BENJAMIN FRANKLIN’S HOUSE. CRAVEN STREET.
At 19 Albert Gate, Sloane Street, lived Charles Reade, who was nearly all his life quarrelling with his critics and fighting against legal injustices with an almost ungovernable fury, and yet David Christie Murray said he was one of the four men he had met who were “distinguished by that splendid urbanity of manner which was once thought to express the acme of high breeding.... A beautiful, stately cordiality commonly marked his social manner, but he could be moved to a towering rage by an act of meanness, treachery, or oppression; and in his public correspondence he was sometimes downright vitriolic.” Anthony Trollope died at 34 Welbeck Street; and Lord Macaulay at Holly Lodge on Campden Hill. George Cruikshank lived in the queer, dull-looking little house that still remains at 263 Hampstead Road, and from that address put forth his groundless claims to being the originator of Ainsworth’s novels, Jack Sheppard and The Miser’s Daughter, and Dickens’s Oliver Twist. Ainsworth was still living, and strenuously denied his assertions; Dickens was dead, but there existed a letter of his about the illustrations to his book that sufficiently proved that the story was not written round Cruickshank’s drawings, as the aged artist seemed to have persuaded himself it was. A greater artist than Cruickshank (and another Cockney, by the way) was born in Cumberland Market, near Regent’s Park, and died in a sponging-house in Eyre Street Hill, Clerkenwell Road, in 1804. That was George Morland. Two years before his death he went with his wife and put up at the Bull Inn, at Highgate, which was kept by a former acquaintance of his. He is supposed to have utilised as a studio the large room with three bay windows that runs above the bar the full width of the building. He entertained Gainsborough and Romney and other contemporary artists there, but within a few months had had a fierce quarrel with the landlord and returned to lodge with his brother in Dean Street, Soho. He was by then showing the effects of his reckless dissipations, and looked “besotted and squalid and cadaverous; hanging cheeks and pinched nose, contracted nostrils, bleared and bloodshot eyes, swelled legs, a palsied hand, and tremulous voice bespeaking the ruin of what had once been the soundest of frames.” Drunk or sober, he worked rapidly and with unfailing mastery, but he was generally cheated by those around him of the due reward of his labours. Going on a short holiday to Brighton, he wrote giving his brother this list of what he had drunk in a single day: “Hollands gin, rum and milk—before breakfast. Coffee—for breakfast. Hollands, porter, shrub, ale, Hollands, port wine and ginger, bottled ale—these before dinner. Port wine at dinner. Porter, bottled porter, punch, porter, ale, opium and water. Port wine at supper. Gin, shrub, and rum on going to bed.” At the bottom of the list he sketched a tombstone bearing a skull and crossbones, and by way of epitaph: “Here lies a drunken dog.” And debts and duns and death in the sponging-house were the inevitable end of it.
CRUIKSHANK. 263 HAMPSTEAD ROAD.
Lady Blessington held her brilliant salon at 8 Seamore Place, Mayfair, before in 1836 she removed to the more noted Gore House, Kensington, and welcomed to her splendid drawing-rooms Byron, Lytton, Disraeli, Landor, Marryat, Dickens, Thackeray, Sydney Smith, Maclise, Hook, and all the greatest men of the day in literature, art, politics, and society, till in 1849 she was overwhelmed with financial embarrassments and fled to Paris, where she died the year after. Gore House has vanished from its place long since, and the Albert Hall more than covers the site of it. But Holland House, which was equally or more celebrated for its magnificent social gatherings in the first half of last century and earlier, still holds its ground. Addison lived there after his marriage to the Countess of Warwick in 1716, and from his bedroom there, in his last hours, sent for his dissipated stepson in order that he might see “how a Christian can die.”
ROBERT BROWNING
