BLEEDING HEART YARD.
With the demolition of Bleeding Heart Yard, many a pilgrim to London will have one goal the less. But it has been too graphically pictured in Little Dorrit ever to be forgotten. Of all Dickens’ many sketches of the London slums, this is one of the best, although it requires great imaginative powers now to recognise here any ‘relish of ancient greatness.’ The ‘mighty stacks of chimneys,’ now much the worse for wear, are still here, and still ‘give the Yard a character.’ But the poor people who had ‘a family sentimental feeling’ about the Yard have nearly all flitted, like rats from a sinking ship. Indeed, piles of massive warehouses, which have sprung up on all sides, have already almost swamped their habitations; and any one seeing them in the gray gloaming of a wet winter afternoon, will have some difficulty in devising pleas for their preservation. The Yard is altogether dreary and unlovely, now that it is deserted, save for a couple of workshops, which, possibly, have replaced the factory of Daniel Doyce. A few carriers’ carts and costers’ barrows, too, seem to have been left here by accident. But for the most part the picture is one of dilapidated desolation. The three-storied brown-brick houses with their low-pitched red-tiled roofs, that run down the southern side, seem to have been the scene of an explosion or a conflagration; or, possibly, they may have been besieged by an army of urchins. Anyhow, not a pane of glass remains in the windows, which were probably cut through the wall at odd times, when wanted; and but for a tattered fringe which still decorates the frames, they might never have been glazed. Some of the cart-sheds and stables which form the ground-floor—to use an appellation that properly belongs to suburban villas—have been converted into shops, but bear no signs of ever having done a thriving trade; and it is easy to believe that the Yard, ‘though as willing a yard as any in Britain,’ was never ‘the better for any demand for labour.’
But whatever its past, before very long it will have been improved away, and visitors will probably soon have some difficulty in finding out even its site. The witchery of Dickens is shown in nothing so much as the atmosphere of vivid actuality with which he surrounded nearly all his characters, and the localities in which they lived and moved. For years, crowds have paid visits of devotion to the shrines which he has surrounded with such a halo of romance; and he possessed in a remarkable degree the faculty of appropriating all the charm with which legend and tradition had surrounded spots, and endowing them with a new glamour, until he made himself the true genius loci. His knowledge of London was certainly ‘extensive and peculiar.’ It would be easy to name a dozen nooks within a stone’s throw of Holborn alone which he made his own. The narrow and crowded streets which, when Dickens wrote, were even more squalid than they are now, had for him an irresistible attraction. From his chambers in Furnival’s Inn as a centre, he was a veritable explorer in all directions; and he has painted for us with his pen a series of sketches of these courts and alleys the realism of which the pencil of even George Cruikshank could not rival.
The nomenclature of London presents an endless succession of problems which never seem to get much nearer solution; and so far as many disputed sites are concerned, there is every likelihood that they will soon be removed from the field of controversy by being obliterated and altogether forgotten. It is notoriously a perpetual cause of surprise to foreigners, and especially our American cousins, that we are so heedless of being a nation with a history as to take no pains to preserve our historical landmarks. There are a thousand-and-one buried sites in the streets of London alone, which have played their parts in our national and municipal development, and there is none that cares to put up a stone to preserve their traditions from oblivion. But for Bleeding Heart Yard no very heroic etymology can be claimed. Dickens, it is to be feared, drew largely on his imagination, which he doubtless found served him in better stead than any number of old folios, for his amusing derivations. Except in Little Dorrit, there seems to be but scanty authority for the tradition that this was the scene of a murder. It is, however, beyond dispute that Ely Place and the adjacent streets were occupied by the luxurious town palace of the Bishops of Ely. Within the walls were included twenty acres of ground. This was, about the year 1577, sold to Christopher Hatton by the Bishop of Ely, who was, however, only made to carry out the contract by Elizabeth’s memorable threat that otherwise she would unfrock him. It was here that the famous chancellor died in 1591. But his house and garden do not seem to have been demolished until the middle of the seventeenth century, for Evelyn, writing in 1659, tells us how he went to see ‘the foundations now laying for a long street and buildings in Hatton Garden, designed for a little town, lately an ample garden.’ Of a certain Lady Hatton, probably the wife of Sir Christopher’s great-nephew, it is gravely recorded that she had a compact with the Evil One, and that on the night when this came to an end, that personage, in the guise of a cavalier, attended certain festivities which were being held at Hatton House, and having lured her into the garden, tore her in pieces—her ‘bleeding heart’ being afterwards found. But if this weird legend had even so solid a foundation as a murder, it is probable that some record of it would have survived.
Little Dorrit is also the authority for the story of the young lady who was closely imprisoned in her chamber here by her cruel father for refusing to marry the suitor he had chosen for her. The legend related how the young lady used to be seen up at her window behind the bars, murmuring a love-lorn song, of which the burden was, ‘Bleeding heart, bleeding heart, bleeding away,’ until she died. It will be remembered that although the Yard was divided in opinion, this story carried the day by a great majority, notwithstanding that it was supposed to have originated with ‘a tambour-worker, a spinster, and romantic,’ living in the Yard.
It is scarcely necessary to say that the point has received the attention of the seekers after miscellaneous knowledge, and a number of alternative derivations have been suggested. One learned antiquary, for instance, reminds us that ‘bleeding heart’ is the name of the red wallflower in certain parts of England, but omits to point out the connection. The most plausible is the suggestion that the court may have taken its name from a hostel known as the Bleeding Hart, and it is well known that sign-painters frequently prove shaky in their orthography. Thus, he records that in Warwickshire, an inn known as the White Hart was some years since adorned with a signboard representing a human heart, or at least an ace of hearts. Then some people still cling to the belief that the sign of the Bleeding Heart dates from pre-Reformation times, and is emblematical of the five sorrowful mysteries of the rosary. We must leave it to others to reconcile these conflicting theories. But for its associations with the fortunes of Little Dorrit, the bare existence of the court would certainly have remained in oblivion, and its demolition would have excited no unusual regret.
But there are those for whom the Yard has been associated with the history of a set of very real personages. Hither many folk have gone in search of ‘the domicile of Plornish, plasterer,’ and have sought to identify ‘the parlour’ in which the Plornish family lived, and which was pointed out to callers by ‘the painted hand, on the forefinger of which the artist had depicted a ring, and a most elaborate nail of the genteelest form.’ Here, too, they have probably pictured for themselves the Patriarch ‘floating serenely through the Yard in the forenoon’ with the express purpose of getting up trustfulness in his shining bumps and silken locks, to be succeeded a few hours later by Pancks, that prince of rent-collectors, who, ‘perspiring, and puffing and darting about in eccentric directions, and becoming hotter and dingier every moment, lashed the tide of the Yard into the most agitated and turbid state.’ They may further have looked for the small grocery and general dealer’s shop ‘at the crack end of the Yard,’ where Mrs Plornish was established by Mr Dorrit; and for ‘Happy Cottage,’ that most wonderful of interiors. And they may have wondered whereabouts was the spot where Pancks tackled the Patriarch, snipped off short the sacred locks, and cut down the broad-brimmed hat to a stewpan, thereby converting the venerable Casby, ‘that first-rate humbug of a thousand guns,’ into ‘a bare-polled, goggle-eyed phantom.’