Palace and Hovel; Or, Phases of London Life

by Daniel Joseph Kirwan

When clubs were first started they were regarded with much hostility as being most antagonistic to domestic life, and the ladies displayed an intense spirit against them. The clubs, however, survived and flourished under their enmity, and it was found that they discouraged coarse drunkenness, the prevalent vice of Englishmen; encouraged social intercourse—of which ladies partook of elsewhere; refined the manners of the members, constituted courts of honor, and tended most materially to the manufacture of gentlemen.

The London clubs are private hotels on a vast and magnificent scale. They have billiard rooms, coffee rooms, nine-pin rooms, splendid libraries, saloons, and furniture, and plate of the costliest and rarest description.

LUXURIOUS DINNER—LADIES EXCLUDED.

All the refreshment which a member has, whether breakfast, dinner, supper, or wine, are furnished to him at the market cost price, all other expenses being defrayed from the annual subscriptions. For a few pounds a year, advantages are to be had, which no incomes but the most ample could procure. The Athenæum, which consists of twelve hundred members, can be taken as a good example of the rest. Among the members can be reckoned a large proportion of the most eminent persons in England—civil, military, and ecclesiastical, peers, spiritual and temporal, commoners, men of the learned professions, those connected with the sciences and arts, and commerce, as well as the distinguished who do not belong to any particular class, and who have nothing to do but live on their means, bore their tailors, and admire their family genealogy, and their own figures. These men are to be met with day after day at the clubs, living with more freedom and nonchalance than they could at their own houses. For six or eight guineas a year every member has the command of an excellent library, with maps, the daily London papers, English and foreign periodicals, and every material for writing, with a flock of gorgeous flunkies, in powder and epaulettes, to attend at the nod of a member, and a host of youthful pages in buttons and broadcloths. The club is a sort of a palace with the comfort of a private dwelling, and every member is a master without having the trouble of a master. He can have whatever meat or refreshment he desires served up at all hours, with luxury and dispatch. There is a fixed place for everything, and it is not customary to remain long at table. You can dine alone, or you can invite a dozen persons to dine with you, females being excluded. From an account kept at the Athenæum for one year, it appears that 17,323 dinners cost on an average 2s. 9¾d. each, and the average quantity of wine drank by each person at these dinners was a small fraction more than a pint for each. The bath accommodations are the finest that can be imagined.

The kitchen of the London clubs cannot be equaled in the world, and the chief cooks who have charge of the kitchens, have each an European fame. Alexis Soyer, the greatest cook since Ude or Vatel, had, for a long time, the charge of the kitchen of the Reform Club, and the kitchen of this club, of which John Bright, and all the leaders of the English liberals are members, is the finest in London.

A description of this kitchen will in a measure answer for that of any other London club, and I will give it here for the information of those who are curious in such matters.

The kitchen, properly so called, is an apartment of moderate size, surrounded on all four sides by smaller rooms, which form the pastry, the poultry, the butchery, the scullery, and other subordinate offices. There are doorways but no doors, between the different rooms, all of which are formed in such a manner that the chief cook, from one particular spot, can command a view of the whole. In the centre of the kitchen is a table and a hot closet, where various knicknacks are prepared and kept to a desired heat, the closet being brought to any required temperature by admitting steam beneath it. Around the hot closet is a bench or table, fitted with drawers and other conveniences for culinary operations. A passage going around the four sides of this table separates it from the various cooking apparatus, which involve all that modern ingenuity has brought to bear on the cuisine.

In the first place there are two enormous fireplaces for roasting, each of which would, in sober truth, roast a whole sheep. The screens placed before these fires are so arranged as to reflect back almost the entire heat which falls upon them, and effectually shields the kitchen from the intense heat which would be otherwise thrown out. Then again, these screens are so provided with shelves and recesses as to bring into profitable use the radiant heat which would be otherwise wasted.

MODEL KITCHEN.

Along two sides of the room are ranges of charcoal fires for broiling and stewing, and other apparatus for other varieties of cooking. These are at a height of about three feet from the ground. The broiling fires are a kind of open pot or pan, throwing upward a fierce but blazeless heat; behind them is a framework by which gridirons may be fixed at any height above the fire, according to the intensity of the heat. Other fires open only at the top, are adapted for various kinds of pans and vessels; and in some cases a polished tin-reflector is so placed as to reflect back to the viands the heat. Under and behind and over and around, are pipes, tanks, and cisterns, in abundance, containing water to be heated, or to be used more directly in the processes of cooking.