Old Chelsea: A Summer-Day's Stroll

Transcribed from the 1889 T. Fisher Unwin edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
BY BENJAMIN ELLIS MARTIN
ILLUSTRATED BY JOSEPH PENNELL
London T FISHER UNWIN 26 Paternoster Square 1889
The stroll described in these pages may be imagined to be taken during the summer of 1888: all the dates, descriptions, and references herein having been brought down to the present moment.
The specimen of Old Chelsea ware on the cover is an accurate copy—reduced in size, naturally—of one of the plates of the set belonging once to Dr. Johnson, now in Holland House. For the privilege of this unique reproduction I am indebted to the courtesy of Lady Holland.
B. E. M.
London, August , 1888
“Out of monuments, names, wordes, proverbs, traditions, private recordes and evidences, fragments of stories, passages of bookes, and the like, we doe save and re-cover somewhat from the deluge of Time.”— Bacon , “ Advancement of Learning ”, Book II . “I have always loved to wander over the scenes inhabited by men I have known, admired, loved, or revered, as well amongst the living as the dead. The spots inhabited and preferred by a great man during his passage on the earth have always appeared to me the surest and most speaking relic of himself: a kind of material manifestation of his genius—a mute revelation of a portion of his soul—a living and sensible commentary on his life, actions, and thoughts.”— Lamartine , “ Pilgrimage to the Holy Land .” “The man that is tired of London is tired of existence.”— Samuel Johnson .
I had strolled, on a summer day, from Apsley House towards the then residence of Charles Reade at Knightsbridge, when I came upon one of those surprises of which London is still so full to me, even after more than a dozen years of fond familiarity with its streets and with all that they mean to the true lover of the Town. For, as I watched the ceaseless traffic of the turbulent turnings from the great thoroughfare down towards Chelsea, there came to my mind a phrase in the pages of its local historian: who, writing but a little earlier than the year 1830, points with pride to a project just then formed for the laying out of the latest of these very streets—at that day it was a new rural road cut through fields and swamps—and by it, he says, “Chelsea will obtain direct connection with London; and henceforth must be considered an integral part of the Great Metropolis of the British Empire”! It is hard to realise that only fifty years ago Chelsea was a rustic and retired village, far from London: even as was Islington, fifty years ago, when Charles Lamb, pensioned and set free from his desk in the India House, retired to that secluded spot with his sister to live “in a cottage, with a spacious garden,” as he wrote; with “the New River, rather elderly by this time, running in front (if a moderate walking pace can be so termed)”: even as was Kensington—“the old court suburb pleasantly situated on the great Western road”—just fifty years ago, when wits and statesmen drove between fields and market gardens to the rival courts of Gore House and of Holland House; and N. P. Willis delighted the feminine readers of the New York Mirror with his gossip about his visits to Lady Blessington and about the celebrities who bowed before her. To-day all these villages, along with many even more remote, are one with London. Yet, more than any of them, has Chelsea kept its old village character—albeit preserving but few of its old village features. Of the many magnificent mansions which gave it the name of “The Village of Palaces” five alone still stand—Blacklands, Gough, Lindsey, Stanley and Walpole Houses—and these are greatly altered. I shall show you all of them in our stroll to-day. In between them, and away beyond them, streets have been cut, new quarters built: made up in part of “genteel” villas and rows of respectable residences; but in great part, also, of cheap dwellings, of small and shabby shops. These extremes render much of modern Chelsea utterly uninteresting, except mayhap to the collector of rents or to the inspector of nuisances. Yet much of that which is truly ancient and honourable has been fondly kept untouched, and not ignobly cleaned, as in next-door Kensington. Alongside this artistic squalor we have the curious contrast of artistic splendour in a blazing, brand-new quarter, of which the sacred centre is Tite Street. Here, amid much that is good and genuine in our modern manner, there is an aggressive affectation of antiquity shown by the little houses and studios obtruding on the street, by the grandiose piles of mansions towering on the embankment: all in raging red brick, and in the so-called Queen Anne style. The original article, deadly dull and decorous as it may be, has yet a decent dignity of its own as a real relic, not found in this painful pretence of ancient quaintness. This is a quarter, however, much in vogue; mighty swells dwell here, and here pose some famous farceurs in art and literature; here, too, work many earnest men and women in all pursuits of life. These latter plentifully people every part of Chelsea, for the sake of the seclusion and the stillness they seek and here find: just as there settled here for the same reasons, two centuries ago and earlier, men of learning and of wealth, scholars and nobles, who kept themselves exclusive by virtue of their birth or their brains. And so this privileged suburb,