Harper's Round Table, March 23, 1897

Copyright, 1897, by Harper & Brothers. All Rights Reserved.

Portsmouth, as I remember the place in the days of my early youth—say, somewhere about the years 1844 to 1850—was surely the liveliest place, the most full of action, movement, and life, of any in her Majesty's dominions, which were then half as wide as they are at present. Not as a place of industry; there was never, if you please, any industry at all carried on in that town outside the Dock-yard, except of course the industry of fleecing the sailor. This was a merry and an exhilarating sport, because the sailor himself enjoyed being fleeced, entered thoroughly into the spirit of the game, and neither resented nor regretted what he knew would be the end of it—viz., the loss of all his money. Nor, again, could the town be considered picturesque. Somehow, Portsmouth always escaped any beauty of buildings and streets. There was, it is true, a late eighteenth-century look about most of the streets; there was one old church within the Walls; there was a square low tower at the end of High Street which looked well; there were Gates in the Walls; and there was the Domus Dei , the ancient garrison chapel, then not yet discovered or restored. There must have been, I suppose, a time when the High Street and St. Thomas's Street and St. Mary's Street were built with gabled houses and with timbered fronts, but they had all disappeared long before my time.
The real centre of the town was, of course, the Common Hard—which is one of the streets of the world like the Cannebière of Marseilles, the King's Road of Brighton, or the High Street of Oxford. Portsmouth cannot be conceived as existing without the Common Hard. It is a broad street facing the harbor; at one end are the gates of the Dock-yard; at the other, a police station, in front of which at one time stood a pair of stocks. The magistrates, in their wisdom, revived this time-honored punishment for a while, but I believe it did not answer. Certainly I myself once saw a man in the stocks. I must have been a child of six or eight at the time, but I remember him well, because I was immensely impressed with the shamefulness of it, and I expected to see the prisoner hanging his head and weeping. Not a bit, if you please. The hardened villain sat up, faced the foot-lights, and grinned merrily all the time.