B. E. M.
London, August, 1888
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
| PAGE | |
| STATUE OF THOMAS CARLYLE, BY BOEHM | Frontispiece |
| THE EMBANKMENT MANSIONS FROM BATTERSEA | [16] |
| A VIEW OF CHELSEA | [21] |
| STEAMBOAT PIER AT OLD BATTERSEA BRIDGE, AND THE RIVER FRONT, TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO | [26] |
| THE EMBANKMENT AND OLD BATTERSEA BRIDGE | [29] |
| MAP OF CHELSEA | [35] |
| THE HOUSES AT CHELSEA | [56] |
| LINDSEY HOUSE AND BATTERSEA BRIDGE | [59] |
| SANDFORD MANOR HOUSE, SAND’S END | [64] |
| CHELSEA HOSPITAL, RIVER FRONT | [72] |
| PARADISE ROW | [88] |
| TITE STREET | [99] |
| STATUE OF SIR HANS SLOANE IN THE BOTANIC GARDENS | [103] |
| NO. 4, CHEYNE WALK | [107] |
| GATEWAY OF ROSSETTI’S OLD HOUSE | [110] |
| DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI’S GARDEN | [114] |
| DON SALTERO’S | [123] |
| CHEYNE WALK, WITH THE MAGPIE AND STUMP | [127] |
| A CHELSEA CORNER | [133] |
| STATUE OF THOMAS CARLYLE, BY BOEHM | [136] |
| CARLYLE’S HOUSE, GREAT CHEYNE ROW | [139] |
| THE CHELSEA RECTORY | [144] |
| A CORNER IN CHELSEA OLD CHURCH | [154] |
| OLD BATTERSEA CHURCH, WHERE BLAKE WAS MARRIED, SHOWING THE WINDOW FROM WHICH TURNER SKETCHED | [164] |
| THE WESTERN END OF CHEYNE WALK | [167] |
| TURNER’S LAST DWELLING-PLACE | [171] |
| BATTERSEA BRIDGE AND CHURCH FROM TURNER’S HOUSE | [176] |
“Out of monuments, names, wordes, proverbs, traditions, private recordes and evidences, fragments of stories, passages of bookes, and the like, we doe save and re-cover somewhat from the deluge of Time.”—Bacon, “Advancement of Learning”, Book II.
“I have always loved to wander over the scenes inhabited by men I have known, admired, loved, or revered, as well amongst the living as the dead. The spots inhabited and preferred by a great man during his passage on the earth have always appeared to me the surest and most speaking relic of himself: a kind of material manifestation of his genius—a mute revelation of a portion of his soul—a living and sensible commentary on his life, actions, and thoughts.”—Lamartine, “Pilgrimage to the Holy Land.”
“The man that is tired of London is tired of existence.”—Samuel Johnson.
Old Chelsea.
I had strolled, on a summer day, from Apsley House towards the then residence of Charles Reade at Knightsbridge, when I came upon one of those surprises of which London is still so full to me, even after more than a dozen years of fond familiarity with its streets and with all that they mean to the true lover of the Town. For, as I watched the ceaseless traffic of the turbulent turnings from the great thoroughfare down towards Chelsea, there came to my mind a phrase in the pages of its local historian: who, writing but a little earlier than the year 1830, points with pride to a project just then formed for the laying out of the latest of these very streets—at that day it was a new rural road cut through fields and swamps—and by it, he says, “Chelsea will obtain direct connection with London; and henceforth must be considered an integral part of the Great Metropolis of the British Empire”! It is hard to realise that only fifty years ago Chelsea was a rustic and retired village, far from London: even as was Islington, fifty years ago, when Charles Lamb, pensioned and set free from his desk in the India House, retired to that secluded spot with his sister to live “in a cottage, with a spacious garden,” as he wrote; with “the New River, rather elderly by this time, running in front (if a moderate walking pace can be so termed)”: even as was Kensington—“the old court suburb pleasantly situated on the great Western road”—just fifty years ago, when wits and statesmen drove between fields and market gardens to the rival courts of Gore House and of Holland House; and N. P. Willis delighted the feminine readers of the New York Mirror with his gossip about his visits to Lady Blessington and about the celebrities who bowed before her. To-day all these villages, along with many even more remote, are one with London. Yet, more than any of them, has Chelsea kept its old village character—albeit preserving but few of its old village features. Of the many magnificent mansions which gave it the name of “The Village of Palaces” five alone still stand—Blacklands, Gough, Lindsey, Stanley and Walpole Houses—and these are greatly altered. I shall show you all of them in our stroll to-day. In between them, and away beyond them, streets have been cut, new quarters built: made up in part of “genteel” villas and rows of respectable residences; but in great part, also, of cheap dwellings, of small and shabby shops. These extremes render much of modern Chelsea utterly uninteresting, except mayhap to the collector of rents or to the inspector of nuisances. Yet much of that which is truly ancient and honourable has been fondly kept untouched, and not ignobly cleaned, as in next-door Kensington. Alongside this artistic squalor we have the curious contrast of artistic splendour in a blazing, brand-new quarter, of which the sacred centre is Tite Street. Here, amid much that is good and genuine in our modern manner, there is an aggressive affectation of antiquity shown by the little houses and studios obtruding on the street, by the grandiose piles of mansions towering on the embankment: all in raging red brick, and in the so-called Queen Anne style. The original article, deadly dull and decorous as it may be, has yet a decent dignity of its own as a real relic, not found in this painful pretence of ancient quaintness. This is a quarter, however, much in vogue; mighty swells dwell here, and here pose some famous farceurs in art and literature; here, too, work many earnest men and women in all pursuits of life. These latter plentifully people every part of Chelsea, for the sake of the seclusion and the stillness they seek and here find: just as there settled here for the same reasons, two centuries ago and earlier, men of learning and of wealth, scholars and nobles, who kept themselves exclusive by virtue of their birth or their brains. And so this privileged suburb,
“Where fruitful Thames salutes the learned shore,”
came to be in time a place of polite resort: while yet, in the words of Macaulay, it was but “a quiet country village of about one thousand inhabitants, the baptisms therein averaging a little more than forty in the year.” On the slope which rises from the river—as we see it in our print of those days—stand, in trim gardens, the grand mansions which first made the little village famous. Back from these isolated houses and between them stretch fair fields, and fertile meadows, and wooded slopes; and along the river bank runs a row of fishermen’s thatched cottages. Here and there on the shore, are nestled noted taverns and pleasure-gardens, much frequented by town visitors, reputable or not, coming up the river on excursions—as does Pepys, “to make merry at the Swan.” Gay sings of the place and the period: