Dr. Soames’ regimen, it will be seen, consisted in early hours, temperance, pure air, invigorating exercise, and whatever tended to maintain a cheerful temper; these made the curative charm of the Hampstead waters, and for a time restored the reputation of the Wells.
It is rather amusing to find the curate in league with the doctor, and setting himself forth as an example of the efficacy of the waters. ‘Could my pen convey to others the idea I have of them,’ exclaims this enthusiastic partisan, ‘and the advantages we should have in using them, we should see the walks crowded as heretofore, twenty or thirty years ago. And it is some pleasure,’ he adds complacently, ‘to be informed that this summer they have not been without a pretty number of visitors.’
Old Cottages, North End
If we add the amount of satisfaction felt by Mr. Watts, Curate and Lecturer of Hampstead, to that of the inhabitants whose tenements were at the disposal of the said visitors, we get the idea that Hampstead must have smiled all over this season with a satisfaction it had not known in many preceding ones. All the little green-fenced white cottages in the neighbourhood of South End and the Vale of Health (reminiscent in its very name of the Gibbons and Soames period), as well as those on the upper slope of the East Heath and Squire’s Mount (to which a then leafy lane ran up from the Wells), had had a fresh coat of spotless paint put on. The mistresses of them were nodding and smiling to one another at their doors, and asking if they were ‘all let,’ or ‘quite full,’ or some question or other, indicative of a personal and neighbourly interest, which left it without doubt that they themselves had not another room to spare; while the select houses in Pond Street, and Lower Flask Walk, with their better accommodation and superior landladies, received such an access of purification and polish, that the flashing of the fanlights over the hall doors, and the shining of brass knobs and knockers, and the superlatively white, neatly-festooned blinds to every window, were in themselves so many letters of recommendation writ large.
Lodgings were to be had in the High Street, where little else was to be had, the few shops in it, with their half-hatch doors, open shop-boards, and hanging shutters, showing only the most simple necessaries of village life—always excepting the so-called general shop, with its heterogeneous stock of dry-goods, drapery, and drugs. Every household in those days baked its own bread, and an itinerant butcher visited the village weekly.[255] But the farms and cottages around supplied the freshest butter, eggs, milk, cream and poultry, with the common kinds of vegetables and fruit; for the rest, there was the London carrier, who led his horse by easy stages up the hill, bringing provisions, as requisitioned from day to day, for the visitors.
At the opening of the season, the farmhouse productions rose to famine price; the laundresses who lived in a congeries of cottages, at the bottom of the Vale of Health, with their backs to the east wind and the pool—for the pond as we see it now was not made till 1777, previous to which date it was a mere pool fed by a spring that trickled from the bank that margined it—immediately raised their prices. The parson bethought him of charity sermons, and the doctors of increased fees; and thus the whole social system of the village found itself comforted, and enriched, by a restored faith in the medicinal springs. In fact, to again quote Baker, ‘everything became as dear as a freeholder’s vote, and as great an imposition as a Dutch reckoning.’
But the Hampstead of these later days was an altered place from what it had been when Baker’s comedy was written. It had been made to see the error of its ways, and as the greatest sinners are said to become the greatest saints, so the peccant village appears to have recoiled to the opposite degree from its former self, even to the verge of decorous (some said dismal) dulness, and had fallen into neglect, as Dr. Soames very oddly phrases it, ‘through the knavery of some, the folly of others, and the exceeding great zeal for the glory of God and the good of the poor.’
The raffling-shops shut up, Mother Huff’s no longer heard of, the tea-gardens deserted for the most part by all but the common people, ‘who on Sundays, always mindful of the commandment which enjoins them to do no work on that day, took occasion to eat buns at Chelsea, drink beer at St. Pancras, of being sworn on the Horns at Highgate,[256] and of drinking tea at Hampstead or Little Hornsey,’[257] which was in the centre of the present Finsbury Park.