Famous Persons and Places

by Nathaniel Parker Willis

LONDON.

A Londoner, if met abroad, answers very vaguely any questions you may be rash enough to put to him about “the city.” Talk to him of “town,” and he would rather miss seeing St. Peter’s, than appear ignorant of any person, thing, custom, or fashion, concerning whom or which you might have a curiosity. It is understood all over the world that the “city” of London is that crowded, smoky, jostling, omnibus and cab-haunted portion of the metropolis of England which lies east of Temple Bar. A kind of debatable country, consisting of the Strand, Covent Garden, and Tottenham Court road, then intervenes, and west of these lies what is called “the town.” A transit from one to the other by an inhabitant of either, is a matter of some forethought and provision. If milord, in Carlton Terrace, for example, finds it necessary to visit his banker in Lombard street, he orders—not the blood bay and the cane tilbury which he is wont to drive in the morning—but the crop roadster in the cab, with the night harness, and Poppet his tiger in plain hat and gaiters. If the banker in Lombard street, on the contrary, emerges from the twilight of his counting-house to make a morning call on the wife of some foreign correspondent, lodging at the Clarendon, he steps into a Piccadilly omnibus, not in the salt-and-pepper creations of his Cheapside tailor, but (for he has an account with Stultz also for the west-end business) in a claret-colored frock of the last fashion at Crockford’s, a fresh hat from New Bond street, and (if he is young) a pair of cherished boots from the Rue St. Honore. He sits very clear of his neighbors on the way, and, getting out at the crossing at Farrance’s, the pastry cook, steps in and indulges in a soup, and then walks slowly past the clubs to his rendezvous, at a pace that would ruin his credit irrevocably if practised a mile to the eastward. The difference between the two migrations is, simply, that though the nobleman affects the plainness of the city, he would not for the world be taken for a citizen; while the junior partner of the house of Firkins and Co. would feel unpleasantly surprised if he were not supposed to be a member of the Clubs, lounging to a late breakfast.

There is a “town” manner, too, and a “city” manner, practised with great nicety by all who frequent both extremities of London. Nothing could be in more violent contrast, for example, than the manner of your banker when you dine with him at his country house, and the same person when you meet him on the narrow sidewalk in Throgmorton street. If you had seen him first in his suburban retreat, you would wonder how the deuce such a cordial, joyous, spare-nothing sort of good fellow could ever reduce himself to the cautious proportions of Change alley. If you met him first in Change alley, on the contrary, you would wonder, with quite as much embarrassment, how such a cold, two-fingered, pucker-browed slave of Mammon could ever, by any license of interpretation, be called a gentleman. And when you have seen him in both places, and know him well, if he is a favorable specimen of his class, you will be astonished still more to see how completely he will sustain both characters—giving you the cold shoulder, in a way that half insults you, at twelve in the morning, and putting his home, horses, cellar, and servants, completely at your disposal at four in the afternoon. Two souls inhabit the banker’s body, and each is apparently sole tenant in turn. As the Hampstead early coach turns the corner by St. Giles’s, on its way to the bank, the spirit of gain enters into the bosom of the junior Firkins, ejecting, till the coach passes the same spot at three in the afternoon, the more gentlemanly inhabitants. Between those hours, look to Firkins for no larger sentiment than may be written upon the blank lines of a note of hand, and expect no courtesy that would occupy the head or hands of the junior partner longer than one second by St. Paul’s. With the broad beam of sunshine that inundates the returning omnibus emerging from Holborn into Tottenham Court road, the angel of port wine and green fields passes his finger across Firkins’s brow, and presto! the man is changed. The sight of a long and narrow strip of paper, sticking from his neighbor’s pocket, depreciates that person in his estimation, he criticises the livery and riding of the groom trotting past, says some very true things of the architecture of the new cottage on the roadside, and is landed at the end of his own shrubbery, as pleasant and joyous-looking a fellow as you would meet on that side of London. You have ridden out to dine with him, and as he meets you on the lawn, there is still an hour to dinner, and a blood horse spatters round from the stables, which you are welcome to drive to the devil if you like, accompanied either by Mrs. Firkins or himself; or, if you like it better, there are Mrs. Firkins’s two ponies, and the chaise holds two and the tiger. Ten to one Mrs. Firkins is a pretty woman, and has her whims, and when you are fairly on the road, she proposes to leave the soup and champagne at home to equalize their extremes of temperature, drive to Whitehall Stairs, take boat and dine, extempore, at Richmond. And Firkins, to whom it will be at least twenty pounds out of pocket, claps his hands and says—“By Jove, it’s a bright thought! touch up the near pony, Mrs. Firkins.” And away you go, Firkins amusing himself the whole way from Hampstead to Richmond, imagining the consternation of his cook and butler when nobody comes to dine.

There is an aristocracy in the city, of course, and Firkins will do business with twenty persons in a day whom he could never introduce to Mrs. Firkins. The situation of that lady with respect to her society is (she will tell you in confidence) rather embarrassing. There are very many worthy persons, she will say, who represent large sums of money or great interests in trade, whom it is necessary to ask to the Lodge, but who are far from being ornamental to her new blue-satin boudoir. She has often proposed to Firkins to have them labelled in tens and thousands, according to their fortunes; that if, by any unpleasant accident, Lord Augustus should meet them there, he might respect them like = in algebra, for what they stand for. But as it is, she is really never safe in calculating on a société choisie to dine or sup. When Hook or Smith is just beginning to melt out, or Lady Priscilla is in the middle of a charade, in walks Mr. Snooks, of the foreign house of Snooks, Son, and Co.—“unexpectedly arrived from Lisbon, and run down without ceremony to call on his respectable correspondent.”

“Isn’t it tiresome?”

“Very, my dear madam! But then you have the happiness of knowing that you promote very essentially your husband’s interests, and when he has made a plum——”

“Yes, very true; and then, to be sure, Firkins has had to build papa a villa, and buy my brother Wilfred a commission, and settle an annuity on my aunt, and fit out my youngest brother Bob to India; and when I think of what he does for my family, why I don’t mind making now and then a sacrifice—but, after all, it’s a great evil not to be able to cultivate one’s own class of society.”

And so murmurs Mrs. Firkins, who is the prettiest and sweetest creature in the world, and really loves the husband she married for his fortune; but as the prosperity of Haman was nothing while Mordecai sat at the gate, it is nothing to Mrs. Firkins that her father lives in luxury, that her brothers are portioned off, and that she herself can have blue boudoirs and pony-chaises ad libitum, while Snooks, Son and Co. may at any moment break in upon the charade of Lady Priscilla!

There is a class of business people in London, mostly bachelors, who have wisely declared themselves independent of the West End, and live in a style of their own in the dark courts and alleys about the Exchange, but with a luxury not exceeded even in the silken recesses of May Fair. You will sometimes meet at the opera a young man of decided style, unexceptionable in his toilet, and quiet and gentlemanlike in his address, who contents himself with the side alley of the pit, and looks at the bright circles of beauty and fashion about him with an indifference it is difficult to explain. Make his acquaintance by chance, and he takes you home to supper in a plain chariot on the best springs Long Acre can turn out; and while you are speculating where, in the name of the Prince of Darkness, these narrow streets will bring you to, you are introduced through a small door into saloons, perfect in taste and luxury, where, ten to one, you sup with the prima donna, or la première danseuse, but certainly with the most polished persons of your own sex, not one of whom, though you may have passed a life in London, you ever met in society before. There are, I doubt not, in that vast metropolis, hundreds of small circles of society, composed thus of persons refined by travel and luxury, whose very existence in unsuspected by the fine gentleman at the West End, but who, in the science of living agreeably, are almost as well entitled to rank among the cognoscenti as Lord Sefton or the “Member for Finsbury.”