Twice round the clock; or, The hours of the day and night in London

by George Augustus Sala

To say nothing of a dreadful German basso, one of the regular line-of-battle ship voices, with 56-pounders on the first deck, who was once a next-door neighbour in the Quadrant, and when he used to call for his servant thus,“PaoOlo!” shook the flower-pots on our own balcony; or of an egregious fiddler, with long hair, who, in imitation of his predecessor, Paganini, gave out that he had sold himself to the devil, but who was, I believe, an arrant humbug with a mania for practising in the open air—it may have been as a medium of advertisement—and used to attract large crowds in the street beneath listening to his complicated fiddlements. Yet I must spare a word for Madame—I really forget whom, but it ended with “heim,” I think—who had the six-and-thirty Austro-Sclavonic children who used to perform the mirror dance and other terpsichorean feats at her Majesty’s Theatre and whom she used to drill on the balcony like soldiers. They made a tremendous noise, these tiny figurantes, and in the hours of recreation were not unaccustomed to fight among themselves. Then Madame Somethingheim would sally forth on the balcony and cut savagely into their poor young bodies with a switch, and after much howling on their part, and chasing to and fro on hers, restore peace.

The colonnades are as fruitful to me in recollections as the balconies. How many miles of daily walks have I gone over, the hand of a toddling little sister in mine, and with strict injunctions not to stray beyond the shadow of the columns, and with prohibitions, under dreadful menaces, of venturing in Air Street on the one side or Vigo Lane on the other! I wore, I remember, then, an absurd blue cloak, too short for me, and lined with red, and with a brass clasp somewhat resembling the ornament on a cartouch box. This cloak chafed and fretted me, and was the bane and terror of my existence; for I knew, or fancied I knew, that every passer-by must know that it had never been made for me, which, indeed, it never had, having formerly been of far larger dimensions and the property of an officer in his Majesty’s light infantry. I believe that there was a domestic ukase promulgated for our benefit against crossing the road; but we did cross it nevertheless, with many looks to the right and the left, not only to secure ourselves against threatening carriage wheels, but with reference to the possible appearance of parents and guardians. There was a delightful bird-stuffer’s shop at the corner of a court, with birds of paradise, parrots, and hummingbirds of gorgeous plumage, and strange creatures with white bodies and long yellow beaks and legs that terrified while they pleasured us. Then there was the funeral monument shop, with the mural tablets, the obelisks, the broken columns, the extinguished torches, and the draped urns in the window, and some with the inscriptions into the bargain, all ready engraved in black and white, puzzling us as to whether the tender husbands, devoted wives, and affectionate sons, to whom they referred, were buried in that grisly shop—it had a pleasant, fascinating terror about it, like an undertaker’s, too. There was Swan and Edgar’s, splendid and radiant, then as now, with brave apparel (how many times have I listened to the enthusiastic cheers of Swan and Edgar’s young men, on the occasion of the proprietors giving their annual banquet to their employés?), and even then replete with legends of dishonest fares, who caused a cab to halt at the Regent Street entrance, got out, said they would be back in a moment, and then darting through the crowded shop, knavishly escaped at the Piccadilly end. There was the Italian statuary shop, with Canova’s Graces, the crouching Venus, and the birds round a vase in alabaster; and, above all, there was Mrs. Lipscombe’s shop—I don’t mean the staymaker’s, but the one next to that, the filter shop, with the astonishing machines for converting foul and muddy water, like gruel, thick and slab, into a sparkling, crystal stream. What a miracle it seemed to me that the goblet, filled to the brim, and yet into which, from the filter above, drops continually fell, never overflowed! How I used to watch the little cork ball, kept in a continually bounding state of agitation by the perpendicular jet of water—watch it with almost breathless agitation, when, every now and then, the centre of gravity would be lost, and the little ball would tumble in the basin beneath—the whole was covered by a glass shade—till, caught up once more, it would be sent in eddying whirls higher than ever! I have seen the same experiment tried since with bigger balls—and of marble—very like twenty-four pounders—at the Grandes Eaux of Versailles, and in the gardens of Peterhoff. Stone Neptunes and Tritons surrounded the basin, and the jets of water, forty feet high, sent the spray flying in the faces of the spectators; but none of these hydraulic displays ever came up, in my opinion, to the tiny squirt, with the little cork ball, underneath the glass shade, in Mrs. Lipscombe’s window. Does she make stays and sell filters yet, I wonder! What a curious mixture of avocations! I know of none stranger since the names of M. Fenwick de Porquet and Mrs. Mary Wedlake were amalgamated, and inquiries as to whether we “bruised our oats yet,” were alternated with pressing questions of “Parlez vous Français?”

When I thus walked the Regent Quadrant, twenty years since, it was haunted by a class of men, now, I am happy to believe, almost entirely extinct. We have plenty of rogues in our body corporate yet. The turf has its blacklegs and touts; the nightside of London is fruitful in “macemen,” “mouchers,” and “go-alongs.” You must not be angry with me for using slang terms; for did not a clergyman, at a highly-respectable institution, deliver a lecture on slang the other day, and did not the “Times” quote him? We are not free from skittle-sharps, card-cheats, “duffers,” and ring-droppers; nay, even at remote country race-courses, you may find remnants of the whilom swarming tribe of “charley-pitchers,” the knavish gentry who pursue the games of “under seven or over seven,” “red, black, leather and star,” or inveigle the unwary with “three little thimbles and one small pea.” But a stern and righteous legislation has put down nine-tenths of the infamous dens where any fool who chose to knock was fleeced to the last lock of wool. If a man wants to be vicious (in the gambling way) now, he must have the entrée to the abodes of vice, and a nodding acquaintance with the demon. A neophyte is not allowed to ruin himself how and where he likes. In the days of which I make mention, Regent Street and its purlieus abounded in open gambling houses, and to the skirts of these necessarily hung on a deboshed regiment of rogues, who made their miserable livings as runners, and decoy-ducks, and bravos to these abominable nests. They were called “Greeks,” and two o’clock in the afternoon was their great time for turning out. From what infected holes or pestiferous garrets in Sherrard, or Brewer, or Rupert Street, they came, I know not; but there they were at the appointed hour, skulking with a half sheepish, half defiant stride up and down Regent Street. Miserable dogs mostly, for all their fine clothes—always resplendently, though dirtily, attired. They wore great white coats, shiny hats, and mosaic jewellery, which was just then coming into fashion. There was another fashion, in which they very nearly succeeded, by adopting, to drive out, and make permanently disreputable: that of wearing moustaches. They used to swagger about, all lacquered, pomatumed, bejewelled, and begrimed, till I knew them all by sight and many of them by name and repute. There was Jack Cheetham, the lord’s son, he who was thrown out of the window at Frascati’s, and killed the Frenchman in the Bois de Vincennes. There was Captain Dollamore, who married the rich widow, and was arrested for her milliner’s bill the week afterwards. There was Charley Skewball; he was called Charley, but he was a baronet, had once been a gentleman, and was the greatest rogue unhung. Mr. Thackeray knows these men well. They are his Count Punters, Major Loders, M. de Caramboles, Hon. Algernon Deuceaces; but they are extinct among us as a class, O Titmarsh; and simple people, who read your admirable novels, wonder whom the monsters are that you draw. They are dead; they are at the hulks; they are feebly punting at the few remaining gambling places on the Rhine: they flaunted in the bad prime of their manhood when I was a child. I have outgrown them; and only now and then, when I am out very late, collecting materials for “Twice Round the Clock,” I come upon a stray Jack or Charley—ragged and drivelling, his fine feathers all moulted or smirched, his occupation quite gone—who sidles up to me and calls me “Your honour,” and with salt-rheumy lips, whimpers forth a supplication for “A penny towards a night’s lodging.”

When our dear Queen Victoria was crowned, I began to lose sight of Regent Street—lost sight of it by degrees altogether, and came not back to it, as an observer, for many years. I rather avoided the place, for I had a bitter baptism of physical misery in the beginning of my working life: wanting food and raiment, not through prodigality (that came afterwards), but through sheer penury and friendlessness. And Regent Street, for all my querulous childhood, was associated with too many memories of happier days gone for ever. You know what the Italian rhymester says—

“Nessun maggior dolore

Che ricordarsi del tempo felice

Nella Miseria.”

An Englishman has stolen the thought in some lines about “a sorrow’s crown of sorrow,” whose summing up I forget; but the sense of the passage is that the times are exceedingly hard, when, destitute and footsore, you pass by a house, and glance at the windows once lighted up by feasting in which you participated; when you think of the rooms, once swept by the robe of the woman whom you loved, but that now, house, windows, rooms, are the portion of strangers. I say I went away from Regent Street, and came not back. There were reasons. I became of the Strand and Fleet Street a denizen, and Temple Bar entered into my soul. For I was affiliated to a great mystery of Masonry, called Literature, and had to follow the behests of my mother lodge. You don’t see much of Regent Street, during your apprenticeship, if you begin at the lowermost degree, I can assure you. Now I am a master-mason, free and accepted, and can hold my own; albeit I shall never be an Office-bearer, or “Grand,” of my lodge, or rise to the superlatives of the Royal Arch or the Thirty-third.

Behold Regent Street at two p.m., in the accompanying cartoon. Not without reason do I declare it the most fashionable street in the world. I call it not so for the aristocratic mansions it might possess; for the lower parts of the houses are occupied as shops, and the furnished apartments are let, either to music or operatic celebrities or to unostentatious old bachelors. But the shops themselves are innately fashionable. There was a dash of utilitarianism mingled with the slightly Bohemian tinge of my Regent Street of twenty years ago; there were bakers’ shops, stationers, and opticians, who had models of steam engines in their windows. There was a grocer not above selling orange marmalade, brown sugar, and Durham mustard. I remember buying a penny cake of chocolate of him one morning; but I find the shop now expanded into a magnificent emporium, where are sold wines, and spirits, sweetmeats and preserves, liqueurs and condiments, Bayonne ham, Narbonne honey, Bologna sausages, Russian caviare, Iceland moss, clotted cream, and terrines of pâté de foie gras. Indeed, Regent Street is an avenue of superfluities—a great trunk-road in Vanity Fair. Fancy watchmakers, haberdashers, and photographers; fancy stationers, fancy hosiers, and fancy staymakers; music shops, shawl shops, jewellers, French glove shops, perfumery, and point lace shops, confectioners and milliners: creamily, these are the merchants whose wares are exhibited in this Bezesteen of the world.