The dock warehouses should be visited, if only to gain some idea of the enormous wealth of London.
"These docks," says M. Taine, "are prodigious, overpowering; each of them is a vast port, and accommodates a multitude of three-masted vessels. There are ships everywhere, ships upon ships in rows ... for the most part they are leviathans, magnificent ... some of them hail from all parts of the world; this is the great trysting-place of the globe."
The shore population, about here, consists mostly of sailors and fishermen; "the Sailors' Town," the region east of the Tower is specially called. The river scenes here are as picturesque in their way as any in the world, a fact of which not only Turner's pictures, but also Mr. Vicat Cole's "Pool of London," now in the Tate Gallery, may well remind us. Why, indeed, should our artists all flock to Venice to paint? Have we not also here golden sunsets, sails of Venetian red, tall masts, dappled skies, all the picturesque litter and crowded life that Turner so loved, suffused in an atmosphere of misty glory?—a glory translated by all the glamour of history and sentiment into
"The light that never was on land or sea,
The consecration and the poet's dream."
To the eyes of the boy Turner, the embryo artist, the child of the City, all was beautiful and worthy to be painted—"black barges, patched sails, and every possible condition of fog." To him, even in mature life, "Thames' shore, with its stranded barges, and glidings of red sail, was dearer than Lucerne lake or Venetian lagoon." Its humanity appealed to him: he, as great a London lover as Dickens, merely expressed this feeling differently. Thus, Ruskin says of Turner's boyhood:
"That mysterious forest below London Bridge,—better for the boy than wood of pine or grove of myrtle. How he must have tormented the watermen, beseeching them to let him crouch anywhere in the bows, quiet as a log, so only that he might get floated down there among the ships, and round and round the ships, and with the ships, and by the ships, and under the ships, staring and clambering;—these the only quite beautiful things he can see in all the world, except the sky; but these, when the sun is on their sails, filling or falling, endlessly disordered by sway of tide and stress of anchorage, beautiful unspeakably; which ships also are inhabited by glorious creatures—red-faced sailors, with pipes, appearing over the gunwales, true knights, over their castle parapets,—the most angelic beings in the whole compass of London world."
The Thames and its wonderful glamour, its mingled beauty and squalor—beauty, in the misty distance—squalor, in the more prosaic near view—suggests memories of Dickens, as it does of Turner. Memories of that "great master of tears and laughter" are, indeed, awakened by every bend of the stream. The romance of the mighty river was all-powerful with him, as with Turner; for he, too, had known it in his early youth. To him, also, even Thames mud afforded mysterious interest. Did not the blacking factory, celebrated in the pathetic pages of David Copperfield, where the miserable hours of his own early youth were spent, stand at the waterside, in Blackfriars? "My favourite lounging place," says David, "in the intervals, was old London Bridge (this was before its demolition in 1832), where I was wont to sit in one of the stone recesses, watching the people going by, or to look over the balustrades at the sun shining in the water, and lighting up the golden flame on the top of the monument." The real David—poor little boy—may, indeed, have occasionally played at being a London mudlark himself, in off-hours; but this he does not tell us!
"Murdstone and Grinby's warehouse was at the water side. It was down in Blackfriars. Modern improvements have altered the place; but it was the last house at the bottom of a narrow street, curving down hill to the river, with some stairs at the end, where people took boat. It was a crazy old house with a wharf of its own, abutting on the water when the tide was in, and on the mud when the tide was out, and literally overrun with rats."
The waterside scenes in The Old Curiosity Shop, including the wharf where Mr. Quilp, the vicious dwarf, broke up his ships, and where Mr. Sampson Brass so nearly broke his shins, were rivalled in vividness, thirty years afterwards, by the river chapters in Our Mutual Friend. In this later story, special stress is laid on the river suicides, and the consequent "dragging" for corpses, done by the watermen for salvage. Dreadful task! but not uncommon "down by Ratcliffe, and by Rotherhithe, where accumulated scum of humanity seemed to be washed from higher ground, like so much moral sewage, and to be pausing until its own weight forced it over the bank and sunk it in the river." Near Rotherhithe—a dingy pier usually infested by mudlarks—is "Jacob's Island," made notorious by the scene in Oliver Twist. "It is surrounded," says Dickens, "by a muddy ditch, six or eight feet deep, and fifteen or twenty wide when the tide is in ... known in these days as Folly Ditch." By means of this ditch, the murderer Sikes tries to escape from the infuriated crowd who clamour for his life, but he fails in the attempt and perishes miserably.
Such is the splendour, such the misery, of the richest, largest, most powerful city in the world! And over all the seething tides of the river and of humanity—the luxury and wretchedness—the "laughing, weeping, hurrying ever" of the crowd, still the grey dome of St. Paul's dominates the scene, still its "cross of gold shines over city and river," calm and changeless above all tides and passions. Browning has suggested the poetry of the view from the dome: