I mounted the broad step-ladder and entered. The room reminded me of a ship’s cabin, for it was panelled and had cross-beams to the arched roof, whilst the bolts and fastenings were of bright brass. If the windows had not been so large, or the roof so high, it would have resembled the fore-cabin of a Gravesend steamer. There were tables and chairs, as in an ordinary cottage room. At one end was the family bed, concealed during the day by chintz curtains, which hung down like a drop-scene before a miniature theatre; and between the openings of these curtains I could catch sight of some gaudily attired wax figures stowed away there for want of room, but standing there like a group of actors behind the scenes.
Along one of the beams a blunderbuss and a pistol rested on hooks, and the showman’s speaking trumpet (as large as the funnel to a grocer’s coffee-mill) hung against the wall, whilst in one corner was a kind of cabin stove of polished brass, before which a boy was drying some of the portraits that had been recently taken.
“So you’ve took him at last,” said the proprietor, who accompanied us as he snatched the portrait from the boy’s hand. “Well, the eyes ain’t no great things, but as it’s the third attempt it must do.”
On inspecting the portrait I found it to be one of those drab-looking portraits with a light back-ground, where the figure rises from the bottom of the plate as straight as a post, and is in the cramped, nervous attitude of a patient in a dentist’s chair.
After a time I left Mr. F——l’s, and went to another establishment close by, which had originally formed part of a shop in the penny-ice-and-bull’s-eye line—for the name-board over “Photographic Depôt” was still the property of the confectioner—so that the portraits displayed in the window were surmounted by an announcement of “Ginger beer 1d. and 2d.”
A touter at the door was crying out “Hi! hi!—walk inside! walk inside! and have your c’rect likeness took, frame and glass complete, and only 6d.!—time of sitting only four seconds!”
A rough-looking, red-faced tanner, who had been staring at some coloured French lithographs which decorated the upper panes, and who, no doubt, imagined that they had been taken by the photographic process, entered, saying, “Let me have my likeness took.”
The touter instantly called out, “Here, a shilling likeness for this here gent.”
The tanner observed that he wanted only a sixpenny.
“Ah, very good, sir!” and raising his voice, the touter shouted louder than before—“A sixpenny one first, and a shilling one afterwards.”