KENSINGTON AND CHELSEA
"In old days ... the hawthorn spread across the fields and
market gardens that lay between Kensington and the river.
Lanes ran to Chelsea, to Fulham, to North End, where
Richardson once lived and wrote in his garden-house. The
mist of the great city hid the horizon and dulled the sound
of the advancing multitude; but close at hand ... were
country corners untouched--blossoms instead of bricks in
spring-time, summer shade in summer."--_Miss Thackeray, Old
Kensington._
"There is not a step of the way, from ... Kensington Gore to
... Holland House, in which you are not greeted with the
face of some pleasant memory. Here, to 'mind's eyes' ...
stands a beauty, looking out of a window; there, a wit,
talking with other wits at a garden gate; there, a poet on
the green sward, glad to get out of the London smoke and
find himself among trees. Here come De Veres of the times of
old; Hollands and Davenants, of the Stuart and Cromwell
times; Evelyn peering about him soberly, and Samuel Pepys in
a bustle.... Here, in his carriage, is King William the
Third, going from the Palace to open Parliament ... and
there, from out of Kensington Gardens, comes bursting, as if
the whole recorded polite world were in flower at one and
the same period, all the fashion of the gayest times of
those sovereigns, blooming with chintzes, full-blown with
hoop-petticoats, towering topknots and toupees.... Who is to
know of all this company, and not be willing to meet
it?"--_Leigh Hunt._
"Faith, and it's the old Court suburb that you spoke of, is
it? Sure, an' it's a mighty fine place for the
quality."--_Old Play._
[Illustration: _Anglers in the Parks._]
The great highway of Knightsbridge,--on the southern side of the
Park,--leads, as everybody knows, from Hyde Park Corner to Kensington.
Kensington, as it is now, is an all-embracing name, a generic term;
it comprises not only Old Kensington, but both "West Kensington," a
new and quickly increasing district of tall flats and "Queen Anne"
houses, as far removed from London proper, for all practical purposes,
as St. Albans; and "South Kensington," a dull and uninteresting
quarter, but close to all the big West-end museums and collections,
and where no self-respecting lady or gentleman of the professional or
"middle classes" can really help living. He, or she, must,
nevertheless, beware lest they stray too far from the sacred
precincts. For, on the west, South Kensington degenerates into Earl's
Court; on the south, a belt of "mean streets" divides it from equally
select Chelsea (and, in London, the difference of but one street may
divide the green enclosure of the elect from the dusty Sahara of the
vulgar); while on the east, its glories fade into the dull, unlovely
streets of Pimlico, brighten into the red-brick of the Cadogan
Estate, or solidify into the gloomy pomp of Belgravia.
These, however, are but Kensington's later excrescences, due to the
enormous increase of London's population, and to the consequent
building craze of the last century. It was the Great Exhibition of
1851 that gave building, in this direction, its great impetus. The
original village of Kensington, the "Old Court Suburb" of Leigh Hunt's
anecdotes, lies in and about the Kensington High Street, the Gardens,
and the Palace. It is pre-eminently of eighteenth century renown;
Pepys hardly mentions it; its glory was after his day. It is reached
from London by the Knightsbridge Road, a thoroughfare that, crowded as
it is to-day by the world of fashion, was, only at the end of the
eighteenth century, so lonely as to be unsafe from the ravages of
thieves and footpads; a road "along which," Mr. Hare remarks
plaintively, "London has been moving out of town for the last twenty
years, but has never succeeded in getting into the country." So
solitary, indeed, was this road that, even at the close of the
eighteenth century, a bell used to be rung on Sunday evenings to
summon the people returning to London from Kensington Village, and to
allow them to set out together under mutual protection. London is not,
even now, well lit as compared with large foreign cities; in old days,
however, the darkness was such as to draw down the well-deserved
strictures of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Such was the insecurity of
that courtly highway, the Kensington or Knightsbridge Road, that it
was the first place to adopt, in 1694, oil lamps with glazed lights,
in preference to the older fashion of lanterns and wicks of cotton.
Some of London's finest mansions are now to be found in this
Knightsbridge Road. On the left, as you go towards Kensington, are
Kent House (Louisa, Lady Ashburton), once lived in by the Duke of
Kent, Queen Victoria's father; Stratheden House, and Alford
House,--this last a fine modern building of brick and terra-cotta,
with high roofs. Beyond Kensington Gore (so called from "Old Gore
House," that once occupied the site of the Albert Hall), is the
attractive and strangely rural-looking Lowther Lodge, now so cruelly
dominated by tall "mansions"; and further still, the vast "Albert
Hall," a red Colosseum of music. This, in spring, is a delightful
drive; indeed, London wears here such a semi-suburban air that it is
with almost the feeling of entering a new townlet that we presently
approach the charming "High Street" of Old Kensington. Charming it is
still, with still something of an old-world air; and yet, during the
last fifty years or so, it has terribly altered. In the old days, the
days when "the shabby tide of progress" had not yet spread to this
quiet old suburb of which Miss Thackeray wrote so lovingly;--had not
yet engulfed "one relic after another, carrying off many and many a
landmark and memory,"--there were "gardens, and trees, and great walls
along the high road that came from London, passing through the old
white turnpike.... In those days the lanes spread to Fulham, white
with blossom in spring, or golden with the yellow London sunsets that
blazed beyond the cabbage-fields.... There were high brown walls along
Kensington Gardens, reaching to the Palace Gate: elms spread their
shade and birds chirruped, and children played behind them."
Yet, even for sweet Dolly Vanborough, Miss Thackeray confesses, Old
Kensington was already vanishing. Already for her "the hawthorn bleeds
as it is laid low and is transformed year after year into iron
railings and areas, for particulars of which you are requested to
apply to the railway company, and to Mr. Taylor, the house-agent." How
much, alas, is left of it now? True, Holland House, and Kensington
Palace, and Gardens, are left inviolate, but Campden Hill is adorned
by the aspiring chimneys of waterworks, the peace of quiet Kensington
Square is invaded by model lodging-houses, the underground railway
defiles the pleasant High Street, and where of old the hawthorn
bloomed, tall placards now advertise "Very Desirable Mansions to be
Let on Exceptional Terms."
[Illustration: _Kensington Palace and the Round Pond._]
But Kensington has not changed in essentials. In those old days it was
already, as it is now, a great Roman Catholic quarter, with convents
and shops for the sale of sacred objects. No great cathedral had as
yet been built there; no Newman as yet looked steadfastly from his
marble alcove over the noisy Brompton Road; the tendencies in that
direction were, however, already paramount.
When a London suburb has once become crowded with houses, what was
once picturesque becomes speedily squalid and sordid; the pretty
village street soon changes to a murky alley, and the ivy-grown tavern
converts itself into a mere disreputable-looking public-house. Of this
sad fact, Miss Thackeray's pleasant lanes, running from Kensington to
Chelsea and Fulham, furnish at the present day abundant proof. The
charming village lanes that at the beginning of last century filled
Kensington and Chelsea,--the dairies such as that where pretty Emma
Penfold dispensed curds and whey,--the cottages with damask
rose-trees,--the tea-gardens, rural as now those on Kew Green,--what
is now their latter end? Their modern realisations--Sydney Street,
Smith Street, Manor Street--are not exactly attractive or savoury
byways. No, it requires palaces and big mansions to keep up the
"rus-in-urbe"; mere cottages cannot do it without degenerating into
drying-grounds, unspeakable back yards, or slums. But, if the old
beauty has gone from Kensington, another beauty, of a different kind,
awaits it. Of such beauty the imposing dome of the "Brompton Oratory,"
seen against a lurid sunset at the end of a vista in the Brompton
Road, is an effective instance. This church, so dramatically placed in
close proximity with the Anglican parish church, is a very striking
object in the landscape; especially striking, too, when the light
"that London takes the day to be," has softened and blended its more
salient architectural features into one dimly glorified mass.
If Kensington is somewhat addicted to "cliques" and to social
exclusiveness, it is, after all, only following out its ancient
traditions. For in older days it was always prim and conservative,
governed by its own laws.
"There was" (says Miss Thackeray) "a Kensington world ...
somewhat apart from the big uneasy world surging beyond the
turnpike--a world of neighbours bound together by the old
winding streets and narrow corners in a community of
venerable elm trees and traditions that are almost levelled
away. Mr. Awl, the bootmaker in High Street, exhibited
peculiar walking-shoes long after high heels and kid
brodekins had come into fashion in the metropolis. The last
time I was in his shop I saw a pair of the old-fashioned,
flat, sandalled shoes, directed to Miss Vieuxtemps, in
Palace Green. Tippets, poke-bonnets, even a sedan chair,
still existed among us long after they had been discarded by
more active minds."
It all suggests nothing so much as one of Mr. G. D. Leslie's pictures.
The poetic fancy of the writer of _Old Kensington_ is, indeed,
conceived in much the same pleasant minor key as the artist's--the
author of _School Revisited_ and kindred idylls,--both evoking visions
of girls in short waists, lank, frilled skirts, and sandals, amid cool
suburban walled gardens, grass plots, and fountains.
Thackeray lived at three Kensington houses:--first, at that known as
"The Cottage":--No. 13 (now No. 16), Young Street,--from 1847 to 1853;
secondly, at No. 36, Onslow Square, from 1853 to 1862; and thirdly, at
No. 2, Palace Green, where he died. The great writer's daughters, who
must have been quite little children when he first came here, no doubt
knew and loved well their home of so many years. From the daughter's
very vivid reminiscences, we get charming sketches of the life and the
different abodes of the family. _The Newcomes_, _The Virginians_, and
the _Four Georges_ were written in Onslow Square, where, says Miss
Thackeray, "I used to look up from the avenue of old trees and see my
father's head bending over his work in the study window, which was
over the drawing-room." But Onslow Square is close to South Kensington
Station, and the Young Street house, which was the earlier residence,
was certainly in a prettier neighbourhood. Also, it has
double-fronted bay windows, and enjoyed, moreover, the honour of
inspiring its tenant's _magnum opus_, for here Thackeray wrote _Vanity
Fair_, as well as _Esmond_ and _Pendennis_. Most of his work was done
in a second-story room, overlooking an open space of orchards and
gardens. A tablet now distinguishes the window where the novelist
worked, with the initials W. M. T. grouped in a monogram between the
dates of his residence here; the names of the three books of this
period being inscribed in the border.
Artists, who in the early part of last century were still more or less
faithful to the northern suburbs, have, during the last three or four
decades flocked to Kensington and Chelsea. Millais, Leighton, and
others led the way; and now fine studios abound in all the newer and
airy streets of red brick houses. At No. 6, The Terrace, Campden Hill,
poor John Leech, who moved hither from Bloomsbury street afflictions,
died in 1864 from spasm of the heart, at the comparatively early age
of forty-seven. On Campden Hill, also, is "Holly Lodge," Lord
Macaulay's residence; the place, too, where he died, and where he
"loved to entertain all his youthful nephews and nieces." Campden Hill
has still a certain charm, a charm of gardens, terraces, and irregular
houses; it has, too, so many winding ways, that it is easier to lose
one's bearings here, than almost anywhere in London.
Leigh Hunt, the gossiping chronicler of Kensington Court scandals and
celebrities, lived for eleven years, and more successfully than
elsewhere, in Edwardes Square, a charming enclosure, a little way back
from the Kensington Road beyond High Street, and opposite the grounds
of Holland House. Here the versatile writer, the ill starred
"Skimpole" of Dickens's satire, lived with his numerous family,--now
older than in the Cheyne Row period of their existence,--and,
possibly, less addicted to litter, and to borrowing the long-suffering
neighbours' tea-cups. Leigh Hunt's son, Thornton Hunt, thus describes
the Square at this time:--
"Our square, with its pretty houses and rustic enclosure,
left with its natural undulations, very slight, but
sufficient to diminish the formal look, its ivy-covered
backs of houses on one side, and gardens and backs of houses
on the other, was a curiosity which, when I first saw it, I
could not account for on English principles, uniting as it
did something decent, pleasant, and cheap, with such
anti-_comme il faut_ anomalies--such aristocratic size and
verdure in the ground plot, with so plebeian a smallness in
the tenements. But it seems a Frenchman invented it."
Edwardes Square is, like Kensington Square, still pretty and rural and
attractive. At one end of it, and looking on to the Kensington Road,
is Earl's Terrace, a row of attractive, old-fashioned houses, set back
from the street, with little front gardens. Here, not so very long
ago, lived Walter Pater, continuing the literary associations of the
neighbourhood; a lover of beauty, he, too, but very different from
Leigh Hunt. In Hunt's time, Mrs. Elizabeth Inchbald lived "as a
boarder" at No. 4 in this terrace. Her chief claim to fame is _The
Simple Story_, a work which few people now read, though many have
heard of it. She appears to have been a charming and eccentric as well
as a talented lady. Here is a diary jotting of hers, quoted by Leigh
Hunt:--"On the 29th of June (Sunday) dined, drank tea, and supped with
Mrs. Whitfield. At dark, she and I and her son William walked out, and
I rapped at doors in New Street and King Street and ran away." "This
was in the year 1788," says Hunt, "when she was five-and-thirty. But
such people never grow old.... Divine Elizabeth Inchbald, qualified to
be the companion of every moment of human life, grave or gay, from a
rap at the street door in a fit of mirth to the deepest phases of
sympathy."
Yes, _The Simple Story_ must have been a real work of genius, for no
one, surely, but a genius, could afford so absolutely to disregard
_les convenances_. Though, for that matter, our feminine geniuses of
to-day take themselves a trifle more seriously. Imagine, for instance,
our George Eliots of the twentieth century, our presidents of writers'
unions and clubs, going out late at night to ring people's doorbells
and run away! Such "eternal childishness" really out-Skimpoles
Skimpole. If Providence had seen fit to place the two in contemporary
residence in Edwardes Square, would not Mrs. Inchbald have been a
neighbour after Leigh Hunt's own heart? The lady, it is further
recorded, died--at sixty-eight, too--of "tight-lacing."
Leigh Hunt's must have been an interesting personality, and Dickens's
caricature of him, intended or no, seems cruel. The late Mr. George
Smith, of the great publishing house, tells an entertaining story of
him. On one occasion, it appears, Mr. Smith paid Leigh Hunt L200 in
bank notes:
"Two days afterwards" (wrote Mr. Smith) "Leigh Hunt came in
a state of great agitation to tell me that his wife had
burned them. He had thrown the envelope with the banknotes
carelessly down, and his wife had flung it into the fire.
Leigh Hunt's agitation while on his way to bring this news
had not prevented him from purchasing on the road a little
statuette of Psyche, which he carried, without any paper
round it, in his hand. I told him I thought something might
be done in the matter. I sent to the bankers and got the
numbers of the notes, and then, in company with Leigh Hunt,
went off to the Bank of England. I explained our business,
and we were shown into a room where three old gentlemen were
sitting at tables. They kept us waiting some time, and Leigh
Hunt, who had meantime been staring all round the room, at
last got up, walked up to one of the staid officials, and
addressing him, said, in wondering tones: 'And this is the
Bank of England! And do you sit here all day, and never see
the green woods and the trees and flowers and the charming
country?' Then, in tones of remonstrance, he demanded: 'Are
you contented with such a life?' All this time he was
holding the little naked Psyche in one hand, and with his
long hair and flashing eyes made a surprising figure. I
fancy I can still see the astonished faces of the three
officials; they would have made a most delightful picture. I
said: 'Come away, Mr. Hunt, these gentlemen are very busy.'
I succeeded in carrying Leigh Hunt off, and, after entering
into certain formalities, we were told that the value of the
notes would be paid in twelve months. I gave Leigh Hunt the
money at once, and he went away rejoicing."
Opposite the Palace Gardens, where "Kensington Court" now stands,
stood once Kensington House, a big Roman Catholic boarding-house,
surely a kind of early prototype of the modern "mansions." Here
Louise de la Querouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth, lived, and here Mrs.
Inchbald died; later it was occupied by Jesuits, who have had for long
a special stronghold in this quarter. Then, at last, in 1876, the
older house made way for Mr. Albert Grant's pretentious Italian
mansion of the same name, which cost L270,000, and only existed seven
years, having been pulled down in 1883. So involved, and so difficult
to decipher, is the history of London buildings.
"Church House," so vividly described by Miss Thackeray as Dolly
Vanborough's home, stood close to the modern Church Street. And close
to Church Street is Campden House, a modern restoration of the ancient
building of that name, which was burned down in 1862; the gateway of
the old mansion being now built up into the east wall of the garden.
Old Campden House dated from 1612, and was principally known as having
been the residence of Queen Anne's charming and precocious little son,
the Duke of Gloucester, the poor child who died at eleven, "from
excessive dancing on his birthday," the last hope of the race dying
out with him. Campden House had been taken for the boy, so that he
might be near his aunt, Queen Mary, who was very fond of him, and had
him carried daily in infancy to see her at Kensington Palace.
Kensington Square, with its comfortable-looking houses of sober red
brick, and windows with white painted casements, has a delightfully
old-world aspect. Behind the houses are pleasant gardens, as yet--but
for how long?--left untouched by the tide of progress. Thackeray, as
well as his daughter, must have known and loved this square well; for
here he imagined Lady Castlewood, Beatrix, and Harry Esmond to dwell.
[Illustration: _Earl's Court._]
Earl's Court,--now mainly remarkable for the near neighbourhood of
"Olympia,"--the "Great Wheel,"--and an endless colony of railway
lines,--was, some fifty years ago, still "a quaint old row of houses,
their lattices stuffed with spring flowers, facing a deep cool pond by
the roadside," and embowered in orchards. Spots of welcome greenery
there still are in the wide area of West and South Kensington; there
is a big cemetery to be buried in, and the oval enclosure called "the
Boltons" is a pleasant place to live in. But, on the whole, the
purlieus of Kensington are depressing. While West Kensington is
mainly degraded "Queen Anne," interspersed with railways,--South
Kensington has one very general distinguishing mark. It is nearly
always stuccoed, and usually also porticoed. Its larger streets, in
sun or shine, bear a gloomy likeness to an array of family vaults,
awaiting their occupants. The early nineteenth century had, in truth,
much to answer for in the way of bricks, mortar, and stucco,--but
principally stucco! Occasionally there is some faint relief to the
prevailing mode, and here and there some of the smaller roads are
brightened in spring by a few acacias and hawthorns; but in the larger
streets there is usually the same saddening uniformity, and, when once
you have left the vicinity of Kensington Square, you find nothing in
quite the same style until you reach Chelsea and Cheyne Walk.
Chelsea, too, was a very picturesque village in old days,--when the
"Old Chelsea Bun-House" was a favourite resort of the Court,--when
"Ranelagh" and "Vauxhall" flourished in the neighbourhood,--and when
the then fashionable race of London's "jolly young watermen" for their
annual badge attracted, as the Oxford and Cambridge boat-race does
nowadays, crowds of spectators.
Ranelagh and Vauxhall! what recollections do they not suggest of
Fielding, of Richardson, of Fanny Burney! Both these places of
amusement flourished in the latter half of the eighteenth century;
Vauxhall (earlier called "Spring Garden"), was, so to speak, the
"Earl's Court," the summer resort of the day; just as "Ranelagh," with
its famous "Rotunda," was the "Olympia," or winter one. Only, both the
ancient pleasure resorts rejoiced in being the centre of fashion,
which can hardly be said with truth of the modern ones. Also, from old
novelists the reader gathers that it was very dangerous for young
ladies to go unprotected to either place, in case of being run away
with by bold, bad young men of the "Lovelace" type. Charming young
ladies are, perhaps, more of "a drug in the market" now: and they are
besides, as a rule, perfectly well able to take care of themselves.
That managers of those days were not more ignorant than their
twentieth-century successors of the great art of advertising,--the
following extract (from Rogers's _Table Talk_) shows:
"The proprietors of Ranelagh and Vauxhall used to send
decoy-ducks among the ladies and gentlemen who were walking
in the Mall, that is, persons attired in the height of
fashion, who every now and then would exclaim in a very
audible tone, 'What charming weather for Ranelagh,' or 'for
Vauxhall!'"
At any rate, old Vauxhall Gardens must have been a charming place for
flirtation, for "the windings and turnings in little wildernesses
(were) so intricate, that the most experienced mothers often lost
themselves in looking for their daughters." Part of the site of old
Ranelagh is now appropriated as the gardens of Chelsea Hospital; the
site of Vauxhall (in South Lambeth, on the Surrey side) is now covered
by St. Peter's, Vauxhall, and its adjacent streets.
Picturesque in old days, Chelsea is a picturesque place still, and
much beloved of painters, poets, and _litterateurs_;--the class of
Bloomsbury, and yet with a vast difference. Here it is the "mode" to
be select and exclusive. The artistic "cliques" of Tite Street and
Cheyne Walk are nothing if not particular. To use the words of the
modest prospectus issued by a recent magazine, they "will not tolerate
mediocrity." But then no one in Chelsea ever is, or at least allows
himself, to be "mediocre." Perhaps the fortunate inhabitants feel, as
do the denizens of the academic towns of Oxford and Cambridge, the
important weight of the traditions of their literary past. The spirit
of Carlyle, Leigh Hunt, Rossetti, George Eliot, yet gives to Chelsea a
literary atmosphere that it must at all hazards keep up. A
dinner-party in its august cliques is not to be lightly undertaken;
you feel, as you enter, that this is indeed a holy place.
Yet, already, the seclusion and selectness of Chelsea's sacred circles
are being threatened with invasion by the Philistine. On "the other
side of the water,"--where a picturesque suspension-bridge, the
Albert Bridge, throws its graceful chain-curves across Chelsea
Reach,--lies Battersea Park, surrounded on three sides by myriad
red-brick flats of varying cheapness, grown like mushrooms, and still
growing. Here is an infant community, a sort of "townier" Bedford
Park, whose inhabitants can boast, with some truth, that they are
"near the hum of the great city, and yet not of it." Flats are
increasing all over London and its immediate suburbs now to such an
extent that they are, indeed, in some danger of being overdone. In
Central London, the growth of flats is, perhaps, of little
consequence; but in suburban or semi-suburban London, the ubiquitous
builder is the great bloodsucker of our day; he wanders perpetually,
seeking, like the devil, what he may devour; and, on his debatable
"Tom Tiddler's Ground," everlastingly "picking up gold and silver."
But the builder has done good work too in Chelsea; for does not Cheyne
Walk, of picturesque and venerable aspect, with its well-restored,
red-brick, white-casemented houses, and fine old ironwork, lend a
dignity to the western end of the Chelsea Embankment, to which, lower
down, the spacious new red mansions, of ornate yet good style, do no
disgrace? And modest Cheyne Row, containing the most famous dwelling
in all Chelsea, is built in quiet, unobjectionable style.
Carlyle's quiet-looking residence in Cheyne Row is, practically, a
museum of the Soane kind, left exactly as when lived in; the only
difference being that here the relics are purely personal. This, a
real "house of pilgrimage" to the literary world, is, especially, the
resort of cultured Americans, who have even, it is said, had to be
mildly dissuaded from sitting on the Sage's chairs and trying on his
head-gear.
The "Carlyle House,"--desecrated, indeed, to the scandal of the
neighbours, for an interregnum of unholy years by a horde of lawless
cats,--is now entirely restored to its pristine neatness and order. It
is difficult to imagine any place less museum-like and more pleasantly
homely than this silent, peaceful, darkly-panelled abode, which
seems,--backed by its green garden-close,--to be indeed a survival of
the past, breathing forth still the spirit of the departed seer.
It was thus that Carlyle wrote of the street and the house some
seventy years ago:
"The street is flag-pathed, sunk-storied, iron-railed, all
old-fashioned and tightly done up; looks out on a rank of
sturdy old _pollarded_ (that is, beheaded) lime trees
standing there like giants in _tawtie_ wigs (for the new
boughs are still young); beyond this a high brick wall;
backwards a garden, the size of our back one at Comely Bank,
with trees, &c., in bad culture; beyond this, green
hayfields and tree avenues, once a bishop's pleasure
grounds, an unpicturesque yet rather cheerful outlook. The
house itself is eminent, antique, wainscoted to the very
ceiling, and has been all new painted and repaired; broadish
stair with massive balustrade (in the old style), corniced
and as thick as one's thigh; floors thick as a rock, wood of
them here and there worm-eaten, yet capable of cleanliness,
and still with thrice the strength of a modern floor....
Chelsea is a singular heterogeneous kind of spot, very dirty
and contused in some places, quite beautiful in others,
abounding in antiquities and the traces of great men--Sir
Thomas More, Steele, Smollett, &c. Our Row, which for the
last three doors or so is a street, and none of the noblest,
runs out upon a 'Parade' (perhaps they call it), running
along the shore of the river, a broad highway with huge
shady trees, boats lying moored, and a smell of shipping and
tan."
Houses where people have lived, and suffered, and experienced,
always--at least to those who know--seem to bear the impress of their
past owners' personality. Who has not gone back, after long years, to
an old dwelling-place, and been haunted by ghosts of the past, lurking
in every well-known corner and cranny? There is something of the
feeling of standing by a new-made grave,--the grave of what has been,
and will never be again. Such feelings, in a minor degree, does the
Carlyle house suggest to those who have read and interested themselves
in the long-drawn-out tragedy of those joint lives with which it was
bound up. In Mrs. Carlyle's pretty "china closet," for instance, you
can almost see the slender figure in neat black silk, deftly arranging
and dusting; here, in the drawing-room beyond, is her work-table; you
can imagine her, most thrifty of housewives, mending a hole in the
carpet; there in the chimney-corner she lay on her sofa, silently
suffering, while her prophet vociferated his thunders, and puffed
clouds of tobacco-smoke into the chimney. Upstairs, on the top story,
is the much-written-of "sound-proof" room, which was really not
"sound-proof" at all, though it was constructed with that object by
Carlyle at a considerable expense. Possibly, "the young lady next
door" still plays on her piano; most likely the neighbours' fowls
still crow loudly in the mornings (for these minor evils of London are
perennial), in full security now and immunity.
A seated statue of Carlyle, by Boehm,--a real work of art,--faces the
river in the neighbouring Embankment Gardens, close to the Albert
Bridge. Weary, wrinkled, as Tithonus, the old man gazes ever towards
the unceasing tides of the river and of humanity, his look troubled,
but yet
"majestic in his sadness at the doubtful doom of human kind."
In Upper (or "Little") Cheyne Row, close by the Carlyles, lived for
seven years,--the most embarrassed years in his chequered
career,--Leigh Hunt. (This was from 1833 to 1840, before the Edwardes
Square time.) Could one imagine a greater contrast than these two
Cheyne Row households? The Hunts were Bohemians of irrepressible type.
Mrs. Carlyle, being, too, in 1834 only at the very beginning of her
neat Chelsea housekeeping, and not yet "bug-bitten, bedusted, and
bedevilled," was, naturally, very severe on the subject of the Hunts.
To judge from the letters of "that clever lady, a little too much
given to insecticide" (as Lord Bowen called her), she had but the
poorest opinion of her neighbour's wife's "management" and borrowing
ways. And here is Carlyle's account of the Hunt _menage_:
"Hunt's house" (he says) "excels all you have ever read
of--a poetical Tinkerdom, without parallel even in
literature. In his family room, where are a sickly large
wife and a whole school of well-conditioned wild children,
you will find half-a-dozen old rickety chairs gathered from
half-a-dozen different hucksters, and all seeming engaged,
and just pausing, in a violent hornpipe. On these and around
them, and over the dusty table and ragged carpet lie all
kinds of litter--books, papers, egg-shells, scissors, and,
last night when I was there, the torn heart of a
half-quartern loaf. His own room above stairs, into which
alone I strive to enter, he keeps cleaner. It has only two
chairs, a bookcase, and a writing-table; yet the noble Hunt
receives you in his Tinkerdom in the spirit of a king,
apologises for nothing, places you in the best seat, takes a
window-sill himself if there is no other, and then, folding
closer his loose-flowing 'muslin-cloud' of a printed
nightgown, in which he always writes, commences the
liveliest dialogue on philosophy and the prospects of man
(who is to be beyond measure happy yet); which again he will
courteously terminate the moment you are bound to go; a most
interesting, pitiable, lovable man, to be used kindly, but
with discretion."
In the neighbouring Cheyne Walk have, of course, lived many notable
people. Innumerable associations cling to this picturesque row of
time-darkened red-brick and white-casemented houses, with the graceful
wrought-iron railings and tall gates that shut out their trim
front-garden plots from the curious Embankment. At No. 4, died George
Eliot the novelist, in 1880, a short time after her marriage to Mr.
Cross. She had only recently settled into this charming London
dwelling, and her voluminous library had only just been arranged for
her with infinite care, "as nearly as possible in the same order as at
the Priory," when the sudden stroke of Death fell. Daniel Maclise, the
early-Victorian painter, a meteor of art, and the wonder of his own
age, had lived in this same house before. Cecil Lawson, that young
painter of such great promise, who died so early, lived at No. 15; and
No. 16, or "Queen's House," is bound up with the memory of that
brilliant and wayward genius, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who lived here
after his wife's tragic death, and gathered round him his famous
miscellany of strange beasts and curious creatures.
"Queen's House," unaltered in essentials, has still a picturesque and
old-world air that agrees well with its long history. Its mellowed
bricks of sober red have a pleasant solidity. It used to be called
"Tudor House," owing to its early traditional associations with Queens
Katherine Parr and Elizabeth; for the ancient "Manor House" of
Chelsea, built by Henry VIII., occupied, with its gardens, the site of
this and the adjoining houses; from No. 18 Cheyne Walk eastward as far
as Oakley street. Of the many celebrated people who have lived there,
Sir Hans Sloane was the latest;--the old house was pulled down after
his death. The basements and gardens of the houses in Cheyne Walk
still show traces of this palace of Henry VIII. The present "Queen's
House" is said to have been built by Wren, the Royal Architect, for
the neglected Queen Catherine of Braganza; and some say that the
initials, "C. R.", in twisted iron on the gate and railings,
commemorate her tenancy. However that may be, we may take it that
Thackeray, in _Esmond_, describes it as the home of the old "Dowager
of Chelsey;" and here, again, we note the curious fact that the
fictional interest is at least as strong as the real.
Inside, the house is delightful; all the rooms and passages are
heavily wainscoted, and the balustrade of the spiral staircase is of
"finest hand-wrought iron." When Rossetti entered on its occupation,
Chelsea was still, though literary, comparatively unfashionable; (for
in those days the two persuasions did not as yet go hand-in-hand). The
poet-painter began a joint tenancy here with Swinburne, George
Meredith, and his brother, William Rossetti; of these Swinburne was
the most constant, and he wrote many of his best-known poems here. But
of Mr. Meredith's would-be-tenancy the following story is told, on the
novelist's own authority:--
"Mr. Meredith had, rather irresponsibly, agreed to occupy a
couple of rooms in Queen's House.... One morning therefore,
shortly after Rossetti moved in,--Mr. Meredith, who was
living in Mayfair, drove over to Chelsea to inspect his new
apartments. 'It was,' says the unhappy co-tenant, 'past
noon. Rossetti had not yet risen, though it was an exquisite
day. On the breakfast table, on a huge dish, rested five
thick slabs of bacon, upon which five rigid eggs had slowly
bled to death! Presently Rossetti appeared in his
dressing-gown with slippers down at heel, and devoured the
dainty repast like an ogre.' This decided Mr. Meredith. He
did not even trouble to look at his rooms, but sent in a
quarter's rent that afternoon, and remained in Mayfair,
where eggs and bacon were, presumably, more appetizingly
served."
Rossetti's studio was at the back of the old house; but what the
painter enjoyed most was the garden, an acre in extent in his time,
with an avenue of limes opening out on to a broad grass plot;--part,
no doubt, of the ancient "Manor House" garden:
"In this garden were kept" (says Mr. Marillier) "most of the
animals for which Rossetti had such a curious and
indiscriminate affection. How many of them there may have
been at any one time does not seem to be stated; but as one
died or disappeared, another would be got to replace it, or
Rossetti would see some particularly outlandish specimen at
Jamrach's and bear it home in triumph to add to the
collection. Wire cages were erected for their accommodation,
but these were not always proof against escape, especially
in the case of the burrowing animals, which had an annoying
way of appearing in the neighbours' gardens. Mr. W. M.
Rossetti has given from memory a tolerably long list of
creatures which at one time or another figured in the
menagerie at Cheyne Walk. They included a Pomeranian puppy,
an Irish deerhound, a barn-owl named Jessie, another owl
named Bobby, rabbits, dormice, hedgehogs, two successive
wombats, a Canadian marmot or woodchuck, an ordinary marmot,
kangaroos and wallabies, a deer, two or more armadillos, a
white mouse with her brood, a raccoon, squirrels, a mole,
peacocks, wood-owls, Virginian owls, horned owls, a jackdaw,
a raven, parakeets, a talking parrot, chameleons, grey
lizards, Japanese salamanders, and a laughing jackass.
Besides these there was a certain famous bull, a zebu, which
cost Rossetti L20 (he borrowed it from his brother), and
which manifested such animosity in confinement that it had
to be disposed of at once. The strident voices of the
peacocks were so little appreciated in the neighbourhood
that Lord Cadogan caused a paragraph to be inserted in all
his leases thereafter forbidding these birds to be kept."
The house, as I said, is very little changed,--though Mr. Haweis, its
recent occupant, added a statue of Mercury, poised on the ball at its
gable apex,--and its brickwork is said by Mr. Marillier to have "had
an older, more natural look in Rossetti's day." And "in front the
unembanked river, and ... the boating bustle and longshore litter of
the old days added picturesqueness to the view, which in all
essentials was the same as the aged Turner had looked out upon from
his little house not very far away." Ghosts,--of Katherine Parr and
others,--have, not unnaturally, been accredited to "Queen's House."
But they do not appear to have survived Rossetti's tenancy; for Mr.
Haweis, who lived and entertained here for 14 years, was not disturbed
by them, "even though he unearthed the entrance of a mysterious
subterranean passage, which was believed to have communicated with the
Lord High Admiral's House;"--a sort of semi-royal cryptoporticus of
intrigue! Mr. Haweis also discovered the antique watergate of the
former stately mansion--leading to the stone steps where in old days
barges were moored,--the shelving river banks extending in those days
far nearer than now. The great thickness of the walls of Queen's House
may, indeed, be partly accounted for by the necessity for protection
against floods; Mr. Haweis, who sacrilegiously cut a window to light
the spiral staircase, had to pierce three feet of solid brickwork.
Here is a funny story, retailed by Mr. Marillier, of Rossetti and the
advancing Age of Progress:
"The only bridge along the reach" (he says) "was old Chelsea
Bridge, concerning which Mr. George Meredith tells me a
pleasant story. One day there called upon Mr. Rossetti a
pompous individual of the vestryman class, with a paper to
which he requested his signature. 'We are getting up a
petition,' he said, 'to replace the old wooden bridge by a
handsome new iron one, with gilt decorations, and I am sure
that you as an artist, Mr. Rossetti, will lend us the weight
of your name for so desirable an object.' Rossetti's
language, on occasion, could be more forcible than polite,
and his unvarnished reception of the vestryman's proposal
caused that rash but well-meaning person to retire with
extreme precipitation."
Of all his many pets, Rossetti was perhaps especially devoted to his
wombats. To one of these he addressed the lines:
"O how the family affections combat
Within this breast, and each hour flings a bomb at
My burning soul! Neither from owl nor from bat
Can peace be gained until I clasp my wombat."
At the same time, it must be confessed, the poet regretted his pet's
inveterate tendencies toward "drain architecture." Rossetti's domestic
proclivities must, one thinks, have rendered him a terror to his
neighbours! Indeed, the only London inhabitant,--if we except the
celebrated "Lady of the Cats" in the desecrated Carlyle House,--who
can be said to have at all emulated him in that line, was Frank
Buckland the great naturalist, who, in his house, No. 34, Albany
Street, Regent's Park, kept "a museum and a menagerie in one." "His
house was full of crawling, creeping, barking, flying, swimming, and
squeaking things." When he was at church one Sunday, "Dick, the rat,"
he relates, "stole away two five-pound notes from my drawers." Among
other creatures Mr. Buckland kept, like Rossetti, a laughing jackass,
who "would never laugh," and "who was only provoked to a titter by the
consumption of a toothsome mouse"; this pet escaped from its cage one
day and was found asleep on the bed of a gentleman near the Hampstead
Road. But Mr. Buckland could at any rate excuse his vagaries on
scientific grounds, for he was trying to acclimatize foreign animals
suitable for food in this country.
The fleeting tide of fashion is now at its height in Chelsea; the
historic old houses of Cheyne Walk are let at enormous rents, and,
year by year, tall, prosaic red-brick edifices spring up like
mushrooms all round them. A few old "bits" of Chelsea still remain
unaltered,--but very few. The old church, and the rectory, the home of
the Kingsleys, with its charming old walled garden, are still
delightful; the embankment houses, standing back behind their gardens
and ironwork, are fine in their dignified, time-hallowed red-brick;
Paradise Row, that picturesque oasis of old dwellings that breaks the
ugliness of the modern Queen's Road West, yet bears witness to the
charm of old Chelsea. In humble Paradise Row, (now part of Queen's
Road West, and converted to laundries and other uses;)--in Paradise
Row, with its quaint tiled roofs, dormer windows, and high white
gate-posts, many well-known people have lived; it was even connected,
more or less, with royalty, for in 1692 it was the dwelling place of
the first Duke of St. Albans, Nell Gwynne's son. Chelsea has always
been associated with the Stuarts. When it was but a picturesque
riverside village,--fishermen's huts diversified by a few old
palaces,--divided yet by space of green fields from the storm and
stress of the greater London,--they brought it wealth and fashion, and
caused its gardens to spread in fragrant greenery down to the water's
edge. The Chelsea of the Restoration had the patronage of the
aristocracy, as well as that of the Royal favourites; here the King's
Mistresses flaunted their grandeur, their extravagance, their
impecuniosity before the world. It was in comparatively humble
Paradise Row that the notorious Duchesse de Mazarin lived in her later
and bankrupt stage; here she entertained royally, and was, besides, in
arrears with the Parish Rates. At No. 2 in Paradise Row lived that
Lord Robartes, Earl of Radnor, who, like the "Vicar of Bray,"
"trimmed" so judiciously through the Jacobite wars. This house (No.
2.), was, by the way, said by Pepys to be "the prettiest contrived
house he ever saw in his life."
King's Road, Chelsea,--now shabby and mediocre enough, but once the
"Merry Monarch's" own private drive, and said to have been made by him
as an easy access to his favourites' suburban resorts,--leads,
finally, to Fulham, and to the old house called Sandford Manor,
traditionally ascribed to Nell Gwynne's tenancy. This ancient mansion,
now divided into two residences, is still unharmed, though, owing to
its too close proximity to the Gas Works, it is now unhappily
threatened with demolition. London, as we know, has ever been more
utilitarian than antiquarian; and perhaps the old house owes its
escape so far to the fact that "it has been used successively as
farmhouse, pottery, cloth manufactory, and patent cask factory."--(Mr.
Reginald Blunt, _An Historical Hand-Book to Chelsea_.) Nevertheless,
its pilastered doorway exists yet, and, internally, it still boasts
its square wainscoted hall and old staircase, much as they were when
King Charles, as the story goes, rode his pony up the stair for a
freak. The old walnut trees, said to have been planted by Nell Gwynne
herself, are gone; but an antiquated mulberry-tree still defies the
railway in front of it, and the awful Gas Works behind it--a very
Scylla and Charybdis of encroaching modernity! A delightful old house,
and yet, surely, all its historical glamour and romance would hardly
enable even an enthusiast to take up his abode there.
The old Church of Chelsea, otherwise St. Luke's,--whose tower of
darkened red-brick lends such picturesque effect to the Battersea
reach beyond the Albert-Bridge,--is, both for its antiquity and its
monuments, one of the most interesting churches in London. Its
interior, never having been "restored," has a very old-world look; and
it still retains, as when it was built, all the simplicity of the
remote village church. Henry Kingsley, whose boyhood was spent in the
delightful old Chelsea rectory, fittingly commemorates his father's
church in his best-known story, "The Hillyars and the Burtons." "Four
hundred years of memory," he makes Joe Burton say, "are crowded into
that old church, and the great flood of change beats round the walls,
and shakes the door in vain, but never enters. The dead stand thick
together there, as if to make a brave resistance to the moving world
outside, which jars upon their slumber. It is a church of the dead."
Dean Stanley greatly loved this church: he used to call it "one of the
chapters of his abbey." Here Sir Thomas More worshipped in the days of
his power, and here, in the chapel that he built, is his monument.
More lived himself near by, in a now vanished mansion called
"Beaufort House," where, in his "fair garden," he received his friend
Erasmus, and also, his king--Henry walking with his arm lovingly
placed about his favourite's neck--that neck he was so soon to
dissever. In Chelsea Church are the famous "chained books," Sir Hans
Sloane's gift; the Bible, the Homilies, and Foxe's Book of Martyrs;
enormous volumes heavily bound in leather with strong clasps, chained,
underneath a bookcase, to a quaint lectern, where they may be read.
This strange custom recalls the monkish days, when printed books were
so rare and costly. The names of the guardian spirits of Chelsea, such
as Lady Jane Cheyne and Sir Hans Sloane,--respectively lady and lord
of the manor, after whom so many streets, squares, and courts have
been christened,--recur here too on elaborate monuments and
sarcophagi. Both were great benefactors to their parish church. Sir
Hans Sloane's daughter was afterwards Lady Cadogan, and hence it was
that the property came into the possession of the Cadogan family.
Sir Hans Sloane is further commemorated in Chelsea by his gift to the
Apothecaries' Company of the "Physick Garden," sometimes also called
the "Botanic Garden." This pleasant green spot, barred by high
railings, and intersected by many paths, used to contain, and contains
this day, so far as may be, "all the herbs of _Materia Medica_ which
can grow in the open air, for the instruction of medical students."
The old gardens have bravely withstood the vandals and iconoclasts of
modern Chelsea, as well as the attacks of builders, seeking what they
may devour; but the growth of bricks and mortar round about them has
but ill suited the delicate plants, which, it is to be feared, grow
now but feebly for the most part. It is long since the days of the
Stuarts,--days when the gardens of Chelsea could still grow roses.
Nevertheless, the "Physick Garden" is still delightful for purposes
quite other than those for which it was first made; and, fortunately,
the terms of the bequest render its alienation difficult and unlikely.
Perhaps, in the happy future, who knows? the garden may be opened
altogether to the Chelsea public. Of its original cedar trees, planted
by Sir Hans Sloane in 1683, but one now remains, and this is very
decrepit; in its decrepitude it is, however, still quite as
picturesque as it could ever have been in its prime. The river, in
pre-Embankment days, flowed close by the Physick Garden, the modern
roadway and parade being land embanked and reclaimed from the river.
The Watergate to Sir Hans's garden has, in consequence, disappeared;
but his statue, erected in 1733, still stands, bewigged and robed,
chipped and stained, on its pedestal by the historic cedar tree.
Close by was the site of Chelsea Ferry, and it was near here that the
Old Swan Tavern, with its attractive wooden balconies projecting over
the river, and an entrance from Queen's Road, used to stand. This was
the famous tavern, house of call for barges, and resort of so many
distinguished pleasure parties, that used to serve as goal for the
annual race,--prototype of the modern Oxford and Cambridge race,--that
was rowed by the young Thames watermen for the prizes of the "Doggett"
badge and the coat full of pockets and guineas. The tavern was
destroyed in 1873 to make room for the new Embankment, which has so
completely changed the aspect of all this part of the river. To quote
a writer in the _Art Journal_ for 1881:--
"No doubt the Embankment at Chelsea was needed; no doubt the
broad margin of mud which used to fringe old Cheyne Walk was
very unhealthy in summer-time; yet no one who cares for what
is quaint and picturesque, and who clings to relics of the
old days of which we shall soon have no traces left, can
recall the river strand at Chelsea, with its wharfs and its
water-stairs, its barges and its altogether indescribable
but most picturesque aspect, and not feel as he looks at the
trim even wall of the Embankment, and the broad monotonous
pavement above it, even if he does not say in words, 'Oh,
the difference to me!'"
On the site of the ancient tavern is now built "Old Swan House," a
modern-antique mansion designed in a charming style by Mr. Norman
Shaw. A few paces westward from Old Swan House, the modern red-brick
Tite Street, full of artists' studios and of the elect, runs up
towards Queen's Road. Tite Street is, so far as its externals go,
somewhat dark and shut in by its tall houses; but it more than atones
for any outside dulness by the excessive light and learning of its
interiors. "The White House," near the lower end of the street on the
right, was built for Mr. Whistler. Further up the street--also on the
right--is "Gough House," a fine old mansion of Charles II.'s time, now
most happily adapted to the needs of the Victoria Hospital for Sick
Children.
Close to the site of the old "Rotunda" of Ranelagh, is the famous
"Royal Military Hospital," usually called "Chelsea Hospital," and made
familiar to all the world outside London by Herkomer's great pictures,
"The Last Muster" and "Chelsea Pensioners." It was John Evelyn who
first gained Charles II.'s consent to the erection of a Royal Hospital
for veteran soldiers on this site,--though local tradition, apparently
without any reason at all, persists in attributing its foundation to
Nell Gwynne, who, with all her frailties, was ever the people's
darling, and especially a Chelsea darling. The Hospital building--an
open quadrangle with wings,--was designed by Wren. In colour as well
as form, it is solid and reposeful--a noble example of Wren's style
and taste. The gardens, open to the public during the day, have
something of the calm regularity of old Dutch palaces. But then
Chelsea, in building as in horticulture, had always a tendency to the
neat Dutch formalism of William and Mary.
A little north of Chelsea Hospital, between the modern Union Street
and Westbourne Street, stood, in the days of the Georges, the "Old
Original Chelsea Bun-House," that was for so long the resort of
eighteenth-century fashion. Hither used to drive George I. and his
consort, Caroline of Anspach; George III. and Queen Charlotte also
came here in person to fetch their buns home, which, of course, set
the fashion. The old house had a picturesque colonnade; but in 1839
new proprietors rebuilt it; which rash proceeding, however, killed
the custom.
Since Stuart and early Hanoverian days, times have changed for Chelsea
and Kensington; they are now,--as more distant Hammersmith and Fulham
are rapidly becoming, and as Putney and Dulwich soon threaten to
be,--integral parts of the "monster London," that, like a great
irresistible flood, in spreading absorbs all the peaceful little pools
that lie in its path. The squalor and the gloom, as well as the
splendour and the riches of the great city, are now their heritage.
Never more will the waves lap peacefully at Chelsea along the river's
shelving shores; never again will the streets and squares of old
Kensington regain their former seclusion and calm. Instead, a modern,
and, let us hope, a yearly more beautiful city will spread, gradually
and certainly, over all the available area. Chelsea and Kensington in
the past have had many glories; who can say what splendid fortune may
yet be theirs? And we who lament the inevitable changes of time, must
remember that they are still living cities, hallowed by their past,
interesting by their present, but whose greater and more enduring
magnificence is yet to come.