Earl's Court,—now mainly remarkable for the near neighbourhood of "Olympia,"—the "Great Wheel,"—and an endless colony of railway lines,—was, some fifty years ago, still "a quaint old row of houses, their lattices stuffed with spring flowers, facing a deep cool pond by the roadside," and embowered in orchards. Spots of welcome greenery there still are in the wide area of West and South Kensington; there is a big cemetery to be buried in, and the oval enclosure called "the Boltons" is a pleasant place to live in. But, on the whole, the purlieus of Kensington are depressing. While West Kensington is mainly degraded "Queen Anne," interspersed with railways,—South Kensington has one very general distinguishing mark. It is nearly always stuccoed, and usually also porticoed. Its larger streets, in sun or shine, bear a gloomy likeness to an array of family vaults, awaiting their occupants. The early nineteenth century had, in truth, much to answer for in the way of bricks, mortar, and stucco,—but principally stucco! Occasionally there is some faint relief to the prevailing mode, and here and there some of the smaller roads are brightened in spring by a few acacias and hawthorns; but in the larger streets there is usually the same saddening uniformity, and, when once you have left the vicinity of Kensington Square, you find nothing in quite the same style until you reach Chelsea and Cheyne Walk.
Chelsea, too, was a very picturesque village in old days,—when the "Old Chelsea Bun-House" was a favourite resort of the Court,—when "Ranelagh" and "Vauxhall" flourished in the neighbourhood,—and when the then fashionable race of London's "jolly young watermen" for their annual badge attracted, as the Oxford and Cambridge boat-race does nowadays, crowds of spectators.
Ranelagh and Vauxhall! what recollections do they not suggest of Fielding, of Richardson, of Fanny Burney! Both these places of amusement flourished in the latter half of the eighteenth century; Vauxhall (earlier called "Spring Garden"), was, so to speak, the "Earl's Court," the summer resort of the day; just as "Ranelagh," with its famous "Rotunda," was the "Olympia," or winter one. Only, both the ancient pleasure resorts rejoiced in being the centre of fashion, which can hardly be said with truth of the modern ones. Also, from old novelists the reader gathers that it was very dangerous for young ladies to go unprotected to either place, in case of being run away with by bold, bad young men of the "Lovelace" type. Charming young ladies are, perhaps, more of "a drug in the market" now: and they are besides, as a rule, perfectly well able to take care of themselves.
That managers of those days were not more ignorant than their twentieth-century successors of the great art of advertising,—the following extract (from Rogers's Table Talk) shows:
"The proprietors of Ranelagh and Vauxhall used to send decoy-ducks among the ladies and gentlemen who were walking in the Mall, that is, persons attired in the height of fashion, who every now and then would exclaim in a very audible tone, 'What charming weather for Ranelagh,' or 'for Vauxhall!'"
At any rate, old Vauxhall Gardens must have been a charming place for flirtation, for "the windings and turnings in little wildernesses (were) so intricate, that the most experienced mothers often lost themselves in looking for their daughters." Part of the site of old Ranelagh is now appropriated as the gardens of Chelsea Hospital; the site of Vauxhall (in South Lambeth, on the Surrey side) is now covered by St. Peter's, Vauxhall, and its adjacent streets.
Picturesque in old days, Chelsea is a picturesque place still, and much beloved of painters, poets, and littérateurs;—the class of Bloomsbury, and yet with a vast difference. Here it is the "mode" to be select and exclusive. The artistic "cliques" of Tite Street and Cheyne Walk are nothing if not particular. To use the words of the modest prospectus issued by a recent magazine, they "will not tolerate mediocrity." But then no one in Chelsea ever is, or at least allows himself, to be "mediocre." Perhaps the fortunate inhabitants feel, as do the denizens of the academic towns of Oxford and Cambridge, the important weight of the traditions of their literary past. The spirit of Carlyle, Leigh Hunt, Rossetti, George Eliot, yet gives to Chelsea a literary atmosphere that it must at all hazards keep up. A dinner-party in its august cliques is not to be lightly undertaken; you feel, as you enter, that this is indeed a holy place.
Yet, already, the seclusion and selectness of Chelsea's sacred circles are being threatened with invasion by the Philistine. On "the other side of the water,"—where a picturesque suspension-bridge, the Albert Bridge, throws its graceful chain-curves across Chelsea Reach,—lies Battersea Park, surrounded on three sides by myriad red-brick flats of varying cheapness, grown like mushrooms, and still growing. Here is an infant community, a sort of "townier" Bedford Park, whose inhabitants can boast, with some truth, that they are "near the hum of the great city, and yet not of it." Flats are increasing all over London and its immediate suburbs now to such an extent that they are, indeed, in some danger of being overdone. In Central London, the growth of flats is, perhaps, of little consequence; but in suburban or semi-suburban London, the ubiquitous builder is the great bloodsucker of our day; he wanders perpetually, seeking, like the devil, what he may devour; and, on his debatable "Tom Tiddler's Ground," everlastingly "picking up gold and silver." But the builder has done good work too in Chelsea; for does not Cheyne Walk, of picturesque and venerable aspect, with its well-restored, red-brick, white-casemented houses, and fine old ironwork, lend a dignity to the western end of the Chelsea Embankment, to which, lower down, the spacious new red mansions, of ornate yet good style, do no disgrace? And modest Cheyne Row, containing the most famous dwelling in all Chelsea, is built in quiet, unobjectionable style.
Carlyle's quiet-looking residence in Cheyne Row is, practically, a museum of the Soane kind, left exactly as when lived in; the only difference being that here the relics are purely personal. This, a real "house of pilgrimage" to the literary world, is, especially, the resort of cultured Americans, who have even, it is said, had to be mildly dissuaded from sitting on the Sage's chairs and trying on his head-gear.
The "Carlyle House,"—desecrated, indeed, to the scandal of the neighbours, for an interregnum of unholy years by a horde of lawless cats,—is now entirely restored to its pristine neatness and order. It is difficult to imagine any place less museum-like and more pleasantly homely than this silent, peaceful, darkly-panelled abode, which seems,—backed by its green garden-close,—to be indeed a survival of the past, breathing forth still the spirit of the departed seer.