Stationers' Hall will perhaps be of the greatest interest to readers of this book. All who have to do with letters have a certain regard for the mysticism which circles around the words, "Entered at Stationers' Hall."
The Stationers' Company was incorporated in 1557; it exercised a virtual monopoly of printing almanacs under a charter of James I. until 1775, when the judges of the Court of Common Pleas decided that their professed patent of monopoly was worthless, the Crown having no power to grant any such exclusive right. Doubtless many another archaic statute is of a like invalidity did but some protestful person choose to take issue therewith. The number of freemen of the company is about 1,100; that of the livery about 450. Printers were formerly obliged to be apprenticed to a member of the company, and all publications for copyright must be entered at their hall. The register of the works so entered for publication commenced from 1557, and is valuable for the light it throws on many points of literary history. The Copyright Act imposes on the company the additional duty of registering all assignments of copyrights. The charities of the company are numerous. In Dickens' time Almanac Day (November 22d) was a busy day at the hall, but the great interest in this species of astrological superstition has waned, and, generally speaking, this day, like all others, is of great quietude and repose in these noble halls, where bewhiskered functionaries amble slowly through the routine in which blue paper documents with bright orange coloured stamps form the only note of liveliness in the entire ensemble.
The Goldsmiths' Company assays all the gold and silver plate manufactured in the metropolis, and stamps it with the "hall-mark," which varies each year, so it is thus possible to tell exactly the year in which any piece of London plate was produced.
The out-of-door amusements of society were at this time, as now, made much of. The turf, cricket, and riding to hounds being those functions which took the Londoner far afield. Nearer at home were the charms of Richmond, with its river, and the Star and Garter, and the Great Regatta at Henley, distinctly an affair of the younger element.
Tea-gardens, once highly popular, had fallen into disrepute so far as "society" was concerned. Bagnigge Wells, Merlin's Cave, the London Spa, Marylebone Gardens, Cromwell's Gardens, Jenny's Whim, were all tea-gardens, with recesses, and avenues, and alcoves for love-making and tea-drinking, where an orchestra discoursed sweet music or an organ served as a substitute. An intelligent foreigner, who had published an account of his impressions of England, remarked: "The English take a great delight in the public gardens, near the metropolis, where they assemble and drink tea together in the open air. The number of these in the capital is amazing, and the order, regularity, neatness, and even elegance of them are truly admirable. They are, however, very rarely frequented by people of fashion; but the middle and lower ranks go there often, and seem much delighted with the music of an organ, which is usually played in an adjoining building."
Vauxhall, the Arabia Felix of the youth of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was still a fashionable resort, "a very pandemonium of society immorality," says a historian. This can well be believed if the many stories current concerning "prince, duke, and noble, and much mob besides," are accepted.
"Here the 'prentice from Aldgate may ogle a toast!
Here his Worship must elbow the knight of the post!
For the wicket is free to the great and the small;—
Sing Tantarara—Vauxhall! Vauxhall!"
The first authentic notice of Vauxhall Gardens appears in the record of the Duchy of Cornwall in 1615, when for two hundred years, through the changes of successive ages, there was conducted a round of gaiety and abandon unlike any other Anglo-Saxon institution. Open, generally, only during the summer months, the entertainment varied from vocal and instrumental music to acrobats, "burlettas," "promenades," and other attractions of a more intellectual nature, and, it is to be feared, likewise of a lesser as well.
The exhibition usually wound up with a display of fireworks, set off at midnight. From 1830 to 1850 the gardens were at the very height of their later festivity, but during the next decade they finally sank into insignificance, and at last flickered out in favour of the more staid and sad amusements of the later Victorian period.
As for the indoor pleasures of society at this time, there were the theatre, the opera, and the concert-room. Dining at a popular restaurant or a gigantic hotel had not been thought of. There were, to be sure, the "assembly-rooms" and the "supper-rooms," but there were many more establishments which catered to the pleasures of the masculine mind and taste than provided a fare of food and amusement which was acceptable to the feminine palate.