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

by George Augustus Sala

Old man with the scythe and hour-glass, I defy thee! I will admit that three o’clock post meridian, requires much deliberation and cogitation, in order to give the millions of human marionettes, of whom I hold, temporarily, the strings, their suitable employment; but it is rather from a profusion than a paucity of scenes and things germane to the hour that I am embarrassed. At three, ’Change is still going on, though its busy time, the acmè of its excitement, is over. As the clock strikes four, the city of London is in full pant; the clerks rush up Cheapside, and dive down the wealthy narrow lanes, their bursting bill-books (secured by leather-covered chains tied round their bodies) charged with “three months after date, please pay to the order,” which they cram into letter-boxes for acceptance. The private banking houses in Lombard Street are in an orderly uproar of finance. The rattling of shovels is incessant; office-boys cast thousands of pounds, in notes, bills, and money, to the cashier, carelessly, across the counter, paying vast sums in to their masters’ accounts; and the mighty partners—in checked neckerchiefs, buff waistcoats, and creaking boots: tremendous bank-partners, who are baronets, and members of Parliament, lords even—stalk back from ’Change, pay a farewell visit to the bank parlour, have a short but solemn confab with confidential subordinates, relative to coming transactions at the clearing-house, and then enter their carriages, and are borne to clubs, to the House of Commons, to Greenwich dinners, or, perchance, if they have a dinner-party at home, to their magnificent villas at Putney and Roehampton. What a colony of bankers dwell there! the sommités of the haute finance seem to entertain as decided a partiality for the banks of the Thames, as the stockbrokers do for Brixton and Tulse Hill. Rare lives these money keepers lead—scattering in the West that which they gather in the East. Graperies, pineries, conservatories, ice-houses, dinner-parties, balls, picnics; all these do they enjoy: they, their comely wives and handsome daughters. They marry into the aristocracy! they have countesses and marchionesses in their list of partners. It is not so many centuries ago since the bankers were humble sellers of gold plate, dwelling in Lombard Street and the Chepe, and following the great courtiers round the quadrangle of the Exchange, intreating their lordships’ honours to be allowed to keep their cash. Worthy individuals, however, are the majority of these bankers, and it is but very rarely indeed that they make ducks and drakes of their customers’ moneys. They are not so very proud either, for all their splendid carriages and horses; and here, upon my word, is Baron Lionel de Rothschild tearing up Ludgate Hill in a common Hansom cab; but he, like the bad man whom Martial in an epigram declares not to be so much vicious as vice itself, is less a Banker than a Bank.

As three o’clock grows old, and the tide of business shows unmistakeable indices of an ebb at no very remote period, so far as the city is concerned, that same business is at the West-end in its extremest activity. The shops of the West Strand, Piccadilly, Oxford and Regent Streets, are thronged with customers, chiefly ladies; the roadway is encumbered with carts and carriages; and street avocations—the minor commerce of the mighty mart—are in full swing. Thick-necked and beetle-browed individuals, by courtesy called dog-fanciers, but who in many cases might with as much propriety answer to the name of dog-stealers—forbidding-looking gentry, in coats of velveteen, with large mother-o’-pearl buttons, and waistcoats of the neat and unpretending moleskin—lurk about the kerbs of the purlieus of Regent Street and Waterloo Place (the police drive them away from the main thoroughfares), with the little “dawgs” they have to sell tucked beneath their arms, made doubly attractive by much washing with scented soap, and the further decoration of their necks with pink or blue ribbons. Here is the little snub-nosed King Charles—I hope the retroussé appearance of his nasal organ is not due to the unkind agency of a noose of whipcord—his feathery feet and tail, and his long silky ears, sweeping the clean summer pavement. Here is the Newfoundland pup, with his bullet head and clubbed caudal-appendage, winking his stupid little eyes, and needing, seemingly, an enormous amount of licking into shape. Here is the bull-dog, in his full growth, with his legs bowed, his tail inclining to the spiral, his broad chest, thin flanks, defined ribs, moist nozzle, hare lip, bloodshot eyes, protruding fang, and symmetrical patch over one eye; or else, in a state of puppyhood, peeping from his proprietor’s side-pocket, all pink and white like a morose sucking-pig become a hermit. Here is the delightful little toy English terrier, with his jet-black coat, erect neck, and tan paws; and here the genuine Skye, gray or brown, like an unravelled ball of worsted. See, too, grimacing at all who come to view, like a mulatto at a slave auction, who fancies himself good-looking, the accomplished French poodle, with his peaked nose, woolly wig, leggings, and tail band, and his horrible shaved, salmon-coloured body. He can dance; he can perform gun-drill; he can fall motionless, as though dead, at the word of command; he can climb up a lamp-post, jump over a stick, hop on one leg, carry a basket in his mouth, and run away when he is told that a policeman is coming. You can teach him to do anything but love you. These, and good store of mongrels and half-breeds that the dealer would fain palm upon us as dogs of blood and price, frisk and fawn about his cord-trouser covered legs; but where is the toy-dog par excellence, the playful, snappish, fractious, facetious, charming, utterly useless little dog, that, a quarter of a century since, was the treasure of our dowagers and our old maids? Where is the Dutch pug? Where is that Narcissus of canine Calibanism, with his coffee-coloured coat, his tail in a ring like the blue-nosed baboon’s, his crisped morsels of ears, his black muzzle, his sharp, gleaming little teeth, his intensely red lips and tongue? Is he extinct, like the lion-dog from Malta, the property of her Majesty the Queen, and the “last of his race,” whom courtly Sir Edwin Landseer drew? Are there no more Dutch pugs? They must exist somewhere. Cunning dealers owning recherché kennels in the New Road or at Battle Bridge, or attending recondite “show clubs,” held at mysterious hostelries in the vicinity of Clerkenwell, must yet have some undoubted specimens of the pug for sale. There must be burghers yet, in the fat comfortable houses at Loo by the Hague, or in the plethoric, oozy vicinage of Amsterdam—there must be Tietjens, and Tenbroecks, and van Ramms, and van Bummels, whose pride it is, amidst their store of tulip bulbs, china vases, cabinet pictures by Breughel and Ostade, lacquer-work from Japan, and spice-boxes from Java, to possess Dutch pugs in the flesh. But the creature is seen no more in London streets, and we must be content with him on Hogarth’s canvases, in Linacre’s engravings, or modelled in china, as we see him in the curiosity shops. I have indeed seen the elephant—I mean the Dutch pug—alive and snarling, once in my life. He was led by a bright scarlet ribbon—scarlet, mind, not pink or blue—attached to his silver collar; and there must have been something in the appearance of my youthful legs (I was but five, and they were bare, plump, and mottled) that excited his carnivorous propensities, for, long as is the lapse of time, I remember that he rushed at me like a coffee-coloured tiger. His mistress was a Duchess, the grandest, handsomest Duchess that had ever lived (of course, I except Georgina of Devonshire) since the days of that Grace of Queensberry of whom Mr. Thackeray was good enough to tell us in the “Virginians.” She, my Duchess, wore a hat and feathers, diamonds, and a moustache—a downy nimbus round her mouth, like that which Mr. Philip insinuates rather than paints in his delightful Spanish girls’ faces. I see her now, parading the cliff at Brighton, with her black velvet train—yes, madam, her train—held up by a page. She was the last duchess who drove down to Brighton in a coach and six. She was the last duchess who at Twelfth-night parties had a diamond ring baked in the cake which was to be distributed by lots. Before she came to her coronet, she had been a singing woman at a playhouse, had married a very foolish rich old banker, and, at his death, remarried a more foolish and very poor duke. But she was an excellent woman, and the relative to whom she left the bulk of her wealth, is one of the most charitable, as I am also afraid she is one of the most ennuyée, ladies in England. I am proud of my reminiscence. It is not every one that has seen a Dutch pug and the Duchess of St. Albans alive.

Body of me! here am I wasting my time among the dog-fanciers—(when the name of the man in the iron mask, the authorship of “Junius,” the murderer of Caspar Hauser, and the date of the laws of Menu, shall be known, it shall also be patent to all men why trafficking in dogs and horses seem necessarily connected with roguery)—here am I descanting on poodles and pug-dogs, when, with quick observant eyes, I should be noting the hundred little trades that are being driven at three o’clock in the afternoon. The feverish industry—the untiring perseverance—the bitter struggle, and all for yon scanty morsel of bread, and a few inches of space for repose at night in a fourpenny lodging-house! Follow the kerb-stone from the County Fire Office to St. Martin’s Lane. See the itinerant venders of catch-’em-alive-o’s, of cheap toys, of quires of writing-paper, sealing-wax and envelopes, all for the small charge of one penny; see the industrials who have walking-sticks, umbrellas, gutta-percha whips, aërated balls, locomotive engines and statuettes of Napoleon in glass phials, that make us wonder, as with flies in amber, however they, the engines and statuettes, got there; the women who have bouquets to dispose of—how many times have they been refreshed beneath the pump, this droughty day?—the boys and girls in looped and windowed raggedness striving to sell fruit, flowers, almanacks, pencils, fusees—anything, to keep the wolf from the door. He is always at the door, that wolf—always at that yawning portal, and his name is Famine. The worst of the brute is, that he comes not alone—that he has a friend, a brother wolf with him, who hankers round the corner, and is always ready to pop in at the door at the slightest suspicion of a summons. This wolf is a full-paunched rogue, and liberal, too, of succulent, but poisoned food to his friends. This is the thief wolf, the gallows wolf, the Calcraft wolf. Lupus carnifex. He keeps up an incessant whining baying, which, being interpreted, means, “Work no more. See how hard the life is. What’s the good of working? Come and Steal.” Look here, my lords and gentlemen—look here, my right honourable friends—look here, my noble captains—look here, your honours’ worships—come out of your carriages, come out of your clubs, come out of your shooting-boxes in the Highlands, and your petites maisons in the Regent’s Park, and look at these faded and patched creatures. I tell you that they have to rise early and go to bed late—that they have to work hours and hours before they can turn one penny. They have never been taught; they are seldom fed, and more seldom washed; but they don’t steal. I declare that it is a wonder they do not—a marvel and a miracle they do not. They remain steadfastly honest; for, in the troubled sea of their lives, Almighty Mercy has planted a Pharos, or light-house. The night is pitchy black oft enough; the light revolves—is for a time invisible—and the poor forlorn, tempest-torn man watches the blank horizon in all but mute despair; but the blessed gladdening gleam comes round again, as we have all seen it many a time on the ocean, and, sighing, the honest man resolutely keeps on his course.

Following the kerb-stone myself from the before-mentioned County Fire Office to St. Martin’s Lane, and passing through Leicester Square—which, what with the Alhambra “Palace” and its hideous American posters, the Great Globe, and the monster cafés chantants, I begin to be rather uncertain about recognising—passing, not without some inward trembling, the stick shop at the corner of the lane, while on either side of the portal those peculiarly ugly carved clubs—the very Gog and Magog of walking-stickery—keep watch and ward, I cut dexterously through the living torrent that is flowing from Charing Cross toward St. Giles’s (they were villages once, Charynge and Saint Gyles’s—ha! ha!) and commence the ascent of New Street, a feat well nigh as disagreeable, if not as perilous, as that of Mont Blanc. I hate this incorrigible little thoroughfare; this New Street. It is full of bad smells, mangy little shops, obstructions, and bad characters. There is a yawning gin-palace at its south-western extremity. The odours of its eating-houses—especially of a seedy little French pension bourgeoise about half way up—are displeasing to my nostrils. The cigars vended in New Street are the worst in London, and the sweetstuff shops are mobbed—yes, mobbed—by children in torn pinafores who never have any pocket handkerchiefs. Of late days, photographers have hung out their signs and set up their lenses in New Street; and if, passing through the street, you escape being run over by a wagon or upset by an inebriated market-gardener, you run great risks of being forcibly dragged into the hole tenanted by a photographic “artist,” and “focussed,” willy nilly. Thoroughfares, almost inconceivably tortuous, crapulous, and infamous, debouch upon New Street. There is that Rose Street, or Rose Alley, where, if I be not wrong in my topography, John Dryden, the poet, was waylaid and cudgelled; and there is a wretched little haunt called Bedfordbury, a devious, slimy little reptile of a place, whose tumble-down tenements and reeking courts spume forth plumps of animated rags, such as can be equalled in no London thoroughfare save Church Lane, St. Giles’s. I don’t think there are five windows in Bedfordbury with a whole pain of glass in them. Rags and filthy loques are hung from poles, like banners from the outward walls. There is an insolent burgher of Bedfordbury, who says I owe him certain stivers. Confound the place! its rags, its children, its red herrings, and tobacco-pipes crossed in the windows, its boulders of whitening, and its turpentine-infected bundles of firewood!

The pursuit of New Street, thus maledicted, brings me to King Street, Covent Garden, a broad, fair, well-conducted public way, against which I have no particular prejudice; for it leads up to Covent Garden Market, which I love; and it contains within its limits the Garrick Club.

Before, however, you come to the Garrick, before you come to the coffee-shop where there is that strange collection of alarming-looking portraits; before you come to Mr. Kilpack’s cigar divan and bowling-alley, you arrive at the door of an unpretending, though roomy mansion, the jambs of whose portals are furnished with flattering catalogues relative to “this day’s sale,” and the pavement before whose frontage is strewn with fragments of straw and shreds of carpeting. It is strange, too, if you do not see half a dozen or so burly-looking porters lounging about the premises, and a corresponding number of porter’s knots, the straw stuffing bulging occasionally from rents in their sides, decorating the railings, as the pint pots do the iron barriers of the licensed victuallers. This mansion contains the great auction-room of Messrs. Debenham and Storr. Let us enter without fear. There is scarcely, I think, so interesting an exhibition in London; yet, in contradistinction to the majority of London exhibitions, there is nothing to pay.

In this monstrous amalgam of microcosms, London, a man may, if he will only take the trouble, find that certain places, streets, rooms, peculiar spots and set apart localities, are haunted by classes of people as peculiar as the localities they affect, and who are seldom to be found anywhere else. In the early forenoon, long before business hours commence, the benches of the piazza of the Royal Exchange have their peculiar occupants—lank, mystic-looking men, mostly advanced in years, and shiny in threadbare blackclothdom. They converse with one another seldom, and when they do so, it is but in furtive whispers, the cavernous mouth screened by the rugose hand, with its knotted cordage of veins and its chalkstoned knuckles, as though the whisper were of such commercial moment that the locutor feared its instantaneous transport to the ears of Rothschild or Baring, and the consequent uprising or downfalling of stocks or corn, silk or tallow. Who are these men, these Exchange ghosts, who haunt the site of Sir Thomas Gresham’s old “Burse?” Are they commission agents come to decay, bankrupt metal brokers, burnt-out, uninsured wharfingers, lame ducks of the Stock Exchange, forced even to “waddle” from the purlieus of Capel Court? There they sit day after day—their feet (lamentably covered with boots of fastidious bigness, for, alas! the soles are warped, the sides crack, the heels are irrevocably lopsided) beating the devil’s tattoo on the stone pavement, their big cotton umbrellas distilling a mouldy moisture, or a pair of faded Berlin gloves, quite gone and ruined at the fingers, lying on the bench beside them. Their battered hats oscillate on their heads through overloading with tape-tied papers, and oft-times, from the breast-pocket of their tightly-buttoned coats, they drag leathern pocketbooks, white and frayed at the edges like the seams of their own poor garments, from which pocketbooks they draw greasy documents, faded envelopes, sleezy letters, which have been folded and refolded so often that they seem in imminent danger of dropping to pieces like an over-used passport at the next display. With what an owl-like, an oracular, look of wisdom they consult these papers! What are they all about? The bankruptcy of their owners thirty years ago, and the infamous behaviour of the official assignees (dead and buried years since)? their early love correspondence? their title-deeds to the estates in Ayrshire, and the large pasture lands in the Isle of Skye? Who knows? But you never see these ghostly time-waiters anywhere but on ’Change, and out of ’Change hours. Directly the legitimate business of that place of commercial re-union commences, they melt away imperceptibly, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father at cock-crow, coming like shadows and so departing.

The dreadful night dens and low revelling houses of past midnight London, the only remnants left among us of the innumerable “finishes” and saloons and night-cellars of a former age, have also their peculiar male population, stamped indelibly with the mint-mark of the place, and not to be found out of it, save in the dock of the adjacent police-court. Where these ruffiani, these copper captains and cozening buz-gloaks, are to be found during the day, or even up to midnight—for in the gallery even of any decent theatre they would not be admitted—must remain a secret; perhaps, like the ghoules and afrits, the bats and dragons of fable, they haunt ruinous tombs, deserted sepulchres, church-yards sealed up long since by the Board of Health; but so soon as two or three o’clock in the morning arrives, they are to be found wherever there are fools to be fleeced or knaves to plot with. You study their lank hair and stained splendid stocks, their rumpled jay’s finery and rascal talk, their cheap canes and sham rings; but they, too, fade away with the dawn—how, no man can say, for the meanest cabman would scorn to convey them in his vehicle—and are not beheld any more till vagabondising time begins again.

“Supers,” too—or theatrical supernumeraries, to give them their full title—are a decidedly distinctive and peculiar race; and though reported, and ordinarily believed, to exercise certain trades and handicrafts in the daytime, such as shoemaking, tailoring, bookbinding, and the like, my private belief is that no “super” could exist long in any atmosphere remote from behind the scenes or the vicinity of the stage-door of a theatre. Look, too, at the audience of a police court: look at the pinched men who persist in attending the sittings of the Insolvent Debtors’ Court in Portugal Street, or hang about the dingy tavern opposite, and who consume with furtive bites Abernethy biscuits and saveloys, half hidden in the folds of blue cotton pocket-handkerchiefs. Yes, the proverb reads aright—as many men, so many minds; and each man’s mind, his idiosyncrasy, leads him to frequent a certain place till he becomes habituated to it, and cannot separate himself therefrom. There are your men who delight in witnessing surgical operations, and those who never miss going to a hanging. There is a class of people who have a morbid predilection for attending coroners’ inquests, and another who insist upon going to the Derby, be the weather wet or dry, cold or hot, though they scarcely know a horse’s fore from his hind legs, and have never a sixpenny bet on the field. There is a class who hang about artists’ studios, knowing no more of painting than Mr. Wakley does of poetry; there are the men you meet at charity dinners, the women you meet at marriages and christenings. Again, there is a class of eccentrics, who, like the crazy Earl of Portsmouth, have an invincible penchant for funerals—“black jobs,” as the mad lord used to call them; and finally, there are the people who haunt Sales by Auction.