ONE P.M.—DOCK LONDON AND DINING LONDON.
This modest series of papers brought me, at the time of their composition, into great trouble, which was very nearly resulting in my complete discomfiture. Perhaps the severest of my trials was having to write the book at all, possessing, as is my misfortune, of course, a constitutional disinclination for the avocation to which I have devoted myself (as a gagne pain, or bread-winning mean). I didn’t so much mind the ladies and gentlemen, who, since the commencement of the periodical in which these articles were originally published—ladies and gentlemen personally quite unknown to me—who overwhelmed me with correspondence; some denouncing, others upbraiding, many ridiculing, and a few—a very few—eulogising yours to command. I didn’t so much object to the attentions of those professional begging-letter writers, who are good enough to include authors in their list of possible contributaries, and who were profuse lately in passionate appeals (in bold, clerkly hands) for pecuniary assistance; for though, like Bardolph, I have nothing, and cannot even coin my nose for guineas, or my blood for drachmas, it is not the less flattering to a man’s minor vanities to receive a begging letter. I can imagine an old pauper out for a holiday, coming home to the workhouse, quite elated at having been accosted in the street by a mendicant, and asked for a halfpenny. I could bear with equanimity—nay, could afford to smile at—the people who went about saying things (who are the people who go about saying things, I wonder!) who ingeniously circulated reports that I was dead; that I wrote these papers under a pseudonym; that they were plagiarisms from some others written twenty years ago; and that I never wrote them at all. I disregarded such insinuations serenely; for who among us is exempt from such bald chat? The very stupidest have their Boswells—the very meanest have those to envy them, as well as the Great and Learned! There are people at this very moment, who are going about saying that Jones has pawned his plate, that the bailiffs are in Thompson’s country house, that Robinson has written himself out, that Brown has run away with Jenkins’s wife, that Muggins has taken to brandy-and-water, that Simpkins murdered Eliza Grimwood, that Larkins cut Thistlewood’s head off, and that Podgers was tried at the Old Bailey, in the year ’thirty-five, for an attempt to set the Thames on fire. But I was infinitely harassed while the clock was ticking periodically—the efforts I had to make to keep it from running down altogether!—by the great plague of “Suggesters.” From the metropolitan and suburban postal districts, from all parts of the United Kingdom—the United Kingdom, pshaw! from the Continent generally, and from across the broad Atlantic (fortunately, the return mail from Australia was not yet due)—suggestions poured in as thickly as letters of congratulation on one who has just inherited a vast fortune. If there had been five hundred in lieu of four-and-twenty hours in “Twice Round the Clock,” the Great Suggestions I received had stomach for them all. The Suggesters would take no denial: I was bound under terrific penalties to adopt, endorse, carry out, their hints,—else would they play the dickens with me. I must have a sing-song meeting for nine p.m.; the committee of a burial club at ten; the dissecting-room of an hospital at eleven; a postal receiving-house, a lawyer’s office, a rag, bones, and bottle shop, the tollgate of Waterloo Bridge, and the interior of a Hammersmith ’bus, at some hour or other of the day or night. The Suggestions were oral as well as written. Strange men darted up on me from by-streets, caught at my button with trembling fingers, told me in husky tones of their vast metropolitan experience, and impressed on me the necessity of a graphic tableau of Joe Perks, the sporting barber’s, at one o’clock in the morning. Low-browed merchants popped from shady shell-fish shops, and, pointing to huge lobsters, asked where they could send the crustaceous delicacies with their compliments, and how excellent a thing it would be to give a view of the aristocracy supping at Whelks’s celebrated oyster and kippered salmon warehouse after the play. And, finally, a shy acquaintance of mine, with a face like an over-ripe Stilton cheese, and remotely connected with the Corporation of London—he may be, for aught I know, a ticket-porter in Doctors’ Commons, or a hanger-on to the water bailiff—favoured me with an occult inuendo that a word-picture of the Court of Common Council will be the very thing for four p.m., fluttering before my dazzled eyes a phantom ticket for the Guildhall banquet. In vain I endeavoured to convince these respectable Suggesters, that the papers in question were not commenced without a definite plan of action; that such plan, sketched forth years since, duly weighed, adjusted, and settled, after mature study and deliberation, not only so far as I am concerned, but by “parties” deeply learned in the mysteries of London Life, and versed in the recondite secret of pleasing the public taste, had at length been put into operation, and was no more capable of alteration than were the laws of the Medes and Persians. But all to no purpose did I make these representations. The Suggesters wouldn’t be convinced; their letters continued to flow in. They found out my address at last (they have lost it now, ha, ha!), and knocked my door down; bringing me peremptory letters of introduction from people I didn’t know, or didn’t care five farthings about, or else introducing themselves boldly, in the “Bottle Imp” manner, with an implied “You must learn to love me;” they nosed me in the lobby, and saw me dancing in the hall, and my only refuge at last was to go away. Yes; the pulsations of time had to beat behind the dial of a clock in the rural districts; and these lines were written among the hay and the ripening corn, laughing a bitter laugh to think that the postman was toiling up the quiet street in London with piles of additional suggestions, and that the Suggesters themselves were waiting for me in my usual haunts, in the fond expectation of a button to hold, or an ear to gloze suggestions within.
I tried the sea-shore; but found London-super-Mare sweltering, stewing, broiling, frying, fizzing, panting, in the sun—like Marseilles, minus the evil odours—to such an extent, and so utterly destitute of shade, that I was compelled to leave it. The paint was blistering on the bright green doors; the shingly pavement seemed to cry out “Come and grill steaks on me!” the pitch oozed from the seams of the fishing-boats; the surf hissed as it came to kiss the pebbles on the beach; the dial on the pier-head blazed with concentric rays; the chains of the suspension bridge were red hot; the camera obscura glared white in the sunshine; the turf on the Steyne was brown and parched, like a forgotten oasis in a desert; the leaves on the trees in the pavilion gardens glittered and chinked in the summer breeze, like new bright guineas; the fly-horses hung their heads, their poor tongues protruding, their limbs flaccid, and their scanty tails almost powerless to flap away the swarms of flies, which alone were riotous and active of living creation, inebriating themselves with saccharine suction in the grocers’ shops, and noisily buzzing their scanmag in private parlours; the flymen dozed on their boxes; the pushers of invalid perambulators slumbered peacefully beneath the hoods of their own Bath chairs; the ladies in the round hats found it too hot to promenade the cliff, and lolled instead at verandahed windows, arrayed in the most ravishing of muslin morning wrappers, and conversed languidly with exquisites, whose moustaches were dank with moisture, and who had scarcely energy enough to yawn. The captivating amazons abandoned for the day their plumed hats, their coquettish gauntlets, their wash-leather sub-fusk garments with the straps and patent-leather boots, and deferred their cavalcades on the skittish mares till the cool of the evening; the showy dragoon officers confined themselves, of their own free will, to the mess-room of their barracks on the Lewes road, where they sipped sangaree, smoked fragrancias, read “Bell’s Life,” and made bets on every imaginable topic. The hair of the little Skye terriers no longer curled, but hung supine in wiry hanks; the little children made piteous appeals to their parents and guardians to be permitted to run about without anything on; the two clerks at the branch bank, who are sleepy enough in the coldest weather, nodded at each other over the ledgers which had no entries in them. The only sound that disturbed the drowsy stillness of the streets was the popping of ginger-beer corks; and the very fleas in the lodging-houses lost all their agility and vivacity. No longer did they playfully leap—no longer archly gyrate; they crawled and crept, like their low relatives the bugs, and were caught and crushed without affording the slightest opportunity for sport. It was mortally hot at London-super-Mare, and I left it. Then I tried that English paradise of the west, Clifton; but woe is me! the Downs were so delightful; the prospect so exquisitely lovely; the Avon winding hundreds of feet beneath me, like a silver skein, yet bearing big three-masted ships on its bosom; the rocks and underwood so full of matter for pleasant, lazy cogitation, that I felt the only exertion of which I was capable, to be writing sonnets on the Avon and its sedgy banks, or making lame attempts at pre-Raphaelite sketches in water-colours; or thinking about doing either, which amounts to pretty nearly the same thing. So I came away from Clifton too, and hung out my sign Here. (It is There now: swallows have come and gone, snows have gathered and melted, babies prattle now who were unborn and unthought of then.) Ye shall not know where Here was situated, oh, ye incorrigible Suggesters. No more particular indices of its whereabouts will I give, even to the general public, than that close to my study was a dry skittle-ground, where every day—the hotter the better—I exercised myself with the wooden “cheese” against the seven and a-half pins which were all that the dry skittle-ground could furnish forth towards the ordinary nine; that over-against this gymnastic course was an étable, a “shippon,” as they call it in the north, where seven cows gravely ruminated; and that, at the end of a yard crowded with agricultural implements which old Pyne alone could draw, there was a Stye, from which, looking over its palings,
“All start, like boys who, unaware,
Ranging the woods to find a hare,
Come to the mouth of some dark lair:
Where, growling low, a fierce old bear
Lies amid bones and blood.”
Not that any fierce or ancient member of the ursine tribe resided therein; but that it was the residence of a horrific-looking old sow, a dreadful creature, that farrowed unheard-of families of pigs, that lay on her broadside starboard the live-long day, winking her cruel eye, and grunting with a persistent sullenness. The chief swineherd proudly declared her to be “the viciousest beast as ever was,” and hinted darkly that she had killed a Man. The chief swineherd and I were friends. He was my “putter-up” at skittles, and did me the honour to report among the neighbouring peasantry, that “barrin’ the gent as cum here last autumn, and was off his head” (insane, I presume); I was “the very wust hand at knock-’em-downs he ever see.” It is something to be popular in the rural districts; and yet I was not three miles distant from the Regent Circus.
My eyes are once again turned to the clock face. It is One o’Clock in the Afternoon, and I must think of London. Come back, ye memories: open Sesame, ye secret chambers of the brain, and let me transport myself away from the dry skittle-ground, the seven grave cows and the vicious sow, to plunge once more into the toil and trouble of the seething, eddying Mistress City of the world.