Could reach, with here and there a sail just skipping
In sight, then lost amid the forestry
Of masts; a wilderness of steeples peeping
On tip-toe through their sea-coal canopy;
A huge, dun cupola, like a foolscap crown
On a fool's head—and there is London town."
Up to the time of Sir Richard Whittington, in the sixteenth century, the burning of coal in London was considered such a nuisance that it was punished by death. A dispensation to burn coal was first made in favor of Whittington, and this innovation on his part has affected the great city, of which he was four times Lord Mayor, infinitely more than the success of his celebrated venture in bringing up and selling a cat, which enabled him to lay the foundation of other investments. Yet the story of the cat is known to boys and girls the world over, while the story of the coal is known to comparatively few, even of their elders.
Coal serves the same purposes in London that it does elsewhere, of course. But, while elsewhere it warms only thousands of people, and makes steam for only thousands of factories, locomotives, and steamboats, here it warms and works for more than five millions. The output of smoke from this unparalleled consumption of coal is, of course, something enormous, and when we consider that the weather itself is frequently, perhaps I may say generally, dull, heavy and thick, with an amount of clouds and rain unknown to our brilliant American climate, it is not strange that the fogs of London are the thickest and most dangerous in the world, sometimes producing complete darkness at midday, and necessitating the lighting of the gas, as though it were midnight, and at other times producing a peculiar gloom, which is so impervious to light itself that the traffic of the streets has to be stopped for hours. Nor is it strange that the city is begrimed to an extraordinary degree from one end to the other.
The Æsthetic Value of Soot.
I have a friend in America, whom I sometimes jestingly call an "Anglomaniac," because he admires Great Britain and her belongings so much. I once accused him of trying to convince me that the sky was bluer and the grass greener in Canada than in the United States—and who speaks of the blackness of the London buildings as "richness." It is interesting to find that he is supported in this view by some of the best writers on London. Hare, for instance, in speaking of St. Paul's Cathedral, emphasizes this point, "Sublimely impressive in its general outlines, it has a peculiar sooty dignity all its own, which, externally, raises it immeasureably above the fresh, modern-looking St. Peter's at Rome. G. A. Sala says, in one of his capital papers, that it is really the better for 'all the incense which all the chimneys since the time of Wren have offered at its shrine, and are still flinging up every day from their foul and grimy censers.' Here and there only is the original grey of the stone seen through the overlaying blackness." Nathaniel Hawthorne, too, says, "It is much better than staring white; the edifice would not be nearly so grand without this drapery of black." By the way, the whole cost of St. Paul's, which was nearly four million dollars, was paid by a tax on every chaldron of coal brought into the port of London, "on which account it is said that the cathedral has a special claim of its own to its smoky exterior."