Sir Jeffery Dunstan’s descendants.—Sir Jeffery’s Hut.—Whitechapel Obelisk.—Dipping for old wigs.
To oblige Mr. Hone I set out in pursuit of “Miss Nancy,” who is now called “lady Ann,” thinking she might be able to furnish me with particulars regarding her father, “sir Jeffery,” and the “Garrett election.” Near the sign of the “Grave Maurice,” in the “road side” of Whitechapel, I addressed myself to a clean, elderly looking woman, whose brow bespoke the cares of three score years at least, and asked her if she could inform me whether sir Jeffery’s daughter, “Miss Nancy” was living or not? “Lord bless you, sir!” said she, “living! aye; I saw her pass with her cats-meat barrow not five minutes ago; and just now I saw running by, a little girl, the fourth generation from sir Jeffery.” I soon ascertained that “lady Ann” lived with her son and his wife, at No. 7, North-street, opposite the Jews’ burying ground, where I knocked boldly, and, to my surprise, was answered by a fine dark little girl of eleven, that her grandmother could not be seen, because she was “very drunk.”
At seven in the evening, by appointment I called, and saw the same little girl again, and was told her father was “drunk also,” and that her mother had instructed her to say, that many similar applications had been made, and “a deal of money offered,” for the information I sought; which spoke in plain terms they had nothing to communicate, or if they had, a good price must be paid for it.
Recollecting that I had been informed that a good likeness of “sir Jeffery” was to be seen at the “Blind Beggar,” near the turnpike, and supposing it not unlikely, from that circumstance, that the landlord of that house might know more of the man than I did myself, I resorted thither. The bar was crowded with applicants for “full proof,” and “the best cordials.” I took my station at the lower end, and calling for a glass of ale, it was served me by Mr. Porter himself, when I took the opportunity of asking him if he had not a portrait of sir Jeffery Dunstan in his parlour; he said there had been one there till lately, but that during the alterations it was removed. On my right hand was a man with a pint of ale and a glass in his hand, and a woman with him, seated on the top of a barrel. At this juncture the man called out to the landlord, “is it not somebody that ‘I knows,’ that you are talking about?” An answer was given in the affirmative. I looked at the man, and perceiving that he was about my own age, observed that his years, like mine, did not warrant much personal knowledge of the person of whom we had been speaking. “Why,” said Mr. Porter, smiling, “that is his grandson; that is sir Jeffery’s grandson.” I, too, could not help smiling on calling to mind that this was the very man that was “also drunk,” and that this, his money-loving wife, who had denied me an interview, I was addressing. I told them the nature of my visit to their house. She said her daughter had informed her of every thing. I then, to use a nautical phrase, “boxed all points of the compass,” without effect. They evidently knew nothing, or did not care to know; the wife, however, told me that her sister, who was either dead, or “abroad,” knew “all sir Jeffery’s speeches from the beginning to end;” and the husband recounted ’squire Liptrap’s kindness in many times escorting and protecting, by a file of soldiers, his grandfather to his home; and said, moreover, that he himself was blamed for not claiming the goold (gold) picked up with the foundling which is now accumulating in the funds of St. Dunstan’s parish.
I urged, “that none of us had any thing to boast of in point of ancestry, and that were I sir Jeffery’s grandson, my great grandfather’s great natural talent and ready flow of wit would induce me to acknowledge him as my great ancestor under any circumstances.” This produced nothing more than that his grandfather, “though he could neither read nor write, could speak many languages.” I left them—the husband, as we say, “top heavy,” the wife expostulating to get him home, and at the same time observing they must be up by three o’clock in the morning “to be off with the cart.”
On my road homewards, I turned up Court-street to “Ducking-pond side,” to take a view of “sir Jeffery’s hut;” it is adjoining his late patron’s distillery, who permitted him to live there rent free. The door is bricked up, and it now forms part of a chandler’s shop. The thick black volumes of smoke from the immense chimnies were rolling above my head to the west, while beneath, in the same direction, came the pestiferous stench from those deadly slaughtering places for horses, that lie huddled together, on the right. It brought to my mind Mr. Martin’s story in the “House,” of the poor starving condemned “animals” and the “truss of hay.” I turned hastily away from the scene, and I conjure thee, reader, go not near it, for it breathes
“Pestilence, rottenness, and death.”
In my preceding notice of “sir Jeffery and his ass,” perhaps I have not been sufficiently explicit. In the “season,” he would sometimes carry the best of fruit in his hampers for sale, as well as his “bag of wigs.” The allusion to the “duck and green peas,” &c. was a sort of joke, which sir Jeffery used constantly, in his witty way, to put off to “standers-by” when “lady Ann,” or “Miss Dinah,” came from their “lady mother” to inform him that his dinner was ready.
An elderly friend of mine perfectly well recollects sir Jeffery’s “one-eared ass,” his hamper of russetings, and sir Jeffery himself, with his back placed against the side of the stone obelisk which then stood at the corner of the road, opposite Whitechapel church rails. There he kept the boys and girls at bay with the ready use of his hands; while his ready tongue kept the elder folks constantly laughing. But where is the stone obelisk. Gone—like sir Jeffery. The spirit of destruction, miscalled improvement, wantonly threw it down. It fell in the pride of its age and glory, before Time’s effacing hand had marked it. Away with destroyers, I say! They may have bettered the condition of the pathway by substituting an iron railway for one of wood, but have they done so by removing that excellent unoffending barrier, the “pillar of stone,” and placing in its stead a paltry old cannon choaked with a ball?
I recollect in my boyish days I never passed that “obelisk” without looking up, and reading on its sculptured sides, “twelve miles to Romford,” “seventeen to Epping.” Then it told the traveller westward, the exact distance to the Royal Exchange and Hyde Park-corner. All beyond it, in an easterly direction, to my youthful fancy, was fairy land; it spoke of pure air, green fields, and trees; of gentle shepherdesses, and arcadian swains. Delightful feelings, which only those who are born and bred in towns can fully enter into! It had originally a tongue of another description, for it seemed to say, in legible characters, “this is the east-end corner of the metropolis,”—at least it marked it as strongly as ever Hyde Park-corner did the west. Pardon the digression, reader, and I will conclude.