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

by George Augustus Sala

And now, whither away? Shall I cross the road, and commence the first of a series of six lessons in dancing from Miss Leonora Geary? Shall I visit the harp and pianoforte establishment of Messrs. Erard, and try the tone of an “upright grand?” Shall I hie me to Marlborough Street police-court, and see how Mr. Bingham or Mr. Hardwick may be getting on? No: I think I will take a walk down Regent Street (one cannot too frequently perambulate that delightful thoroughfare at the height of the season), turn off by Vigo Lane, and take a stroll—a five minutes’ stroll, mind, for I have an appointment close to St. George’s Hospital, and Mr. Decimus Burton’s triumphal arch, as soon after four as possible—down the Burlington Arcade.

I remember once refecting myself at a public dinner—the Tenth Anniversary Festival of the Hospital for Elephantiasis, I think it was—when my next neighbour to the right (to the left was a rural dean) was a gentleman in a white waistcoat that loomed large like the lateen sail of a Palermian felucca, and whose convivial countenance was of the exact hue and texture of the inside of an over-ripe fig. He took remarkably good care of himself during dinner time, had twice spring soup, and twice salmon and cucumber, led the waiters a terrible life, and gathered quite a little grove of bottles of choice wine round him. I am bound to say that he was not selfish or solitary in his enjoyment, for he pressed a peculiar Sautern upon me, and an especial Chateau Lafitte (the landlord must have known and respected him), with a silver label hanging to its bottle neck, like the badge of a Hansom cabman. He also recommended gosling to me, as being the very thing to take after lamb, in a rich husky voice, that did one good to hear. At the conclusion of the repast, after we had dabbled with the rosewater in the silver-gilt shield, which it is the custom to send round, and which nobody knows exactly what to do with—I always feel inclined to upset it, for the purpose of eliciting an expression of public feeling, and clearing the atmosphere generally; and when the business of the evening, as the absurd system of indiscriminate toast-giving is termed, had commenced, and the professional ladies and gentlemen were singing something about the “brave and bearded barley” in execrable time and tune, of course in the most preposterously irrelevant connection with the health just drank—either the Army and Navy, or the two Houses of Parliament—my neighbour with the ripe fig countenance turned to me, and wiping his moist lips with his serviette, whispered these remarkable words: “Sir, a public dinner is the sublimation of an assemblage of superfluities.” He said no more during the evening, filled up his name, however, for a handsome amount in the subscription-list (his name was announced amid thunders of applause by the secretary, but I really forget whether he was a general or a wholesale grocer), and went away in anything but a superfluous state of sobriety. But his words sank deep into my mind, and they bring me at once to the Burlington Arcade.

Which is to me another sublimate of superfluities: a booth transplanted bodily from Vanity Fair. I don’t think there is a shop in its enceinte where they sell anything that we could not do without. Boots and shoes are sold there, to be sure, but what boots and shoes? varnished and embroidered and be-ribboned figments, fitter for a fancy ball or a lady’s chamber, there to caper to the jingling melody of a lute, than for serious pedestrianism. Paintings and lithographs for gilded boudoirs, collars for puppy dogs, and silver-mounted whips for spaniels, pocket handkerchiefs, in which an islet of cambric is surrounded by an ocean of lace, embroidered garters and braces, fillagree flounces, firework-looking bonnets, scent bottles, sword-knots, brocaded sashes, worked dressing-gowns, inlaid snuff-boxes, and falbalas of all descriptions; these form the stock-in-trade of the merchants who have here their tiny boutiques. There are hair-dressers’ shops too; but I will be bound that their proprietors would not be content with trimming a too luxuriant head of hair. They would insist upon curling, oiling, scenting, and generally tittivating you. They would want you to buy amandine for your hands, kalydor for your hair, dentifrice, odonto, vinaigre de toilette, hair-brushes with ivory backs, and tortoiseshell pocket-combs with mirrors appended to them. They would insist that you could not live without pommade Hongroise and fixatures for the moustaches, or Frangipani for the pocket-handkerchief. I have very few ambitions, but one is to become the proprietor of a house in the Burlington Arcade, and forthwith to open a chandler’s shop in the very midst of its vanities and its whim-whams. The reproof, I trust, would be as stern, though I am afraid it would have as little effect, as that of the uncompromising patriots of the reign of terror, who planted the parterres of the Tuileries gardens with potatoes. To the end of time, I perpend, we shall have this hankering after superfluities, and little princesses will ask their governesses why the people need starve for want of bread, when there are such nice Bath buns in the confectioners’ shop windows.

But the clock of St. James’s warns me that I am due at Hyde Park Corner, and passing by yet another beadle, I emerge into Piccadilly.

FOUR P.M.—TATTERSALL’S, AND THE PARK.

Was there not a time when Hyde Park Corner was the Ultima Thule of London, and Kensington was in the country?—when Hammersmith was far away—a district known only to washerwomen and nursery gardeners—and Turnham Green and Kew were places where citizens took their wives to enjoy the perfection of ruralisation? Was it not to the Hercules’ Pillars at Hyde Park Corner that Squire Western sent his chaplain to recover the snuff-box, which the worthy landed-gentleman and justice of the peace had left there when he halted to bait? Was not Hyde Park Corner a rendezvous for highwaymen, where they listened with eagerness for “the sound of coaches;” and parted, some towards Fulham, some towards Hounslow, some towards the Uxbridge road, where they might meet full-pouched travellers, and bid them “stand and deliver?” I remember, myself, old Padlock House at Knightsbride, standing in the midst of the roadway, like Middle Row in Holborn, or the southern block of Holywell Street in the Strand, with the padlock itself fixed in the grimy wall, which, according to the legendary wishes of a mythical testator, was never to be pulled down till the lock rotted away from its chain, and the chain from the brick and mortar in which it was imbedded. The cavalry barracks at Knightsbride seemed to have been built in the year One, and we boys whispered that the little iron knobs on the wall of the line of stables, which are, it is to be presumed, intended for purposes of ventilation (though I am not at all certain about the matter yet) were miniature portholes, at which fierce troopers, with carbines loaded to the muzzle, and ready pointed, kept guard every day, in order to repel the attacks of the “Radicals.” Alack-a-day! but the “Radicals” seem to be getting somewhat the better of it at this present time of writing. Kensington High Street seemed to belong to a hamlet of immense age; the old church was a very cathedral—built, of course, by William of Wykeham; and as for Holland House, there could not be any doubt about that. It came in naturally with the Conqueror, and the first Lord Holland.

Hyde Park Corner before the battle of Waterloo must have been a strange, old-fashioned-looking place. No Apsley House: the site was occupied by the old woman who kept the apple-stall, or the bun-house, or the curds and whey shop, and who wouldn’t be bought out, save at enormous prices, by his late Grace, Field-Marshal Arthur Duke of Wellington. No triumphal arch; and, thank good taste, no equestrian statue of the late F. M. Arthur Dux, &c., on the summit thereof. No entablatured colonnade, with nothing to support, towards the Park. No Achilles statue. A mean, unpicturesque, common-place spot, I take it. What could you expect of an epoch in which the Life Guards wore cocked hats and pig-tails, the police-officers red waistcoats and top boots, when the king de jure was mad, and the king de facto wore a wig and padded himself? A bad time. We have a lady on the throne now who behaves as a sovereign should behave, and London grows handsomer every day.

I declare that it does; and I don’t care a fig for the cynics—most of them ignorant cynics, too—who, because they have accomplished a cheap tour to Paris, or have gone half-way up the Rhine, think themselves qualified to under-rate and to decry the finest metropolis in the world. I grant the smoke—in the city—and I confess that the Thames is anything but odoriferous in sultry weather, and is neither so blue nor so clear as the Neva; but I say that London has dozens and scores of splendid streets and mansions, such as I defy Paris, Vienna, Berlin, or St. Petersburg—I know their architectural glories by heart—to produce. I say that Pall Mall beats the Grand Canal at Venice; that Regent Street, with a little more altitude in its buildings, would put the Boulevard des Italiens to shame; and that Cannon Street makes the Nevskoi Perspective hide its diminished head. Some of these days, when I can get that balance at the banker’s I have been waiting for so long, I shall sit down and indite a book entitled, “A Defence of London, Architecturally Considered,” the which I shall publish at my own expense, as I am certain no publisher would purchase the copyright.

Take Hyde Park Corner. Between the Brandenburg Thor at Berlin and the Puerta del Sol at Madrid, you will not find a gayer, more picturesque, more sparkling scene. Ugly and preposterous as is the man in the cocked hat, who holds the rolling-pin and is wrapped in the counterpane, on the top of the arch, we are not for ever giving ourselves wry necks in the attempt to look up at him; and the arch itself is noble and grandiose. Then, opposite, through the a giorno of Mr. “Anastasius” Hope’s colonnade, that supports nothing, you catch a glimpse of the leafy glories of Hyde Park—carriages, horses, horsewomen, Achilles’ statue, and all. And again, to the right of the arch, is St. George’s Hospital, looking more like a gentleman’s mansion than an abode of pain; and to the left the ever-beautiful, ever-fresh, and ever-charming Green Park. And then far away east stretches the hill of Piccadilly, a dry Rialto (only watch it at night, and see the magical effects of its double line of gas-lamps); and westward the new city that the Londoners have built after their city was finished, beyond the Ultima Thule. Magnificent lines of stately mansions, towering park gates, bring us to the two gigantic many-storeyed edifices at Albert Gate, which were for a long time christened “Gibraltar,” because they were supposed to be impregnable, no tenant having been found rich or bold enough to “take them.” Taken they both were at last, however. The further one, or at least its lower portion, has been for a considerable period occupied by a banking company; while the near one—ah! that near Gibraltar, has had two strange tenants—the representatives of two strange fortunes. There dwelt the Railway King, a gross, common, mean man, who could not spell very well, Rumour said: but to him—being king of iron roads and stuffed with shares even to repletion, such shares being gold in those days, not dross—came the nobles of the land, humbling themselves on their gartered knees, and pressing the earth with their coroneted brows, and calling him King of Men, that he might give them shares, which he gave them. So this gross man was “hail fellow well met” with the nobles, and was drunk at their feasts and they at his, and he sat in the Parliament House, and made laws for us; and when he sent out cards of invitation, the wives and daughters of the nobles rose gladly in the night season, and having painted their faces and bared their necks, and put tresses of dead men’s hair on their heads, they drove in swift chariots to Albert Gate, and all went merry as a marriage bell.

“But, hush! hark! a deep sound strikes like a rising knell!”