Sweet Hampstead and Its Associations

by Caroline A. White

When, in 1782, ‘Cecilia’ was published, Miss Burney’s fame enlarged. The greatest men of the day eulogized her works, and overwhelmed her with compliments and congratulations, Burke, Johnson, Reynolds, Windham, Gibbon, and Sheridan being of the number. At public places she became the ‘observed of all observers,’ and the gaze of admiring crowds ‘followed her along the Steyne at Brighton, and the Pantiles at Tunbridge Wells.’ Two years later, in 1784, the year her friend Dr. Johnson died, Mrs. Barbauld was staying in London, and witnessed a balloon exhibition at the Pantheon, which occupied the site of the future opera-house. In a letter to her niece she observes that next to the balloon Miss Burney is the object of curiosity. In the next year, 1785, when the Barbaulds moved from Wimbledon to Hampstead, Mrs. Barbauld brought her literary reputation with her, and was at once received in the best local society, the centre of which at this time, as I have elsewhere said, was Heath House, the home of the liberal-minded Quaker banker, Samuel Hoare. Here she made the acquaintance of many literary persons of note, amongst others that of Dr. Beattie, and Dr. George Crabbe, the author of the ‘Borough,’ the poet of the poor as he was called, and subsequently that of Mrs. Hannah More, Miss Seward, Mme. Chapone, and, in curious contrast with them, the banker-poet, Samuel Rogers, and later still Montgomery, whose sobriquet was ‘Satan,’[282] and nearer again to this century Campbell, and Coleridge. In the autumn of 1788 I find Samuel Rogers writing to Mrs. Barbauld that they are to have an assembly at the Long Room on Monday, October 22, ‘which they say will be a pretty good one,’ inviting her to join their party. He was probably staying with his sisters at Hampstead, a frequent practice in those days instead of going to the seaside.

In 1855 the author of the ‘Pleasures of Imagination’ and various other works died, aged ninety-two years. He was born in 1763.

In 1785 there had appeared in the journals and magazines of the day the appointment of Miss Burney to the Court function of Dresser to the Queen, and for five years the literary world lost sight of the clever novelist, who at their expiration managed to get enfranchised from what had proved to her the house of bondage, and we find her at Hampstead in 1792, the guest of the celebrated Mrs. Crewe.

At this time many notable persons were living here. Lord Loughborough, rather tolerated than trusted, resided in the Chesterfields’ old house, which we are told resembled in appearance an ancient French château, and on receiving the title of Lord Rosslyn he renamed it Rosslyn House. Lord Erskine had his home at the Evergreens, or Evergreen Hill, as it was sometimes called, not very far from Caen Wood, Lord Mansfield’s seat, and Lord Thurlow, the ‘lion of the law,’ had a retreat at Hampstead. His town residence was in Great Ormond Street, then abutting in the rear on fields, whence the thieves who stole the Great Seal made their way to the house. Other men high in legal office, bankers, and rich merchants, were living at Frognal, and North End; and so far as rank and wealth were concerned, the village of Hampstead at this period was eminently favoured.

Lord Thurlow, who seems to have ostentatiously set social laws at defiance, in spite of fashion, was wont to appear amongst the visitors ‘wearing his full suit of cloth of the old mode, great cuffs, massy buttons, great wig, long ruffles,’ his black eyebrows exceeding in size any Lord Campbell had ever seen, and ‘his voice, though not without melody, was like the rumbling of murmuring thunder.’[283] Fanny Burney says of his voice: ‘Though low, it was very melodious.’ I do not know if when at Hampstead he permitted the companionship of the tame white goose by which he was generally attended in his London home, and which followed him about his grounds, and is said to have been never absent from his consultations. If so, the presence of his feathered pet must have considerably added to the grotesqueness of his own; for a gentleman’s dress of the period, as established ‘in the polite circles of St. James’s and at Bath,’ consisted of a light-coloured French frock, with gilt wire or gold buttons, breeches of the same colour, and tamboured waistcoats for afternoon dress. His lordship’s wide-skirted coat, like the rest of his habiliments, must have been a score of years behind the mode. Strong passions and a hard, vindictive, unforgiving nature lowered in the large dusky eyes and thick, almost meeting eyebrows of his lordship. His treatment of the daughter who had offended him by marrying the man she loved, but who nursed her father with the greatest tenderness in his last illness, fully bears out the character that his countenance indicated.

With the commencement of the present century, new names appear in connection with Hampstead and its celebrities. Joanna Baillie, the shy girl of Mrs. Barbauld’s acquaintance, upon the publication of her tragedy of ‘De Montfort,’ was at once accepted as a genius and poetess. A few years later Sir Walter Scott visited Sweet Hampstead to do her honour, and heralded the poet of Rydal Mount,[284] some years in advance of his appearance there in person. Later on in the present century we find Lord Byron, for his health’s sake, I presume, spending some weeks of summer in one of the toy cottages in the Vale of Health, two doors distant from that subsequently tenanted by Leigh Hunt. It was on a window-pane of this humble habitation, and not, as has been stated, in Leigh Hunt’s cottage, which he never visited, that he wrote with a diamond (a favourite amusement of the time when diamonds were less common than in these days) two lines which are said to have afterwards appeared in ‘Childe Harold.’

In 1816 the presence of Leigh Hunt, fresh from expiating, by a fine of £1,000 and three years’ confinement in Horsemonger Lane Gaol, the crime of libellously characterizing the Regent as ‘a fat Adonis of fifty,’ is felt as a social shock by some of the eminently loyal residents of Hampstead, especially when the magnetism of the man attracted Shelley to him—the disowned and denounced Shelley; then came Charles Lamb[285] and Keats, and robust Charles Cowden Clarke, with his voice and laugh as strong as the blast of the rams’ horns that levelled Jericho—in brief, the brotherhood who constituted what the critics of that day called the ‘Cockney School of Poets,’ a school whose works—those of three of them, at least—were destined to a worldwide reputation. The ‘Essays’ of Leigh Hunt are too delightful reading to be ever wholly laid aside.

When Keats’ first book of poems appeared, one of these critics, more mannerly than most of them, admitted that the author had ‘a fine ear for the grand, elaborate, and abstracted music of Nature, and now and then catches a few notes from passages of that never-ending harmony which God made to retain in exaltation and purity the spirits of our first parents.’ A curious limitation to the power of an eternal harmony. At the same time, he accuses the poems of ‘savouring too much of the foppery and affectation of Leigh Hunt.’

When the tall, fragile figure and beautiful face of Shelley were no more seen on the Heath, when Keats had forsaken the ‘places of nestling green for poets made,’ and Elia and his sister were no longer met with in the vicinity of the Vale of Health, and Leigh Hunt himself—the slight, rather tall, straight gentleman with the wide low forehead, dark eyes, and foreign complexion, whom Godfrey Turner remembered and described to me, and to whom (except in height) his son Vincent, whom I knew, must have borne a strong resemblance—had all left Hampstead, there still remained Joanna Baillie and her literary home, which had, as time went on, become a pilgrimage and shrine, not only to the most celebrated men and women of England, but of those of other countries also.