FOOTNOTES:
[4] “The supper was elegant. Johnson had directed that a magnificent hot apple-pie should make part of it, and this he would have stuck with bay leaves, because, forsooth, Mrs. Lennox had written verses, and, further, he had prepared for her a crown of bays with which, but not till he had invoked the Muses by some ceremonies of his own invention, he encircled her brows.”
The first literary child whose birth was here celebrated was a dreary novel called The Female Quixote, or the Adventures of Arabella.
CHAPTER VIII
DR. JOHNSON’S HOMES AND HAUNTS
Whoe’er has travelled life’s dull round,
Where’er his stages may have been,
May sigh to think he still has found
The warmest welcome at an inn.
Shenstone.
It is a common belief that Fleet Street is dotted with houses which were Dr. Johnson’s homes in later years, and with the taverns in which he sat drinking tea and talking philosophy till the small hours of the morning. It is not so. The Doctor’s house at No. 1 Inner Temple Lane has given way to “Johnson’s Buildings.”
In Johnson’s Court (named after Thomas Johnson, citizen and merchant taylor, and one of the Common Council from 1598 till his death in 1625) the Doctor lived from 1765 to 1776, and during his “journey” in Scotland humorously described himself as “Johnson of that Ilk.” The house (No. 7) has, however, gone the way of all bricks and mortar. In 1776 he removed to No. 8 Bolt Court, where he passed the rest of his life. The house was demolished soon after his death. In fact there is only one house—No. 17 Gough Square—on which we can look and say, “Here dwelt Dr. Johnson.”
Gough Square itself has undergone inevitable alteration, but fortunately for the devotee, at the western end the Doctor’s house, No. 17, still stands intact. Here his wife died in 1752, and here he completed his Dictionary in 1755. In his note book for 1831, Carlyle mentions having paid a visit to the house and interviewed the occupant, who was apparently under the impression that his illustrious predecessor in the tenancy had been a schoolmaster. So he had been, and one of his pupils, a pupil of whom any master might have been proud, was David Garrick. But the tenant knew not that schoolmastering had long been abandoned when the Doctor was compiling his Dictionary in that by no means majestic abode. On the right-hand side of the doorway the Society of Arts has placed a plaque with the following inscription:—
DR. SAMUEL
JOHNSON
Author
Lived Here
B. 1709. D. 1784.
CHAPTER IX
THE “CHEESE” AND ITS FARE—A GREAT FALL IN PUDDING
Resurgam.
La découverte d’un mets nouveau fait plus pour le bonheur du genre humain que la découverte d’une étoile.—Brillat-Savarin.
If, as Brillat-Savarin says, the discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of mankind than the discovery of a star, how much more deserving of human gratitude is the discoverer of the “Cheese” pudding than a Herschel or an Adams?
The Sportsman of March 30, 1887, has a long and eulogistic article on the “Cheese,” but exigencies of space preclude its being quoted in its entirety. The writer says: “Happily the most famous of London ancient taverns is left to us in the Old Cheshire Cheese, which is yet nightly haunted by the shade of Dr. Johnson, whose modern prototypes still enjoy their steaks and punch, and discuss politics, polemics, and plays, though they wear short hair and masher collars instead of full-bottomed wigs and ruffles.
“The ‘Old C.C.’ is a retiring, respectable, very conservative, and hoary-headed aristocrat of the bygone school. Changes are made with a very rebellious spirit, and the introduction of a patent American machine for squeezing lemons savoured so much of modern progress that its appearance nearly raised a riot amongst the patrons of the sawdust-strewed bar. The ‘Cheese’ has no glaring front, nor does it invite custom by acres of plate glass, glittering gasaliers, or gorgeous frescoes. A modest representation of a cheese in dingy glass does duty for a sign, so far as the street of Fleet is concerned. The house has its school of customers, who look upon it as a species of club, without the expense of entrance fee. How old the original edifice was I am not prepared to say, but I notice by an ancient sideboard that it was rebuilt in 1667.
“Inside, the hostelry has a curiously quaint, old-world appearance, and this has been jealously preserved to good purpose by successive proprietors. Rebuilt, decorated in the prevailing style of public-house architecture, the ‘Old C.C.’ would have nothing to recommend it over scores—nay, hundreds—of its fellows.
“The dining-room is fitted with rows of wooden benches and wooden tables without the slightest pretence of show. But the cloths are white and clean, and the cutlery bright, while the china service is of that ancient and undemonstrative blue design which delighted our forefathers, and is known as the willow pattern.... On the walls hang three prominent objects, a barometer, a print of Dr. Johnson, and an old oil painting by Wageman, representing the interior of the room, with a gentleman trying his steak with his knife; a waiter holding up a port wine cork in the well-known attitude ‘two with you’; and a cat rubbing her oleaginous hide in anxious expectation against the leg of the settle. This picture, like one in the bar, is an heirloom, or rather a fixture, which cannot be sold—‘for ever and ever, amen!’—but must pass from landlord to landlord.
“Upstairs there are extensive ranges of kitchens where burnt sacrifices are being perpetually offered up in the shape of mutton and beef; a dining-room and a smoke-room, dark-panelled and cosy, where a man may forget the world and be lost to it during a much coveted mid-day rest. Of other rooms on other floors no man knoweth, save that in rumours it is alleged there have been private parties over marrow-bones and puddings, a theory which is well borne out by echoes of peals of laughter, and the popping of champagne corks. Whatever the place may be above, however, it has no comparison with the glories that lie below the paving. The privileged few who are allowed to go into the wondrous cellars—redolent of sawdust, cobweb-coated, and covered with dust—wander amidst avenues of wine-bins with wonder and astonishment at the space occupied underground as compared with the upper regions. The entrance to the cellars is in the dingy office in the street of Fleet, which is devoted to the wholesale department, and here a record is kept of the rich old ports and generous clarets sleeping below, with the merry devils of laughter bottled up in quarts and magnums in overcoats of pink and foil. No man could remember them, be his experience as a cellar-man what it may.
“The ‘Old C.C.’ is a fine record of the passing seasons. When genial spring has brought forward vegetation, the waiter’s cheerful intimation that ‘Asparagus is on, sir,’ recalls the fact forcibly to your notice. When, later, ‘’Am and peas’ can be secured, the vision of early summer is perfect, and is not even disturbed by boiled beans and bacon. In the hot, sultry days, cool salads are appropriate, and when these disappear there is a closing in of daylight and a general warning that the year is past its prime. Then does the ‘Cheese’ draw its blinds and light its gas, stoke up its fires, and announce its great puddings. Yet further ahead, when raw November days come upon us, the savoury smell of Irish stew—that fine winter lining for the hungry—pervades the place and so the season goes round. Of all the changes brought about by the rolling year, however, none is so popular as the advent of
THE PUDDING,
though it means frost, and damp, and cold winds. The pudding (italics for ‘the,’ please,) has no rival in size or quality. Its glories have been sung in every country. The pudding ranges from fifty to sixty, seventy, and eighty pounds’ weight, and gossip has it that in the dim past the rare dish was constructed to proportions of a hundredweight. It is composed of a fine light crust in a huge basin, and there are entombed therein beefsteaks, kidneys, oysters, larks, mushrooms, and wondrous spices and gravies, the secret of which is known only to the compounder. The boiling process takes about
SIXTEEN TO TWENTY HOURS,
and the smell on a windy day has been known to reach as far as the Stock Exchange. The process of carving the pudding on Wednesdays and Saturdays is a solemn ceremony. The late proprietor, Mr. Beaufoy A. Moore, could be with difficulty restrained from rising from his bed, when stricken down with illness, to drive to the ‘Cheese’ and serve out the pudding. No one, he believed, could do it with such judicious care and judgment as he did.
“Once, and once only was that pudding dropped. Alas, the sad day! In the room sat an expectant hungry army of fifty men. The waiter, bearing in triumph the pudding, appeared smiling on the scene. His foot slipped, he tripped, the pudding wavered, and then bowled along the floor, breaking up and gathering sawdust as it went. There was a breathless silence. The proprietor dropped the upraised carver, stood speechless for a moment, and then went out and wept bitterly. The occasion was too much for him. One after another the awed and hungry crowd put their hats on and departed, with sorrowful faces and watering mouths.”
CHAPTER X
MR. GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA AND OTHERS ON THE “CHEESE”
For he’s a jolly good fellow.—Old Song.
The late Mr. George Augustus Sala, in an article entitled “Brain Street,” which is to be found in “Old and New London” (Cassell, Petter & Galpin), thus describes Wine Office Court and the Cheshire Cheese:—
“The vast establishments of Messrs. Pewter and Antimony, type-founders (Alderman Antimony was Lord Mayor in the year ’46); of Messrs. Quoin, Case, and Chappell, printers to the Board of Blue Cloth; of Messrs. Cutedge and Treecalf, bookbinders; with the smaller industries of Scawper and Tinttool, wood-engravers; and Treacle, Gluepot, and Lampblack, printing-roller makers, are packed together in the upper part of the court as closely as herrings in a cask. The ‘Cheese’ is at the Brain Street end. It is a little lop-sided, wedged-up house, that always reminds you, structurally, of a high-shouldered man with his hands in his pockets. It is full of holes and corners and cupboards and sharp turnings; and in ascending the stairs to the tiny smoking-room you must tread cautiously, if you would not wish to be tripped up by plates and dishes momentarily deposited there by furious waiters. The waiters at the ‘Cheese’ are always furious. Old customers abound in the comfortable old tavern, in whose sanded-floored eating-rooms a new face is a rarity; and the guests and the waiter are the oldest of familiars. Yet the waiter seldom fails to bite your nose off as a preliminary measure when you proceed to pay him. How should it be otherwise when on that waiter’s soul there lies heavy a perpetual sense of injury caused by the savoury odour of steaks and ‘muts’ to follow; of cheese bubbling in tiny tins—the original ‘speciality’ of the house; of floury potatoes and fragrant green peas; of cool salads, and cooler tankards of bitter beer; of extra-creaming stout and ‘goes’ of Cork and ‘rack,’ by which is meant gin; and, in the winter-time, of Irish stew and rump-steak pudding, glorious and grateful to every sense? To be compelled to run to and fro with these succulent viands from noon to late at night, without being able to spare time to consume them in comfort—where do waiters dine, and when, and how?—to be continually taking other people’s money only for the purpose of handing it to other people—are not these grievances sufficient to cross-grain the temper of the mildest-mannered waiter? Somebody is always in a passion at the ‘Cheese’: either a customer because there is not fat enough on his ‘point’ steak, or because there is too much bone in his mutton-chop; or else the waiter is wroth with the cook; or the landlord with the waiter, or the barmaid with all. Yes, there is a barmaid at the ‘Cheese,’ mewed up in a box not much bigger than a bird-cage, surrounded by groves of lemons, ‘ones’ of cheese, punch-bowls, and cruets of mushroom-catsup. I should not care to dispute with her, lest she should quoit me over the head with a punch-ladle, having a William-the-Third guinea soldered in the bowl.”
“Old and New London,” ch. 10, part iii., p. 123, contains this paragraph:—
“Mr. William Sawyer[5] has also written a very admirable sketch of the ‘Cheese’ and its old-fashioned conservative ways, which we cannot resist quoting:—
“‘We are a close, conservative, inflexible body—we, the regular frequenters of the “Cheshire,”’ says Mr. Sawyer. ‘No new-fangled notions, new usages, new customs, or new customers for us. We have our history, our traditions, and our observations, all sacred and inviolable. Look around! There is nothing new, gaudy, flippant, or effeminately luxurious here. A small room, with heavily timbered windows, a low-planked ceiling. A huge projecting fireplace, with a great copper boiler always on the simmer, the sight of which might have roused even old John Willett, of the “Maypole,” to admiration. High, stiff-backed, inflexible “settees,” hard and grainy in texture, box off the guests half a dozen each to a table. Sawdust covers the floor, giving forth that peculiar faint odour which the French avoid by the use of the vine sawdust with its pleasant aroma. A chief ornament in which we indulge is a picture over the mantel-piece, a full-length of a now departed waiter, whom, in the long past, we caused to be painted, by subscription of the whole room, to commemorate his virtues, and our esteem. We sit bolt upright round our tables, waiting, but not impatient. A time-honoured solemnity is about to be observed, and we, the old stagers, is it for us to precipitate it? There are men in the room who have dined here every day for a quarter of a century—aye, the whisper goes round that one man did it on his wedding day! In all that time the more staid and well-regulated among us have observed a steady regularity of feeding. Five days in the week we have “Rotherham steak”—that mystery of mysteries—or our “chop and chop to follow,” with the indispensable wedge of Cheshire—unless it is preferred stewed or toasted—and on Saturday decorous variety is afforded in a plate of the world-renowned “Cheshire” pudding. It is of this latter luxury that we are now assembled to partake, and that with all fitting ceremony and observance.’”