Dickens's England (29 page)

THE CITY CROWD

Not long ago, about the closing in of an evening in autumn, I sat at the large bow window of the D— Coffee House in London. . . . I had been amusing myself for the greater part of the afternoon, now in poring over advertisements, now in observing the promiscuous company in the room, and now in peering through the smoky panes into the street . . . .

By far the greater number of those who went by had a satisfied business-like demeanour, and seemed to be thinking only of making their way through the press. Their brows were knit, and their eyes rolled quickly; when pushed against by fellow-wayfarers they evinced no symptoms of impatience, but adjusted their clothes and hurried on. Others, still a numerous class, were restless in their movements, had flushed faces, and talked and gesticulated to themselves, as if feeling in solitude on account of the very denseness of the company around. When impeded in their progress, these people suddenly ceased muttering, but redoubled their gesticulations, and awaited, with an absent and overdone smile upon the lips, the course of the persons impeding them. If jostled, they bowed profusely to the jostler, and appeared overwhelmed with confusion. . . . They were undoubtedly noblemen, merchants, attorneys, tradesmen, stockjobbers – the Eupatrids [patricians] and the commonplaces of society – men of leisure and men actively engaged in affairs of their own – conducting business upon their own responsibility. . . .

The tribe of clerks was an obvious one; and here I discerned two remarkable divisions. There were the junior clerks of flash houses – young gentlemen with tight coats, bright boots, well-oiled hair and supercilious lips. Setting aside a certain dapperness of carriage, which may be termed
clerkism
for want of a better word, the manner of these persons seemed to me an exact facsimile of what had been the perfection of
bon ton
about twelve or eighteen months before. They wore the cast-off graces of the gentry – and this, I believe, involves the best definition of the class.

The division of the upper clerks of staunch firms, or of the ‘steady old fellows', it was not possible to mistake. These were known by their coats and pantaloons of black or brown, made to sit comfortably, with white cravats and waistcoats, brown solid-looking shoes, and thick hose or gaiters. They had all slightly bald heads, from which the right ears, long used to pen-holding, had an odd habit of standing off on end. I observed that they always removed or settled their hats with both hands, and wore watches with short gold chains of a substantial and ancient pattern. Theirs was the affectation of respectability – if indeed there be an affectation so honourable. . . .

The gamblers, of whom I descried not a few, were still more easily recognisable. They wore every variety of dress, from that of the desperate thimble-rig bully [precursor of the modern find-the-lady or shell-game man], with velvet waistcoat, fancy neckerchief, gilt chains and filigreed buttons, to that of the scrupulously inornate clergyman than which nothing could be less liable to suspicion. . . .

Descending in the scale of what is termed gentility, I found darker and deeper themes for speculation. I saw Jew pedlars, with hawk eyes flashing from countenances whose every other feature wore only an expression of abject humility; sturdy professional street beggars scowling upon mendicants of a better stamp, whom despair alone had driven forth into the night for charity; . . . modest young girls returning from long and late labour to a cheerless home, and shrinking more tearfully than indignantly from the glances of ruffians, whose direct contact, even, could not be avoided; women of the town of all kinds and of all ages – the unequivocal beauty in the prime of her womanhood, putting one in mind of the statue in Lucian with the surface of Parian marble and the interior filled with filth – the loathsome and utterly lost leper in rags – the wrinkled, bejewelled and paint-begrimed beldame, making a last effort at youth – the mere child of immature form, yet, from long association, an adept in the dreadful coquetries of her trade, and burning with a rabid ambition to be ranked the equal of her elders in vice; drunkards innumerable and indescribable . . . besides these, piemen, porters, coal-heavers, sweeps; organ-grinders, monkey-exhibitors, and ballad-mongers, those who vended with those who sang; ragged artisans and exhausted labourers of every description, and all full of a noisy and inordinate vivacity which jarred discordantly upon the ear, and gave an aching sensation to the eye.

As the night deepened, so deepened to me the interest of the scene . . . the rays of the gas-lamps, feeble at first in their struggle with the dying day, had now at length gained ascendancy, and threw over everything a fitful and garish lustre. All was dark yet splendid . . .

Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Man in the Crowd' (1840)

JOLLY SCENES

Anyone who has ever visited London must have been at least once in the Haymarket at night. It is a district in certain streets of which prostitutes swarm by night in their thousands. Streets are lit by jets of gas – something completely unknown in our country. At every step you come across magnificent public houses, all mirrors and gilt. They serve as meeting places as well as shelters. It is a terrifying experience to find oneself in that crowd. And what a mixture it is. You will find old women there and beautiful women at the sight of whom you stop in amazement. There are no women in the world as beautiful as the English. The streets can hardly accommodate the dense, seething crowd. . . . All this mass of humanity craves booty and hurls itself at the first comer with shameless cynicism. Glistening, expensive clothes and semi-rags and sharp differences in age – they are all there. A drunken tramp shuffling along in this terrible crowd is jostled by the rich and titled. You hear curses, quarrels, solicitations, and the quiet, whispered invitation of some still bashful beauty. And how beautiful they are sometimes, with their keepsake faces! I remember once I went into a ‘hall'. The music was blaring, people were dancing, a huge crowd was still milling around. The place was magnificently decorated. But gloom never forsakes the English even in the midst of gaiety; even when they dance they look serious, not to say sullen, making hardly any steps and then only as if in execution of some duty. . . . In the Haymarket I noticed mothers who brought their little daughters to make them ply that same trade. Little girls aged about twelve seize you by the arm and beg you to come with them. . . . Jolly scenes, altogether.

F. Dostoyevsky,
Winter Thoughts on Summer Impressions
(1863)

LONDON FOG

London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes – gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, indistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foothold at streetcorners, where tens of thousands of other foot-passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust of mud sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping in the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongy fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time – as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest, near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate monument for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation: Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln's Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

Charles Dickens,
Bleak House
(1853)

CRIES OF LONDON

Like a lark in the morning with early song,

Comes the sweep, with his
‘Sweep! soot, ho!'

Next the cherry-cheeked damsel, she trips it along,

‘Any milk, pretty maids below?'

‘Any
dust?
any
dust?'
goes the tinkling bell,

While sharp in each corner they look;

Next the Jew with his bag,
‘Any cloash to shell?'

‘Any
hare-skins,
or
rabbit-skins, cook?'

Let none despise

The merry, merry cries

Of famous London Town!

Thus the various
callings
in harmony blend –

‘Come, here is your nice
curds
and
whey
!'

‘The last dying speech of —.' ‘Old chairs to mend!'

‘Choice fruit, and a bill of the play!'

‘Here's three for a shilling, fine mackerel, O!'

‘Any phials, or broken flint glass?'

‘Come break me, or make me, before I go!'

‘D'ye want any fine
sparrow
-grass?'       [asparagus]

Let none despise

The merry, merry cries

Of famous London Town!

Pierce Egan,
Life in London
(1821)

TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK IN LONDON

Four o'clock a.m. – Billingsgate Market

New Billingsgate, with a real fountain in the centre, which during the day plays real water, is now in full life and bustle and activity. . . . This wharf is covered with fish, and the scaly things themselves are being landed with prodigious celerity, and in quantities almost as prodigious, from vessels moored in triple tier before the market. Here are Dutch boats that bring eels, and boats from the North Sea that bring lobsters, and boats from Hartlepool, Whitstable, Harwich, Great Grimsby and other English seaports and fishing stations. . . . As the clock strikes five, the auctioneers disperse to their various boxes. . . . Plaice, soles, haddocks (fresh), skate, maids [young skate or shad], cod and ling (the two last-mentioned fish in batches of threes and fours, with a string passed through the gills), are the only fish sold by auction. Fresh herrings are sold from the vessel by the long hundred (130). . . . Eels are sold by the ‘draft' of twenty pounds weight – the price of the draft varying from three shillings to fifteen. . . . Sprats are sold on board the ships by the bushel [eight gallons]. A ‘tindal' is a thousand bushels of sprats. When we came to consider the vast number of these oily, savoury little fishes that a bushel will contain, the idea of a ‘tindal' of them seems perfectly Gargantuan; yet many ‘tindals' of them are sold every week during the winter season – for the consumption of sprats among the poorer classes is enormous. What says the Muse of the Bull at Somers Town – what sweet stanzas issue from the anthology of Seven Dials?

O! 'tis my delight on a Friday night,

When sprats they isn't dear,

To fry a couple of score or so

Upon a fire clear.

They eats so well, they bears the bell

From all the fish I knows:

Then let us eat them while we can,

Before the price is rose.

Five o'clock a.m. – ‘The Times' newspaper

Hard by St Paul's, the cathedral of Anglicanism, is Printing House Square, the cathedral of Journalism, and in it hangs a bell to which Great Tom of Lincoln, Peter of York, the Kolokol of Moscow, and our own defunct ‘Big Ben' are but as tinkling muffineers. For though the sides of the bell are only paper, the clapper is the great public tongue; the booming sound that fills the city every morning, and, to use the words of Mr Walter Whitman, ‘utters its barbaric youp over the house-tops of creation', is the great Public Voice. . . .

The best way to reach the office is to take any turning to the south side of London Bridge, or the east of Bridge Street, Blackfriars, and then trust to chance. The probabilities are varied. Very likely you will find yourself entangled in a seemingly hopeless network of narrow streets . . . Never mind the suffocating odour of second-hand fish . . . the noises of dogs barking, of children that are smacked by their parents or guardians for crying, and then, of course, roar louder; of boys yelling the insufferable ‘Keemo Kimo', the hideous ‘Hoomtoomdoodendoo', and rattling those abhorrent instruments of discord, the ‘bones', of women scolding, quarelling or shrieking domestic calumnies . . . never mind the damages of hop, ‘hopscotch', ‘fly-the-garter', ‘thread-the-needle', ‘trip-the-baker', ‘tipcat', and ‘shove-halfpenny', for the carrying out of which exciting and amusing games the juvenile population entirely monopolise what spare strips of pavement there are. Trust on, be not afraid, keep struggling; and it is five hundred to one that you will eventually turn up Printing House Square, over against the ‘Times' office. . . .