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

by George Augustus Sala

As in this real life of ours, Old Age and Infancy often meet on neutral ground, and the prattle of the child goes forth with hand out-stretched to meet the graybeard’s maundering: so, oh reader, do I find the beginning and the end of these papers drawing closer and closer together. Ere many hours they will meet; and their conjunction shall be the signal for their decay. You will remember how, when the day was very young, the morning scarce swaddled, and kicking in his cradle with encrimsoned heels (Aurora, the nurse, had chafed them), we visited a great newspaper office, and saw the publication of the monster journal. Now, when midnight itself is fallen into the sere and yellow, we stand once more within the precincts of journalism. This is not, however, the monster journal that has all Printing House Square to roar and rattle in. No: our office is in the Strand. We are free of the charmed domains. We pass up a narrow court running by the side of the office, push aside a heavy door, ascend the creaking staircase, and discreetly tapping at a door, this time covered with green baize, find ourselves in the presence of Mr. Limberly, the sub-editor of the “Daily Wagon.”

Let us cast a glance round the room. What a litter it is in, to be sure! what piles of newspapers, home and country ones, mangled and disembowelled by the relentless scissors, cumber the floor! More newspapers on shelves—old files, these—more on the table; letters opened and unopened, wet proof-sheets, files of “copy,” books for review, just sent by the publishers, or returned by the reviewers, after they have duly demolished the contents and the authors. And all about the room are great splashes and dried-up pools of ink, and the ceiling is darkened with the smoke of innumerable candles—gas was, until very lately, considered anything but orthodox in a newspaper office, and many sub-editors still find its sharp, harsh, flickering, though brilliant light, far inferior to the honest, though evil-smelling, old tallow-candles, in their tin sconces and japanned shades. The “Daily Wagon,” be it understood, is a newspaper of the good old Conservative way of thinking—no Liberal notions, or humbug of that sort: Church and State, strict constitutional and social discipline (including game-laws, religious disabilities, church-rates, unequal taxation, rural justices’ justice, and flogging in the army and schools)—the True Blue British line of politics, in fact. Thus situated, the “Wagon,” one of whose proprietors is said to be a peer, another a bishop, and a third a brewer—nothing could be more respectable—sticks to its old office, its old rooms, and its old staff. The two former have not been painted within the memory of man; though it must be admitted that the latter wash quite as frequently as the employés of the “Morning Cracker,” with its bran-new offices, its bran-new furniture, its bran-new type, paper, machines, writers—bran-new everything but ideas. The “Daily Wagoners” affect to sneer at the “Morning Cracker,” which, in its turn, laughs the “Wagon” to scorn; but both combine in abusing the monster journal of Printing House Square. “Wagoner” and “Cracker” are both high-priced journals. So, of course, they both feel bound to ignore even the existence of a journal called the “Daily Bombshell,” which somehow manages to keep up a better staff of writers, and a larger establishment, to give fresher news, more accurate intelligence, more interesting correspondence, and reflections on public events incomparably more powerful, than its high-priced contemporaries, all for the small sum of one penny. The “Wagon” and the “Cracker” are in a chronic state of rage at the “Bombshell,” though they pretend to ignore its existence; but one day the bishop who is interested in the “Wagon,” hearing that the circulation of the abhorred “Bombshell” exceeded fifty thousand, while that of his own beloved journal fluctuated between five and seven hundred, drove down in almost delirious excitement to the offices of the “Wagon”—drove down in his own carriage, with his mitre on the panels—and suggested to Mr. Fitzfluke, the editor, that the price of the paper should forthwith come down to one penny. But Mr. Fitzfluke shook his head in respectful deprecation of the proposition, and summoned to his aid Mr. Limberly, who likewise shook his head, and whispered the magic word “advertisements.” A grand consultation between the proprietors took place next day, whereat the brewer came out in a rabidly conservative point of view, and declared, striking a leathern-covered table, that he would sooner see his own “Entire” retailed at a penny a pint, than submit to an imitation in price of the “rubbishing prints” of a set of “dam radicals.” So the “Daily Wagon” keeps up its price, and manages to crawl on in a tortoise-like manner, supported by its advertisements. It sleeps a good deal, and doesn’t want much to eat; and will bear being trodden on, stumbled over, nay, occasionally jumped upon, without seeming in the least to mind it.

MIDNIGHT: THE SUB-EDITOR’S ROOM.

Mr. Limberly sits, then, in his sub-editorial throne—an unpretending cane-bottomed arm-chair—surrounded by his attachés and myrmidons, his good men and true. The electric telegraph messenger—a spruce lad in the not unbecoming uniform of that recently-formed corps—has just arrived, bearing a message which may announce either war in the East or Peace in China, either a fluctuation in the funds at St. Petersburg, or a murder at Haverfordwest; either the wreck of a steamer, with all hands lost, on the north-west coast of Ireland, or the arrival in the Mersey of a clipper ship from Australia, with a few score thousand ounces of gold in her treasure-room, to say nothing of the nuggets, the gold dust, and the bankers’ receipts in the pockets of her wide-awake-hatted passengers. But all is fish that comes to Mr. Limberly’s net. Leading article and literary criticism, theatrical notices and prices of railway and mining shares, advertisements and letters from eulogistic or indignant correspondents, telegrams and foreign tittle-tattle, fires, murders, fatal accidents, coroners’ inquests, enormous gooseberries, showers of frogs, the acceptances of the St. Leger, and the prices of hops in the Borough Market: he looks upon all these items but as so much “copy,” for which the master printer is waiting, and which are required to fill the ever-yawning columns of the “Daily Wagon.” Snipping and pasting, extracting, excising, revising, and correcting, Mr. Limberly will work late into the night and early into the morning; but he will not dream of retiring to rest till the paper itself be “put to bed,”—i.e., laid on the printing machine for the requisite number of copies to be struck off; and even then he will probably go and smoke a cigar at the “Crimson Hippopotamus,” in the Strand, hard by—the great house of call for morning journalists—before he hails his matutinal cab, the driver of which waits for him on the stand, and looks out for him quite as a regular customer, and rattles over Waterloo Bridge to his well-deserved bed.

ONE O’CLOCK A.M.—EVANS’S SUPPER-ROOMS, AND A FIRE.

In the bleak, timbery city of Copenhagen, so terribly maltreated at the commencement of the century by Admiral Lord Nelson, K.C.B.; in that anything-but-agreeable capital of Denmark, where raw turnips sliced in brandy form a favourite whet before dinner,—where they blacklead (apparently) the stairs in the houses, and three-fourths of every apartment are sacrificed to the preposterous exigencies of the Stove; where the churches are mostly of wood, and the streets are paved with a substance nearly resembling petrified kidney potatoes; in Copenhagen, then, I formed, some thirty months since, a transient acquaintance with an old gentleman in green spectacles. He was a Dane, formerly commercial, now retired from business. He came every day, and with unvarying regularity, to take his post-prandial coffee and petit verre in the speise saal of the hotel then afflicted with my custom: he generally indulged in the refreshment by dipping a large lump of sugar in the hot liquid, sucking it, replenishing it, occasionally replacing the lump, till the cup was emptied; and he snuffed eternally. These are not such peculiar characteristics of a foreign gentleman that I have any special cause to dwell upon them here; but as the hotel was very empty, and I was very dull, I made this old gentleman—as my incorrigible habit is—a study and a theme. I converted him into a mental clothes-prop, and hung an infinity of fantastic notions, theories, and speculations upon him. We soon became, thanks to the French language and constant proximity, tolerably good friends. Of course the old gentleman did not delay long in asking me why I had come to Copenhagen. That question is invariably asked you—ad nauseam, too—throughout the North of Europe. They begin at Hamburg, continue at Berlin, return to it in Denmark and Sweden, and end at St. Petersburg. If a man be not a commercial traveller, or a diplomatist, a spy, or a negotiator of forged bank-notes, these Northern people seem utterly bewildered as to his object in coming to such latitudes. The Rhine, the Mediterranean, the Bosphorus, the Holy Land, Switzerland, the Tyrol, good; but the North: que diable! what does he want in that galley? I confess that I was somewhat at a loss to give a straightforward answer to the old gentleman in green spectacles. I might have told him that I had come to see the birthplace of Hans Christian Anderson; but then I was not quite certain as to whether that delightful Danish writer first drew breath in Copenhagen. It would have been equally disingenuous to have adduced a wish to see the famous Thorwaldsen’s Museum as the reason for my visit; for with shame I acknowledge that, having no guide-book with me, I had entirely forgotten that the Danish metropolis contained that triumph of plastic art. It is true that, by attentive study of the glorious museum, I subsequently atoned for my mnemonic shortcomings. So, being on the horns of a dilemma, I elected to tell the truth—not a bad plan under any circumstances—and said that I had come to Copenhagen for the simple reason that I did not know what to do with myself, and would have gone with equal alacrity to Nova Zembla or to Katamandu; which candid avowal placed me on a most confidential footing with the old gentleman in green spectacles, and materially assisted the progress of our intercourse.

Now, whatever can this Danish old gentleman and his verdant spectacles have to do with One o’Clock in the morning, and Evans’s Supper-rooms? You must have patience, and you shall hear. In subsequent chatty interviews, it came out that the old gentleman had once upon a time—a very long while ago, more than a quarter of a century—been in England. His reminiscences of our country were very dim and indistinct by this time. His knowledge of the English language, I take it, had not at any time been very extensive, and it was reduced now to a few phrases and interjections; some trifling oaths, a few facetious party-cries, current, I presume, at the time of his visit, and having, mainly, reference to Catholic Emancipation and the Reform Bill; these, with some odds and ends of tattered conversation, formed his philological stock in trade. But, even as “single-speech Hamilton” had his solitary oration, Mrs. Dubsy’s hen her one chick, and Major Panton his unique run of luck at the card-table, so my old gentleman had his one story which he persisted in delivering in English. It was a mysterious and almost incomprehensible legend; and began thus: “’Ackney Rod! Aha!” Then he would snuff and suck his lump of sugar, and I would look on wonderingly. Then he would explain matters a little. “’Ackney Rod. I live there so long time ago. Aha!” This would lead to a renewed series of snuffings and suckings, and he would proceed—“Vontleroy he not ’ang. He rich man, banquier in America. He ’ang in a sospender basket. Aha!” For the life of me, I could not for a long time understand the drift about “Vontleroy” and the “sospender basket;” but at length a light broke in upon me, and I began to comprehend that this wondrous legend related to Henry Fauntleroy, the banker, who was hanged at Newgate for forgery, and concerning whose apocryphal rescue from strangulation—by the means, according to some, of a silver tube in his windpipe, and, according to others, of an apparatus of wicker-work, which, suspending him from the waist, so took the strain off his neck—rumours were current at the time of his death and for a considerable period afterwards. This cock-and-bull story was well-nigh all the poor man could recollect about England, and he decidedly made the most of it.