Part 13

So—up this broad, roomy flight of granite steps on the Lombard Street side of the Mansion House frontage—on through a double barrier of swing-doors at the corresponding angle beneath the portico; and in less time than it would take to accept a bill (an operation in comparison to the celerity of which a pig’s whisper is an age, and the pronunciation of the mystic words “Jack Robinson” a life-long task), we are within the sanctuary of municipal justice. The first thing that strikes the stranger, accustomed as he may be to frequenting other police-courts, is the unwonted courtesy of the officials, and their gorgeous costumes. About Bow Street, Lambeth, Westminster, there hangs an indefinable but pervading miasma of meanness and squalor. A settled mildew seems to infest the walls and ceiling, a chronic dust to mantle the furniture and flooring. No one connected with the court, officially or otherwise, with the single exception of the Magistrate—who, always smug and clean shaven, and in a checked morning neckerchief and a high shirt collar, looks like a judicial edition of Major Pendennis—seems to have had his clothes brushed for a week or his boots blacked for a month. A dreadful jail-bird odour ascends from the ill-favoured auditory. The policemen are shabby in attire and morose in manner. The buckles of their belts are dull, and their buttons tarnished. They hustle you hither and thither, and order you in or out in a manner most distressing to your nerves; and the gloomy usher thrusts a ragged Testament into your hands, and swears you as though he were swearing _at_ you. But at the Mansion House there is a bluff, easy-going, turtle-and-venison-fed politeness generally manifest. You enter and you emerge from the court without being elbowed or shoved. The city policemen are more substantial-looking, well to do, and better natured men than their metropolitan _confrères_. Some of them have the appearance of small freeholders, and others, I am sure, have snug sums in the savings’ banks. As to the jailers, ushers, court-keepers, warrant-officers, marshalmen, and other multifarious hangers-on of civic justice, they are mostly men of mature age, rosy, bald and white-headed sages, who remember Sir John Key and the great Sir Claudius Hunter, and mind the time when Mr. Alderman Wood rode on horseback at the side of Queen Caroline’s hearse, on the occasion of the passage of that injured lady’s funeral procession through the city. As to their attire, it is positively—if I may be allowed the use of a barbarism—“splendiferous.” Stout broadcloth, bright gilt buttons, with elaborate chasings of civic heraldry, scarlet collars, with deep gold lace: none of your paltry blue blanketing, horn buttons, and worsted gloves. No doubt, when in full uniform, the “splendiferous” functionaries all wear cocked-hats. Maybe, feathers. There is one weazened creature who flits in and out of a side door, to the left of the Lord Mayor’s chair, and is perpetually handing up printed forms to his Lordship or to the chief clerk. I don’t know exactly what he is, whether the Lord Mayor’s butler, or the sword-bearer’s uncle, or the city-marshal’s grandfather, or the water-bailiff’s son-in-law; but the front of his coat is profusely ornamented with bars of gold braid, like pokers from Crœsus’s kitchen, and on his shoulders he wears a pair of state epaulettes, the which give him somewhat of a military appearance, and, contrasting with his civilian spectacles and white neckcloth, would produce an effect positively sublime if it were not irresistibly ludicrous. The home of Beadledom—its last home, I am afraid, after the exhaustion of the Windsor uniform, and that of the Elder Brethren of the Trinity House—will be at the Mansion House.

The architect who has contrived the new Justice-room in this stately edifice must have been, if not a man of genius, at least one of original conceptions. The old police-court—sacred to the manes of Mr. Hobler—was simply a Cave of Trophonius and Den of Despair. There was no light in it—“only darkness visible;” and when you peered at the misty prisoner in the dock, you were always reminded of Captain Macheath in his cell, when the inhuman Mr. Lockit wouldn’t allow him any more candles, and threatened to clap on extra fetters in default of an immediate supply on the captain’s part of “garnish” or jail fees. But the Palladio who has arisen to remedy these defects has contrived to introduce a considerable amount of light—only it labours under the trifling disadvantage of being all in the wrong place. The Lord Mayor, with his back to the window, sits in a reflected light, just as does Wilkie’s portrait of the Duke of York; and the fine effect of the city arms carved on his chair, to say nothing of his Lordship’s gold chain and furred robe, is thereby totally lost. Mr. Goodman and the clerks, who are all very gentlemanly-looking individuals, much given to all-round collars and parting their hair down the middle, fill up commitments and make out summonses in a puzzling haze of chiaro oscuro; the reporters are compelled to pore over their “Times” with their noses close to the paper (for no one ever saw a police reporter do anything save read the newspaper, though we are sure to read a verbatim narrative of the case in which we are interested next day), and the general audience is lost in a Cimmerian gloom. To make amends, there is plenty of light on the ceiling, and some liberal patches of it on the walls, and a generous distribution of its bounty on the bald heads, golden epaulettes, and scarlet collars of the marshalmen. We can’t have everything we want, not even in the way of Light. Let us be thankful that there is some of it about, even as it behoves us to be exceedingly grateful that there is such a vast amount of wealth in the world. Other people possess it—only, we don’t.

This, then, is the justice-room of the Mansion House. I have not given you, _seriatim_, a George Robins’s catalogue of its contents, but by bits and bits I trust you will have been enabled to form a tolerably correct mind-picture of its contents. My Lord Mayor in the chair, clerks before him, reporters to the right, marshalmen left; spectacled official at the desk in the left-hand corner—the summoning officer, I think—audience not too tightly packed into a neat pen at the back of the court; dock in the centre, and the prisoner—Ah! the prisoner!

Did it never strike you, in a criminal court of assize—“the judges all ranged, a terrible show,” the solemn clerk of the arraigns gazing over the indictment, the spectators almost breathless with excited curiosity, rays from opera glasses refracted from the gallery, Regent Street bonnets and artificial flowers relieving the dark mass of the menfolk’s dress, the bar bewigged, the eloquent advocate for the defence thundering forth genteel philippics against the eloquent counsel for the prosecution—did it never strike you, I say, what a terrible fuss and bother, and calling on Jupiter to lift a wagon wheel out of a rut, what a waste of words, and show, and ceremonial all this became, when its object, the End to all these imposing means, was one miserable creature in the dock, with spikes, and rue, and rosemary before him, accused of having purloined a quart pot? As for the prisoner who is this day arraigned before the mighty Lord Mayor—but first stand on tiptoe. There he is, God help him and us all! a miserable, weazened, ragged, unkempt child, whose head, the police reports will tell us to-morrow, “scarcely reached to the railing of the dock.” He has been caught picking pockets. It is not his first, his second, his third offence. He is an incorrigible thief. The great Lord Mayor tells him so with a shake of his fine head of hair. He must go to jail. To jail with him. He has been there before. It is the only home he ever had. It is his preparatory school for the hulks. The jail nursing-mother to thousands, and not so stony-hearted a step-mother as the streets. He is nobody’s child, nobody save the police knows anything about him, he lives nowhere; but in the eyes of the law he is somebody. He is a figure in a tabular statement, a neat item to finish a column in a report, withal. He is somebody to Colonel Jebb and Mr. Capper of the Home Office, and, in the end, the Ordinary of Newgate, the sheriffs, and, especially, somebody to CALCRAFT. He is somebody to whip, somebody to put to the crank, and into “punishment jackets,” and to “deprive of his bed and gas,” and gag, and drench with water, and choke with salt, and otherwise torture _à la mode de_ Birmingham (Austin’s improved method), somebody to build castellated jails for, somebody to transport, somebody to hang.

There are reformatories, you say, for such as these. Yes, those admirable institutions do exist; but do you know, O easily-satisfied optimist! that police magistrates every day deplore that reformatories, niggardly subsidised by a State grudging in every thing but jails, and gyves, and gibbets, are nine tenths of them full, and can receive no more inmates, even though recommended to them by “the proper authorities?” But the streets are fuller still of strayed lambs, and though wolves devour them by the score each day, the tainted flock of lost ones still increases and increases.

I must tell you, that before the “case of wipes,” as an irreverent bystander called the _procès_ of the pickpocket, was gone into (a good-for-nothing rascal that _filou_, deservedly punished, of course), what are called the night charges were disposed of. As I shall have something to say of the manners and customs of these night charges at another hour in the morning and in another place, I will content myself with informing you now, that a blue bonnet and black silk velvet mantle, charged with being drunk and disorderly in Cheapside the night before, were set at liberty without pecuniary mulct, it being her, or their, first offence; but a white hat with a black band, surmounting a rough coat, cord trousers, and Balbriggan boots, who had fought four omnibus conductors, broken eighteen panes of glass, demolished sundry waiters, and seriously damaged the beadle of the Royal Exchange (off duty, and enjoying the _dulce deripere in loco_ in the shape of cold whiskey-and-water in a shady tavern somewhere up a court of the Poultry)—all in consequence of their (or his) refusal to pay for a bottle of soda-water, was fined in heavy sums—the aggregate cost of his whistle being about six pounds. The white hat was very penitent, and looked (the face under it likewise) very haggard and tired, and, in addition to his, or its, or their penalty, munificently contributed half a sovereign to the poor box. My Lord Mayor was severe but paternal, and hoped with benignant austerity that he might never see the white hat there again; in which hope, and on his part, I daresay the white hat most cordially joined.

I never could make out what they are always doing with paupers at the Mansion House. I never pay his Lordship a visit without finding a bevy of the poor things pottering about in a corner under the care of some workhouse official, and being ultimately called up to be exorcised or excommunicated, or, at all events, to have something done to them, under the New Poor Law Act. This morning there are at least a dozen of them, forlorn, decrepit, shame-faced, little old men, cowering and shivering, although the day is warm enough, in their uncomfortable-looking gray suits. Pauper females seem to be at a discount at the Mansion House, save when, brazen-faced, blear-eyed, and dishevelled, they are dragged in droves to the bar to be committed to Holloway prison, for a month’s hard labour, for shivering innumerable panes of glass, throwing cataracts of gruel about, and expressing an earnest desire to lacerate with sharp cutlery the abdominal economy of the master of the City of London Union. Of incarnations of male impecuniosity, there is a lamentable plenty and to spare.

The pickpocket is succeeded by a distinguished burglar, well known in political—I beg pardon, in police—circles. There is no absolute charge of felony against him at present, and the only cause for his appearance to-day is his having been unfortunate enough to fall in with an acquaintance, who knew him by sight, in the shape of a city police-constable, who forthwith took him into custody for roaming about with intent to commit a felony. My Lord having heard a brief biographical sketch of his career, and being satisfied that he is a “man of mark” in a felonious point of view, sends him to Holloway for three months, which, considering that the fellow has committed, this time, at least, no absolute crime, seems, at the first blush, something very like a gross perversion of justice, and an unwarrantable interference with the liberty of the subject. When subsequently, however, I gather that a few inconsiderable trifles, such as a “jemmy,” a bunch of skeleton keys, a “knuckle duster,” and a piece of wax candle, all articles sufficiently indicative of the housebreaker’s stock-in-trade, have been found in his possession, I cease to quarrel with the decision, and confess that my burglarious friend’s incarceration, if not in strict accordance with law, is based on very sound principles of equity. After the housebreaker, there are two beggar women and a troop of ragged children—twenty-one days; and a most pitiable sight to see and hear—beggar woman, children, and sentence, and their state of life into which it has _not_ pleased Heaven to call, but cruel and perverse man to send them. Then an Irish tailor who has had a slight dispute with his wife the night before, and has corporeally chastised her with a hot goose—a tailor’s goose, be it understood—to the extent of all but fracturing her skull. He is sent for four months’ hard labour, which is rather a pleasurable thing to hear, although I should derive infinitely more delectation from the sentence if it included a sound thrashing.

But, holloa! we have been here three-quarters of an hour, and it is close upon one o’clock. Come, my red-whiskered friend, I think we have had enough of the Mansion House Justice-room. Let us make a bow to his Lordship, and evaporate. You want some lunch, you say—you are hungry now; well, let us go and lunch accordingly; but where?

I mentioned Garraway’s and the Cock. There is the Anti-Gallican, famous for soups. There is Birch’s, with real turtle, fit for Olympian deities to regale upon. There is Joe’s in Finch Lane, if you feel disposed for chop or steak, sausage or bacon, and like to see it cooked yourself on a Brobdignagian gridiron. No: you want something simple, something immediate; well, then, let us go to the Bay Tree.

I never knew exactly the name of the street in which the Bay Tree is situated. I know you go down a narrow lane, and that you will suddenly come upon it, as a jack-in-the-box suddenly comes upon you. The first time I was taken there was by a friend, who, just prior to our arrival at the house of refection, took me up a dark entry, showed me a small court-yard, and, at its extremity, a handsome-looking stone building. _That is Rothschild’s_, he said, and I thought I should have fainted. I am not a City man, and when I come eastward, it is merely (of course) to make a morning call on my friend the Governor of the Bank of England, or the Secretary for India for the time being, at his palace in Leadenhall Street. When I travel in foreign parts, my brougham (of course) takes me to the London Bridge Terminus. Authors never come into the City now-a-days, save to visit their bankers or their publishers. Authors ride blood horses, dine with dukes, and earn ten thousand a year. Such, at least, is the amount of their income surmised to be by the Commissioners of Income Tax, when they assess them arbitrarily and at such a figure their opposing creditors declare their revenue should be estimated, when they petition the Court for the Relief of Insolvent Debtors.

I never sat down in the Bay Tree; though its premises include, I believe, vast apartments for smoking and punch-bibbing purposes. I never looked one of the innumerable assistants (are they barmen or barmaids?) in the face. I was always in such a hurry. All I know of the establishment is, that it is a capital place to lunch at, and that everything is very excellent and very cheap; and that the thousands who resort to it between eleven and three, always seem to be in as desperate a hurry as I am.

ONE P.M.—DOCK LONDON AND DINING LONDON.

This modest series of papers brought me, at the time of their composition, into great trouble, which was very nearly resulting in my complete discomfiture. Perhaps the severest of my trials was having to write the book at all, possessing, as is my misfortune, of course, a constitutional disinclination for the avocation to which I have devoted myself (as a _gagne pain_, or bread-winning mean). I didn’t so much mind the ladies and gentlemen, who, since the commencement of the periodical in which these articles were originally published—ladies and gentlemen personally quite unknown to me—who overwhelmed me with correspondence; some denouncing, others upbraiding, many ridiculing, and a few—a very few—eulogising yours to command. I didn’t so much object to the attentions of those professional begging-letter writers, who are good enough to include authors in their list of possible contributaries, and who were profuse lately in passionate appeals (in bold, clerkly hands) for pecuniary assistance; for though, like Bardolph, I have nothing, and cannot even coin my nose for guineas, or my blood for drachmas, it is not the less flattering to a man’s minor vanities to receive a begging letter. I can imagine an old pauper out for a holiday, coming home to the workhouse, quite elated at having been accosted in the street by a mendicant, and asked for a halfpenny. I could bear with equanimity—nay, could afford to smile at—the people who went about saying things (who _are_ the people who go about saying things, I wonder!) who ingeniously circulated reports that I was dead; that I wrote these papers under a pseudonym; that they were plagiarisms from some others written twenty years ago; and that I never wrote them at all. I disregarded such insinuations serenely; for who among us is exempt from such bald chat? The very stupidest have their Boswells—the very meanest have those to envy them, as well as the Great and Learned! There are people at this very moment, who are going about saying that Jones has pawned his plate, that the bailiffs are in Thompson’s country house, that Robinson has written himself out, that Brown has run away with Jenkins’s wife, that Muggins has taken to brandy-and-water, that Simpkins murdered Eliza Grimwood, that Larkins cut Thistlewood’s head off, and that Podgers was tried at the Old Bailey, in the year ’thirty-five, for an attempt to set the Thames on fire. But I was infinitely harassed while the clock was ticking periodically—the efforts I had to make to keep it from running down altogether!—by the great plague of “Suggesters.” From the metropolitan and suburban postal districts, from all parts of the United Kingdom—the United Kingdom, pshaw! from the Continent generally, and from across the broad Atlantic (fortunately, the return mail from Australia was not yet due)—suggestions poured in as thickly as letters of congratulation on one who has just inherited a vast fortune. If there had been five hundred in lieu of four-and-twenty hours in “Twice Round the Clock,” the Great Suggestions I received had stomach for them all. The Suggesters would take no denial: I was bound under terrific penalties to adopt, endorse, carry out, their hints,—else would they play the dickens with me. I _must_ have a sing-song meeting for nine p.m.; the committee of a burial club at ten; the dissecting-room of an hospital at eleven; a postal receiving-house, a lawyer’s office, a rag, bones, and bottle shop, the tollgate of Waterloo Bridge, and the interior of a Hammersmith ’bus, at some hour or other of the day or night. The Suggestions were oral as well as written. Strange men darted up on me from by-streets, caught at my button with trembling fingers, told me in husky tones of their vast metropolitan experience, and impressed on me the necessity of a graphic tableau of Joe Perks, the sporting barber’s, at one o’clock in the morning. Low-browed merchants popped from shady shell-fish shops, and, pointing to huge lobsters, asked where they could send the crustaceous delicacies with their compliments, and how excellent a thing it would be to give a view of the aristocracy supping at Whelks’s celebrated oyster and kippered salmon warehouse after the play. And, finally, a shy acquaintance of mine, with a face like an over-ripe Stilton cheese, and remotely connected with the Corporation of London—he may be, for aught I know, a ticket-porter in Doctors’ Commons, or a hanger-on to the water bailiff—favoured me with an occult inuendo that a word-picture of the Court of Common Council will be the very thing for four p.m., fluttering before my dazzled eyes a phantom ticket for the Guildhall banquet. In vain I endeavoured to convince these respectable Suggesters, that the papers in question were not commenced without a definite plan of action; that such plan, sketched forth years since, duly weighed, adjusted, and settled, after mature study and deliberation, not only so far as I am concerned, but by “parties” deeply learned in the mysteries of London Life, and versed in the recondite secret of pleasing the public taste, had at length been put into operation, and was no more capable of alteration than were the laws of the Medes and Persians. But all to no purpose did I make these representations. The Suggesters wouldn’t be convinced; their letters continued to flow in. They found out my address at last (they have lost it now, ha, ha!), and knocked my door down; bringing me peremptory letters of introduction from people I didn’t know, or didn’t care five farthings about, or else introducing themselves boldly, in the “Bottle Imp” manner, with an implied “You must learn to love me;” they nosed me in the lobby, and saw me dancing in the hall, and my only refuge at last was to go away. Yes; the pulsations of time had to beat behind the dial of a clock in the rural districts; and these lines were written among the hay and the ripening corn, laughing a bitter laugh to think that the postman was toiling up the quiet street in London with piles of additional suggestions, and that the Suggesters themselves were waiting for me in my usual haunts, in the fond expectation of a button to hold, or an ear to gloze suggestions within.