What I Remember, Volume 1

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

I feel no confidence that years have rendered me safe from the first fault which my excellent master thus warned me against; but I am sure they have cured me of the second.

I remember too, in connection with those Keppel Street days, to have heard my mother speak of an incident which somewhat curiously illustrates the ways and habits of a time already so far left behind us by a whole world of social changes. It was nothing more than a simple visit to the theatre to hear Mrs. Siddons in Lady Macbeth. But this exploit involved circumstances that rendered it memorable for other reasons besides the intense gratification derived from the performance. In the first place “the pit” was the destination to which my father and mother were bound; not altogether, I take it, so much for the sake of the lower price of admission (though my father was a sufficiently poor and a sufficiently careful man to render this a consideration), as from the idea that the pit offered the best vantage ground for a thoroughly appreciative and critical judgment of the performance. For when we children were taken to see a pantomime we went, as I remember, to the boxes. But this visit to the pit involved the necessity of being at the theatre at two in the afternoon, and then standing in the crowd till, if I rightly remember, six in the evening! Of course food had to be carried. And each man there did his best to support and assist the lady under his charge. But the ordeal must have been something tremendous, and the amount of enthusiasm needed to induce a lady to face it something scarcely to be understood at the present day. My mother used to relate that sundry women were carried out from the crowd at the theatre door fainting.

Before closing this Keppel Street chapter of my existence I may mention one or two circumstances of the family life there which illustrate the social habits of those days. The family dinner-hour was five. There were no dinner napkins to be seen; they were perhaps less needed by clean-shaven chins and lips. Two tallow candles, requiring to be snuffed by snuffers lying in a little plated tray ad hoc every now and then, partially illumined the table, but scarcely at all the more distant corners of the room. Nor were any more or better lights used during the evening in the drawing-room. The only alternative would have been wax lights at half-a-crown a pound—an extravagance not to be thought of. Port and sherry were always placed on the shining mahogany table when the cloth was withdrawn, and no other wine. Only on the occasion of having friends to dinner, the port became a “magnum” of a vintage for which my father’s cellar was famous, and possibly Madeira might be added.

Perhaps it may be worth noting here as an incident illustrating change of manners that I vividly remember my mother often singing to us children in Keppel Street an old song about an “unfortunate Miss Bayly,” who had been seduced by a “Captain bold of Halifax, who dwelt in country quarters.” Now a purer or more innocent-minded woman than my mother did not live, nor one less likely to have suffered aught that she imagined to be unfitted virginibus puerisque to reach the ears of her children. Nor do I suppose that we had the faintest notion of the nature of the evil inflicted on the unfortunate Miss Bayly by the Captain bold, nor that we were in any degree scandalised by the subsequent incident of the parish priest being bribed by “a one pound note” to accord Christian burial to the corpse of a suicide, which he had previously refused to bury. It may be feared that quite as many “unfortunates” share the fate of Miss Bayly either in town or country quarters at the present day as in the early days of the century. But I take it that the old world ditty in question would not be selected for nursery use at the present day.

I could chatter on about those childish days in Keppel Street, and have been, I am afraid, too garrulous already. What I have said, however, is all illustrative of the social changes seventy years have wrought, and may at the same time serve to show that I started on my octogenarian career a sturdy, hardy little mortal, non sine Dîs animosus infans.

CHAPTER II.

These fragmentary recollections of our childish days may have served to suggest some hints of the changes which have made the London of the present day almost—perhaps quite—as different from the London of the second decade of this century as the latter was from “the town” in the days of George the First. But it is difficult for middle-aged people of the present day to form any vivid and sufficient conception of the greatness of them. Of course the mere material ameliorations and extensions have so metamorphosed the localities that I, on returning after long years to the London I once knew, topographically at least, so well, find myself in a new town of which the geography is in some parts strange to me, with just so much of the old landmarks remaining as serves to suggest false clues to the labyrinth and render the matter more puzzling. But the changes in ways and habits and modes of living and feeling and thinking are still greater and of much more profound significance.

To say that there were in those days no omnibuses and no cabs, and of course no railways, either under ground or over it, is a simple matter, and very easily stated. But it is not easy to picture to oneself the whole meaning and consequences of their non-existence. Let any Londoner, with the exception of the comparatively small number of those who use carriages of their own, think what his life would be, and the transaction of his day’s work or of his day’s pleasure, without any means of locomotion save his own legs or a hackney coach, which, at a cost of about five times the cab hire of the present day, used to shut him up in an atmosphere like that of a very dirty stable, and jolt him over the uneven pavement at a pace of about four miles an hour. Dickens has given in his own graphic way more than one sketch of the old hackney coach. I do not think that I ever saw a hackney coach that had been built for the work it was engaged in as such. They were heavy, old-fashioned, rickety vehicles, which had become too heavy, too old-fashioned, too rickety to be retained in the service of the families to which they had once belonged. They were built for the most part with hammer cloths, and many of them exhibited huge and gorgeously-painted armorial bearings on the panels. (By the by, why did not the officials of the Inland Revenue come down on the proprietors of these venerable vehicles for the use of armorial bearings? I take it that the march of modern intelligence, acuens mortalia corda, would impel their successors of the present day to do so.) The drivers of those carriages were “in a concatenation accordingly”—shabby, slow, stupid, dirty, and often muddled with drink. We hear occasionally nowadays of a cabman “driving furiously” when drunk. The wording of the charge smacks of another era. Not all the gin in London could have stimulated the old “Jarvey” to drive his skeletons of horses furiously. He was not often incapacitated by drink, but very frequently muddled. If it was necessary for him to descend from his hammer-cloth for the purpose of opening the door of his carriage, which the presence of the “waterman” of the stand for the most part rendered unnecessary, he was a long time about it, and a longer in clambering back to his seat, loaded as he generally was in all weathers with an immense greatcoat of many capes, weatherbeaten out of all resemblance to its original colour. The “watermen,” so-called, as we know from high authority, “because they opens the coach doors,” were nevertheless surrounded by their half-a-dozen or so of little shallow pails of water, as they stood by the side of the curbstone near a coach stand. They were to the hackney-coachman what the bricklayer’s labourer is to the bricklayer. And a more sorry sight can hardly be conceived than the “stand” with its broken-down carriages, more broken-down drivers, and most of all broken-down horses, which supplied us in the days when we “called a coach, and let a coach be called, and he that calls it, let him be the caller,” as it stands written in a page almost as much (but far less deservedly) forgotten as the hackney coach.

Already in my boyhood “Oxford Road” was beginning to be called “Oxford Street.” But my father and his contemporaries always used the former phrase. At the end of Oxford Street was Tyburn turnpike; not a mere name, but a veritable barrier closing not only the continuation of the Oxford Road but also the Edgware Road, turning at right angles to the north of it. And there stood one turnpike-man to receive the toll and give tickets in return for the whole of the Oxford Street traffic! I can see him now, with his low-crowned hat, a straw in his mouth, his vigilant eye, and the preternatural quickness and coolness, as it seemed to me, with which, standing in the centre between his two gates, he took the halfpence and delivered the tickets. He had always an irreproachably clean white apron with pockets in the front of it, one for halfpence and one for tickets.

I have spoken of my delight in the spectacle of the coaches starting from and arriving at the White Horse Cellar in Piccadilly. But there were many other aspects of London life in the days before railroads in which the coaches made a leading feature. One of the sights of London for country cousins was to see the mails starting at 8 P.M. from the Post Office. To view it under the most favourable circumstances, one went there on the anniversary of the king’s birthday, when all the guards had their scarlet coats new, and the horses’ heads were all decked with flowers. And truly the yard around the Post Office offered on such an occasion a prettier sight than all the travelling arrangements of the present day could supply. Of course I am speaking of a time a little subsequent to my earliest recollections. For I can remember when the huge edifice in Saint Martin’s le Grand was built; and remember well, too, the ridicule and the outcry that was raised at the size of the building, so enormously larger, it was supposed, than could possibly be needed! But it has now long since been found altogether insufficient for the needs of the service.