THE STREETS OF LONDON.
It has been said that “few men know how to take a walk.” In London it requires some experience to know where to take a walk. The taste of the perambulator, the hour of the day, and the season of the year, would each affect materially the decision of the question.
If you are up early—I mean early for London—say ten o’clock—we would start from your hotel in Bond street, and hastening through Regent street and the Quadrant (deserts at that hour) strike into the zig-zag alleys, cutting traversely from Coventry street to Covent Garden. The horses on the cab stand in the Haymarket “are at this hour asleep.” The late supper-eaters at Dubourg’s and the Café de l’Europe were the last infliction upon their galled wisthers, and while dissipation slumbers they may find an hour to hang their heads upon the bit, and forget gall and spavin in the sunshiny drowse of morning. The cabman, too, nods on his perch outside, careless of the custom of “them as pays only their fare,” and quite sure not to get “a gemman to drive” at that unseasonable hour. The “waterman” (called a “water-man,” as he will tell you, “because he gives hay to the ’orses”) leans against the gas-lamp at the corner, looking with a vacant indifference of habit at the splendid coach with its four blood-bays just starting from the Brighton coach-office in the Crescent. The side-walk of Coventry street, usually radiant with the flaunting dresses of the frail and vicious, is now sober with the dull habiliments of the early stirring and the poor. The town, (for this is town, not city) beats its more honest pulse. Industry alone is abroad.
Rupert street on the left is the haunt of shabby-genteel poverty. To its low-doored chop-houses steal the more needy loungers of Regent street, and in confined and greasy, but separate and exclusive boxes, they eat their mutton-chop and potato unseen of their gayer acquaintances. Here comes the half-pay officer, whose half-pay is halved or quartered with wife and children, to drink his solitary half-pint of sherry, and, over a niggardly portion of soup and vegetables, recall, as he may in imagination, the gay dinners at mess, and the companions now grown cold—in death or worldliness! Here comes the sharper out of luck, the debtor newly out of prison. And here comes many a “gay fellow about town,” who will dine to-morrow, or may have dined yesterday, at a table of unsparing luxury, but who now turns up Rupert street at seven, cursing the mischance that draws upon his own slender pocket for the dinner of to-day. Here are found the watchful host and the suspicious waiter—the closely-measured wine, and the more closely-measured attention—the silent and shrinking company, the close-drawn curtain, the suppressed call for the bill, the lingering at the table of those who value the retreat and the shelter to recover from the embarrassing recognition and the objectless saunter through the streets. The ruin, the distress, the despair, that wait so closely upon the heels of fashion, pass here with their victims. It is the last step within the bounds of respectability. They still live “at the West end,” while they dine in Rupert street. They may still linger in the Park, or stroll in Bond street, till their better-fledged friends flit to dinner at the clubs, and, within a stone’s throw of the luxurious tables and the gay mirth they so bitterly remember, sit down to an ill-dressed meal, and satisfy the calls of hunger in silence. Ah, the outskirts of the bright places in life are darker for the light that shines so near them! How much sweeter is the coarsest meal shared with the savage in the wilderness, than the comparative comfort of cooked meats and wine in a neighborhood like this!
Come through this narrow lane into Leicester Square. You cross here the first limit of the fashionable quarter. The Sabloniere hotel is in this square; but you may not give it as your address unless you are a foreigner. This is the home of that most miserable fish out of water—a Frenchman in London. A bad French hotel, and two or three execrable French restaurants, make this spot the most habitable to the exiled habitué of the Palais Royal. Here he gets a mocking imitation of what, in any possible degree, is better than the sacré biftek, or the half-raw mutton-chop and barbarous boiled potato! Here he comes forth, if the sun shine perchance for one hour at noon, and paces up and down on the side-walk, trying to get the better of his bile and his bad breakfast. Here waits for him at three, the shabby, but most expensive remise cab, hired by the day for as much as would support him a month in Paris. Leicester square is the place for conjurors, bird-fanciers, showmen, and generally for every foreign novelty in the line of nostrums and marvels. If there is a dwarf in London, or a child with two heads, you will see one or all in that building, so radiant with placards, and so thronged with beggars.
Come on through Cranbourne alley. Old clothes, second-hand stays, idem shawls, capes, collars, and ladies’ articles of ornamental ware generally; cheap straw bonnets, old books, gingerbread, and stationery! Look at this once-expensive and finely-worked muslin cape! What fair shoulders did it adorn when these dingy flowers were new—when this fine lace edging bounded some heaving bosom, perhaps, like frost-work on the edge of a snow-drift. It has been the property of some minion of elegance and wealth, vicious or virtuous, and by what hard necessity came it here? Ten to one, could it speak, its history would keep us standing at this shop-window, indifferent alike to the curious glances of these passing damsels, and the gentle eloquence of the Jew on the other side, who pays us the unflattering compliment of suggesting an improvement in our toilet by the purchase of the half-worn habiliments he exposes.
I like Cranbourne alley, because it reminds me of Venice. The half-daylight between the high and overhanging roofs, the just audible hum of voices and occupation from the different shops, the shuffling of hasty feet over the smooth flags, and particularly the absence of horses and wheels, make it (in all but the damp air and the softer speech) a fair resemblance to those close passages in the rear of the canals between St. Mark’s and the Rialto. Then I like studying a pawnbroker’s window, and I like ferreting in the old book-stalls that abound here. It is a good lesson in humility for an author to see what he can be bought for in Cranbourne alley. Some “gentle reader,” who has paid a guinea and a half for you, has resold you for two-and-sixpence. For three shillings you may have the three volumes, “as good as new,” and the shopman, by his civility, pleased to be rid of it on the terms. If you would console yourself, however, buy Milton for one-and-sixpence, and credit your vanity with the eighteen-pence of the remainder.
The labyrinth of alleys between this and Covent Garden are redolent of poverty and pot-houses. In crossing St. Martin’s lane, life appears to have become suddenly a struggle and a calamity. Turbulent and dirty women are everywhere visible through the open windows; the half-naked children at the doors look already care-worn and incapable of a smile; and the men throng the gin-shops, bloated, surly, and repulsive. Hurry through this leprous spot in the vast body of London, and let us emerge in the Strand.
You would think London Strand the main artery of the world. I suppose there is no thoroughfare on the face of the earth where the stream of human life runs with a tide so overwhelming. In any other street in the world you catch the eye of the passer-by. In the Strand, no man sees another except as a solid body, whose contact is to be avoided. You are safe nowhere on the pavement without all the vigilance of your senses. Omnibuses and cabs, drays, carriages, wheelbarrows, and porters, beset the street. Newspaper-hawkers, pickpockets, shop-boys, coal-heavers, and a perpetual and selfish crowd dispute the sidewalk. If you venture to look at a print in a shop-window, you arrest the tide of passengers, who immediately walk over you; and, if you stop to speak with a friend, who by chance has run his nose against yours rather than another man’s, you impede the way, and are made to understand it by the force of jostling. If you would get into an omnibus you are quarrelled for by half-a-dozen who catch your eye at once; and after using all your physical strength and most of your discrimination, you are most probably embarked in the wrong one, and are going at ten miles the hour to Blackwell, when you are bound to Islington. A Londoner passes his life in learning the most adroit mode of threading a crowd, and escaping compulsory journeys in cabs and omnibuses; and dine with any man in that metropolis from twenty-five to sixty years of age, and he will entertain you, from the soup to the Curacoa, with his hair-breadth escapes and difficulties with cads and coach-drivers.