight and measure. A
farden is a farden in districts where a penny is a
substantial coin of the realm."
The "Surrey Side" is noted for its hospitals, as well as its prisons
and its slums; and of these "Guy's Hospital," on the left of the
Borough High Street,--an eighteenth-century foundation, due to the
wealth of a Lombard Street bookseller named Thomas Guy,--is one of the
most important. This Guy was in his way a miser, and his savings were
vastly increased by dealings in South Sea stock,--showing that some
good, at any rate, was wrought by the terrible "Bubble" that ruined so
many thousands. Yet the hospital narrowly escaped losing the rich
man's bequest. He was on the point of marrying his pretty maid, Sally,
when, his bride offending him by officious interference, he broke off
the marriage, and endowed the present hospital with his great wealth.
A blackened brass statue of the founder stands in the courtyard of the
edifice.
If Chaucer, with his ever memorable _Canterbury Pilgrims_, did much to
immortalise the Southwark of mediaeval times, Dickens, the child of a
later era, has done at least as much for the Southwark of his day. In
the Borough High Street, close to the site of the demolished
Marshalsea Prison, stands St. George's Church, chiefly remarkable for
the fact that Dickens has here placed the marriage of his heroine,
"Little Dorrit," the Child of the Marshalsea. This was always a
district of prisons; the natural sequence, one would think, of
Southwark merry-making. Of the two Marshalsea prisons established here
at different times, the earlier, nearer to London Bridge, was
abolished in 1849; the later, so graphically described by Dickens, was
not pulled down till 1887, after having been let for forty years as a
lodging for tramps and vagabonds. Relics of it are now hard to find.
Dickens, who knew it well as a boy, thus describes (in the preface to
_Little Dorrit_) his search for it in later life:
"I found the outer front courtyard metamorphosed into a
butter shop; and I then almost gave up every brick of the
jail for lost. Wandering, however, down a certain adjacent
'Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey,' I came to Marshalsea
Place, the houses in which I recognized, not only as the
great block of the former prison, but as preserving the
rooms that arose to my mind's eye when I became Little
Dorrit's biographer.... Whoever goes into Marshalsea Place,
turning out of Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey, will find
his feet on the very paving-stones of the extinct Marshalsea
jail; will see its narrow yard to the right and to the left,
very little altered if at all, except that the walls were
lowered when the place got free; will look upon the rooms in
which the debtors lived; will stand among the crowding
ghosts of many miserable years."
Dickens's boyish recollections of the ancient debtors prison have, as
was perhaps natural, sometimes more than a tinge of bitterness; here
he passed to and fro during wretched childish years, between the daily
drudgery of covering blacking pots at "Murdstone and Grinby's," down
by Hungerford Stairs. More wretched, indeed, far, than any modern
Borough waif, was this neglected and sensitive child of genius. The
intense torture of his degradation (as he thought it) was never wholly
forgotten. In this connection he tells (in Forster's _Life_) a
pathetic little story. No boy at the blacking office, it seems, knew
where or how he lived; and once, being taken ill there, and helped
towards home by a kindly fellow-worker, the child Dickens said
good-bye to his friend by Southwark Bridge:
"I was too proud" (he says) "to let him know about the
prison; and after making several efforts to get rid of him,
to all of which Bob Fagin in his goodness was deaf, shook
hands with him on the steps of a house near Southwark-bridge
on the Surrey side, making believe that I lived there. As a
finishing piece of reality in case of his looking back, I
knocked at the door, I recollect, and asked, when the woman
opened it, if that was Mr. Robert Fagin's house."
While the boy suffered thus acutely, his father lived on in a
Micawberish way at the Marshalsea, being merely of the amiable,
shiftless, idle genus that drags its family down. For the rest, they
did well enough at the Marshalsea: "The family," the son wrote, "lived
more comfortably in prison than they had done for a long time out of
it. They were waited on still by the maid-of-all-work from Bayham
Street, the orphan girl from Chatham workhouse, from whose sharp
little worldly, yet also kindly, ways I took my first impressions of
the "Marchioness" in _The Old Curiosity Shop_."
Yet Destiny works in strange and devious ways, and all the while, if
he had only known it, the Fates were conspiring for Charles Dickens's
good. It was the father's misfortunes that really taught the boy all
he needed to learn. Here, amid the unsavoury purlieus of the prison,
he unconsciously studied all the types and localities of which he was
to make such wonderful use in after-life. The Marshalsea and its ways;
Lant Street and Bob Sawyer; "Tip," "of the prison prisonous, and of
the streets streety"; Sam Weller at the "White Hart;" Nancy at London
Bridge Steps; Sikes and Folly Ditch; with a hundred others,--were,
more or less, to be the outcome of that time.
The glamour of a romantic past, the spirit of Chaucer and of
Shakespeare, may still attach to Southwark; the playhouses and
gaieties of Elizabeth's time may yet leave some faint record there;
but it is, after all, by another of Fate's strange ironies, the Child
of the Marshalsea, the boy brought up in wretchedness and squalor, who
has glorified by his genius the place, the whole district, where he so
suffered in early youth. Other and greater men have told London's
history in the past; but Dickens, whose grave is still faithfully
tended in Westminster Abbey while those of the mightier dead are long
forgotten, Dickens, who cared everything for the lower, warmer phases
of humanity; Dickens, to whom every grimy London stone was dear, and
every dirty cockney child a creature of infinite possibilities;
Dickens, whose name will be ever dear to the faithful Londoner; is the
modern chronicler of the great city.