Joseph Addison lived for a time in the old Manor House, and two of his letters, written to the Lord Warwick whose mother he afterwards married, describe the bird concerts in the neighbouring woods.
If anyone wants to know exactly what the place looked like in Nell Gwynne’s day, a very interesting account of it may be found in a book written by a French London-lover, called Fulham Old and New. It is now out of print, but may be consulted at the Fulham Public Library, reached by any of the buses travelling westward along the Fulham Road.
All this is ancient history, of which there is little trace to-day. The shades of Sir Robert Walpole, Dean Swift, Fielding and Smollett, and good Dr. Burney, Fanny’s father, who was organist of Chelsea Hospital and buried in its now closed cemetery, may still haunt Chelsea; but the actual homes of the people of living memory make a more vivid appeal. Chelsea still keeps up the reputation of being the haunt of famous people. Unlike the inhabitants of the Paris Latin Quarter, artists and poets who have once breathed her air do not remove to more fashionable Mayfair streets when they have “arrived.”
And what a brilliant band of them were found in the Chelsea of the nineteenth century! Meredith wrote The Ordeal of Richard Feverel at No. 7 Hobury Street; Charles and Henry Kingsley spent their youth in the old rectory in Church Street when their father was rector of Chelsea Old Church; George Eliot moved her household gods to No. 4 Cheyne Walk, the beautiful house where Daniel Maclise, the early Victorian painter, had lived, only three short weeks before her death; and Cecil Lawson, the painter of The Harvest Moon in the Tate Gallery, lived at No. 15.
A volume might be written about Cheyne Walk alone; those pleasant red-brick houses with their wrought-iron railings were the homes of some of the greatest geniuses of the Victorian age. Turner lived at 118 for the four years before his death in 1851: Rossetti lived at No. 16 with Swinburne and W. M. Rossetti. Meredith had some idea of joining this ménage, but recoiled at the sight of Rossetti’s oft-quoted poached eggs “bleeding to death” on cold bacon very late in the morning. He paid a quarter’s rent and decided to live by himself. The Rev. Mr. Haweis was a later tenant of this famous house, which, in spite of popular tradition, has no connection with Catherine of Braganza. Mrs. Gaskell, the authoress of Cranford, was born at No. 93. Whistler spent twelve years at No. 96, and here he painted the portraits of his mother and Carlyle.
The painter had many Chelsea houses, from 101 Cheyne Walk, where he lived for four years from 1873, to the White House in Tite Street which he built, and, after his quarrel with the architect, adorned with a truly Whistlerian inscription, now removed, “Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it. This house was built by Mr. X.”
William de Morgan and Leigh Hunt lived in Chelsea, but the man whose memory is the most vivid of all this brilliant group was Thomas Carlyle. His house at 24 Cheyne Row is a memorial museum open to any visitor on the payment of one shilling, sixpence on Saturday. The house is kept exactly as it was in the days which Mr. Blunt has so charmingly described in his book The Carlyles’ Chelsea Home.
I can tell no more about it except from hearsay, for the terrible loneliness of Hugo’s house in the Place des Vosges and of Balzac’s in the Rue Raynouard in Paris dissuaded me from visiting any more houses turned into museums of their owners’ belongings.
I would rather go to the Chelsea Hospital, that is very much alive with the presence of remarkably long-lived old men: one of them lived till he was 123 years and another to 116. They think nothing there of mere centenarians—they even tell you of one pensioner who had served for eighty-five years and married at the age of 100. They think that was a mistake on the whole, but they are secretly proud of it, and also of the lady warriors—one of them had the domestic-sounding name of Hannah Snell—who lie buried in the old churchyard among their comrades.
Visitors can see the hospital every week-day from 10 till dusk, except for an hour from 12.45 to 1.45, and they may attend the chapel services on Sunday at 11 A.M. and 6.30, when the pensioners in their brave scarlet coats remind one of Herkomer’s picture. My advice to you, if you want to see Chelsea Hospital really well, is to enlist one of the pensioners as guide. He will show you the old leather black-jacks, and Grinling Gibbons’ statue of Charles II. in a toga, and the colonnades of the old Wren building, so fine in its severe simplicity—and the flags in the chapel, so filmy now with age that they look as if a breath of wind would blow them to pieces—and the old portraits and many other arresting things. But what he will like best to exhibit will be the fragments of the bomb that hit one of the buildings during an air-raid. He won’t allow you to hold on to the belief that Nell Gwynne had anything to do with the foundation, but he will tell you a lot of interesting details about the regulations of the Hospital—how very little like an institution it is, and you will leave the building with an added respect for Charles II.