The Seven Dials are thus described in Gay’s Trivia:—
“Where famed St. Giles’s ancient limits spread,
An in-railed column rears its lofty head;
Here to seven streets, seven dials count their day,
And from each other catch the circling ray;
Here oft the peasant, with inquiring face,
Bewildered, trudges on from place to place;
He dwells on every sign with stupid gaze—
Enters the narrow alley’s doubtful maze—
Tries every winding court and street in vain,
And doubles o’er his weary steps again.”
This column was removed in July, 1773, on the supposition that a considerable sum of money was lodged at the base; but the search was ineffectual.
Charles Knight, in his “London,” writes thus of Seven Dials:—
“It is here that the literature of St. Giles’s has fixed its abode; and a literature the parish has of its own, and that, as times go, of a very respectable standing in point of antiquity. In a letter from Letitia Pilkington, to the demure author of ‘Sir Charles Grandison,’ and published by the no less exemplary and irreproachable Mrs. Barbauld, the lady informs her correspondent that she has taken apartments in Great White Lion Street, and stuck up a bill intimating that all who have not found ‘reading and writing come by nature,’ and who had had no teacher to make up the defect by art, might have ‘letters written here.’ With the progress of education, printing presses have found their way into St. Giles’s, and what with literature and a taste for flowers and birds, there is much of the ‘sweet south’ about the Seven Dials harmonising with the out-of-door habits of its occupants. It was here—in Monmouth Court, a thoroughfare connecting Monmouth Street with Little Earl Street—that the late eminent Mr. Catnach developed the resources of his genius and trade. It was he who first availed himself of greater mechanical skill and a larger capital than had previously been employed in the department of THE TRADE, to substitute—for the excrable tea-paper, blotched with lamp-black and oil, which characterised the old broadside and ballad printing—tolerably white paper and real printer’s ink. But more than that, it was he who first conceived and carried into effect, the idea of publishing collections of songs by the yard, and giving to purchasers, for the small sum of one penny (in former days the cost of a single ballad), strings of poetry, resembling in shape and length the list of Don Juan’s mistresses, which Leporello unrolls on the stage before Donna Anna. He was no ordinary man, Catnach; he patronised original talents in many a bard of St Giles’s and is understood to have accumulated the largest store of broadsides, last dying speeches, ballads and other stock-in-trade of the flying stationer’s upon record.”
Douglas Jerrold in his article on the Ballad Singer, published in “Heads of the People; or Portraits of the English”—1841, writes thus of Seven Dials and its surroundings:—
“The public ear has become dainty, fastidious, hypercritical; hence the Ballad-Singer languishes and dies. Only now and then, his pipings are to be heard * * * With the fall of Napoleon, declined the English Ballad-Singer. During the war, it was his peculiar province to vend halfpenny historical abridgments to his country’s glory; recommending the short poetic chronicle by some familiar household air, that fixed it in the memory of the purchaser, who thus easily got hatred of the French by heart, with a new assurance of his own invulnerability. No battle was fought, no vessel taken or sunken, that the triumph was not published, proclaimed in the national gazette of our Ballad-Singer. If he were not the clear silver trump of Fame, he was at least her tin horn. It was he who bellowed music into news, which, made to jingle, was thus, even to the weakest understanding, rendered portable. It was his narrow strips of history that adorned the garrets of the poor; it was he who made them yearn towards their country, albiet to them so rough and niggard a mother.
Napoleon lost Waterloo, and the English Ballad-Singer not only lost his greatest prerogative, but was almost immediately assailed by foreign rivals, who had well-nigh played him dumb. Little thought the Ballad-Singer, when he crowed forth the crowning triumphs of the war, and in his sweetest possible modulations breathed the promised blessings of a golden peace, that he was then, swan-like, singing his own knell; that he did but herald the advent of his own provençal destroyers.
Oh muse! descend and say, did no omen tell the coming of the fall? Did no friendly god give warning to the native son of song? Burned the stars clearly, tranquilly in heaven,—or shot they madly across Primrose-hill, the Middlesex Parnassus?
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