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

by George Augustus Sala

And, after all, I have only introduced him as a species of gentleman-usher to another foreign acquaintance—with whom my intercourse was even more transient, for I met him but once in my life, and then had only about seven minutes’ conversation with him on the deck of a steamer—whose knowledge of English and recollection of England were even more limited. “Ver fine place,” he remarked, referring to my native land. “Moch night plaisir, London. Sing-song ver good. Ev’ns magnifique.” There, the secret of my digression is out now, and I land you—somewhat wearied with the journey, it may be—under the Piazza of Covent Garden Market.

Mr. Charles Dickens once declared in print that were he to start a horse for the Derby, he would call that horse Fortnum and Mason: the delightful hampers of edibles and drinkables vended by that eminent firm about the period of Epsom Races being connected with the most pleasurable of his impressions concerning that exciting sporting event. I have no doubt that my steamboat acquaintance was not by any means solitary in his enthusiastic estimate of the “magnifique” nature of Ev’ns, or Evans’s, and its “sing-song;” and his opinion is, I have reason to believe, shared by many hundreds of English country gentlemen who patronise the Bedford, the Tavistock, the Hummums, and other kindred Covent Garden hotels, and who at Evans’s find their heartiest welcome and their most inexhaustible fund of amusement. Nor can I see myself, exactly, how this great town of ours could manage to get on without the time-honoured Cave of Harmony; for be it known to all men—at least to so many as do not know it already—Evans’s, though Captain Costigan is no longer permitted to sing his songs there, and even Colonel Newcome, were he to volunteer to oblige the company with a song, would be politely requested to desist by a waiter—is the “Cave,” and the “Cave” is Evans’s. It is not without a certain sly chuckle of gratulation that I record this fact. Those friends of mine who have adopted the highly honourable pursuit of hiding round corners in order to throw, with the greater security, jagged stones at me as I pass, those precious purists and immaculate precisians who cry hard upon a writer on London life in the nineteenth century, because he describes things and places which every man knows to exist, and whose existence he for one has not the hypocrisy to deny—these good gentlemen will scarcely be angry with their poor servant, Scriblerus, for giving a word-picture of a place of amusement which is immortalised in the first chapter of “The Newcomes.” And please to observe, gentlemen, that I am not about to venture on the very delicate ground with respect to the quality of the songs once sung at Evans’s, and so boldly trodden by Mr. Thackeray. I have the less need to do so, as that delicate or indelicate ground has long since—and to the honour of the present proprietor, Mr. Green—been ploughed up and sown with salt, and the musical programme rendered as innocuous as the bill of fare of a festival in a cathedral town.

And now for the place itself. About a century since, when the shadowy hero of the “Virginians” was beating the town with my Lords Castlewood and March, and Parson Sampson, and his black man Gumbo was flirting with Colonel Lambert’s servant-maids; about a century since, when in reality Johnson—not so long since emancipated from sleeping on bulks with that other homeless wretch, and man of genius, Savage—was painfully finishing his gigantic work, the “Dictionary;” when Goldsmith was “living in Axe Lane among the beggars,” or starving in Green Arbour Court; when honest Hogarth dwelt at the sign of the Golden Head, in Leicester Fields (he had set up his coach by this time, worthy man, was Serjeant-painter to the King, and had his country-house at Chiswick); when the wicked, witty Wilkes was carousing with other “choice spirits” as wicked and as witty as he, at Medmenham Abbey; when the furious Churchill was astonishing the town with his talent and his excesses; when Lawrence Sterne was yet fiddling, and painting, and preaching, while his friend Hall indited the “Crazy Tales;” when George II., hitherto considered as a heavy, morose German king, who did not like “boetry and bainting,” and could not see the fun of the “March to Finchley,” but now for the first time revealed to us by Mr. Carlyle as a dapper, consequential little coxcomb—the “mein bruder der comödiant,” “my brother the playactor” of Friedrich-Wilhelm, was Sovereign of Great Britain, by the grace of the Act of Settlement and the madness of the Stuarts—this town of London was full of choice holes and corners, known under the generic name of “night cellars.” You may see in Liverpool to this day—and I am told, also, in New York—some flourishing specimens of these inviting localities, but they have almost died out in London. The White Horse Cellar in Piccadilly is now a booking-office; the Shades in Leicester Square (underneath Saville House), once Pennant’s “pouting house for princes,” is a restaurant; the cellar of the Ship at Charing Cross is yet a tavern, but is used more as a waiting-room for passengers by the Kent Road and Deptford omnibuses; and a whole nest of cellars were swept away by the Adamses when the Adelphi Terrace, with a worse range of cellars beneath, as it afterwards turned out, was constructed. But the night cellars of a hundred years ago! What dens, what sinks, what roaring saturnalia of very town scoundrelism they must have been! We have but two reliable authorities extant as to their manners and appearance: Hogarth’s prints, and the pages of the Old Bailey Sessions Papers. The former are the engraven testimony of a man to whose honest nature it was utterly abhorrent and intolerable to bear false witness; the latter is a record that cannot lie. I don’t mean by these Sessions Papers the collection of trials known as the “Newgate Calendar.” In these, crimes are dressed up with all manner of romantic and adventitious details, and occasionally spiced with moral reflections by the ordinary of Newgate. I mean the real Sessions Papers, the verbatim reports of the trials—from murder to pot-stealing—taken officially in short-hand by the Gurneys and their predecessors, and which, in their matchless extenso, remain, to the inestimable advantage of our historians and our painters of manners. They date from the time of Judge Jeffreys, to the last session of the Central Criminal Court—it may have been the day before yesterday.

The cellars come out with a perfectly livid radiance in the reports of these trials. You see the “brimstone” woman, whom Hogarth pointed out to his friend and sketched upon his thumbnail, spurting brandy from her mouth at the enraged virago her companion. You see Kate Hackabout passing the stolen watch to Tom Idle, who is under the unseen surveillance of one of Justice de Veil or Harry Fielding’s runners, and the luckless Thomas will be laid by the heels by daybreak to-morrow. Kate will go to Bridewell, there to be whipped and to pick oakum. Foote’s Mother Cole is here, you may be sure; and Tom Rakewell, spending his last guineas among the gamblers and ruffians. Who else are there? Ferdinand Count Fathom, you may sure; poets and hack-writers—for Grub Street existed then in spirit and in truth—making my lord’s gold pieces, which he gave for that last foolishly-fulsome dedication, fly. Yes; Mr. Peregrine Pickle, and you are spending your night in the cellar. And Mr. Thomas Jones, fresh from the western counties,—you, too, are here, with a laced coat bought out of my Lady Bellaston’s last bank-note. Ah! Thomas! Thomas! if pure-minded Sophy Western could but see you in this bad place, among these ruffianly companions!—among horse-jockeys, highwaymen-captains, unfrocked parsons; deboshed adventurers, redolent of twopenny ordinaries and Mount Scoundrel in the Fleet; disbanded lieutenants of phantom regiments; scriveners struck off the rolls, ruined spendthrifts, Irish desperadoes enthusiastic for the Pretender and other men’s pence, bankrupt traders, French and Italian rascals flagrant from the galleys of foreign seaports, and all, according to their own showing, distressed patriots; German swindlers and card-sharpers, who declare themselves to be Counts of the Holy Roman Empire, Jew coin-clippers and diamond-slicers, riverside vagabonds in the pay of the commanders of press-gangs on the look-out for benighted journeymen, or dissolute lads who have run away from their apprenticeship or quarrelled with their parents, recruiting crimps for both sexes, usurers looking for prodigals who have yet money to lose, bailiffs’ followers looking for prodigals who have lost all and owe more; and, scattered among all this scum of frantic knavery and ragabosh, some gay young sprigs of aristocracy, some officers in the regiment of Guards, some noisy young country squires of the Western type. This, all garnished with dirt and spilt liquors, with the fumes of mum, Geneva, punch, wine, and tobacco smoke, with oaths and shrieks and horrid songs, with the clatter of glasses and tankards, the clash of rapiers and verberations of bludgeons—is the London night cellar of a hundred years ago. Round Covent Garden such places positively swarmed. The Strand, the neighbourhood of Exeter ’Change, Long Acre, and Drury Lane, reeked with dens of this description. For hereabouts were the playhouses, and in their purlieus, as in those of cathedrals, you must expect to find, and do find, in every age, the haunts of vice and dissipation. It may be profane to say ubi apis ibi mel: but such is the sorry fact.

I am to give you notice that this article was originally intended to be intensely topographical—nay, sant soit peu, antiquarian and archæological. It was my desire to give you a minute description of the hostelry called Evans’s Hotel, and whose basement contains the saloon known as Evans’s supper-room, from the earliest period of authentic research to the present time. How it emerged from a state of brawling night-cellarhood, to the dignity of a harmonic meeting; who first ordered “chops to follow,” and what ingenious spirit originally suggested the curious principle now in practice, of paying for your refreshment at the door on quitting the establishment; who instituted the glee-choir, introduced books of the words, and discovered that baked potatoes are necessarily associated with bumpers of stout, poached eggs, and liberally cayenned kidneys; who formed the gallery of portraits which now graces the walls of the ante-saloon, and who first dreamed of such an Arabian Night’s succedaneum as a ladies’ gallery. All these things it was my firm intention to record, in Roman type, for your amusement, if not your edification. “Who knows,” I asked myself enthusiastically, “if I take sweet counsel (hot and strong as well as sweet, sometimes) of Mr. Paddy Green, most urbane of nocturnal Bonifaces, and sit reverentially at the feet of Mr. Peter Cunningham, who, it is rumoured, in the matter of London localities, could, an he chose, rival the marvellous feat of memory ascribed to old Fuller of the ‘Worthies,’ who could repeat backwards, and without book, the names of all the tavern signs on both sides of the way from Temple Bar to Ludgate: who knows,” I repeated, “but that I shall be able to submit to the readers of ‘Twice Round the Clock,’ a copy of an unpaid score left by Oliver Goldsmith at some Evans’s of the past; or put it upon record that Sir Thomas Lawrence and Major Hanger had claret-cup together here, on the night that Thurtell was hanged, or that on the fatal evening when the Catholic Bill passed the Lords, a live bishop—a hackney coachman’s many-caped coat over his apron and shorts—descended Evans’s well-worn stairs, ordered a Welsh rabbit, partook of two ‘stouts,’ and, the tears coursing down his right reverend cheeks, murmured—‘Britain! oh my country! Delenda est Carthago!’ by way of chorus to Captain Costigan’s favourite ditty of ‘The Night before Larry was stretched?’”

In the famous gardens of the Villa Pallavicini, near Genoa, there is an artificial piece of water winding between rocks, at the extremity of which the mimic river seems to lose itself in the blue waters of the Mediterranean. Nothing of the sort is the case: the sea is, in reality, more than three hundred yards distant; but the intervening ground has been so dexterously sloped and masked with groups of plants, that the optical delusion is marvellous. Of such are the aspirations of mankind. In such disappointment ended my castles in the air with respect to Evans’s. It was from across the ocean that I had to respond to the printers’ wail for “copy:” this article was commenced in view of the Castle of Rolandseck, on board a Rhine steamer, whose worn-out engines throbbed as irregularly as though they had palpitation of the heart. It is being continued now at the sea-side, in bed, gruel on the one side, sweet spirits of nitre on the other: and where it will be finished, who can tell? Old Æsop told the soldiers, when they asked him whither he was going, that he did not know, whereupon they arrested him for an impertinent. “Was I not right?” he cried; “did I know that I was going to jail?” “Sait on où l’on va?” echoes Diderot. How do I, how do you, how does your lordship, how does your grace, how does your majesty, know what will happen the moment after this? Therefore, take heed of the present time, and make your wills: the best will, in my humble thinking, that a man can make, being that strong will and determination to act as justly as he can in each moment in the which he is permitted to live.

So you understand, now, why I was compelled to dispense with the assistance of Mr. Paddy Green and Mr. Peter Cunningham, and why I am reduced to a dependence on my own personal reminiscences with respect to Evans’s, without the adventitious aid of recondite anecdote and historical data. Here is the place as I remember it.

One o’clock in the morning. Of course we are supposed to be spending just a fortnight in town, and putting up at the Bedford, or it would never do to be so early-late abroad. We have been to the play, and have consumed a few oysters in the Haymarket; but the principal effect of that refreshment seems to have been to make us ten times hungrier. The delicate bivalves of Colchester have failed in appeasing our bucolic stomachs. We require meat. So, says the friend most learned in the ways of the town to his companion—“Meat at our hotel we eschew, for we shall find the entertainment of the dearest and dullest. We will go sup at Evans’s, for there we can have good meat and good liquor at fair rates, and hear a good song besides.” Whereupon we walk, till the piazza, about which I have kept you so long lingering, looms in sight. A low doorway, brilliantly lit with gas, greets our view. We descend a flight of some steps, pass through a vestibule, and enter the “Cave of Harmony.”

Push further on, if you please. You are not to linger in this ante-chamber, thickly hung with pictures, and otherwise, with its circular marble tables, much resembling a Parisian café, minus the mirrors and the rattle of the dominoes. This ante-chamber will be treated of anon; but your present business is with chops and harmony.

Passing, then, through this atrium, the visitor finds himself in a vast music-hall, of really noble proportions, and decorated not only with admirable taste, but with something nearly akin to splendour. You see I am at a loss for authorities again, and I cannot tell you how much of the hall is Corinthian, and how much composite; whether the columns are fluted, the cornices gilt or the soffits carved, and whether the Renaissance or the Arabesque style most prevails in the decorations employed. All I know is, that it is a lofty, handsome, comfortable room, whose acoustic properties, by the way, are far superior to those enjoyed by some establishments with loftier philharmonic pretensions. At the northern extremity of the hall is a spacious proscenium and stage, with the grand pianoforte de rigueur, the whole veiled by a curtain in the intervals of performance. As for the huge area stretching from the proscenium to a row of columns which separate it from the ante-chamber café, it is occupied by parallel lines of tables, which, if they do not groan beneath the weight of good eatables and drinkables piled upon them, might certainly be excused for groaning—to say nothing of shrieking, yelling, and uttering other lamentable noises, evoked by the unmerciful thumping and hammering they undergo at the conclusion of every fresh exercitation of harmony.