While I am yet young in foreign travel, and capable of an approximation to truth, I wish to say that London is not only not a cheap place to live, but an exceedingly dear one.
THE MATTER OF COST.
“Just think of it,” said a travel-wise New Yorker, in New York, to me, “just think of a steak for a shilling! Here you pay twice that!”
So we do, but when you pay fifty cents for a steak in New York, you get a steak, and you get with it bread and butter ad libitum—you get pickles, and sauces, and potatoes, and all that sort of thing. Your fifty cent steak, with the accompaniments it carries, makes you a meal, and a good one.
In London your steak is twenty-five cents, but it is only a sample. After eating it you want some steak. Then you pay six cents for potatoes, two cents for what they call a bread—you always have more and there is a charge for each individual slice—you pay two cents for each tiny pat of butter, you are compelled to struggle for a napkin, and if you ask for ice to cool the infernal insipid water, you pay two cents for that, and you get just enough to aggravate you. And, then, when you are through, the smirking mass of stupidity and inefficiency they call a waiter wants and expects a sixpence, which is twelve and one-half cents more.
Where is your cheapness now? If you have a square, appetite-satisfying, strength-giving meal, it has cost you twice as much as it would in New York, with the difference that in New York it would be decently cooked, decently served, and done with a sort of breadth that makes it a luxury to eat, while here it is so hampered about with extras and charges for minute things—things which in America are free to everybody—that eating is reduced to a mere commercial basis and has no comfort in it.
The hotels are simply infamous in their charges. You agree to pay so much per day for your rooms, and it looks tolerably cheap, but you discover your mistake at the close of the first week, when you come to settle your bill. Though you have never touched your bell and have never seen the face of a servant, you are charged so much a day for “attendance,” you are charged for light, for fires. If you have ordered a bit of anything, no matter how infinitesimal, it is there, and these charges make up a bill larger than your room rent.
There is no use in remonstrating, nor in threatening to leave. You know, and the landlord knows a great deal better, that no matter where you go it will be the same, and so submitting to the inevitable, you draw a draft for more money, and settle down to be cheated in peace.
The lodging houses are quite as bad, only of course in a smaller way. Your accommodations are less, and the swindle less, but the proportion is very carefully observed.
Clothing is somewhat cheaper than in America, but nevertheless let me warn the intending comer against buying it here. You may buy cloths, if you choose, and pay duty on them and take them home, but never let a London tailor or dressmaker profane your person, be you man or woman. The Creator never made either for a London tailor to mar. He has too much respect for His handiwork. I have been here now two weeks, and have yet to see a native Englishman or a tailor-spoiled American who was well-dressed. The English tailor has no more idea of style than a pig has of the revised Testament. You can tell an American a square off by the cut of his coat, and an American woman by the very hang of her dress. The English tailor looks at you wisely, and takes a measurement or two, and puts his shears into the cloth. The result is a sort of a square abortion, loose where it should be close, close where it should be wide, long where it should be short and short where it should be long, and the poor victim takes it and is miserable till time releases him from it.