POND STREET.
Pond Street—evidently the fashionable street in the eighteenth century for the reception of visitors of the class dignified as the ‘quality’—appears to have been in the early years of this, the Harley Street of Hampstead. Here resided Baron Dimsdale, in a house on the left side of the road going down, the physician who inoculated the Empress Catherine of Russia for small-pox. It will be remembered, to the Empress’s credit, that she requested him to leave the country as soon as possible after the operation, as in the event of her death he would be held guilty of it.
Dr. Rodd, Dr. Lond, and various other medical men, lived in Pond Street.
I can remember it with a row of trees on the right-hand side of the way as you entered it from the highroad, and a strip of greensward running down it—a quiet street of formal appearance, with an air of genteel frigidity characteristic of its period.
It was in Pond Street that ‘poor Kirkman,’ as Keats sympathetically calls him, ‘fell amongst thieves,’ who stopped and beat and robbed him of his watch. He had been visiting the poet at Wentworth Place, and left about half-past eight in the evening, and was on his way to the London Road, probably intending to meet the coach there, when he was waylaid, maltreated and robbed. This was in 1818, so that the middle passage between Hampstead and the Metropolis was not even then without its danger.
Keats, writing to his brother some days after the event, tells him he had been to see Kirkman, who had not recovered of his bruises.