We have here described the worst class of London lodging-houses, such as are kept by unprincipled persons who have no other means of living except what they make by their apartments and by robbing their lodgers. A stranger cannot wholly avoid these man-traps; but, if he take our advice, he will stay at some decent coffee-house or tavern until he gets settled, and not venture into apartments, unless those who have them to let can be recommended by such acquaintance as he is pretty sure to meet with when he has once found employment. Poor people do not rob each other in this manner; it is that hungry class which “apes gentility”—who “smile, and rob while they do smile.”
There are thousands of places to be found in London where it is their study to make a lodger feel “at home;” where a man may sit and sun himself in the smiles of a warm domestic hearth, and, though a stranger, never know what it is to feel lonely. But these are not houses in which people live alone by letting lodgings, neither will you find more than one or two lodgers under such a roof. Changes, such as they foresaw not, compel them to add a few shillings a week to their income—for they have lived so many years in the same house that it would make them miserable to leave it. A son is in a situation, or a daughter has got married, and they have no longer any use for the rooms they occupied; or the landlord cannot do so much work as he formerly did. These, and a hundred other causes, open the door to the most comfortable of all London lodgings, and fortunate is the stranger who finds a home under such a roof. Such people would scorn to take away the value of a pin that was not their own; and the only discomfort you feel is in the fear that they do not charge enough to remunerate them for their kindness and attention.
Young men and “fast men!” if you are fortunate enough to dwell in such a home, where their circumstances will not allow them to keep a servant, but where a modest daughter honours you by her attendance, respect her as you would a sister. Remember, also, that it is poverty which compels the servant to wait upon you, and that it is your duty to respect her for those services. Remember that
“He prayeth best who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.”
Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner.
Although the old “memories” that float about Fleet-street would fill a volume, we must not pass on without glancing at St. Dunstan’s Church, though it is a new building, and the figures, so often gazed on in “wonderment” by the gaping crowds of other days, no longer step out in their wonted place to strike the hours. For the origin of these wooden “puppets,” see Douglas Jerrold’s St. James’s and St. Giles’s, in which he reads as severe a lecture to hard-hearted overseers as the old ballad of The Babes in the Wood does to “wicked uncles.” Before the statue of Queen Elizabeth, which stands over the doorway fronting Fleet-street, a poor simple-hearted Irishwoman was one morning, not long ago, observed kneeling, and repeating her prayers: she mistook it for the figure of the Virgin. This statue is supposed to be the only relic preserved when Ludgate (one of the city-gates that stood on Ludgate-hill,) was taken down in 1760. It ornamented the old church of St. Dunstan, as it now does the present one.
Nor must we omit a word or two before we pass through Temple-Bar about the Cock Tavern, to which our living poet laureate Alfred Tennyson does “most resort,” according to his own confession, in “Will Waterproof’s lyrical monologue made at the Cock,” in an old box
“larded with the steam
Of thirty thousand dinners.”
Many of the old taverns in Fleet-street—Dr. Johnson’s favourite “Mitre” for example—have rich recollections of the wit and wisdom of the wits and sages of former days. With many of these our readers are doubtless familiar, but they perhaps never heard of the “Cock” before reading Tennyson’s poems. Nevertheless there is a fact in the history of this old tavern worth knowing. The bird that gives name to this “haunt of hungry sinners” was, according to our laureate,
“Of a larger egg
Than modern poultry drop,
Stepped forward on a firmer leg,
And crammed a plumper crop.”
He was, indeed, a regal fowl, for he not only coined copper money, but stamped it with his own effigy and circulated it amongst his customers in the form of tokens. If a man who had newly dined required change out of the money for his dinner, he received it, not in pence, but in copper cocks, which were afterwards duly honoured by the worthy landlord, who gave to their bearer full value in generous food and liquor. This currency was so extensive that when, during the ravages of the Great Plague in London, the door of the Cock was closed, “when the plump head waiter” and all other subordinates were dismissed, and the landlord had fled to the country to escape the scourge, public notice was given of the time when the house would be again opened, and that the copper tokens would be duly honoured. One of these is still carefully preserved as “a relic of the olden time.”