[20] For some curious erudition on go-carts see Smith’s Life of Nollekens, where he says (1829 ed. i. 221): “When I was a boy, the go-cart was common in every toy-shop in London; but it was to be found in the greatest abundance in the once far-famed turners’ shop in Spinning-wheel Alley, Moorfields: a narrow passage leading from those fields to the spot upon which the original Bethlehem Hospital stood in Bishopsgate Street. In 1825-26, however, both Spinning-wheel Alley and Old Bethlehem were considerably altered and widened, and subsequently named Liverpool Street.”
[21] Hone says: “The late King George IV. and his brothers and sisters, all the royal family of George III., were rocked. The rocker was a female officer of the household, with a salary” (Every Day Book). Rocker cradles are to-day made in Ireland by villagers, and sold from door to door.
[22] Two artists, father and son, bore the name of Israel von Meckenen. They flourished in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and appear to have collaborated on some 250 prints. The British Museum has a fine set of their engravings.
[23] The stone inscribed “Here lies Nancy Dawson” no longer exists. M. Dorsay Ansell, the obliging keeper of the burial-grounds (now laid out as one recreation-ground) of St. George the Martyr and St. George’s, Bloomsbury, is frequently applied to for information as to its existence. Eighteen years ago, when these grounds were formed, careful search was made for interesting stones, and the gravestone of Zachary Macaulay, among others, was discovered by Mr. Ansell. That of Nancy Dawson was never found, but it may be buried out of sight.
Nancy Dawson is stated to have died at Haverstock Hill, May 27, 1767. Her portrait in oils still hangs in the Garrick Club, and the print-sellers are familiar with her figure in theatrical costume. She is believed to have been born about 1730, to have been the daughter of a Clare Market porter, and to have lived in poverty in St. Giles’s or in a Drury Lane cellar. The rather ill-supported narratives of her career speak, as does Smith, of her waiting on the skittle-players at a Marylebone tavern, which Mr. George Clinch thinks (Marylebone and St. Pancras) may have been the old “Rose of Normandy” in High Street.
Nancy Dawson’s fortune was made in 1759 in the Beggars’ Opera. The man who danced the hornpipe among the thieves happened to have fallen ill, and his place was taken by Nancy, who was then a rising young actress. From that moment her success was secure. Her real monument is the song beginning—
“Of all the girls in our town,
The black, the fair, the red, the brown,
That dance and prance it up and down,
There’s none like Nancy Dawson!