Highways and Byways in London Part 8

And, since London Bridge, that natural dividing-line of peoples, was pa.s.sed, 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"

pa.s.s 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 bal.u.s.traded 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!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: _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 d.i.c.kens 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 pa.s.sages and staircases wide enough and antiquated enough to furnish materials for a hundred ghost stories."

At the old "White Hart," now destroyed, d.i.c.kens 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 princ.i.p.ally noted for its amus.e.m.e.nts 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 amus.e.m.e.nt; 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 a.s.sociates 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 d.i.c.kens, and his creation Mr. Bob Sawyer. d.i.c.kens lived in Lant Street himself as a boy, while his insolvent family were rusticating in the neighbouring Marshalsea; hence he knew it well.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _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," d.i.c.kens 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 mult.i.tudinous 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 n.o.ble 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 inst.i.tution 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 d.i.c.kens'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 bra.s.s 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, d.i.c.kens, 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 d.i.c.kens 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 d.i.c.kens, 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.

d.i.c.kens, 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 b.u.t.ter 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."

d.i.c.kens's boyish recollections of the ancient debtors prison have, as was perhaps natural, sometimes more than a tinge of bitterness; here he pa.s.sed 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 d.i.c.kens 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 f.a.gin 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 f.a.gin'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 d.i.c.kens'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 d.i.c.kens, whose grave is still faithfully tended in Westminster Abbey while those of the mightier dead are long forgotten, d.i.c.kens, who cared everything for the lower, warmer phases of humanity; d.i.c.kens, to whom every grimy London stone was dear, and every dirty c.o.c.kney child a creature of infinite possibilities; d.i.c.kens, whose name will be ever dear to the faithful Londoner; is the modern chronicler of the great city.

CHAPTER VII

THE INNS OF COURT

"The perplexed and troublous valley of the shadow of the law."--_d.i.c.kens._

"those bricky towers, The which on Thames' broad aged back doe ride, Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers, There whilom wont the Templar knights to bide, Till they decayed through pride."--_Spenser._

Among the by-ways that open suddenly out of the highways of London, are there any more attractive than the Inns of Court? which, in an almost startling manner, bring into the whirl of Holborn, and the din of Fleet Street, something of the charm of an older and more peaceful world. No parts of London are more delightful, and few call up more interesting historic a.s.sociations. Picturesque and charming old enclosures,--full of that mysterious and intangible "romance of London" that appealed so strongly to writers such as Lamb, d.i.c.kens, and Nathaniel Hawthorne,--the Inns of Court have in their time sheltered many great men. How strange and how unexpected, in the very heart of busy London, are these quiet old-world quadrangles, of calm, collegiate aspect, of infinite peace; a peace that seems perhaps more intense in contrast with the outside, just as the London "close" of greenery seems all the greener for its being set amid the surrounding grime, shining "like a star in blackest night." Historic houses, indeed, in every sense, are these old Inns, with their worm-eaten wooden staircases, worn into holes by the pa.s.sage of countless feet; their panelled walls inscribed with many names; their floors often crazy and slanting as the decks of a ship in mid-ocean. Even the so-called "laundresses" who act as caretakers and servants in these establishments, seem as though they belonged to former centuries, and were, in a manner, impervious to the flight of time. Many have been the noted residents in the Inns; the most noted, perhaps, of those in the Temple are Fielding, Charles Lamb, and the poet Cowper; Dr.

Johnson lived once in Staple Inn, writing _Ra.s.selas_ there "in the evenings of a week," to defray his mother's funeral expenses. Surely, if ghosts ever walk, they must walk in these historic abodes. It was my lot lately to search for rooms in one of the Inns (I will not invidiously specify which). The rooms were romantic enough, at a cursory glance; further investigations revealed, I regret to say, the fact that romance was depressingly dark, as well as unduly favourable to rats, mice, and the unholy black-beetle; to say nothing of a general and indescribable musty smell.

"How long have these rooms been vacant?" I inquired, with some faint show of cheerfulness, of the frowsy "laundress," a d.i.c.kensy lady with an appalling squint and a husky voice suggestive of the bottle.

"W'y, not to say long, 'm. On'y a year come nex' Wensday. Though not to deceive you 'm, the larst gempleman as lived 'ere, 'e give the place a bad name."

"What did he do?" I inquired, startled.

"W'y, 'e had the 'orrors dreadful; 'e did away with 'isself; _that's where it is_" (with increased huskiness).

I looked tremblingly at the panelled walls, the blackened ceiling, the faded carpet. Was it fancy, or did I see a darker patch in the threadbare web, and the shadow of a dusky Roman pointing from the ceiling (as in d.i.c.kens's murder of Mr. Tulkinghorn) threateningly at that darker stain? "'Orrors"! I thought; and no wonder! Romance, rats, and old panelling are, no doubt, beautiful in their way; but hardly suitable to prosaic, everyday life.

It is, perhaps, in these old Inns, that, more than anywhere else in London, the past is linked with the present. Much the same did they look, their red brick perhaps a trifle less charmingly darkened by time, in the days when fair ladies and gallant gentlemen walked in their green plots, the ladies in the quaint clinging dresses of the Georgian era, the gentlemen in the gay lace ruffles and knee-breeches of that picturesque period in dress. If London stones could speak, what stories could they tell! The old elm trees, planted by Bacon (Lord Verulam) that shade so charmingly the cool green sward of Gray's Inn, were comparatively youthful when Mr. Pepys walked with his lady-wife in that historic enclosure "to observe the fashions of the ladies, because of my wife making some clothes." Time enough, surely, for the trees to have developed a quite Wordsworthian seriousness!

There were many rooks in these gardens; but these have lately disappeared, owing, thinks Mr. Hare, "to the erection of a corrugated iron building near them some years ago"! Possibly Mr. Hare credits the rooks with an aesthetic feeling for beauty!

Charles Lamb, that "small, spare man in black,"--who, with his saddest of life-histories, his patient devotion and fort.i.tude, ill deserved Carlyle's crude vituperation,--was a great devotee of the Inns, and especially of the Temple, his birthplace. It was in Little Queen Street, off Holborn, that the early tragedy happened that saddened all his life; the murder of his mother by the hand of his dearly-loved sister, in a fit of insanity. After this terrible occurrence, the brother took his sister Mary into his charge, never after to part from her, except only for her occasional necessary periods of restraint in an asylum. In Colebrook Row, Islington, where Lamb retired on his emanc.i.p.ation from the India Office, was the last abode of this devoted couple; and here occurred the pathetic incident recorded by a friend, that of the brother and sister walking across the fields towards the safety of the neighbouring asylum, hand-in-hand, like two children, and weeping bitterly.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Pepys and his Wife._]