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

by George Augustus Sala

I do not think I am called upon to give the bill of fare of a public dinner. I have no desire to edit the next republication of Ude, or Doctor Kitchener, Soyer, or Francatelli; besides, I could only make your and my mouth water by expatiating on the rich viands and wines which “mine host” (he is always mine host) of the Albion, the London Tavern, or the Freemasons’, provides for a guinea a-head. You remember what I told you the friend with the face like an over-ripe fig said of public dinners—that they were the sublimation of superfluities; and, indeed, if such a repast be not one of those in which a man is called upon to eat Italian trout, Dutch dory, Glo’ster salmon, quails and madeira, Cherbourg pea-chicks, Russian artichokes, Macedonian jellies, Charlottes of a thousand fruits, Richelieu puddings, vanilla creams, Toulouse leverets, iced punch, hock, champagne, claret, moselle and burgundy, port, sherry, kirschwasser, and pale brandy, I don’t know the meaning of the word superfluity at all.

Some three hours after the company have sate down to dinner; after the “usual loyal and constitutional toasts,” with the usual musical honours; after the toast of the evening—“Prosperity to the Royal Asylum for Fatuous Monomaniacs”—with its accompanying (more or less) eloquent speech from the noble or distinguished chairman, beseeching liberal pecuniary support for so deserving an institution; after the prompt and generous response, in the way of cheques and guineas, from the guests; after a tedious programme of glees and ballads has been got through, and the chairman has discreetly vanished to his carriage; after the inveterate diners-out, who will tarry long at the wine, have received one or two gentle hints that coffee awaits their acceptance in an adjoining apartment; and about the time that the feast begins to wear a somewhat bleared and faded aspect (the lights cannot grow pale till they are turned off, for these are of the Gas Company’s providing), the waiters slouch about with wooden trays, full of ruined dessert-plates, cracked nuts, muddy decanters, and half-emptied glasses; cherry stalks, strawberry stems, squeezed oranges, the expressed skins of grapes, litter the tables; chairs are standing at all sorts of eccentric angles; and crumpled and twisted napkins are thrown pell-mell about. There is an end to the fine feast: the cates are eaten, the wine drunk. Lazarus the beggar might have taken his rags out of pawn (had he indeed any such rags to mortgage), and his thin-limbed little brats might have grown plump and rosy on a tithe of the money that has been wasted this night in guttling and guzzling. Wasted? Oh! say not wasted, Cynic; take the mote from thine own eye. Grumbler, for shame! I have done ill, I think, to caricature the name even of any public charity. Let the “Fatuous Monomaniacs” be numbered with the rest of my exploded fantastic conceits. Let this rather be remembered: that the tavern feast of superfluities is prolific in generous and glorious results; that from this seemingly gross and sensual gathering spring charity, love, mercy, and benevolence. Pardon the rich dinners and rare wines; look over the excess in animal enjoyments; forgive even the prosy speeches; for the plate has gone round. To-morrow Lazarus shall rejoice in his rags, and blind Tobias shall lift up his hands for gratitude; the voice in Rama shall be bushed and Rachel shall weep no more; and all because these good gentlemen with the rosy faces and the white waistcoats have dined so well. For these dinners are for the benefit of the sick and the infirm, the lunatic and the imbecile, the widow and the orphan, the decayed artist and the reduced gentlewoman, the lame, the halt, the blind, the poor harlot and the penitent thief, and they shall have their part in these abundant loaves and fishes; and the sublimation of superfluities must be condoned for the sake of those voluntary contributions which are the noblest support of the noble charities in England. Remember the story of the Pot of Ointment. These superfluities yield a better surplus than though the spikenard was sold for an hundred-pence and given to the poor.

A very cream of waiters has taken good care of me during the evening. He now fetches me my walking gear, and as he pockets my modest “largesse,” whispers confidentially that he has had the honour of “seeing me afore;” and, blushing, I remember that I have met him at private parties. It is well for me if I can slip downstairs quietly, hail a cab, and drive to one of the operas; for an act of the “Trovatore” or “Lucrezia Borgia” are, in my opinion, far better than Seltzer water in restoring the balance of one’s mind after an arduous public dinner. But it oft-times happens that a man in your memorialist’s position has to pass a quart d’heure de Rabelais, worse than paying the bill, after one of these festive meetings. For, in a roomy apartment downstairs, lighted by waxen tapers, such things as pens, ink, and paper, coffee, cognac, and cigars, are, by the forethought of the liberal proprietors of the establishment, laid out for the benefit of those merry gentlemen you saw upstairs at the small table in a line with the chairman, where they were so well taken care of; and if circumstances compel me to be in a merry mood to-night, I must hie me into this roomy chamber, and scribble a column or so of “copy” about the dinner, which will appear to-morrow morning in the “Meteor.” Rubbing my eyes as I glance over the damp sheet between my own warm ones in bed, I wonder who ever could have written the report of all those elegant speeches. It seems at least a year since I dined with the “Fatuous Monomanaics.”

This is again six o’clock p.m., but not by any means on the same evening. The occasion could have no possible connection with going out to dinner, for it happens to be six o’clock “sharp:” and, moreover, it is on Friday, a day on which it is supposed to be as unlucky to go out to dinner as to go to sea, to marry, to put on a new coat, to commence a new novel, to cut your nails, or buy tripe. Now, what can I be doing in the city on this Friday evening? Certainly not to perform any of the operations alluded to above. Scarcely on business. Bank, Exchange, wharfs, Custom-house, money-market, merchants’ counting-houses, are all closed, and the inner city, the narrow winding lanes, that almost smell of money, are deserted. What am I doing so close to St. Paul’s Cathedral, and why do I turn off by St. Martin’s-le-Grand? For the simple reason, that Friday evening is the very best one in the seven to witness the spectacle I am going to see—Newspaper Fair at the General Post Office.

In the vast vestibule, or hall, of the establishment so admirably presided over by Mr. Rowland Hill (for I do not reckon the aristocratic placeman who is, turn and turn about, Whig or Tory, its nominal chief, for much), and whose fostering care has made it (with some slight occasional shortcomings) the best-managed and most efficient national institution in Europe, you may observe, in the left-hand corner from the peristyle, and opposite the secretary’s office (tremendous “counts” are the clerks in the secretary’s office, jaunty bureaucrats, who ride upon park hacks, and are “come for” by ringlets in broughams at closing time, but who get through their work in about half the time it would take the ordinary slaves of the desk, simply because their shrewdness and knowledge of the world enables them to “see through a case” before the average man of tape and quill can make up his mind to docket a letter) a huge longitudinal slit in the panelling above, on which is the inscription “For newspapers only.” And all day long, newspapers only, stringed or labelled, are thrust into this incision; and the typographed lucubrations of the some five hundred men who, for salaries ranging from twenty shillings to twenty pounds per week, have to think, and sometimes almost feel, in the Anglo-Saxon tongue, for some sixty millions of people (I say nothing of the re-actionary influence upon foreign nations), go forth to the uttermost ends of the earth. But as six o’clock approaches (and six o’clock sharp is the irrevocable closing time for the departure of newspapers by the current night’s mail), they open a tall window above, and the newspapers are no more thrust, but flung in.

SIX O’CLOCK P.M.: THE NEWSPAPER WINDOW AT THE GENERAL POST-OFFICE.

It is on this congenial ground that I meet those juvenile friends to whom I introduced a large circle of acquaintances, even in the second hour of “Twice Round the Clock”—I mean the newspaper boys. In another page I said, jestingly, that I was afraid of boys. I must except from the category the newspaper boys. I have been sadly harassed and teazed by them in their out-of-door or bagful state, when they go round to purchase newspapers: for I once happened to be editor of a cheap journal, at whose office there was no editor’s room. I was compelled, occasionally, to read my proofs behind the counter, in the presence of the publisher and his assistant, and I have endured much mental pain and suffering from the somewhat too demonstrative facetiæ of the young gentlemen engaged in the “trade.” Verbal satire of the most acutely personal nature was their ordinary mode of procedure; but, occasionally, when the publication (as sometimes happened) was late in its appearance, their playfulness was aggravated to the extent of casting an old shoe at me, and on one signal occasion a bag of flour. Still the newspaper boy is the twin-brother of the printer’s devil; and, much as I have seen of those patient, willing little urchins, I should be a brute if I were hard to them, here.