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

by George Augustus Sala

An inedited anecdote of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.,—an anecdote passed over or ignored by Boswell, Croker, Piozzi, and Hawkins,—an anecdote to allude to which, perhaps, Lord Macaulay might disdain, while Mr. Carlyle might stigmatise it as an “unutterable sham of mud-volcano gigability,” but in which I have, nevertheless, under correction, the most implicit faith, relates that the Sage’s opinion was once asked by Oliver Goldsmith (Mr. Boswell of Auchinlech being present, of course) as to whether he approved, or did not approve, of the theatrical institution known as “half-price?” The Doctor was against it. “Sir,” he reasoned, or rather decided, “a man has no right to see half an entertainment. He should either enjoy all or none.” “But, sir,” objected Goldsmith deferentially, “supposing the entertainment to be divided into equal halves, both complete in themselves, has not a man a right to suit his pocket and his convenience, and see only one half?” “Sir, you are frivolous,” thundered the Doctor; “the man has but Hobson’s choice: the second moiety of the entertainment. If he go at first price, he must pay whole price.” “But, sir,” suggested Bozzy with a simper, “how would it stand, if the man coming at half-price promised the doorkeeper to go away punctually at nine o’clock, when the second price commenced?” “Hold your tongue, sir,” said Doctor Johnson, whereat Mr. Boswell of Auchinlech was abashed, and spake no more till the kindly old Doctor invited him to tea, with blind Miss Williams and Mr. Levett the apothecary.

I am sure that it must be a matter of lamentation for any man with a well-regulated mind to be under the necessity of disagreeing with so eminent an authority as Doctor Johnson—with the rough, genial, old bear, who had had so many sorrows of his own when young; had danced upon so many hot plates, and to the very ungenteelest of tunes; had been so pitilessly muzzled and baited by mangy curs, that he yet made it his delight in age and comparative affluence to take the young bears under his protection, to assuage their ursine sorrows, and lick them with a lumbering pity into shape. I am equally certain that few would even dare to differ from the scholar, critic, poet, dramatist, essayist, moralist, philosopher, and Christian gentleman, whose pure life and death in an unbelieving age are an answer for all time to the ephemeral brilliance of the fribble Chesterfield, the icicle Hume, the stalactite Gibbon, and the flashy Bristol-diamond Voltaire. Still, in the interests of the British drama (and assuming my anecdote to be otherwise than apocryphal), I must, perforce, dissent from the Doctor, and pin my faith to half-price. The absence of a second price is suitable enough for such exotic exhibitions as the Italian operas and the French plays; but I deplored the suspension of that dramatic habeas corpus in the palmy Lyceum days of Madame Vestris’s management. There is something supercilious, pragmatical, maccaronyish, un-English, in the announcement, “No half-price.” How immeasurably superior is the fine old British placard, now, alas! so seldom seen, “Pit full: standing-room only in the upper boxes!”

There is a transpontine theatre, situated laterally towards the Waterloo Road, and having a northern front towards an anomalous thoroughfare that runs from Lambeth to Blackfriars, for which I have had, during a long period of years, a great esteem and admiration. This is the Royal Victoria Theatre. To the neophyte in London I frequently point out a brick erection, above the cornice of the pediment, and say, “My friend, in the days when the ‘Vic.’ (it is popularly termed the ‘Vic.’) was known as the ‘Coburg,’ that brick slip was built to contain at its rise—for it could not be rolled up—the famous ‘Crystal curtain,’ which ruined one management to construct, and half ruined another to demolish. The grand melodramas the Coburg used to give us—real horses, real armour, real blood, almost real water!” Those were the days of “Ginevra the Impaled One” and “Manfroni the One-handed Monk.” There are famous dramatists, actors, scene-painters, who would look rather shame-faced (though I cannot see why they should be ashamed) were they reminded, now, of their achievements in the service of transpontine melodrama at the Coburg. How stupidly absurd people are in repudiating their beginnings! Buffel, the millionaire contractor, denies stoutly that he ever carried a hod, although hundreds of us remember him on the ladder. Linning, the fashionable tailor, would poison any one who told him he once kept a beer-shop in Lambeth Walk, and afterwards failed as a tea-dealer in Shoreditch. One of the most accomplished comedians of the day makes a point of cutting me dead, because I can recollect the time, and knew him, when he used to colour prints for a livelihood; and I daresay that Baron Rothschild—with all the philosophy his unbounded wealth should properly give him—would not ask me to dinner, if I reminded him that his grandfather was a pedlar in the Juden-Grasse, at Frankfort. The next Tamworth baronet, I suppose, will strike the beehive and “Industriâ” out of the family escutcheon, and assume the three leeches sable on a field gules semée or, of his ancestors the De la Pills, who came over with the Conqueror as barber-chirurgeons to the ducal body. And yet a certain Emperor and King was not ashamed to talk of the period when he was a “lieutenant in the Regiment of Lafère;” and the present writer, who is, on one side (the wrong), of the sangre azul of Spain, is not above confessing the existence of a tradition in his family, hinting that his maternal grandmother danced on the tight rope.

Although I am a devotee of the opera, and am always glad when Drury Lane doors are open, and mourn over the decadence of the Lyceum, and wish that the Strand would succeed,[10] and longed for the day when the resuscitated Adelphi should open its doors, and rejoice at the prosperity of the Olympic, and think that one of the most rational and delightful night’s amusements in Europe, may be attained by the sight of the “Merchant of Venice” at the now closed (so far as Charles Kean is concerned) Princess’s, I have yet a tenderness, a predilection, an almost preference, for the Vic. There is a sturdy honesty of purpose, unity of action, sledge-hammer morality about the rubbishing melodramas, which are nightly yelled and ranted through on the Victoria stage, that are productive, I believe, of an intellectual tone, highly healthful and beneficial. Burkins, the garotter, who is now in hold in Pentonville for his sins, and is so promising a pupil of the chaplain, (having nearly learnt the Gunpowder Plot service and the prohibitions of consanguinity by heart,) has confidentially informed his reverend instructor that to the melodramas at the Victoria must be ascribed his ruin. It was the “Lonely Man of the Ocean” that led him to fall on Mr. Jabez Cheddar, cheesemonger, in Westminster Broadway, at two o’clock in the morning, split his skull open with a life-preserver, jump upon him, and rob him of eight pounds twelve, a silver hunting-watch, and a brass tobacco-box; at which confession the chaplain orders him more beef and books, and puts him down in the front rank for his next recommendatory report to the visiting magistrates. Partaking, in company with some other persons, of the opinion that Burkins adds to the characteristics of a ruffian and a blockhead, those of a hypocrite and a Liar, I do not necessarily set much store by the expression of his opinions on the British drama. But when I find shrewd police-inspectors and astute stipendiary magistrates moralising over the dreadful effects of cheap theatres, attended as they are by the “youth of both sexes,” I deem them foemen worthy of my steel. Good Mr. Inspector, worthy Master Justice, where are the youth and the adults of both sexes to go in quest of that amusement, which I suppose you will concede to them, of some nature, the necessity? Are the churches open on week nights, and to such as they? and would you yourselves like to sit under Doctor Cumming, or even Mr. Spurgeon, from Saturday to Saturday? Are they to go to the Opera, to Almack’s, to the Carlton Club, or to the conversaziones of the Geological Society? You object, you say, to the nature of the entertainments provided for them. Come with me, and sit on the coarse deal benches in the coarsely and tawdrily-decorated cheap theatre, and listen to the sorrily-dressed actors and actresses—periwigged-pated fellows and slatternly wenches, if you like—tearing their passion to tatters, mouthing and ranting, and splitting the ears of the groundlings. But in what description of pieces? In dramas, I declare and maintain, in which, for all the jargon, silliness, and buffoonery, the immutable principles of right and justice are asserted; in which virtue, in the end, is always triumphant, and vice is punished; in which cowardice and falsehood are hissed, and bravery and integrity vehemently applauded; in which, were we to sift away the bad grammar, and the extravagant action, we should find the dictates of the purest and highest morality. These poor people can’t help misplacing their h’s, and fighting combats of six with tin broadswords. They haven’t been to the university of Cambridge; they can’t compete for the middle-class examinations; they don’t subscribe to the “Saturday Review;” they have never taken dancing lessons from Madame Michau; they have never read Lord Chesterfield’s Letters; they can’t even afford to purchase a “Shilling Handbook of Etiquette.” Which is best? That they should gamble in low coffee-shops, break each other’s heads with pewter pots in public-houses, fight and wrangle at street corners, or lie in wait in doorways and blind alleys to rob and murder, or that they should pay their threepence for admission into the gallery of the “Vic.”—witness the triumph of a single British sailor over twelve armed ruffians, who are about to carry off the Lady Maud to outrage worse than death; see the discomfiture of the dissolute young nobleman, and the restitution of the family estates (through the timely intervention of a ghost in a table-cloth) to the oppressed orphan? And of this nature are the vast mass of transpontine melodramas. The very “blood-and-murder” pieces, as they are termed, always end with the detection of the assassin and his condign punishment. George Cruikshank’s admirable moral story of “The Bottle” was dramatised at the “Vic.,” and had an immense run. They are performing “Never Too Late to Mend,” now, over the water, to crowded houses. If we want genteel improprieties, sparkling immoral repartees, decorously scandalous intrigues, and artful cobwebs of double entendre, touching on the seventh commandment, we must cross the bridges and visit the high-priced, fashionably-attended theatres of the West-end. At a West-end theatre, was produced the only immoral version of an immoral (and imbecile) “Jack Sheppard,” which is, even now, vauntingly announced as being the “authorised version”—the only one licensed by the Lord Chamberlain; and in that “authorised version” occurs the line, “Jack Sheppard is a thief, but he never told a lie,” a declaration than which the worst dictum of howling Tom Paine or rabid Mary Wolstoncraft was not more subversive of the balance of moral ethics. And, at a West-end theatre, likewise, his Lordship the Chamberlain authorised the production of a play, whose story, regarded either as a melodrama or as the libretto of a trashy Italian opera, has not been equalled for systematic immorality: no, not by Wilkes; no, not by Aphra Behn: no, not by Crebillon the younger: no, not by Voltaire in the scandalous “Pucelle.”

And have I brought you all the way over Waterloo Bridge in the evening only to sermonise you! I deserve to be mulcted in three times the halfpenny toll; and I must make amends by saying nothing whatsoever about the shot towers, or the Lion Brewery, the London and South-Western Terminus, and Hawkstone Hall. Here we are, at the corner of the New Cut. It is Nine o’Clock precisely (I must have flown rather than walked from the pawnbroker’s in that lane on the Middlesex side), and while the half-price is pouring into the Victoria Theatre, the whole-price (there is no half-price to the gallery, mind, the charge for the evening’s entertainment being only threepence) is pouring out with equal and continuous persistence, and are deluging the New Cut. Whither, you may ask, are they bound? They are in quest of their Beer.

The English have been a beer-loving people for very many ages. It gives them their masculine, sturdy, truculent character. Beer and beef, it has been before remarked, make boys. Beer and beef won the battle of Waterloo. Beer and beef have built railways all over the world. Our troops in the Crimea languished, even on beef (it was but hard corned junk, to be sure) till the authorities sent them beer. There is a lex non scripta among the labouring English, much more potent than many Acts of Parliament, and called the “Strong Beer Act.” They have songs about beer with lusty “nipperkin, pipperkin, and the brown beer” choruses; and in village parlours you may hear stentorian baritones, of agricultural extraction, shouting out that “Feayther likes his beer, he does;” that “Sarah’s passionately fond of her beer, she is;” and denouncing awful vengeance upon those enemies of the people who would “rob a poor man of his beer.” Our fingers were brought to the very hair-trigger of a revolution by the attempted interference of an otherwise well-meaning nobleman, with the people’s beer; and did not William Hogarth strike the right nail on the head when he drew those two terrible pictures of Beer Street and Gin Lane? The authorities of the Victoria Theatre have preserved, I am glad to say, a wholesome reverence for the provisions of the Strong Beer Act, and it is, I believe, a clause in the Magna Charta of the management, that the performances on Saturday evenings shall invariably terminate within a few minutes of midnight, in order to afford the audience due and sufficient time to pour out their final libations at the shrine of Beer, before the law compels the licensed victuallers to close.

There are not many gradations of rank among the frequenters of the Victoria Theatre. Many of the occupants of the boxes sat last night in the pit, and will sit to-morrow in the gallery, according to the fluctuation of their finances; nay, spirited denizens of the New Cut will not unfrequently, say on a Monday evening, when the week’s wages have not been irremediably dipped into, pay their half-crown like men, and occupy seats in the private box next the stage. And the same equality and fraternity are manifest when the audience pour forth at half-price to take their beer. There may be a few cheap dandies, indeed—Cornwall Road exquisites and Elephant-and-Castle bucks—who prefer to do the “grand” in the saloon attached to the theatre; there may be some dozens of couples sweethearting, who are content to consume oranges, ginger beer, and Abernethy biscuits within the walls of the house; but the great pressure is outwards, and the great gulf stream of this human ocean flows towards a gigantic “public” opposite the Victoria, and which continually drives a roaring trade.

I wish that I had a more savoury locality to take you to than the New Cut. I acknowledge frankly that I don’t like it. We have visited many queer places in London together, of which, it may be, the fashionables of the West-end have never heard; but they all had some out-of-the-way scraps of Bohemianism to recommend them. I can’t say the same for the New Cut. It isn’t picturesque, it isn’t quaint, it isn’t curious. It has not even the questionable merit of being old. It is simply Low. It is sordid, squalid, and, the truth must out, disreputable. The broad thoroughfare, which, bordered with fitting houses, would make one of the handsomest streets in London, is gorged with vile, rotten tenements, occupied by merchants who oft-times pursue the very contrary to innocent callings. Everything is second-hand, except the leviathan gin-shops, which are ghastly in their newness and richness of decoration. The broad pavement presents a mixture of Vanity Fair and Rag Fair. It is the paradise of the lowest of costermongers, and often the saturnalia of the most emerited thieves. Women appear there in their most unlovely aspect: brazen, slovenly, dishevelled, brawling, muddled with beer or fractious with gin. The howling of beaten children and kicked dogs, the yells of ballad-singers, “death and fire-hunters,” and reciters of sham murders and elopements; the bawling recitations of professional denunciators of the Queen, the Royal family, and the ministry; the monotonous jödels of the itinerant hucksters; the fumes of the vilest tobacco, of stale corduroy suits, of oilskin caps, of mildewed umbrellas, of decaying vegetables, of escaping (and frequently surreptitiously tapped) gas, of deceased cats, of ancient fish, of cagmag meat, of dubious mutton pies, and of unwashed, soddened, unkempt, reckless humanity: all these make the night hideous and the heart sick. The New Cut is one of the most unpleasant samples of London that you could offer to a foreigner. Bethnal Green is ragged, squalid, woe-begone, but it is quiet and industrious. Here, there is mingled with the poverty a flaunting, idle, vagabond, beggarly-fine don’t-care-a-centishness. Burkins in hold in Pentonville for his sins assures the chaplain that the wickedness of the New Cut is due solely to the proximity of the “Wictoriar Theayter, that ‘aunt of disypashion and the wust of karackters.” For my part, I think that if there were no such safety-valve as a theatre for the inhabitants of the “Cut,” it would become a mere Devil’s Acre, a Cour des Miracles, a modern edition of the Whitefriars Alsatia; and that the Cutites would fall to plundering, quarrelling, and fighting, through sheer ennui. It is horrible, dreadful, we know, to have such a place; but then, consider—the population of London is fast advancing towards three millions, and the wicked people must live somewhere—under a strictly constitutional government. There is a despot, now, over the water, who would make very short work of the New Cut. He would see, at a glance, the capacities of the place; in the twinkling of a decree the rotten tenements would be doomed to destruction; houses and shops like palaces would line the thoroughfare; trees would be planted along the pavement; and the Boulevard de Lambeth would be one of the stateliest avenues in the metropolis. But Britons never will be slaves, and we must submit to thorns (known as “vested interests”) in the constitutional rose, and pay somewhat dear for our liberty as well as for our whistle.

In the cartoon accompanying this essay, you will find a delineation of the hostelry—the tavern—bah! it isn’t a hostelry—it isn’t a tavern; it is an unadulterated gin and beer palace—whither takes place the rush at half-price for malt refreshment. I have kept you lingering at the door a long time; I have digressed, parried, evaded the question; discoursed upon the transpontine drama, and the moot question of its morality; I have wandered about the New Cut, and have even gone back to the last century, and evoked the ghost of Doctor Johnson; I have been discursive, evasive, tedious very probably, but purposely so. I was bound to show you the place, but it is better that the pen should leave the fulness of representation to the pencil in this instance. It is humorous enough, brilliant enough, full of varied life and bustle enough. I could make you very merry with accounts of the mock Ethiopian serenaders at the door, with facetious remarks on the gentleman in the sou’-wester, knee-shorts, anklejacks, and gaiters, who is instructing the lady in the mob-cap in the mysteries of the celebrated dance known as the “Roberto Polveroso,” or “Dusty Bob and Black Sal.” I might be eloquent upon the subject of the sturdy sailor who is hobnobbing with the negro, the Life Guardsman treating the ladies, like a gallant fellow as he is, and the stream of honest, hardworking mechanics, their wives, and families, who have surged in from the “Vic.” to have their “drop of beer.” But the picture would still be incomplete. In graver pages—in tedious, solemn journals only—could be told (and I have told, in my time) the truth about a gin-shop in the New Cut. I will not descant upon the crime and shame, the age made hardened, the very babies weaned on gin. Let us take the better part, and throw a veil over this ugly position of the night side of London.