Warrington smoking his cutty pipe, and writing his articles—the fine-hearted fellow, the unfortunate gentleman, the unpedantic scholar, who took Pendennis by the hand and introduced him to Grub street when that young unfortunate came to the end of his means. George Warrington teaches us a new lesson in manhood, in patience, in self-abnegation. His lot is full of sorrow, his cherished ambitions are impossible, through no fault of his own, but it is not in him to surrender to “the dull gray life and apathetic end,”—his contentment is the repose of a generous nature, his cheeriness with his pipe and his work springs out of a calmly philosophic mind, a satisfied conscience, a profound faith, and when we pass through Lamb’s court, not least in our affections is the shadow of him.
“The man of letters cannot but love the place which has been inhabited by so many of his brethren, and peopled by their creations as real to us at this day, as the authors whose children they were,” and says Thackeray. “Sir Roger de Coverley walking in the Temple garden, and discoursing with Mr. Spectator about the beauties in hoops and patches who are sauntering over the grass, is just as lively a figure to me, as old Samuel Johnson rolling through the fog with the Scotch gentleman at his heels, on their way to Mr. Goldsmith’s chambers in Brick court, or Harry Fielding, with inked ruffles and a wet towel round his head, dashing off articles at midnight for the Covent Garden Journal, while the printer’s boy is asleep in the passage.”
Leaving the Temple, we once more enter Smithfield, to look for the site of the old Fleet prison, the scene of many episodes in the stories of Dickens. It was in this strange place, that the brilliant, but thriftless Captain Shandon lived, “one of the wisest, wittiest, and most incorrigible of Irishmen;” here Pendennis found him sitting on a bed, in a torn dressing gown, with a desk on his knees: here a prisoner for debt, he indited the prospectus of the Pall Mall Gazette, which was so called, he said, because its editor was born in Dublin, and the sub-editor (excellent Jack Finucane) at Cork; because the proprietor lived in Paternoster Row, and the paper was published in Catherine Street, Strand. This imaginary title of Thackeray’s was not the only one afterwards adopted by a real newspaper. He writes of the Whitehall Review as an opposing print, and that is now the name of a successful London journal.
The Fleet is a thing of the past, and the attributes of Captain Shandon have no inheritors in the press of to-day. A knight armed cap-à-pie in Cheapside, would not be a more antiquated figure, than the boozy scholar editing a reputable journal in the cell of a prison. Journalism has taken off its soft hat and shabby clothes; it has mended its erring and improvident ways, and put on the manners of polite society. Not in a tap-room, with jorums of hot whiskey, Welsh rabbits, and devilled chops does the modern scribe regale himself. He has a club somewhere in Adelphi, or St. James’, where he presents himself in sedate evening dress, he turns pale at the very mention of supper, and, instead of singing old English songs, sadly compares notes with his fellow-dyspeptics. A vulgar public-house, or low music hall stands on the site of the Haunt and the Back Kitchen. When Warrington, Pendennis, Tom Sarjeant, Clive Newcome, and Fred. Bayham frequented the Haunt, and joined in the diversions of the literary democracy, there was a superstition among them, that the place vanished at the approach of daybreak, that when Betsy turned the gas off at the door lamp, as the company went away, the whole thing faded into mist—the door, the house, the bar, Betsy, the beer-boy, Mrs. Nokes, and all. Whether this was so or not, it has now vanished, not for a day, but for ever, like Captain Shandon, and the wild Bohemianism of his time. [42]
V.
It is only a minutes’ walk from the corner of Fleet Lane, to the street of booksellers, Paternoster Row, in which the rival publishers, Bungay and Bacon lived—Bacon in an ancient low-browed building, with a few of his books displayed in the windows under a bust of my Lord Verulam; and Bungay in the house opposite, which was newly painted, and elaborately decorated in the style of the seventeenth century, “so that you might have fancied stately Mr. Evelyn passing over the threshold, or curious Mr. Pepys examining the books in the windows.” The Row, so called—as financiers arrogantly call Wall Street, the Street—is not wider than an alley way, and in this respect it is exactly as it was when Warrington introduced Pendennis to the editor of the Parlor Table Annual, wherein his verses were published. But though its breadth has not been increased, the old buildings on both sides of it have given place in many instances to towering new ones, five and six stories high, which shut out the light, and keep the editors, compilers, printers, engravers, and book-binders, who are the principal laborers of the Row, in an all-day gloom. Both Bungay and Bacon had their domestic establishments over their shops, and their wives, who were sisters, thus had an opportunity to insult one another by looks and mute signs from their opposite windows. Bungay and Bacon, and their belligerent spouses are now out of the trade, and the annual Souvenirs and Keepsakes which made a part of their business, belong to an extinct form of literature. The Row is full of Grub Street curiosities; but Lady Fanny Fantail, Miss Bunion, and the Honorable Percy Popinjay are seen within its precincts no more, and if they still exist, they probably find a new field for their distinguished services in the society papers.
Let anyone strike out which way he will from Fleet Street, he is sure to find himself in the presence of something which reminds him of Dickens, near some object which his humor has made famous, or which answers to one of his luminous descriptions.
The slums between the Strand and Soho, and between Smithfield and Clerkenwell, were fertile to him, and not a gamin there knew the winding alleys, and crisscross streets better than the gentleman with the high complexion, the sparkling eye, the iron-gray beard, the well-cut dress, and the brisk step, who might have been seen speeding through them at all sorts of unusual hours. One day, he was heard of in Ratcliff Highway, or among the riverside shanties of Poplar, and the next, among the bird shops of Seven Dials, or in the courts of Lambeth. When we contrast the little we have found of Thackeray in the neighbourhood through which we have just been, with the variety and suggestiveness of the reminiscences of Dickens in the same region, our search seems disappointing.
As we have said Thackeray was not a novelist of low life. “Perhaps,” he says in the preface to Pendennis: “the lovers of excitement may care to know that this book began with a very precise plan, which was entirely put aside. Ladies and Gentlemen, you were to have been treated, and the writer’s and publisher’s pocket benefited by the recital of the most active horrors. What more exciting than a ruffian (with many admirable virtues) in St. Giles, visited constantly by a young lady from Belgravia? What more stirring than the contrasts of society? The mixture of slang and fashionable language? The escapes, the battles, the murders? . . . . The exciting plan was laid aside (with a very honorable forbearance on part of the publishers) because on attempting it, I found that I failed from want of experience of my subject; and never having been intimate with any convict in my life, and the manners of ruffians and gaol-birds being quite unfamiliar to me, the idea of entering into competition with M. Eugene Sue was abandoned.”