Famous Persons and Places

by Nathaniel Parker Willis

If you are up early—I mean early for London—say ten o’clock—we would start from your hotel in Bond street, and hastening through Regent street and the Quadrant (deserts at that hour) strike into the zig-zag alleys, cutting traversely from Coventry street to Covent Garden. The horses on the cab stand in the Haymarket “are at this hour asleep.” The late supper-eaters at Dubourg’s and the Café de l’Europe were the last infliction upon their galled wisthers, and while dissipation slumbers they may find an hour to hang their heads upon the bit, and forget gall and spavin in the sunshiny drowse of morning. The cabman, too, nods on his perch outside, careless of the custom of “them as pays only their fare,” and quite sure not to get “a gemman to drive” at that unseasonable hour. The “waterman” (called a “water-man,” as he will tell you, “because he gives hay to the ’orses”) leans against the gas-lamp at the corner, looking with a vacant indifference of habit at the splendid coach with its four blood-bays just starting from the Brighton coach-office in the Crescent. The side-walk of Coventry street, usually radiant with the flaunting dresses of the frail and vicious, is now sober with the dull habiliments of the early stirring and the poor. The town, (for this is town, not city) beats its more honest pulse. Industry alone is abroad.

Rupert street on the left is the haunt of shabby-genteel poverty. To its low-doored chop-houses steal the more needy loungers of Regent street, and in confined and greasy, but separate and exclusive boxes, they eat their mutton-chop and potato unseen of their gayer acquaintances. Here comes the half-pay officer, whose half-pay is halved or quartered with wife and children, to drink his solitary half-pint of sherry, and, over a niggardly portion of soup and vegetables, recall, as he may in imagination, the gay dinners at mess, and the companions now grown cold—in death or worldliness! Here comes the sharper out of luck, the debtor newly out of prison. And here comes many a “gay fellow about town,” who will dine to-morrow, or may have dined yesterday, at a table of unsparing luxury, but who now turns up Rupert street at seven, cursing the mischance that draws upon his own slender pocket for the dinner of to-day. Here are found the watchful host and the suspicious waiter—the closely-measured wine, and the more closely-measured attention—the silent and shrinking company, the close-drawn curtain, the suppressed call for the bill, the lingering at the table of those who value the retreat and the shelter to recover from the embarrassing recognition and the objectless saunter through the streets. The ruin, the distress, the despair, that wait so closely upon the heels of fashion, pass here with their victims. It is the last step within the bounds of respectability. They still live “at the West end,” while they dine in Rupert street. They may still linger in the Park, or stroll in Bond street, till their better-fledged friends flit to dinner at the clubs, and, within a stone’s throw of the luxurious tables and the gay mirth they so bitterly remember, sit down to an ill-dressed meal, and satisfy the calls of hunger in silence. Ah, the outskirts of the bright places in life are darker for the light that shines so near them! How much sweeter is the coarsest meal shared with the savage in the wilderness, than the comparative comfort of cooked meats and wine in a neighborhood like this!

Come through this narrow lane into Leicester Square. You cross here the first limit of the fashionable quarter. The Sabloniere hotel is in this square; but you may not give it as your address unless you are a foreigner. This is the home of that most miserable fish out of water—a Frenchman in London. A bad French hotel, and two or three execrable French restaurants, make this spot the most habitable to the exiled habitué of the Palais Royal. Here he gets a mocking imitation of what, in any possible degree, is better than the sacré biftek, or the half-raw mutton-chop and barbarous boiled potato! Here he comes forth, if the sun shine perchance for one hour at noon, and paces up and down on the side-walk, trying to get the better of his bile and his bad breakfast. Here waits for him at three, the shabby, but most expensive remise cab, hired by the day for as much as would support him a month in Paris. Leicester square is the place for conjurors, bird-fanciers, showmen, and generally for every foreign novelty in the line of nostrums and marvels. If there is a dwarf in London, or a child with two heads, you will see one or all in that building, so radiant with placards, and so thronged with beggars.

Come on through Cranbourne alley. Old clothes, second-hand stays, idem shawls, capes, collars, and ladies’ articles of ornamental ware generally; cheap straw bonnets, old books, gingerbread, and stationery! Look at this once-expensive and finely-worked muslin cape! What fair shoulders did it adorn when these dingy flowers were new—when this fine lace edging bounded some heaving bosom, perhaps, like frost-work on the edge of a snow-drift. It has been the property of some minion of elegance and wealth, vicious or virtuous, and by what hard necessity came it here? Ten to one, could it speak, its history would keep us standing at this shop-window, indifferent alike to the curious glances of these passing damsels, and the gentle eloquence of the Jew on the other side, who pays us the unflattering compliment of suggesting an improvement in our toilet by the purchase of the half-worn habiliments he exposes.

I like Cranbourne alley, because it reminds me of Venice. The half-daylight between the high and overhanging roofs, the just audible hum of voices and occupation from the different shops, the shuffling of hasty feet over the smooth flags, and particularly the absence of horses and wheels, make it (in all but the damp air and the softer speech) a fair resemblance to those close passages in the rear of the canals between St. Mark’s and the Rialto. Then I like studying a pawnbroker’s window, and I like ferreting in the old book-stalls that abound here. It is a good lesson in humility for an author to see what he can be bought for in Cranbourne alley. Some “gentle reader,” who has paid a guinea and a half for you, has resold you for two-and-sixpence. For three shillings you may have the three volumes, “as good as new,” and the shopman, by his civility, pleased to be rid of it on the terms. If you would console yourself, however, buy Milton for one-and-sixpence, and credit your vanity with the eighteen-pence of the remainder.

The labyrinth of alleys between this and Covent Garden are redolent of poverty and pot-houses. In crossing St. Martin’s lane, life appears to have become suddenly a struggle and a calamity. Turbulent and dirty women are everywhere visible through the open windows; the half-naked children at the doors look already care-worn and incapable of a smile; and the men throng the gin-shops, bloated, surly, and repulsive. Hurry through this leprous spot in the vast body of London, and let us emerge in the Strand.

You would think London Strand the main artery of the world. I suppose there is no thoroughfare on the face of the earth where the stream of human life runs with a tide so overwhelming. In any other street in the world you catch the eye of the passer-by. In the Strand, no man sees another except as a solid body, whose contact is to be avoided. You are safe nowhere on the pavement without all the vigilance of your senses. Omnibuses and cabs, drays, carriages, wheelbarrows, and porters, beset the street. Newspaper-hawkers, pickpockets, shop-boys, coal-heavers, and a perpetual and selfish crowd dispute the sidewalk. If you venture to look at a print in a shop-window, you arrest the tide of passengers, who immediately walk over you; and, if you stop to speak with a friend, who by chance has run his nose against yours rather than another man’s, you impede the way, and are made to understand it by the force of jostling. If you would get into an omnibus you are quarrelled for by half-a-dozen who catch your eye at once; and after using all your physical strength and most of your discrimination, you are most probably embarked in the wrong one, and are going at ten miles the hour to Blackwell, when you are bound to Islington. A Londoner passes his life in learning the most adroit mode of threading a crowd, and escaping compulsory journeys in cabs and omnibuses; and dine with any man in that metropolis from twenty-five to sixty years of age, and he will entertain you, from the soup to the Curacoa, with his hair-breadth escapes and difficulties with cads and coach-drivers.

LONDON.

A Londoner, if met abroad, answers very vaguely any questions you may be rash enough to put to him about “the city.” Talk to him of “town,” and he would rather miss seeing St. Peter’s, than appear ignorant of any person, thing, custom, or fashion, concerning whom or which you might have a curiosity. It is understood all over the world that the “city” of London is that crowded, smoky, jostling, omnibus and cab-haunted portion of the metropolis of England which lies east of Temple Bar. A kind of debatable country, consisting of the Strand, Covent Garden, and Tottenham Court road, then intervenes, and west of these lies what is called “the town.” A transit from one to the other by an inhabitant of either, is a matter of some forethought and provision. If milord, in Carlton Terrace, for example, finds it necessary to visit his banker in Lombard street, he orders—not the blood bay and the cane tilbury which he is wont to drive in the morning—but the crop roadster in the cab, with the night harness, and Poppet his tiger in plain hat and gaiters. If the banker in Lombard street, on the contrary, emerges from the twilight of his counting-house to make a morning call on the wife of some foreign correspondent, lodging at the Clarendon, he steps into a Piccadilly omnibus, not in the salt-and-pepper creations of his Cheapside tailor, but (for he has an account with Stultz also for the west-end business) in a claret-colored frock of the last fashion at Crockford’s, a fresh hat from New Bond street, and (if he is young) a pair of cherished boots from the Rue St. Honore. He sits very clear of his neighbors on the way, and, getting out at the crossing at Farrance’s, the pastry cook, steps in and indulges in a soup, and then walks slowly past the clubs to his rendezvous, at a pace that would ruin his credit irrevocably if practised a mile to the eastward. The difference between the two migrations is, simply, that though the nobleman affects the plainness of the city, he would not for the world be taken for a citizen; while the junior partner of the house of Firkins and Co. would feel unpleasantly surprised if he were not supposed to be a member of the Clubs, lounging to a late breakfast.

There is a “town” manner, too, and a “city” manner, practised with great nicety by all who frequent both extremities of London. Nothing could be in more violent contrast, for example, than the manner of your banker when you dine with him at his country house, and the same person when you meet him on the narrow sidewalk in Throgmorton street. If you had seen him first in his suburban retreat, you would wonder how the deuce such a cordial, joyous, spare-nothing sort of good fellow could ever reduce himself to the cautious proportions of Change alley. If you met him first in Change alley, on the contrary, you would wonder, with quite as much embarrassment, how such a cold, two-fingered, pucker-browed slave of Mammon could ever, by any license of interpretation, be called a gentleman. And when you have seen him in both places, and know him well, if he is a favorable specimen of his class, you will be astonished still more to see how completely he will sustain both characters—giving you the cold shoulder, in a way that half insults you, at twelve in the morning, and putting his home, horses, cellar, and servants, completely at your disposal at four in the afternoon. Two souls inhabit the banker’s body, and each is apparently sole tenant in turn. As the Hampstead early coach turns the corner by St. Giles’s, on its way to the bank, the spirit of gain enters into the bosom of the junior Firkins, ejecting, till the coach passes the same spot at three in the afternoon, the more gentlemanly inhabitants. Between those hours, look to Firkins for no larger sentiment than may be written upon the blank lines of a note of hand, and expect no courtesy that would occupy the head or hands of the junior partner longer than one second by St. Paul’s. With the broad beam of sunshine that inundates the returning omnibus emerging from Holborn into Tottenham Court road, the angel of port wine and green fields passes his finger across Firkins’s brow, and presto! the man is changed. The sight of a long and narrow strip of paper, sticking from his neighbor’s pocket, depreciates that person in his estimation, he criticises the livery and riding of the groom trotting past, says some very true things of the architecture of the new cottage on the roadside, and is landed at the end of his own shrubbery, as pleasant and joyous-looking a fellow as you would meet on that side of London. You have ridden out to dine with him, and as he meets you on the lawn, there is still an hour to dinner, and a blood horse spatters round from the stables, which you are welcome to drive to the devil if you like, accompanied either by Mrs. Firkins or himself; or, if you like it better, there are Mrs. Firkins’s two ponies, and the chaise holds two and the tiger. Ten to one Mrs. Firkins is a pretty woman, and has her whims, and when you are fairly on the road, she proposes to leave the soup and champagne at home to equalize their extremes of temperature, drive to Whitehall Stairs, take boat and dine, extempore, at Richmond. And Firkins, to whom it will be at least twenty pounds out of pocket, claps his hands and says—“By Jove, it’s a bright thought! touch up the near pony, Mrs. Firkins.” And away you go, Firkins amusing himself the whole way from Hampstead to Richmond, imagining the consternation of his cook and butler when nobody comes to dine.