upon poverty, coining gold from its vices and morbid longings. As for the garrets of those houses, we would not for the world answer for the comfort of their inhabitants. All the lower floors are let out as shops, in which are displayed dingy dresses and articles of female ornament, coarse eatables, cheap and nasty literature, shockingly illustrated; thick-soled shoes, old clothes, awful cigars—all at very low prices. But the gin-palaces are the lions of Drury-lane; they stand in conspicuous positions, at the corners and crossings of the various intersecting streets. They may be seen from afar, and are lighthouses which guide the thirsty “sweater” on the road to ruin. For they are resplendent with plate glass and gilt cornices, and a variety of many-coloured inscriptions. One of the windows displays the portrait of the “Norfolk Giant,” who acts as barman to this particular house; the walls of another establishment inform you, in green letters, that here they sell “THE ONLY REAL BRANDY IN LONDON,” and a set of scarlet letters announces to the world, that in this house they sell “THE FAMOUS CORDIAL MEDICATED GIN, WHICH IS SO STRONGLY RECOMMENDED BY THE FACULTY.” Cream Gin, Honey Gin, Sparkling Ale, Genuine Porter, and other words calculated utterly to confound a tee-totaller, are painted up in conspicuous characters, even so that they cover the door-posts. It is a remarkable fact, that the houses which are most splendid from without, appear most dismal and comfortless from within. The landlord is locked up behind his “bar,” a snug place enough, with painted casks and a fire and an arm-chair; but the guests stand in front of the bar in a narrow dirty place, exposed to the draught of the door, which is continually opening and shutting. Now and then an old barrel, flung in a corner, serves as a seat. But nevertheless the “palace” is always crowded with guests, who, standing, staggering, crouching, or lying down, groaning, and cursing, drink and forget.
On sober working-days, and in tolerable weather, there is nothing to strike the uninitiated in Drury-lane. Many a capital of a small German country is worse paved and lighted. Nor is misery so conspicuous and staring in this quarter as in Spitalfields, St. Giles’, Saffron-hill, and other “back-slums” of London. But at certain bestial periods, misery oozes out of all its pores like Mississipi mud. Saturday and Monday nights, and Sunday after Church-time, those are the times in which Drury-lane appears in full characteristic glory. A Sunday-afternoon in Drury-lane is enough to make the cheerfullest splenetic. For to the poor labourer the Lord’s day is a day of penance or dissipation. The cotton-frock and fustian-jacket are scared away from the churches and the parks by their respectful awe of rich toilettes and splendid liveries. For the poor man of England is ashamed of his rags; he has no idea of arranging them into a graceful draperie in the manner of the Spanish or Italian Lazarone, who devoutly believes that begging is an honest trade. Even the lowest among the low in England are proud enough to avoid the society of a higher caste, though that superiority consist but in half a degree. They consort with persons of their own stamp, among whom they may walk with their heads erect. Church and park have moreover no charm for the blunted senses of the overworked and under-fed artizan. He is too weak and fatigued to think of an excursion into the country. Steamers, omnibuses, or the rail, are too expensive. His church, his park, his club, his theatre, his place of refuge from the smell of the sewers that infect his dwelling—his sole place of relaxation—is the gin-palace.
To provide against the Sunday, he takes a supply of fire-water on Saturday evening when he has received his week’s wages, for with the stroke of twelve the sabbath shuts the door of all public-houses, and on Sunday-morning the beer or brandy paradise must not open before one o’clock in the afternoon, to be closed again from three to five. Hence that unsacred stillness which weighs down upon Drury-lane on Sunday-mornings. The majority of the inhabitants sleep away their intoxication or ennui. Old time-worn maudlinness reigns supreme in the few faces which peer from the half-opened street-doors; maudlinness pervades the half-sleepy groups which surround the public-house at noon to be ready for its opening; chronic maudlinness pervades the atmosphere. And if a stray ray of light break through the clouds, it falls upon the frowsy loungers and the dim window-panes in a strange manner, as though it had no business there.
It is Saturday-night, and the orgies of Drury-lane have commenced. “That’s the way thou shouldst look,” says Dr. Keif, hurrying forward to the divan in the Strand; “that’s the way thou shouldst look, thou Citta Dolente, to awe us with thy charms. Oh for a Dutch painter of the old school to turn this scene into a Höllenbreughel.”
A dense fog, with a deep red colouring, from the reflection of numberless gas-jets, and the pavement flooded with mud; a fitful illumination according to the strength of the gas, which flares forth in long jets from the butchers’ shops, while the less illumined parts are lost in gloomy twilight. If your nerves are delicate, you had better not pass too close by the gin-shops, for as the door opens—and those doors are always opening—you are overwhelmed with the pestilential fumes of gin. The pavements are crowded. Slatternly servants with baskets hurry to the butchers and grocers, and the haunters of the coffee-houses of Drury-lane elbow their way through the very midst of the population—the sweepings of humanity. A wicked word this, but the only one fit for these forms of woe and livid faces, in which hunger contends with thirst, and vice with disease.
What subjects for Hogarth on the narrow space of a couple of flag-stones! How ravenous the craving which flashes from the eyes of that grey-haired woman, as she drags a slight, yellow-haired girl—perhaps her own child—to the gin-shop! The little girl follows in a dumb wooden way; but her small slight hand is shut with an anxious grasp, as though she feared to lose her weekly earnings—the wages, perhaps, of hard work, or still harder beggary. She stumbles at the threshold, and almost falls over a couple of children that are crouching on the ground, shivering with cold, and waiting for their father within. The father comes, staggering and kicking the air, with manifest danger to his equilibrium, and cursing awfully. The kick was meant for his wife, a thin woman, with hollow yellow cheeks, whose long serpent-like curls are covered with an old silk bonnet, while her stockingless feet are contained in large slippers. She counts five copper pence in her bony hand, looks at her drunken husband, and at the fatal door, and at the costermonger’s cart in the middle of the street; and she counts her pence, and recounts them, and cannot come to the end of them, though they are but five. The large oysters in the dirty cart, too, excite her appetite. Which is it to be? the public-house or a lot of oysters? “Penny a lot, oysters!” shouts the man, as he moves his cart forward. A dozen greedy eyes watch his movements.
Similar groups are met with at every step. At the door of almost every gin-shop you see drunken women, many of them with children in their arms; and wherever you go, amidst the confused noise and murmur of many voices, you hear distinctly the most awful oaths. It is not at all necessary to quote those oaths. Let it suffice, that one of them, beginning with a B, startled Dr. Keif’s ears a hundred times at least in his walk through Drury-lane.
“Adventure number one!” said Mr. Baxter, to whom our friend communicated the result of his observations.
The fact is, Dr. Keif and Mr. Baxter are seated in the pit of the Olympic Theatre, which is small enough to enable even a short-sighted person to make the public in the boxes and the galleries the subject of a physiognomical study. The “Caucasian population” of Mr. Disraeli’s novels may be seen in large numbers enjoying their sabbath. The pit and the upper gallery are filled with sentimental cooks and housemaids, intermixed with a sprinkling of females, to whom we do but justice if we describe them as lorettes in a small way. They enjoy the patronage of a select assembly of beardless shopmen and attorneys’ clerks, who treat them to ginger-beer, soda-water, lemonade, and oranges. The curtain has just fallen.
“How do you like it?” asks Mr. Baxter.