It was thus that Carlyle wrote of the street and the house some seventy years ago:
"The street is flag-pathed, sunk-storied, iron-railed, all old-fashioned and tightly done up; looks out on a rank of sturdy old pollarded (that is, beheaded) lime trees standing there like giants in tawtie wigs (for the new boughs are still young); beyond this a high brick wall; backwards a garden, the size of our back one at Comely Bank, with trees, &c., in bad culture; beyond this, green hayfields and tree avenues, once a bishop's pleasure grounds, an unpicturesque yet rather cheerful outlook. The house itself is eminent, antique, wainscoted to the very ceiling, and has been all new painted and repaired; broadish stair with massive balustrade (in the old style), corniced and as thick as one's thigh; floors thick as a rock, wood of them here and there worm-eaten, yet capable of cleanliness, and still with thrice the strength of a modern floor.... Chelsea is a singular heterogeneous kind of spot, very dirty and contused in some places, quite beautiful in others, abounding in antiquities and the traces of great men—Sir Thomas More, Steele, Smollett, &c. Our Row, which for the last three doors or so is a street, and none of the noblest, runs out upon a 'Parade' (perhaps they call it), running along the shore of the river, a broad highway with huge shady trees, boats lying moored, and a smell of shipping and tan."
Houses where people have lived, and suffered, and experienced, always—at least to those who know—seem to bear the impress of their past owners' personality. Who has not gone back, after long years, to an old dwelling-place, and been haunted by ghosts of the past, lurking in every well-known corner and cranny? There is something of the feeling of standing by a new-made grave,—the grave of what has been, and will never be again. Such feelings, in a minor degree, does the Carlyle house suggest to those who have read and interested themselves in the long-drawn-out tragedy of those joint lives with which it was bound up. In Mrs. Carlyle's pretty "china closet," for instance, you can almost see the slender figure in neat black silk, deftly arranging and dusting; here, in the drawing-room beyond, is her work-table; you can imagine her, most thrifty of housewives, mending a hole in the carpet; there in the chimney-corner she lay on her sofa, silently suffering, while her prophet vociferated his thunders, and puffed clouds of tobacco-smoke into the chimney. Upstairs, on the top story, is the much-written-of "sound-proof" room, which was really not "sound-proof" at all, though it was constructed with that object by Carlyle at a considerable expense. Possibly, "the young lady next door" still plays on her piano; most likely the neighbours' fowls still crow loudly in the mornings (for these minor evils of London are perennial), in full security now and immunity.
A seated statue of Carlyle, by Boehm,—a real work of art,—faces the river in the neighbouring Embankment Gardens, close to the Albert Bridge. Weary, wrinkled, as Tithonus, the old man gazes ever towards the unceasing tides of the river and of humanity, his look troubled, but yet
"majestic in his sadness at the doubtful doom of human kind."
In Upper (or "Little") Cheyne Row, close by the Carlyles, lived for seven years,—the most embarrassed years in his chequered career,—Leigh Hunt. (This was from 1833 to 1840, before the Edwardes Square time.) Could one imagine a greater contrast than these two Cheyne Row households? The Hunts were Bohemians of irrepressible type. Mrs. Carlyle, being, too, in 1834 only at the very beginning of her neat Chelsea housekeeping, and not yet "bug-bitten, bedusted, and bedevilled," was, naturally, very severe on the subject of the Hunts. To judge from the letters of "that clever lady, a little too much given to insecticide" (as Lord Bowen called her), she had but the poorest opinion of her neighbour's wife's "management" and borrowing ways. And here is Carlyle's account of the Hunt ménage:
"Hunt's house" (he says) "excels all you have ever read of—a poetical Tinkerdom, without parallel even in literature. In his family room, where are a sickly large wife and a whole school of well-conditioned wild children, you will find half-a-dozen old rickety chairs gathered from half-a-dozen different hucksters, and all seeming engaged, and just pausing, in a violent hornpipe. On these and around them, and over the dusty table and ragged carpet lie all kinds of litter—books, papers, egg-shells, scissors, and, last night when I was there, the torn heart of a half-quartern loaf. His own room above stairs, into which alone I strive to enter, he keeps cleaner. It has only two chairs, a bookcase, and a writing-table; yet the noble Hunt receives you in his Tinkerdom in the spirit of a king, apologises for nothing, places you in the best seat, takes a window-sill himself if there is no other, and then, folding closer his loose-flowing 'muslin-cloud' of a printed nightgown, in which he always writes, commences the liveliest dialogue on philosophy and the prospects of man (who is to be beyond measure happy yet); which again he will courteously terminate the moment you are bound to go; a most interesting, pitiable, lovable man, to be used kindly, but with discretion."
In the neighbouring Cheyne Walk have, of course, lived many notable people. Innumerable associations cling to this picturesque row of time-darkened red-brick and white-casemented houses, with the graceful wrought-iron railings and tall gates that shut out their trim front-garden plots from the curious Embankment. At No. 4, died George Eliot the novelist, in 1880, a short time after her marriage to Mr. Cross. She had only recently settled into this charming London dwelling, and her voluminous library had only just been arranged for her with infinite care, "as nearly as possible in the same order as at the Priory," when the sudden stroke of Death fell. Daniel Maclise, the early-Victorian painter, a meteor of art, and the wonder of his own age, had lived in this same house before. Cecil Lawson, that young painter of such great promise, who died so early, lived at No. 15; and No. 16, or "Queen's House," is bound up with the memory of that brilliant and wayward genius, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who lived here after his wife's tragic death, and gathered round him his famous miscellany of strange beasts and curious creatures.
"Queen's House," unaltered in essentials, has still a picturesque and old-world air that agrees well with its long history. Its mellowed bricks of sober red have a pleasant solidity. It used to be called "Tudor House," owing to its early traditional associations with Queens Katherine Parr and Elizabeth; for the ancient "Manor House" of Chelsea, built by Henry VIII., occupied, with its gardens, the site of this and the adjoining houses; from No. 18 Cheyne Walk eastward as far as Oakley street. Of the many celebrated people who have lived there, Sir Hans Sloane was the latest;—the old house was pulled down after his death. The basements and gardens of the houses in Cheyne Walk still show traces of this palace of Henry VIII. The present "Queen's House" is said to have been built by Wren, the Royal Architect, for the neglected Queen Catherine of Braganza; and some say that the initials, "C. R.", in twisted iron on the gate and railings, commemorate her tenancy. However that may be, we may take it that Thackeray, in Esmond, describes it as the home of the old "Dowager of Chelsey;" and here, again, we note the curious fact that the fictional interest is at least as strong as the real.
Inside, the house is delightful; all the rooms and passages are heavily wainscoted, and the balustrade of the spiral staircase is of "finest hand-wrought iron." When Rossetti entered on its occupation, Chelsea was still, though literary, comparatively unfashionable; (for in those days the two persuasions did not as yet go hand-in-hand). The poet-painter began a joint tenancy here with Swinburne, George Meredith, and his brother, William Rossetti; of these Swinburne was the most constant, and he wrote many of his best-known poems here. But of Mr. Meredith's would-be-tenancy the following story is told, on the novelist's own authority:—