We will now present the reader with the observations of writers who have less cursorily investigated this wonderland. A writer in a metropolitan newspaper gave the following well-considered description:—“These openings are the famous Yarmouth ‘Rows,’ 154 in number, running parallel to each other, between the river and the sea, and so narrow that the meanest London Lane would look a very Regent Street if placed alongside of them. I measured one, it was the narrowest I saw, and found, that at the entrance, it was little more than two feet across. It is probably reserved for thin natives, since no fat man, with all his clothes on, could safely venture to tread it. In all points of comparison, however, but narrowness, the Yarmouth Rows have a decided advantage over the London Lanes, and it is this that makes their appearance so extraordinary to a Londoner. He naturally associates poverty, filth, squalor, and all sorts of misery and crime with courts in which the inhabitants can shake hands with each other out of the opposite windows, or step at one stride across the so-called street or lane. Everyone with a watch to lose, carefully shuns such localities, or instinctively buttons up his coat if he happens to wander into them. At night the narrow gloomy jaws of the Yarmouth Rows must, to a cockney pilgrim of a lively imagination, look even more formidable; but in daylight, one glance down them suffices to show that they are widely different from anything that his experience had taught him to expect.
“The model Row is respectability itself; its tiny toy pavement of brick or stone is easily kept clean, and shines like the deck of a man-of-war; the houses on each side, so far from betraying any signs of squalor or painful poverty, are, some of them, so nicely kept with rows of flower pots brightening the windows, and clustering creepers draping the naked wall, that one begins to wonder how people, who are in a position to consider the amenities, as well as the necessaries of life, consent to live in such close, crowded quarters, and is driven to conjure that they are a jolly neighbourly race, who like, out of pure good fellowship, to be always in talking and hand-shaking distance of each other.
“And this theory that the grotesque construction of the Yarmouth Rows is due not to strategic, but to social considerations, is supported by the fact, in the ‘good old times,’ each Row took its name, in friendly fashion, from the best-known or the principal person living in it. In these degenerate days of scientific classification, arithmetic has triumphed over flesh and blood, and each Row is known by its number, with the single exception, I believe, of ‘Kitty Witches’ Row’—once a pet preserve of the invaluable public servant, the witch-finder Hopkins, who could always count upon unearthing enough ugly women in Yarmouth, with the unmistakeable witch marks on their sea-tanned shrivelled old skins, to make a respectable official return, and satisfy Government that public money was not being wasted. The Rows are, I am told, chiefly the resort of the seafaring population, who constitute Yarmouth’s working class.”
A writer in Cassell’s Magazine says: “the Rows are not wooden arcades like those of Chester, but straight and extremely narrow alleys, running between the principal streets and the river, like the rungs of a ladder, to the number of 156. Now-a-days only the humbler class of people live there, but having penetrated into a good many of them, I am bound to say that in no instance have I seen the squalor and misery of a low neighbourhood in London. There are vice and poverty in Herring-haven, as elsewhere, but you see none of those sights which saddens the heart of the reflective Londoner. I think the filthy coal smoke has something to do with the degradation of our metropolitan poor. Country folks who come and settle in Babylon grow in time weary of contending with the blacks, and suffer their children to grow up grimy and ragged, while the children playing about the doors in the Rows are clean, healthy, decently dressed, and civil spoken. * * * Whitewash is laid liberally on every accessible place, the causeway is plentifully supplied with gutters made of semi-circular yellow tiles, and in no instance have I encountered those vile odours which offend you on the Continent. It would be false to say that I never smelt fish; there is a vast deal of shrimp boiling done in some of these Rows, but of those filthy stenches of which Coleridge numbered seventy-two in the city of Cologne, I detected not one.”
Harper’s Magazine of June, 1882, gave the following interesting description:—“At one time the inhabitants of this old borough took up to living on a plan almost entirely their own, and the Rows in which they built their houses remain to this day the most curious of all the features of the ancient town. The Rows are narrow streets leading to and from the quay,—not narrow in the ordinary sense, but narrower, perhaps, than any other streets in the world, their average width being six feet. They are not isolated infrequent lanes left between more commodious thoroughfares by the incomplete modifications of early plans, but they form a system and their aggregate length is about eight miles. Six feet is their average width, but some of them are scarcely more than three feet, and two persons cannot pass one another without contracting themselves and painfully sidling in the opposite directions. The pavement is of rough cobble-stones, with sometimes a strip of flags down the middle to ease the way of the pedestrian. The houses tower up with smooth perpendicular walls, like cliffs, on both sides, and shut out the light, the upper stories projecting in many cases beyond the lower, and forming an arch over the narrow passage below. Most of these houses are very old, and the material of which they are built is flint or stone, often white-washed, though occasionally left in its natural condition with open timbering in the fronts; in one or two the masonry is of the herring-bone pattern; but huddled up as they are, without regard to privacy or ventilation, staring into one another’s faces with undesirable intimacy, they are of a good class, and in good condition, and some of them have courtyards before them with nasturtiums and scarlet runners dragging a tender green web over their white walls. The narrowest of the Rows is only 2 feet 3 inches in width. There are in all 156 of them, each known by its number. The object of the frugal plan in which they originated is a mystery. One of the guesses at it is this:—‘The fishermen spread out their nets to dry very carefully, and leave on the four sides of each net a clear passage, four, five or six feet wide.’ It is suggested that the ground on which the Rows stand was once used for this purpose, and that the passages became so well defined from constant traffic that eventually they were perpetuated as streets. However this may be, it is certain that some of the houses in the Rows were among the first built in the town, and certain also that, leading from the main street, they give easy access to the Quay, whereon Yarmouth finds its chief interest. When the moon is full and throws black beams of shadows across these alleys, and opens seeming pitfalls in their rugged pavement, a stranger hesitates to enter them. At all times they seem properly to belong to conspirators, but they are quite safe and reputable. In olden times the Watchmen patrolled them, ‘crying the wind’ for sleepless merchants and anxious skippers; and the bellmen of the Church of St. Nicholas prayed in them for the souls of those who had bequeathed money for the purpose. [11] The wind holds pretty well to one quarter in Yarmouth, and it is said the watchmen seldom had occasion to vary their announcement: ‘East is the wind, east-north-east; past two and a cloudy morning.’
“Having invented the narrowest streets in the world, the inhabitants had to devise an original vehicle for their locomotion, as no ordinary carts could enter them, and this necessity was relieved by the ‘trolly,’ a peculiar cart about 12 feet long, with two wheels revolving on a box axle, placed underneath the sledge, the extreme width of the vehicle being about 3 feet 6 inches.
“Even in the dead of night the Rows are not quite still. All of them lead toward the river, and some of them reveal the black lines of clustered masts and rigging. Many of the houses are occupied by fishermen, who are astir at all hours. The shrimpers go out to meet the tide at eleven or twelve o’clock, and though the river has some traffic with distant ports, the most frequent vessels on it are the ‘dandy-rigged’ boats and the rakish cutters which belong to the great industry of the town.”
Were we to omit the characteristic description given in Household Words, Vol. VII., p. 163, that is very generally ascribed to the pen of the late Charles Dickens, our list of noteworthy quotations would be rightly deemed by many readers to be very incomplete. We gladly insert the following from that excellent magazine, heading the extract with some lines from a rhyming description of Yarmouth, written by Mr. H. J. Betts:—