Fulham Park Road is now where Fulham Lodge stood, and the ground is partly built on, the rest is to be let for building.
This walk is exactly three miles and a half from Hyde Park Corner; and what an Irishman would call the iron mile-stone stood exactly opposite to Ivy Lodge, until placed against the brick wall immediately beyond the railings.
Ivy Lodge was for some years the residence of Rudolph Ackermann, a name, as a printseller, known (it is not
using too broad a word to say) throughout the world, and whose representatives still carry on this business in Regent Street.
Ackermann was a remarkable man. He was born in 1764, at Stollberg, near Schneeberg, in Saxony; and, having been bred a coach-builder, upon visiting England shortly before the French Revolution, found employment as a carriage-draughtsman, which led to his forming the acquaintance of artists, and becoming a print-publisher in London. The French refugees, whose necessities obliged them to exercise their acquirements and talents as a means of support, found in Mr. Ackermann’s shop a repository for the exhibition and sale of decorative articles, which elevated this branch of business to an importance that it had never before assumed in England. Ackermann’s name stands prominently forward in the early history of gas and lithography in England, and he must be remembered as the introducer of a species of illustrated periodicals, by the publication of the ‘Forget-Me-Not;’ to which, or to similar works, nearly every honoured contemporary name in the whole circle of British literature have contributed, and which have produced a certain, but advantageously a questionable, influence upon the Fine Arts.
After the battle of Leipzig, Mr. Ackermann publicly advocated the cause of the starving population of many districts of Germany, in consequence of the calamities of war, with so much zeal and success, that a parliamentary grant of £100,000 was more than doubled by a public subscription. In the spring of 1830, when residing at Ivy Lodge, he experienced a sudden attack of paralysis; and a
change of air was recommended by his medical attendants. This led to Mr. Ackermann’s removal to Finchley, where he died on the 30th of March, 1834.
Having now arrived at Fulham, we will in the next chapter accompany the reader in a walk through that ancient village.
