[I should properly in a footnote, but prefer in brackets, to qualify the expression “hovel,” as applied to London tradesmen’s shops at this time, 1712-20. The majority, indeed, merit no better appellation: the windows oft-times are not glazed, albeit the sign may be an elaborate and even artistic performance, framed in curious scroll-work, and costing not unfrequently a hundred pounds. The exceptions to the structural poverty of the shops themselves are to be found in the toymen’s—mostly in Fleet Street,—and the pastrycooks’—mainly in Leadenhall. There is a mania for toys; and the toyshop people realize fortunes. Horace Walpole bought his toy-villa at Strawberry Hill—which he afterwards improved into a Gothic doll’s-house—of a retired Marchand de Joujoux. The toy-merchants dealt in other wares besides playthings. They dealt in cogged dice. They dealt in assignations and billet-doux. They dealt in masks and dominos. Counsellor Silvertongue may have called at the toyshop coming from the Temple, and have there learnt what hour the countess would be at Heidegger’s masquerade. Woe to the wicked city! Thank Heaven we can go and purchase Noah’s arks and flexible acrobats for our children now, without rubbing shoulders with Counsellor Silvertongue or Lord Fanny Sporus, on their bad errands. Frequented as they were by rank and fashion, the toyshops threw themselves into outward decoration. Many of these shops were kept by Frenchmen and Frenchwomen, and it has ever been the custom of that fantastic nation to gild the outside of pills, be the inside ever so nauseous. Next in splendour to the toyshops were the pastrycooks. Such a bill as can be seen of the charges for fresh furnishing one of these establishments about Twelfth Night time! “Sash windows, all of looking-glass plates; the walls of the shop lined up with galley-tiles in panels, finely painted in forest-work and figures; two large branches of candlesticks; three great glass lanterns; twenty-five sconces against the wall; fine large silver salvers to serve sweetmeats; large high stands of rings for jellies; painting the ceiling, and gilding the lanterns, the sashes, and the carved work!” Think of this, Master Brook! What be your Cafés des Mille Colonnes, your Véfours, your Vérys, your Maisons-dorées, after this magnificence? And at what sum, think you, does the stern censor, crying out against it meanwhile as wicked luxury and extravagance, estimate this Arabian Nights’ pastrycookery? At three hundred pounds sterling! Grant that the sum represents six hundred of our money. The Lorenzos the Magnificent, of Cornhill and Regent Street, would think little of as many thousands for the building and ornamentation of their palaces of trade. Not for selling tarts or toys though. The tide has taken a turn; yet some comfortable reminiscences of the old celebrity of the city toy and tart shops linger between Temple Bar and Leadenhall. Farley, you yet delight the young. Holt, Birch, Button, Purssell, at your sober warehouses the most urbane and beautiful young ladies—how pale the pasty exhalations make them!—yet dispense the most delightful of indigestions.]
So he must have scraped this apprenticeship money together, Dominie Hogarth: laid it by, by cheeseparing from his meagre school fees, borrowed it from some rich scholar who pitied his learning and his poverty, or perhaps become acquainted with Ellis Gamble, who may have frequented the club held at the “Eagle and Child,” in the little Old Bailey. “A wonderful turn for limning has my son,” I think I hear Dominie Hogarth cry, holding up some precocious cartoon of William’s. “I doubt not, sir, that were he to study the humanities of the Italian bustos, and the just rules of Jesuit’s perspective, and the anatomies of the learned Albinus, that he would paint as well as Signor Verrio, who hath lately done that noble piece in the new hall Sir Christopher hath built for the blue-coat children in Newgate Street.” “Plague on the Jesuits,” answers honest (and supposititious) Mr. Ellis Gamble. “Plague on all foreigners and papists, goodman Hogarth. If you will have your lad draw bustos and paint ceilings, forsooth, you must get one of the great court lords to be his patron, and send him to Italy, where he shall learn not only the cunningness of limning, but to dance, and to dice, and to break all the commandments, and to play on the viol-di-gamby. But if you want to make an honest man and a fair tradesman of him, Master Hogarth, and one who will be a loyal subject to the Queen, and hate the French, you shall e’en bind him ’prentice to me; and I will be answerable for all his concernments, and send him to church and catechize, and all at small charges to you.” Might not such a conversation have taken place? I think so. Is it not very probable that the lad Hogarth being then some fourteen years old, was forthwith combed his straightest, and brushed his neatest, and his bundle or his box of needments being made up by the hands of his loving mother and sisters, despatched westward, and with all due solemnity of parchment and blue seal, bound ’prentice to Mr. Ellis Gamble? I am sure, by the way in which he talks of the poor old Dominie and the dictionary, that he was a loving son. I know he was a tender brother. Good Ellis Gamble—the lad being industrious, quick, and dexterous of hand—must have allowed him to earn some journeyman’s wages during his ’prentice-time; for that probation being out, he set not only himself, but his two sisters, Mary and Ann, up in business. They were in some small hosiery line, and William engraved a shop-card for them, which did not, I am afraid, prosper with these unsubstantial spinsters any more than did the celebrated lollipop emporium established in The House with the Seven Gables. One sister survived him, and to her, by his will, he left an annuity of eighty pounds.
Already have I spoken of the Leicester Square gold and silver smith’s style and titles. It is meet that you should peruse them in full:—
So to Cranbourn Street, Leicester Fields, is William Hogarth bound for seven long years. Very curious is it to mark how old trades and old types of inhabitants linger about localities. They were obliged to pull old Cranbourn Street and Cranbourn Alley quite down before they could get rid of the silversmiths, and even now I see them sprouting forth again round about the familiar haunt; the latest ensample thereof being in the shop of a pawnbroker—of immense wealth, I presume, who, gorged and fevered by multitudes of unredeemed pledges, has suddenly astonished New Cranbourn Street with plate-glass windows, overflowing with plate, jewellery, and trinkets; buhl cabinets, gilt consoles, suits of armour, antique china, Pompadour clocks, bronze monsters, and other articles of virtù. But don’t you remember Hamlet’s in the dear old Dædalean, bonnet-building Cranbourn Alley days?—that long low shop whose windows seemed to have no end, and not to have been dusted for centuries; those dim vistas of dish-covers, coffee biggins and centre-pieces. You must think of Crœsus when you speak of the reputed wealth of Hamlet. His stock was said to be worth millions. Seven watchmen kept guard over it every night. Half the aristocracy were in his debt. Royalty itself had gone credit for plate and jewellery at Hamlet’s. Rest his bones, poor old gentleman, if he be departed. He took to building and came to grief. His shop is no more, and his name is but a noise.
In our time, Cranbourn Street and Cranbourn Alley were dingy labyrinths of dish-covers, bonnets, boots, coffee-shops, and cutlers; but what must the place have been like in Hogarth’s time? We can have no realizable conception; for late in George the Third’s reign, or early in George the Fourth’s, the whole pâté of lanes and courts between Leicester Square and St. Martin’s Lane had become so shamefully rotten and decayed, that they half tumbled, and were half pulled down. The labyrinth was rebuilt; but, to the shame of the surveyors and architects of the noble landlord, on the same labyrinthine principle of mean and shabby tenements. You see, rents are rents, little fishes eat sweet, and many a little makes a mickle. Since that period, however, better ideas of architectural economy have prevailed; and, although part of the labyrinth remains, there has still been erected a really handsome thoroughfare from Leicester Square to Long Acre. As a sad and natural consequence, the shops don’t let, while the little tenements in the alleys that remain are crowded; but let us hope that the example of the feverish pawnbroker who has burst out in an eruption of jewellery and art fabrics, may be speedily followed by other professors of bricabrac.
Gay’s Trivia, in miniature, must have been manifest every hour in the day in Hogarth’s Cranbourn Alley. Fights for the wall must have taken place between fops. Sweeps and small coalmen must have interfered with the “nice conduct of a clouded cane.” The beggars must have swarmed here: the blind beggar, and the lame beggar, the stump-in-the-bowl, and the woman bent double: the beggar who blew a trumpet—the impudent varlet!—to announce his destitution;—the beggar with a beard like unto Belisarius, the beggar who couldn’t eat cold meat, the beggar who had been to Ireland and the Seven United Provinces—was this “Philip in the tub” that W. H. afterwards drew?—the beggar in the blue apron, the leathern cap, and the wen on his forehead, who was supposed to be so like the late Monsieur de St. Evremonde, Governor of Duck Island; not forgetting the beggar in the ragged red coat and the black patch over his eye, who by his own showing had been one of the army that swore so terribly in Flanders, and howled Tom D’Urfey’s song, “The Queene’s old souldiers, and the ould souldiers of the Queene.” Then there was the day watchman, who cried the hour when nobody wanted to hear it, and to whose “half-past one,” the muddy goose that waddled after him, cried “quack.” And then there must have been the silent mendicant, of whom Mr. Spectator says (1712), “He has nothing to sell, but very gravely receives the bounty of the people for no other merit than the homage due to his manner of signifying to them that he wants a subsidy.”[7] Said I not truly that the old types will linger in the old localities? What is this silent mendicant but the “serious poor young man” we have all seen standing mute on the edge of the kerb, his head downcast, his hands meekly folded before him, himself attired in speckless but shabby black, and a spotless though frayed white neckerchief?
Mixed up among the beggars, among the costermongers and hucksters who lounge or brawl on the pavement, undeterred by fear of barrow-impounding policemen; among the varlets who have “young lambs to sell”—they have sold those sweet cakes since Elizabeth’s time;—among the descendants and progenitors of hundreds of “Tiddy Dolls,” and “Colly Molly Puffs;” among bailiffs prowling for their prey, and ruffian cheats and gamesters from the back-waters of Covent Garden; among the fellows with hares-and-tabors, the matchsellers, the masksellers—for in this inconceivable period ladies and gentlemen wanted vizors at twelve o’clock at noon—be it admitted, nevertheless, that the real “quality” ceased to wear them about the end of William’s reign—among the tradesmen, wigs awry, and apron-girt, darting out from their shops to swallow their matutinal pint of wine, or dram of strong waters; among all this tohu-bohu, this Galimatias of small industries and small vices, chairmen come swaggering and jolting along with the gilded sedans between poles; and lo! the periwigged, Mechlin-laced, gold-embroidered beau hands out Belinda, radiant, charming, powdered, patched, fanned, perfumed, who is come to Cranbourn Alley to choose new diamonds. And more beaux’ shins are wounded by more whalebone petticoats, and Sir Fopling Flutter treads on Aramanta’s brocaded queue; and the heavens above are almost shut out by the great projecting, clattering signs. Conspicuous among them is the “Golden Angel,” kept by Ellis Gamble.