Part 15

Look at these labourers, and wonder. For it is matter for astonishment to know that among these meanly-clad, frequently ragged men, coarse, dirty, and repulsive in aspect, there are very many who have been tenderly bred and nurtured; who have been, save the mark, gentlemen! who have received University educations and borne the Queen’s commission. And here also are the draff and husks of foreign immigration; Polish, German, and Italian exiles. They have come to this—down to this—up to this, if you choose; come to the old, old level, as old as Gardener Adam’s time, of earning the daily bread by the sweat of the brow. It were better so than to starve; better so than to steal.

[Illustration: ONE O’CLOCK P.M.: DINING ROOMS IN BUCKLERSBURY.]

What time the dock-labourers have finished lunch, another very meritorious class of human ants begin their prandial repasts. With just one thought at the vast number of merchants’, brokers’, shipping-agents’, warehousemen’s, wholesale dealers’ counting-houses that exist in London city, you will be able to form an idea of the legions of clerks, juniors and seniors, who, invariably early-breakfasting men, must get seriously hungry at one p.m. Some I know are too proud to dine at this patriarchal hour. They dine, after office hours, at Simpson’s, at the Albion, at the London, or, save us, at the Wellington. They go even further west, and patronise Feetum’s, or the Scotch Stores in Regent Street, merely skating out, as it were, for a few minutes at noon, for a snack at that Bay Tree to which I have already alluded. Many, and they are the married clerks, bring neat parcels with them, containing sandwiches or bread-and-cheese, consuming those refreshments in the counting-house. In the very great houses, it is not considered etiquette to dine during office-hours, save on foreign-post nights. As to the extremely junior clerks, or office-boys, as they are irreverently termed, they eat whatever they can get, and whenever they can get it, very frequently getting nothing at all. But there are yet hundreds upon hundreds of clerks who consume an orthodox dinner of meat, vegetables, and cheese—and on high days and holidays pudding—at one p.m. Their numbers are sufficient to cram almost to suffocation the eating-houses of Cheapside, the Poultry, Mark Lane, Cornhill, and especially Bucklersbury. Of late years there has been an attempt to change the eating-houses of Cheapside into pseudo “restaurants.” Seductive announcements, brilliantly emblazoned, and showily framed and glazed, have been hung up, relating to “turtle” and “venison;” salmon, with wide waddling mouths, have gasped in the windows; and insinuating mural inscriptions have hinted at the existence of “Private dining-rooms for ladies.” Now, whatever can ladies—though I have the authority of Mr. Charles Dibdin and my own lips for declaring that there are fine ones in the city—want to come and dine in Cheapside for? At these restaurants they give you things with French names, charge you a stated sum for attendance, provide the pale ale in silver tankards, and take care of your hat and coat; but I like them not—neither, I believe, do my friends, the one-o’clock-dining clerks. Either let me go to Birch’s or the Anti-Gallican, or let me take my modest cut of roast and boiled, my “one o’ taters,” my “cheese and sallary,” at an eating-house in Bucklersbury—such a one as my _alter ego_, Mr. M’Connell, has here presented for your edification. And his pictured morals must eke out my written apophthegms—for this sheet is full.

TWO P.M.—FROM REGENT STREET TO HIGH CHANGE.

I breathe again. I see before me, broad-spread, a vista of gentility. I have done, for many hours to come, with shabby subjects. No more dams I’ll make for fish—in Billingsgate; nor scrape trencher, nor wash dish, at second-rate eating-houses; nor fetch firing at requiring in Covent Garden or the Docks. Prospero must get a new man, for Caliban has got a new master: Fashion, in Regent Street.

I declare that when I approach this solemnly-genteel theme, my frame dilates, my eyes kindle, my heart dances. I experience an intense desire to array myself in purple and fine linen, knee shorts, lace ruffles, pink silk stockings, diamond buckles, and a silver-hilted sword; to have my hair powdered, and my jewelled _tabatière_ filled with scented rappee; to sit with my feet on a Turkey carpet, before a table inlaid with _marqueterie_, wax candles in silver sconces (the candles all green, with fillagree _bobeches_) on either side; and then—while my Dulcinea in a hoop petticoat, a point lace apron, red-heeled _mules_, a _toupet_ and a _mouche_ on the left cheek, her feathered fan, painted by Fragonard on the finest chicken-skin, lying beside her—plays the minuet from “Ariadne” in an adjoining and gilded _salon_, decorated in the _Style Pompadour_, on the harpsichord; and on pink scented note-paper, with a diamond pointed pen and violet ink—the golden pounce-box at my elbow—then under these circumstances and with these luxurious appliances around me, I think I could manage to devote myself to the task of inditing matter concerning Regent Street in the smoothest dythrambics. This is rather a violent contrast to the dry skittle-ground, the cows, and the depraved sow which inspired me in the last chapter; but only take my subject into consideration: only permit me to inoculate you with one drop of the ethereal nectar which should be quaffed by every writer who would look upon Regent Street from a proper point of view. Ladies and gentlemen moving in the polite circles have—but that is long ago—accused me of being of Bohemia, and to that manner born; of writing a great deal too much about the Virginian weed in its manufactured state, and the fermented infusion of malt and hops; publishers have refused to purchase my novels because they contained too many descriptions of “low life;” because my heroes and heroines were too frequently ragged and forlorn creatures, who didn’t go into “society,” who didn’t go to church, who were never seen at the May meetings in Exeter Hall, but who went to public-houses and penny-gaffs instead. Oh, lords and ladies! oh, brilliant butterflies of society! oh, respectable people of every degree! whose ear coarse language wounds, but who would have, believe me, to undergo much coarser deeds from the ragged ones you despise, were it not for the humble efforts of us poor pen-and-ink missionaries; O salt ones of the earth! think that you are but hundreds among the millions of the tattered and torn, who have never studied the “Handbook to Etiquette,” nor heard of Burke and Debrett, and who would eat peas with their knives if they had any peas to eat—Heaven help them! They are around and about you always. I have no greed of gain in advocating their cause, for I am unknown to them, and am of your middle class, and am as liable to be stoned by the ragged ones for having a better coat than they any day. But woe be to you, respectables, if you shut your ears to their plaints and your eyes to their condition. For the stones may fly thick and fast some day; there may be none to help you, and it may be too late to cry for help.

I have heard Regent Street compared to the Boulevard des Italiens, to Unter-den-Linden at Berlin, to Broadway at New York, to the Montagne de la Cour at Brussels, to the Corso de’ Servi at Milan, to the Toledo at Naples, to George Street, Sydney, and to the Nevskoi Perspective at Petersburg. In my opinion, Regent Street is an amalgamation of all these streets, and surpasses them all. Their elements are strained, filtered, refined, condensed, sublimated, to make up one glorious thoroughfare. Add to this, the unique and almost indescribable _cachet_ which the presence of English aristocracy lends to every place it chooses for its frequentation, and the result is Regent Street. Of the many cities I have wandered into and about, there is but one possessing a street that can challenge comparison with—and that, I must confess, well nigh equals—the street that Nash, prince of architects, built for the fourth George. At a right angle from the pleasant waters of the river Liffey, there runs a street, wide in dimensions, magnificent in the proportions of its edifices, splendid in its temples and its palaces, though many of the latter, alas! are converted now into hotels, now into linen-drapers’ shops; but on a golden summer’s afternoon, when you see, speeding towards the column of Nelson in the distance, the glittering equipages of the rich and noble, who yet have their dwelling in Eblana; the clattering orderlies, on sleek-groomed horses, and with burnished accoutrements, spurring from the Castle towards the Post Office—and, beauty of beauties, the side walks on either hand converted into parterres of living flowers, the grand and glorious Irish girls, with their bright raiment and brighter eyes; you will acknowledge that Regent Street has a rival, that beyond St. George’s Channel is a street that the triumphal procession of a Zenobia or a Semiramis might pass down, and that the queen of streets is Sackville Street, Dublin.

Do you know, youth of the present generation—for I fondly hope that I have good store of juveniles among my readers—that Regent Street has its antiquities, its archæologia, its topographical curiosities? Mr. Peter Cunningham knows them all by heart; I am not about to steal from the “Handbook of London” of our modern Camden; but will just tell you, in my desultory way, that, in the days when the Mews reared their head, an unsightly mass of brick buildings, in the area which is now Trafalgar Square; when Carlton House loomed at the eastern end of Pall Mall, instead of the ugly post erected as a monument of national gratitude to the Royal Duke who paid nobody; when the Golden Cross, Charing Cross, was hemmed in by a cobweb mass of dirty tenements, and Hungerford Market was yet a mass of fishy hovels ungraced by Hungerford Hall and Mr. Gatti’s penny-ice shop; when the old “Courier” newspaper office stood (over-against Mr. Cross’s older Exeter ’Change, with the elephant’s tusks displayed outside, the shops beneath, and Chunee and the wild beasts all alive and roaring upstairs) in the space that now forms the approach to Waterloo Bridge; and when the vicinity of Temple Bar was blocked up by a brick-and-mortar _cloaca_, since swept away to form what is now termed Picket Place. Are you at all aware, neophytes in topographical lore, that the area of Regent Street the superb, was occupied by mean and shambling tenth-rate avenues, among which the chiefest was a large, dirty highway, called Great Swallow Street? Old Fuller (I don’t know why he should be called “old” so persistently, for he did not attain anything like a venerable age) was in the habit of collecting information for the “Worthies of England” from the tottering crones who sat spinning by the ingle-nook, and from the white-headed grand-sires sunning themselves on the bench by the almshouse door. In like manner, I owe much of the information I possess on the aspect of London streets, at the time just previous to my nonage, to communing with nurses and nurses’ female friends. The good folks who tend children, seldom deem that the little pitchers they say jestingly have long ears, will suck their lore in so greedily, or retain it so long.

My personal acquaintance with Regent Street dates from the year ’thirty-two, when I remember a great scrambling procession of operatives, with parti-coloured flags, emblazoned with devices I could not read, passing down it. Mrs. Esner, who was then attached to my person in a domestic capacity (she often calls upon me now, and, saying that she “nussed” me, expatiates on the benefits of a pound of green tea), told me that these operatives belonged to the “Trades Union.” She said—though the good woman must have exaggerated—that they were half a million in number, and I recollect her portending, in a grave low voice, that there would be riots that night. I don’t think that any occurred; but long after, whenever I saw a crowd I used to ask whether “there would be any riots” that night, just as I might have inquired whether there would be any bread-and-butter for tea. This was about the time that they used to call the great Duke of Wellington “Nosey,” and “Sawbones,” and to break his windows. I was too young to know then, that the Athenians grew tired of hearing Aristides called “The Just;” and that a nation once grumbled at having to pay for the palace it had bestowed upon that John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, who won the battle of Blenheim. I think, too, there must have been something about the Cholera in my earliest recollections of Regent Street; yet, no: I lived in North Audley Street at that time, and opposite the mansion of the great Earl of Clarendon; for, as clearly as though it were yesterday, I see now in the eye to which the attention of Horatio, friend of Hamlet Prince of Denmark, was directed—a hot autumn afternoon. I am at the nursery-window in sad disgrace, and pouting because I have wrenched the sprightly wooden hussar from the horse which had the semi-circle of wire with the bullet at the end fixed in his stomach, and who used, with that impetus, to swing so deftly. There is much commotion in the great earl’s mansion; for one of the servants partook too plentifully last night of gooseberry-fool after a rout his lordship gave—where are the “routs” and the “gooseberry-fools” now?—and she is dead this morning of cholera morbus. My female _entourage_ are unanimously exacting in calling it cholera “morbus.” The undertaker’s men bring the body out; the shell gleams white in the afternoon’s sunshine, and it is begirt with cords; “for,” says the domestic oracles behind me, “it was so mortal swole that it would ’ave bust else.” A horrible rumour runs about, that the coffin has been “pitched and sealed.” What can “pitching and sealing” mean? There is a great crowd before the earl’s door, who are violent and clamorous, because rumour—a servant’s hall, an area gate, a coachman from-the-house-to-his-wife-in-the-mews rumour—bruits it about that the body has not been washed. My nurse says that they will have to send for the “padroll” with “cut-lashes.” All these things sink into my little mind; and then the whole sequel, with a train of years behind it, fade away, leaving me with but one more recollection—that we had a twopenny cottage-loaf boiled in milk that day for dinner, which was consequently swollen to twice its natural size; and which the Eumenides of the nursery authoritatively assured me was, with brown sugar, the “best puddin’ out.” I know now that congested loaf to have been an insipid swindle.

I am again in Regent Street, but at another window, and in another house. There is no nurse now, but a genteel young woman, aged about thirty—she asked me once, for fun, how old she was, and I guessed, in all youthful seriousness, fifty, whereupon she slapped me—to take care of me. Her name is Sprackmore, she has long corkscrew ringlets, and is very pious, and beneath her auspices I first study the “Loss of the _Kent_ East Indiaman,” and the “Dairyman’s Daughter.” She has fits, too, occasionally. I am just of that age to be a hollow-eyed little boy in a tunic, with a frill and a belt, and to be dreadfully afraid of the parent I used a year before to love and caress with such fearless confidence. They say I am a clever child, and my cleverness is encouraged by being told that I am not to ask questions, and that I had much better go and play with my toys than mope over that big volume of Lyttelton’s “History of England,” lent to me by Mr. Somebody, the lawyer—I see him now, very stout and gray, at the funeral whenever any of us dies: of which volume—it is in very shabby condition—I break the top-cover off by letting it fall from the chair, which is my reading-desk. I suffer agonies of terror and remorse for months, lest the fracture should be discovered, though I have temporarily repaired it by means of a gimlet and a piece of twine. Then, one bright day, my cousin Sarah gives me a bright five-shilling piece—I take her to the opera now, but she always remembers my childish dependence upon her, and insists upon paying the cab home—and take Lyttelton’s “History,” still with great fear and trembling, to a bookbinder’s in Broad Street, Golden Square, who tells me that the “hends is jagged,” and that there must be a new back, lettering, and gilding to the book. He works his will with it, and charges me four shillings and sixpence out of the five shilling-piece for working it; but to tell of the joyful relief I feel when I bring Lyttelton’s “History” back safe and sound! I do not get rid of my perturbation entirely, however, till I have rubbed the back against the carpet a little to soil it, in order that it may not look too new. Oh! the agonies, the Laocoon-like conscience windings, the Promethean tortures, that children suffer through these accidental breakages! Oh! the unreasoning cruelty of parents, who punish children for such mischances! So I am the little boy in a tunic; and I daresay that, with my inquisitiveness, and my moping over books, I am an intolerable little nuisance. I am at the Regent Street window, and much speculation is rife as to whether the King, who is lying mortally sick at Windsor, is dead. For it is within a few minutes of eleven, and at that time the well-known troop of Horse Guards pass on their way to St. James’s; and it is reasonably inferred that, if King William be gathered to his fathers, the standard will be furled. The Guards pass; they wore helmets, with plumes above them shaped like black mutton chops—not the casques with the flowing horse-hair they wear now; and to be sure the standard is furled, in a species of drab umbrella case. The King is dead for sure; nay, he does not die for a full week afterwards; the flag was merely furled because the day was dark and lowering, presaging rain.

[Illustration: TWO O’CLOCK P.M.: REGENT STREET.]