Christopher Crayon's Recollections. The Life and Times of the late James Ewing Ritchie as told by himself

CHAPTER VII.
London Long Ago

In due time – that is when I was about sixteen years old – I made my way to London, a city as deadly, as dreary as can well be conceived, in spite of the wonderful Cathedral of St. Paul’s, as much a thing of beauty as it ever was, and the Monument, one of the first things the country cousin was taken to see, with the exception of Madame Tussaud’s, then in Baker Street. In the streets where the shops were the houses were mean and low, of dirty red brick, of which the houses in the more aristocratic streets and squares were composed. Belgravia, with its grand houses, was never dreamt of. The hotels were of the stuffiest character; some of them had galleries all round for the sleeping chambers, which, however, as often as not were over the stables, where the coach horses were left to rest after the last gallop into London, and to be ready for the early start at five or six in the morning. Perhaps at that time the best way of coming into London was sailing up the Thames. As there were few steamers then the number of ships of all kinds was much greater than at present, when a steamer comes up with unerring regularity, discharges her cargo, takes in a fresh one, and is off again without a moment’s delay. You saw Greenwich Hospital, as beautiful then as now, the big docks with the foreign produce, the miles of black colliers in the Pool, the Tower of London, the Customs House, and Billingsgate, a very inconvenient hole, more famed for classic language then than now. Yet it was always a pleasure to be landed in the city after sitting all day long on the top of a stage coach. In many ways the railway was but a poor improvement on the stage coach. In the first place you could see the country better; in the second place the chances were you had better company, at any rate people talked more, and were more inclined to be agreeable; and the third place, in case of an accident, you felt yourself safer. As an old Jehu said, contrasting the chances, “If you have an accident on a coach there you are, but if you are in a railway carriage where are you!” And some of the approaches to London were almost dazzling. Of a winter’s night it was quite a treat to come into town by the East Anglian coaches, and to see the glare of the Whitechapel butchers’ shops all lit up with gas, and redolent of beef and mutton. It was wonderful in the eyes of the young man from the country.

The one great improvement in London was Regent Street, from Portland Place and Regent’s Park to the statue an infatuated people erected to a shady Duke of York in Trafalgar Square. Just by there was the National Gallery, at any rate in a situation easy of access. Right past the Mansion House a new street had been made to London Bridge, and there the half-cracked King William was honoured by a statue, which was supposed to represent the Royal body and the Royal head. In Cornhill there was an old-fashioned building known as the Royal Exchange, which kept alive the memory of the great civic benefactor, Sir Thomas Gresham, and the maiden Queen; but everywhere the streets were narrow and the houses mean. Holborn Hill led to a deep valley, on one side of which ran a lane filled with pickpockets, and cut-throats and ruffians of all kinds, into which it was not safe for any one to enter. And as you climbed the hill you came to Newgate Market, along which locomotion was almost impossible all the early morning, as there came from the north and the south and the east and the west all the suburban butchers for their daily supply. Just over the way on the left was that horror of horrors, Smithfield, where on a market day some thousands of oxen and sheep by unheard of brutality had been penned up, waiting to be purchased and let loose mad with hunger and thirst and fright and pain all over the narrow streets of the city, to the danger of pedestrians, especially such as were old and feeble. Happily, St. Bartholomew’s Hospital was close by, and the sufferer had perhaps a chance of life. The guardians of the streets were the new police, the Peelers or the Bobbies as they were sarcastically called. The idiotic public did not think much of them; they were the thin edge of the wedge, their aim was to destroy the glorious liberty of every man, to do all the mischief they could, and to enslave the people. Was not Sir Robert Peel a Tory of the Tories and the friend of Wellington, so beloved by the people that he had to guard his house with iron shutters? At that time the public was rather badly off for heroes, with the exception of Orator Hunt, who got into Parliament and collapsed, as most of the men of the people did. Yet I was a Liberal – as almost all Dissenters were with the exception of the wealthy who attended at the Poultry or at Walworth, where John and George Clayton preached.

In the City life was unbearable by reason of the awful noise of the stone-paven streets, now happily superseded by asphalte. Papers were dear, but in all parts of London there were old-fashioned coffee and chop houses where you could have a dinner at a reasonable price and read the newspapers and magazines. Peele’s, in Fleet Street, at the corner of Fetter Lane, was a great place for newspapers and reporters and special correspondents. Many a newspaper article have I written there. Then there were no clubs, or hardly any, and such places as the Cheshire Cheese, with its memories of old Dr. Johnson, did a roaring trade far into the night. There was a twopenny post for London, but elsewhere the charge for letters was exorbitant and prohibitory. Vice had more opportunities than now. There was no early closing, and in the Haymarket and in Drury Lane these places were frequented by prostitutes and their victims all night long. A favourite place for men to sup at was Evans’s in Covent Garden, the Cider Cellars in Maiden Lane, and the Coal Hole in the Strand. The songs were of the coarsest, and the company, consisting of lords and touts, medical students, swell mobsmen, and fast men from the City, not much better. At such places decency was unknown, and yet how patronised they were, especially at Christmas time, when the country farmer stole away from home, ostensibly to see the Fat Cattle Show, then held in Baker Street. Of course there were no underground railways, and the travelling public had to put up with omnibuses and cabs, dearer, more like hearses than they are now.

I should be sorry to recommend any one to read the novels of Fielding or of Smollet. And yet in one sense they are useful. At any rate, they show how much the England of to-day is in advance of the England of 150 years ago. For instance, take London. It is held that London is in a bad way in spite of its reforming County Council. It is clear from the perusal of Smollet’s novels that a purifying process has long been at work with regard to London, and that if our County Councillors do their duty as their progenitors have done, little will remain to be done to make the metropolis a model city. “Humphry Clinker” appeared in 1771. It contains the adventures of a worthy Welsh Squire, Matthew Bramble, who in the course of his travels with his family finds himself in London. The old Squire is astonished at its size. “What I left open fields, producing corn and hay, I now find covered with streets and squares, and palaces and churches. I am credibly informed that in the space of seven years 11,000 new houses have been built in one quarter of Westminster, exclusive of what is daily added to other parts of this metropolis. Pimlico is almost joined to Chelsea and Kensington, and if this infatuation continues for half-a-century, I suppose, the whole county of Middlesex will be covered with brick.” A prophecy that has almost come to pass in our time. At that time London contained one-sixth of the entire population of the kingdom. “No wonder,” he writes, “that our villages are depopulated and our farms in want of day labourers. The villagers come up to London in the hopes of getting into service where they can live luxuriously and wear fine clothes. Disappointed in this respect, they become thieves and sharpers, and London being an immense wilderness, in which there is neither watch nor ward of any signification, nor any order or police, affords them lurking-places as well as prey.” The old Squire’s complaint is to be heard every day when we think or speak or write of the great metropolis.

The poor Squire writes bitterly of London life: “I start every hour from my sleep at the horrid noise of the watchmen calling the hour through every street, and thundering at every door.” “If I would drink water I must quaff the mawkish contents of an open aqueduct, exposed to all manner of defilement, or swallow that which comes from the Thames, impregnated with all the filth of London and Westminster. Human excrement is the least offensive part of the concrete, which is composed of all the drugs, minerals and poisons used in mechanics and manufactures, enriched with the putrefying carcases of beasts and men, and mixed with the scourings of all the washtubs, kennels, and common sewers within the bills of mortality.” The City churches and churchyards were in my time constant sources of disease, and the chapels were, where they had burying-grounds attached, equally bad. One need not remark in this connection how much better off we are in our day. Again the Squire writes: “The bread I eat is a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum and bone ashes.” Here, again, we note gladly a change for the better. The vegetables taste of nothing but the dung-hills from whence they spring. The meat the Squire holds to be villainously bad, “and as for the pork, it is an abominable carnivorous animal fed with horseflesh and distillers’ grains, and the poultry is all rotten in consequence of fever, occasioned by the infamous practice of sewing up the guts, that they may be the sooner fattened in crops in consequence of this cruel restriction.” Then there is the butter, a tallowy, rancid mass, manufactured with candle grease and butcher’s stuff. Well, these enormities are permitted no longer, and that is a step gained. We have good water; the watchman is gone, and the policeman has taken his place; but London as I knew it was little better than it was in the Squire’s time. I fear in eggs we have not improved. The old Squire complains that they are imported from Scotland and France. We have, alas! for our fresh eggs to go a good deal further now. Milk, he tells us, was carried through the streets in open pails, exposed to foul rinsings discharged from doors and windows, and contaminated in many other ways too horrible to mention. No wonder the old Squire longed to get back to his old mansion in Wales, where, at any rate, he could enjoy pure water, fresh eggs and real milk. It is hard to conceive how the abominations he describes could have been tolerated an hour. There was no Holborn Viaduct – nothing but a descent into a valley – always fatal to horses, and for many reasons trying to pedestrians. One of the sights of London which I sorely missed was the Surrey Gardens, with its fireworks and half-starved and very limited zoological collection. It has long been built over, but many is the happy summer evening I have spent there witnessing the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, or some other representation equally striking and realistic. In the City Road there were tea-gardens, and at Highbury Barn was a dancing establishment, more famous than those of the Eagle or White Conduit Fields, and all at times made the scene of political demonstrations and party triumphs. In this way also were much celebrated the London Tavern and Freemasons’ Hall. There was no attention paid to sanitation, and Lord Palmerston had not horrified all Scotland by telling the clergy who waited on him that it was not days of humiliation that the nation wanted, but a more intimate acquaintance with the virtues of soap and water. The clergy as a rule looked upon an outbreak of disease, not as an illustration of the evils of want and water and defective drainage, but as a sign of the Divine disgust for and against a nation that had admitted Dissenters in Parliament, and emancipated the Roman Catholics. Perhaps the greatest abomination of all was the fearful custom which existed of burying the dead in the midst of the living. The custom died hard – churches and chapels made a lot of money in this way, careless of the fact that the sickly odours of the vault and the graveyard filled up the building where, on Sunday, men and women and children came to worship and pray. Yet London got more country air than it does now. The Thames was not a sewer, and it was all open fields from Camden Town to Hampstead Heath, and at the back of the Holloway Road, and such-like places. There was country everywhere. As a whole, the London of to-day is a far statelier city than the London of my earlier years. Everything was mean and dirty. I miss the twopenny postman, to whom I had always to entrust a lot of letters – when I came up from my village home – as thus the writers save a good sum of money on every letter. There were few omnibuses, and they were dear. Old hackney coaches abounded, and the cabs were few and far between, and very dirty as well, all of which have immensely improved of late. The cab in which I rode when I was set down by the coach at the White Horse, Fetter Lane, then a much-frequented hotel of the highest respectability, was an awful affair, hooded and on two high wheels, while the driver was perched on a seat just outside. I was astonished – as well I might be – when I got to that journey’s end in safety.

In London and the environs everything was dull and common-place, with the exception of Regent Street, where it was tacitly assumed the force of grandeur could no further go. There was no Thames Embankment, and only a collection of wharves and coal agencies, and tumble-down sheds, at all times – especially when the tide was out – hideous to contemplate. The old Houses of Parliament had been burnt down, and no costly palace had been erected on their site. The Law Courts in Westminster Hall were crowded and inconvenient. Where now Queen Victoria Street rears its stately head were narrow streets and mean buildings. Eating-houses were close and stuffy, and so were the inns, which now we call by the more dignified name of hotels.

As to the poor sixty years ago, society was indifferent alike as to the state of their souls or bodies. In Ratcliff Highway the sailor was robbed right and left. The common lodging-house was a den of thieves. The poor shirt-maker and needlewoman lived on starvation wages. Sanitary arrangements were unknown. There was no decency of any kind; the streets, or rather lanes, where the children played, with their open sewers, were nurseries of disease. Even in Bethnal Green, the Sanitary Commission found that while the mean age of death among the well-to-do residents was forty-four, that of the working-classes was twenty-two; and yet Bethnal Green with its open spaces was a garden of Eden compared with the lodging-houses in some of the streets off Drury Lane. Perhaps the most unfortunate classes in the London of that time were the poor chimney-sweeps – little children from four to eight years of age, the majority of them orphans, the rest bartered or sold by brutal parents. In order to do their work they had to move up and down by pressing every joint in their bodies against the hard and often broken surface of the chimneys; and to prevent their hands and knees from streaming with blood, the children were rubbed with brine before a fire to harden their flesh. They were liable to a frightful disorder – the chimneysweeper’s cancer, involving one of the most terrible forms of physical suffering. They began the day’s work at four, three, and even two in the morning; they were half suffocated by the hot sulphurous air in the flues; often they would stick in the chimneys and faint; and then if the usual remedy – straw lighted to bring them round – failed, they were often half killed, and sometimes killed outright, by the very means used to extricate them. They lived in low, ill-drained, ill-ventilated, and noxious rooms and cellars, and often slept upon the soot heaps. They remained unwashed for weeks, and on Sundays they were generally shut up together so that their neighbours might not see their miserable condition. Perhaps the worst part of London when I knew it was Field Lane, at the bottom of Holborn Hill, now happily improved off the face of the earth. It was known as “Jack Ketch’s Warren,” from the fact that the greater part of the persons hanged at Newgate came from the lanes and alleys in the vicinity. The disturbances that occurred in these low quarters were often so great that from forty to fifty constables armed with cutlasses were marched down, it being often impossible for officers to act in fewer numbers or disarmed. Some of the houses close beside the Fleet Ditch were fitted with dark closets, trapdoors, sliding panels, and other means of escape, while extensive basements served for the purpose of concealing goods; and in others there were furnaces used by coiners and stills for the production of excisable spirits. It was here that in 1843 the Ragged School movement in London commenced its wonderful and praiseworthy career.

Naturally in this connection I must speak of the Earl of Shaftesbury, the great philanthropist of the Victorian era, a nobleman whose long and honourable life was spent in the service of man and the fear of God. He was somewhat narrow-minded, an Evangelical Churchman of a now almost extinct type, not beloved by Cobden and the Free Traders, occasionally very vehement in his utterances, a man who, if he had stuck to the party game of politics, would have taken a high place in the management of public affairs. I knew him well, and he was always friendly to me. In his prime he must have been a remarkably handsome man, tall, pale, with dark hair and a commanding presence. Perhaps he took life a little too seriously. To shake hands with him, said his brother, was a solemn function. But his earnestness might well make him sad, as he saw and felt the seriousness of the great work to which he had devoted his life. He had no great party to back him up. The Dissenters regarded him with suspicion, for he doubted their orthodoxy, and in his way he was a Churchman to the core. He was too much a Tory for the Whigs, and too Radical a philanthropist for the old-fashioned Tory fossils then abounding in the land. On one occasion Lord Melbourne, when dining with the Queen in his company, introduced him to royalty as the greatest Jacobin in her dominions. In Exeter Hall he reigned supreme, and though dead he still lives as his works survive. He was the friend of all the weak, the poor, the desolate who needed help. He did much to arouse the aristocracy to the discharge of their duties as well as the maintenance of their rights. All the world is the better for his life. It was a miracle to me how his son, the eighth Earl, came to commit suicide, as he always seemed to me the cheerfullest of men, of the rollicking sailor type. I often met him on board the steamer which took us all down the river to the Chichester and Arethusa, founded by the late Mr. William Williams in 1843 – a good man for whom Earl Shaftesbury had the most ardent esteem – as refuges for homeless and destitute children to train up for a naval career.

London poverty and London vice flourished unchecked till long after Queen Victoria had commenced her reign. When I first knew London the streets after dark were fearful, and a terrible snare to all, especially the young and idle and well-to-do. The public-houses were kept open till a late hour. There were coffee-houses that were never closed; music-halls, where the songs, such as described in Thackeray’s “Cave of Harmony,” were of a most degrading character; Judge and Jury Clubs, where the low wit and obscenity of the actors were fearful; saloons for the pickpocket, the swell mobsman, and the man about town, and women who shone in evening dress, and were alike fair and frail. It is only within the last twenty years that the Middlesex magistrates refused Mr. Bignell a licence for the Argyle Rooms; that was not until Mr. Bignell had found it worth while to invest £80,000 in the place. Year after year noble lords and Middlesex magistrates had visited the place and licensed it. Indeed, it had become one of the institutions of the metropolis, one of the places where Bob Logic and Corinthian Tom – such men still existed, though they went by other names – were safe to be found of an evening. The theatre was too staid and respectable for them, though dashing Cyprians, as they were termed, were sure to be found at the refreshment saloon. When the Argyle was shut up, it was said a great public scandal was removed. Perhaps so; but the real scandal was that such a place was ever needed in the capital of a land which handsomely paid clergymen and deans and bishops and archbishops to exterminate the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eye, and the pride of life, which found their full development in such places as the Argyle Rooms. It was a scandal and a shame that men who had been born in English homes, and nursed by English mothers, and confirmed by English bishops, and had been trained in English public schools and Universities, and worshipped in English churches and cathedrals, should have helped to make the Argyle Rooms a successful public institution. Mr. Bignell created no public vices; he merely pandered to what was in existence. It was the men of wealth and fashion who made the place what it was. It was not an improving spectacle in an age that sacrificed everything to worldly show, and had come to regard the brougham as the one thing needful – the outward sign of respectability and grace – to see equipages of this kind, filled with fashionably dressed women, most of them

Born in a garret, in a kitchen bred —

driving up nightly to the Argyle, or the Holborn, or the Piccadilly, or Bob Croft’s in the Haymarket, with their gallants or protectors or friends, or whatever they might term themselves, amidst a dense crowd of lookers-on, rich or poor, male or female, old or young, drunk or sober. In no other capital in Europe was such a sight to be seen. It was often there that a young and giddy girl, with good looks and a good constitution, and above all things set on fine dresses and gay society, and weary of her lowly home and of the drudgery of daily life, learned what she could gain if she could make up her mind to give her virtue; many of them, indeed, owing to the disgusting and indecent overcrowding in rustic cottages and great cities having but little virtue to part with. Then assailed her the companionship of men of birth and breeding and wealth, and the gaiety and splendour of successful vice. I knew of two Essex girls, born to service, who came to town and led a vicious life, and one became the wife of the son of a Marquis, and the other married a respectable country solicitor; the portrait of the lady I have often seen amongst the photographs displayed in Regent Street. The pleasures of sin, says the preacher, are only for a season, but a similar remark, I fancy, applies to most of the enjoyments of life. It is true that in the outside crowd there were in rags and tatters, in degradation and filth, shivering in the cold, wan and pale with want, hideous with intemperance, homeless and destitute, and prematurely old, withered hags, whom the policemen ordered to move on – forlorn hags, who were once habitués of the Argyle and the darlings of England’s gilded youth – the bane and the antidote side by side, as it were. But when did giddy youth ever realise that riches take to themselves wings and fly away, that beauty vanishes as a dream, that joy and laughter often end in despair and tears? The amusements of London were not much better when the music-hall – which has greatly improved of late – came to be the rage. One has no right to expect anything intellectual in the way of amusements. People require them, and naturally, as a relief from hard work, a change after the wearying and wearisome drudgery of the day. A little amusement is a necessity of our common humanity, whether rich or poor, saintly or the reverse. And, of course, in the matter of amusements, we must allow people a considerable latitude according to temperament and age, and their surroundings and education, or the want of it; and it is an undoubted fact that the outdoor sports and pastimes, in which ladies take part as well as men, have done much to improve the physical stamina and the moral condition of young men. Scarcely anything of the kind existed when I first knew London, and the amusements of the people chiefly consisted in drinking or going to see a man hanged. At one time there were many debating halls, where, over beer and baccy, orators, great in their own estimation, settled the affairs of the nation, at any rate, let us hope, according to their own estimation, in a very satisfactory manner. In Fleet Street there was the Temple Forum, and at the end, just out of it, was the Codgers’ Hall, both famous for debates, which have long ceased to exist. A glance at the modern music-hall will show us whether we have much improved of late. It is more showy, more attractive, more stylish in appearance than its predecessors, but in one respect it is unchanged. Primarily it is a place in which men and women are expected to drink. The music is an afterthought, and when given, is done with the view to keep the people longer in their places, and to make them drink more. “Don’t you think,” said the manager of one of the theatres most warmly patronised by the working classes, to a clerical friend of mine – “don’t you think that I am doing good in keeping these people out of the public-house all night?” and my friend was compelled to yield a very reluctant consent. When I first knew London the music-hall was an unmitigated evil. It was there the greenhorn from the country took his first steps in the road to ruin.