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

by George Augustus Sala

The lions of literature are present in the flesh. Here is the distinguished Snortup, author of “The Common Objects of the Back-yard,” “Geology in Joke,” “Trigonometry Judged by Taxation,” “The Extinct Animals of Eel-pie Island,” and other erudite and ponderous scientific works. Snortup, who is a Doctor of Philosophy of the University of Schinckelbrauen, is a heavy man, with a black wig and a huge black satin stock, in which gleams a cameo bearing a curious resemblance to an oyster. He snuffs a great deal, and when he speaks he does not belie his name, but literally snorts. Near him is young Twiddles, with his auburn hair, his turn-down collar, and Byron tie, his speckled silk stockings and low shoes, his baby face and falsetto voice. Twiddles, who writes under the pseudonym of Swedenborg Scanderberg, has just published a volume of poems of the ultra-spasmodic order. In passages replete with burning eloquence, he has spoken of the “moonbeam’s frosty rime, that hoars the head of nature, and makes last summer’s sapling patriarchal white.” His grand passage in “Ladye Babbynetta,” in which he alludes to “the hot and rabid ice, that burns and sears by force of congelation,” has been enthusiastically spoken of by Sidney Muffins, editor of the “Tomfool” (with which is incorporated the “Pinchbeck News”) weekly journal. Muffins is not a poet yet, but he hopes to be one when his whiskers grow and he has read “Cassel’s Popular Educator.” Meanwhile, he swears by Twiddles, and fiercely abuses, in print and in person, those who can’t avoid the conviction that Twiddles is a donkey.

Do you see that man with the enormous red beard, the black velvet cuffs, collars, and facings to his coat, and the fez cap? That is O’Roarer. O’Roarer is a special correspondent to the “Howl” daily newspaper. O’Roarer went to the Crimea for the “Howl,” during the war; he quarrelled with a major in a marching regiment, and challenged him to mortal combat. The general commanding the division was compelled to request O’Roarer to select some other locality for his hut, and terrific were the criticisms upon that divisional general’s military conduct, which subsequently appeared in the “Howl.” Little Eggles, who was a clerk in the Commissariat Department, who hates O’Roarer, declares that he was found in Balaclava once returning from a carouse on board ship, and Bacchi plenus, that he was taken to the main-guard, and in the morning, notwithstanding his protestations that it was “all a mistake,” and his assertions of his “responsible position,” he received the customary hospitality of the main-guard, namely, two dozen lashes. Eggles adds, with a knowing wink, that the provost-marshal was not General ——’s nephew for nothing.

Besides Mr. O’Roarer and his fellows already described, there is the Honourable Simperkin Blushington, that pleasing novelist and Oriental traveller. A little to the left, and scowling at the Honourable Simperkin fearfully, is Leathers, the author of “A Jaunt to Jericho” and “Seven Years in a Penal Settlement.” Leathers wears a huge cut-velvet waistcoat, that looks like a fragment from some tapestried window-curtain. He is not at all clever, is Leathers—has no humour, observation, or power of description; but he has got a name among the book-selling trade, somehow, as a “good travelling hand”—a safe man for two volumes royal octavo with plates and a map—and so soon does any foreign country, from Canton to British Columbia, begin, from political or other causes, to attract public attention, so soon is Leathers commissioned to write his two bulky volumes of travels therein. Ill-natured people say that he keeps particulars relative to geography pigeon-holed in his library, and that he never went further than Boulogne, in the days of the five-shilling fares; but Leathers gets his price, and can afford to laugh at the evil-speaking. Bonassus, the publisher, of Bumpus Street, will have Leathers’s portrait in the next edition of “Rambles in the Island of Perim.”

I am sure it is very ungallant in me to have been so long silent regarding the ladies who grace the literary conversazione with their presence. A man must be, indeed, a brute who could pass over the charms of Miss Withers, aged forty, authoress of “Crackings of the Heartstrings,” “Shudderings of the Soul,” “Crinklings of the Spirit-skin,” “Eyeball Darts,” and other pathetic lyrics. Miss Withers once kept a boarding-school, but gradually languished into poetry. She attained considerable celebrity in the time of the Annuals, but on the downfall of those amusing ephemerides, she betook herself to history, and is the writer of “Lives of the Wet Nurses of the Princesses of England,” “Memorials of celebrated Bedchamber Women,” and “The Silversticks in Waiting before the Conquest”—all works replete with critical acumen, and brimful of historical lore, though following a little too closely in the footsteps of a lady who has written an admirable and genuine History concerning some Queens of England. Miss Withers, however, has done very well for her publishers and for herself. She is one of those authoresses who, dying, would never wish to blot out a line they had written, simply because Heaven has gifted them with a happy mental cecity that prevents them from discerning that nine-tenths of their works should never have been written at all. You may see Miss Withers any day in the British Museum Reading-room, vigorously compiling away at the desk marked “for ladies only.” She has piles of books around her; she makes the attendants’ lives a torment to them with the flying squadrons of book-tickets she deposits at the bar; she walks about the india-rubber flooring with one pen behind her ear and another in her mouth. She, being tall, bony, severe of aspect, and much given to snuff-taking, is generally feared by the Museum frequenters. She wrenches volumes of the catalogue from mild young clergymen in spectacles and M. B. waistcoats. She follows line after line of the printed page with her heavy inkstained forefinger. Once Dedman the pedigree-hunter, who was filling up his ticket opposite Miss Withers, was venturous enough to ask her the day of the month. She called him, in a hollow voice, “fellow,” on the spot, snuffed indignantly, and afterwards spoke of him to the attendant with the red moustache as an “impertinent jackanapes.” The only person with whom she condescends to be conversational in the reading-room, is Eglintoun Beaverup, the famous novelist, satirist, poet, traveller, Quarterly Reviewer, essayist, epigrammatist and politician, who stood for the Macbeth district of burghs last general election, and proved in an article in the “Rampant Magazine,” that the present Duke of Sennacherib’s grandfather was a pork butcher in Liquorpond Street, and that Sir Ranulph De Brie’s papa (who was a pawnbroker) owed his baronetcy to a loan of ten thousand pounds, advanced by him to the Prince Regent on the security of a pinchbeck watch, which that improvident scion of royalty, having no other available pawnable property, had borrowed for the nonce from one of the helpers in his stable. Beaverup is himself descended from Brian de Bois Guilbert on the father’s side, and from the original Thane of Cawdor, who slew Duncan, on that of the mother. Miss Withers will sometimes exchange deadly whispers with him relative to the mushroom characteristics of our modern peerage, and the departed glories of soccage and villeinage, infang theof and outfang theof.

Ah! and you are there, too, at Mrs. Van Umbug’s conversazione, little Fanny Gillytin. Even so! behold Fanny in a black satin dress and a laced berthe, and her yellow wavy hair parted on one side like a man, seated on an ottoman in deep conversation with Professor Sventurato, that red-hot republican, formerly one of the tribunes of the Ultramontane Republic; next, under the name of Kibaub Bey, a colonel in the Turkish service, warring against the Moscovs in Anatolia; then deputy-assistant quartermaster-general under the immortal Walker, liberator of Nicaragua; next, an actor at the Variétés Theatre, New Orleans; next, keeper of an oyster and lager bier saloon, in One-Hundred-and-Twenty-seventh Street, Ginslingopolis, in the United States of America; next, of Paris, Milan, Turin, Vienna, and Pesth, travelling as a broom-girl, an old woman, a Jesuit priest, a waiter at a café, a Franciscan friar, and a clown to a circus; now of the Whetstone Park College for Ladies (by whom he is adored), professor of modern languages; during the foregoing time, and occasionally, a prisoner in divers cells, wards, casemates, underground dungeons, oubliettes, piombi, ergastoli, and penal colonies, from all of which he has escaped by means little short of miraculous. Fanny, they say, is madly in love with Sventurato, and would marry him, were not the professor already allied to a Moldo-Wallachian lady, the daughter of a Kaïmakan, whose heroism effected his escape from the citadel of Comorn, and who afterwards essayed to poison him in his coffee. Fanny is no less mad after liberty, by which she means universal democracy, universal spoliation, and universal smash. She has some private fortune, which she dispenses liberally among necessitous refugees; and in furtherance of the sacred cause of liberty—as she understands it—she has written piles of books. She is the authoress of that flaming epic, “The Tyrant’s Entrails, or a Maiden’s Wish;” “Crowns and Coffins, or Oligarchs and Ogres,” an historical retrospect; “Mazzini the Shiloh,” and “Victory and Vitriol,” those soul-stirring pamphlets. She signs revolutionary bank-notes; she applauds regicide; she is in correspondence (in a complicated cipher which every police official from Paris to Petersburg understands and laughs at) with foreign revolutionary committees. She visits the Continent sometimes to distribute funds and ammunition. She would be ready to assume man’s clothes for the benefit of her adored liberty—as she understands it. Ah! Fanny, Fanny, pause; ah! rash and foolish girl, for whom to be whipped and sent to bed would be the better portion, forbear to play with these edged tools! No second-sight is necessary for the result of these miserable machinations to be manifest. I see the portico of a theatre brilliantly lighted up; for a Tyrant and his young innocent wife come hither to-night. He is hemmed in by guards and police-agents; yet, for all his escort, desperate men rush forward and throw hand-grenades beneath his carriage-wheels. A horrible explosion, and then scores of peaceful men, women, and children, are borne, dead or frightfully mutilated, to the hospitals; and the Tyrant, safe and sound, bows to a cheering audience from his box. I see four downcast men sitting between gensd’arme on the criminals’ bench of a crowded court-house, before stern judges who have doomed them to death before the very reading of the indictment. I see a straight-waistcoated wretch sitting in his chair in a gloomy cell, his head bent down, the governor and the priest standing by, while the executioner cuts off his hair and shaves the back of his neck. I see a grim, gray winter’s morning in the fatal Place of the Roquette. A space is kept clear by thousands of horse, foot, artillery, and police; and, thrust to the furthermost limits of the place, is a pale-faced crowd surging like a sea. Then the drums beat, and the dismal procession issues from a prison to a scaffold. Then, tottering between priests and turn-keys, come two bare-footed men, with long white shirts over their garments, and their faces concealed by hideous black veils. But the veils are removed when they mount the scaffold, when one by one a distorted, livid face, with white lips, appears, when the executioner seizes the pinioned criminal, and flings him—yes, flings him, is the word—on the plank. Then I see the horrible gash in the face as the moribund strives to shape his mouth to utter his last words on earth; the last up-turning of the starting eye-balls; but the plank reverses, the rollers revolve, the slide closes, the spring is touched, the knife falls, the blood spouts, and the heads drop into the sawdust of the red basket. Liberty, equality, and fraternity, flaming epics, soul-stirring pamphlets, and complicated ciphers, have come to this miserable end. The Tyrant is borne through the streets, the people shouting, and the maidens strewing flowers at his feet. The telegram has been despatched from the revolutionary committee to the Roquette, and the answer is a corpse that quivers, the parricide’s shroud, and the headsman’s bloody axe.

Of course there are some titled folks at Mrs. Van Umbug’s conversazione: it would not be complete without a literary lord—a harmless nobleman, generally, who has translated Horace, invented a new metre, or discovered a new butterfly; and a literary lady—if separated from her husband all the better, who paints him in the darkest of colours, as the hero of every one of her novels. And, equally of course, Ethelred Guffoon is here. Ethelred Guffoon is everywhere. He is one of Mrs. Van Umbug’s special favourites. She calls him by his Christian name. He hunts up new lions for her; occasionally he officiates as peacemaker, and prevents the lions from growling and fighting among themselves. He rushes from Mrs. Van Umbug’s conversazione to the Pontoppidan Theatre, to see a new face, which he must criticise; after that he will sit up half the night to review Mr. Gladstone’s Homer, for the “Daily Scratcher,” and will be at Somerset House by punctual office hours the next morning. A man of the age, Ethelred Guffoon—a man of the time, a good fellow, but frivolous.

I wonder whether the celebrities one sees at this shadowy conversazione really represent the literary world—the real people who write the books and think the thoughts. I am afraid they do not. I fear that to find the princes of the pen, the giants of the land of letters, I must go further afield. Lo, here is Great Tom of Chelsea, sitting cosily, in his back parlour, smoking a pipe of bird’s-eye with Eglintoun Beaverup, and telling him he is about having his ceilings whitewashed. Here is Lord Livy poring over Restoration and Revolution broadsides by his reading-lamp in his lonely chambers in the Albany;—no, not lonely, the spirits of the old historic men come from their dusty shelves and clap him on the shoulder, and cry, “Go on and prosper, Thomas Babington, Lord Livy.” The great Mr. Polyphemus, the novelist, is bidden to the Duke of Sennacherib’s, and as he rolls to Sennacherib House in his brougham, meditates satiric onslaughts on “Tom Garbage” and “Young Grubstreet”—those Tom Thumb foes of his[12]—in the next number of the “Pennsylvanians.” Mr. Goodman Twoshoes is reading one of his own books to the members of the Chawbacon Athenæum, and making, I am delighted to hear, a mint of money by the simple process. Goldpen, the poet, has taken his wife and children to Miss P. Horton’s entertainment; Bays, the great dramatist, is sitting in the stalls of the Pontoppidan Theatre listening with rapt ears to the jokes in his own farce; and Selwyn Cope, the essayist, is snoring snugly between the sheets, having to rise very early to-morrow morning in order to see a man hanged. And where are the working-men of literature, the conscripts of the pen, doomed to carry Brown Bess, for sixpence a day, all their lives? Where are Garbage and Grubstreet? In the worst inn’s worst room, with racing prints half hung, the walls of plaster and the floors of sand, at once a deal table but stained with beer, sits Garbage playing four-handed cribbage with an impenitent hostler, a sporting man who has sold the fight, and a potboy who is a returned convict? Sits he there, I ask, or is he peacefully pursuing his vocation in country lodgings? And Grubstreet, is he in some murky den, with a vulture’s quill dipped in vitriol inditing libels upon the great, good, and wise of the day? Wonder upon wonders, Grubstreet sits in a handsome study—listening to his wife laughing, over her crochet work, at Mr. Polyphemus’s last attack on him, and dandling a little child upon his knee! Oh! the strange world in which we live, and the post that people will knock their heads against!

ELEVEN O’CLOCK P.M.: A SCIENTIFIC CONVERSAZIONE.