Dickens's England (30 page)

Later, and later still. The last report from the late debate in the Commons has come in; the last paragraph of interesting news, dropped into the box by a stealthy penny-a-liner, has been eliminated from a mass of flimsy on its probation, and for the most part rejected; the foreign telegrams are in type; the slaughtering leaders glare in their ‘chases', presaging woe and disaster to ministers tomorrow; the last critic, in a white neckcloth, has hurried down with his column-and-a half on the last new spectacle at the Princess's. . . . Nothing is wanting: city correspondence, sporting intelligence, markets, state of the weather, prices of stocks and railway shares, Parliamentary summary, law and police reports, mysterious advertisements, and births, deaths and marriages. Now let the nations wonder, and the conductors of the mangy little continental fly-sheets of newspapers hide their heads in shame, for the ‘Times' – the mighty ‘Times' – has gone to bed. . . .

At five o'clock a.m., the first phase of the publication of the ‘Times' newpaper commences. In a large bare room – something like the receiving ward of an hospital – with a pay counter at one end, and lined throughout with parallel rows of bare deal tables, the ‘leading journal' first sees the light of publicity. The tables are covered with huge piles of newspapers spread out the full size of the sheet. These are, with dazzling celerity, folded by legions of stout porters, and straightway carried to the door, where cabs, and carts, and light express phaeton-like vehicles, are in readiness to convey them to the railway stations. . . . At about half-past seven the cohorts of newsvendors, infantry and cavalry, gradually disperse, and the ‘Times' is left to the agonies of its second edition.

Six o'clock a.m. – Covent Garden Market

All night long the heavily-laden waggons – mountains of cabbages, cauliflowers, broccoli, asparagus, carrots, turnips and seakale; Egyptian pyramids of red-huddled baskets full of apples and pears, hecatombs of cherries, holocausts of strawberry pottles, their wicker bosoms crimsoned by sanguinolent spots; and above all, piles, heaps, – Pelions on Ossas, Atlases on Olympuses, Chimborazos on Himalayas, Mount Aboras on Mont Blancs – of
PEAS
, have been creaking and rumbling and heavily wheezing along suburban roads, and through the main streets of the never-sleeping city. . . .

But sweeter even than the smell of the peas, and more delightful than the odour of the strawberries, is the delicious perfume of the innumerable flowers which crowd the north-western angle of the market, from the corner of King Street to the entrance of the grand avenue. . . . There are simply hundreds upon hundreds of flower-pots, blooming with roses and geraniums, with pinks and lilacs, with heartsease and fuchsias. There are long boxes full of mignonette and jessamine; there are little pot vases full of peculiar roses with strange names; there are rose-trees, roots and all, reft from the earth by some floral Milo who cared not for the rebound. . . .

Young sempstresses and milliner's girls, barmaids and shopwomen, pent up all day in a hot and close atmosphere, have risen an hour or two earlier, and made a party of pleasure to come to Covent Garden market to buy flowers. It is one of heaven's mercies that the very poorest manage somehow to buy these treasures . . . Crowds more of purchasers are there yet around the violet baskets; but these are buyers to sell again. Wretched-looking little buyers are they, half-starved Bedouin children, mostly Irish, in faded and tattered garments, with ragged hair and bare feet. . . . They cry violets! They cried violets in good Master Herrick's time. . . .

It is past six o'clock, and high 'Change in the market. What gabbling! what shouting! what rushing and pushing! what confusion of tongues and men and horses and carts! . . . Bow Street is blocked by a triple line of costermongers' ‘shallows', drawn by woebegone donkeys; their masters are in the market purchasing that ‘sparrergrass' which they will so sonorously cry throughout the suburbs in the afternoon. . . . Early coffee-shops and taverns are gorged with customers, for the Covent Gardeners are essentially jolly gardeners, and besides, being stalwart men, are naturally hungry and athirst after their night's labour. There are public-houses in the market itself, where they give you hot shoulder of mutton for breakfast at seven o'clock in the morning!

Seven o'clock a.m. – Under way; and a Parliamentary train

Potboys, rubbing their eyes, take down the shutters of taverns in leading thoroughfares, and then fall to rubbing the pewter pots till they assume a transcendent sheen. Within, the young ladies who officiate in the bar, and who look very drowsy in their curl-papers and cotton print dresses, are rubbing the pewter counters and the brasswork of the beer-engines, the funnels and the whisky noggins, washing the glasses, polishing up the mahogany, cutting up the pork pies which Mr Watling's man has just left, displaying the Banbury cakes and Epping sausages under crystal canopies. . . . I like the barmaid, for she is often pretty, always civil, works about fourteen hours a day for her keep and from eighteen to twenty pounds a year, is frequently a kinless orphan out of that admirable Licensed Victuallers' School, and is, in nine cases out of ten, as chaste as Diana. . . .

The Prime Minister is dressed, and poring over a savage leader in the ‘Times', denouncing his policy, sneering at his latest measure, and insulting him personally in a facetious manner. . . .

There is Millbank, where the boarders and lodgers, clad in hodden [coarse woollen] grey, with masks on their faces and numbers on their backs, have been up and stirring since six. And there, north-west of Millbank, is the Palace, almost as ugly as the prison, where dwells the Great Governess of the Land. She is there, for you may see the standard floating in the morning breeze; and at seven in the morning she too is up and doing. . . . There are despatches to be read; private and confidential letters to foreign sovereigns to be written; the breakfast, perchance, of the little princes and princesses to be superintended; the proofs, probably, of the last Royal etching or princely photograph to be inspected; a new pony to be tried in the riding-house; a new dog to be taught tricks; a host of things to do. Who shall say? . . . For my part, I often wonder how kings and queens and emperors find time to go to bed at all. . . .

I think the Euston Square Terminus is, for its purpose, the handsomest building I have ever seen, and I have seen a few railway stations. . . . Let us follow the crowd of third-class passengers onto the vast platform. There the train awaits them, puffing and snorting, and champing its adamantine bit, like some great iron horse of Troy suddenly gifted with life and power of locomotion. . . . Very few first or even second-class carriages are attached to the great morning train. The rare exceptions seem to be placed there as a concession to the gentilities, or the respectabilities, or the ‘gigabilities' as Mr Carlyle would call them, than with any reference to their real utility in a journey to the north. . . .

But what a contrast to the quietude of the scarcely patronised first and second class
wagons
are the great hearse-like caravans in which travel the teeming hundreds who can afford to pay but a penny a mile! . . . What a motley assemblage of men, women and children, belonging to callings multifariously varied, yet all marked with the homogenous penny-a-mile stamp of poverty! Sailors with bronzed faces and tarry hands, and those marvellous tarpaulin pancake hats, stuck, in defiance of all the laws of gravity, at the back of their heads; squat, squarely-built fellows, using strange and occasionally not very polite language, but full of a simple, manly courtesy to all the females, and marvellously kind to the babies and little children; gaunt American sailors in red worsted shirts, with case-knives suspended to their belts, taciturn men expectorating frequently, and when they do condescend to address themselves to speech, using the most astounding combination of adjective adjurations, relating chiefly to their limbs and their organs of vision; railway navvies going to work at some place down the line, and obligingly franked thither for that purpose by the company; pretty servant-maids going to see their relatives; Jew pedlars; Irish labourers in swarms; soldiers on furlough, with the breast of their scarlet coatees open, and disclosing beneath linen of an elaborate coarseness of texture – one might fancy so many military penitents wearing hair tunics; other soldiers in full uniform with their knapsacks laid across their knees, and their muskets – prudently divested of the transfixing bayonets – which the old women in the carriage are marvellously afraid will ‘go off', disposed beside them, proceeding to Weedon barracks under the command of a staid Scotch corporal, who reads a tract, ‘Grace for Grenadiers' or ‘Powder and Piety', and takes snuff; journeymen mechanics with their tool-baskets; charwomen, servants out of place, stablemen, bricklayers' labourers, and shopboys.

Eight o'clock a.m. – St James's Park; opening shop

At this early eight o'clock in the morningtide, see, perambulating the Mall, a tremendous ‘swell'. No fictitious aristocrat, no cheap dandy, no Whitechapel brick or Bermondsey exquisite, no apprentice who has been to a masquerade disguised as a gentleman, can this be. Aristocracy is imprinted on every lineament of his moustached face, in every crease of his superb clothes, in each particular horsehair of his flowing plume. He is a magnificent creature, over six feet in height, with a burnished helmet, burnished boots, burnished spurs, burnished sabre, burnished cuirass – burnished whiskers and moustache. He shines all over, like a meteor, or a lobster which has been kept a
little
too long, in a dark room. He is young, brave, handsome and generous; he is the delight of Eaton Square, the cynosure of the Castor and Pollux Club, the idol of the corps de ballet of Her Majesty's Theatre, the pet of several most exclusive Puseyite circles in Tyburnia, the mirror of Tattersall's, the pillar and patron of Jem Bundy's ratting, dog-showing, man-fighting, horse-racing and general sporting house in Cat and Fiddle Court, Dog and Duck Lane, Cripplegate. Cruel country, cruel fate, that compel Lieutenant Algernon Percy Plantagenet, of the Royal Life Guards, the handsomest man in his regiment, and heir to £9,000 a year, to be mounting guard at eight o'clock in the morning! . . .

There is another ceremony performed with much clattering solemnity of wooden panels, and iron bars, and stanchions, which occurs at eight o'clock in the morning. 'Tis then that the shop-shutters are taken down. The great ‘stores' and ‘magazines' of the principal thoroughfares gradually open their eyes; apprentices, light porters, and where the staff of assistants is not very numerous, the shopmen, release the imprisoned wares, and bid the sun shine on good family ‘souchong' [tea], ‘fresh Epping sausages', ‘Beaufort collars', ‘guinea capes', ‘Eureka shirts' and ‘Alexandre harmoniums'. In the smaller thoroughfares, the proprietor often dispenses with the aid of apprentice, light porter and shopman – for the simple reason that he never possessed the services of any assistant at all – and unostentatiously takes down the shutters of his own chandler's, greengrocer's, tripe, or small stationery shop. In the magnificent linen-drapery establishments of Oxford and Regent Streets, the vast shop-fronts, museums of fashion in plate-glass cases, offer a series of animated
tableaux
of
poses plastiques
in the shape of young ladies in morning costume, and young gentlemen in whiskers and white neckcloths, faultlessly complete as to costume, with the exception that they are yet in their shirtsleeves, who are accomplishing the difficult and mysterious feat known as ‘dressing' the shop window.

Nine o'clock a.m. – Clerks

If the morning be fine, the pavement of the Strand and Fleet Street looks quite radiant with the spruce clerks walking down to their offices, governmental, financial and commercial. Marvellous young bucks some of them are. These are the customers, you see at a glance, whom the resplendent wares in the hosiers' shops attract, in whom those wary industrials find avid customers. These are the dashing young parties who purchase the pea-green, the orange, and the rose-pink gloves; the crimson braces, the kaleidoscopic shirt-studs, the shirts embroidered with dahlias, death's heads, racehorses, sunflowers, and ballet girls; the horseshoe, fox-head, pewter-pot-and-crossed-pipes, willow-pattern plate and knife-and-fork pins. These are the glasses of city fashion and the mould of city form, for whom the legions of fourteen, of fifteen, of sixteen and of seventeen shilling trousers, all unrivalled, patented and warranted are made; for these ingenious youths coats with strange names are devised, scarves and shawls of wondrous pattern and texture despatched from distant Manchester and Paisley . . . These mostly turn off in the Strand, are in the Admiralty or Somerset House. As for the government clerks of the extreme West End – the patricians of the Home and Foreign Offices – the bureaucrats of the Circumlocution Office, in a word –
they
ride down to Whitehall or Downing Street in broughams or on park hacks. Catch them on omnibuses, or walking on the vulgar pavement, forsooth! . . .

‘Every road,' says the proverb, ‘leads to Rome'; every commercial ways leads to the Bank of England. And there, in the midst of that heterogeneous architectural jumble . . . the vast train of omnibuses . . . with another great army of clerk martyrs outside and inside, their knees drawn up to their chins, and their chins resting on their umbrella handles, set down their loads of cash-book and ledger fillers. What an incalculable mass of figures there must be collected in those commercial heads! What legions of £.s.d.! . . . They plod away to their gloomy wharves and hard-hearted counting-houses, where the chains from great cranes wind round their bodies, and the mahogany of the desks enters into their souls. . . .

Ten o'clock a.m. – The Court of Queen's Bench

Parliament Street and Palace Yard are fair to see this pleasant morning in term time. The cause list for all the courts is pretty full, and there is the prospect of nice legal pickings. The pavement is dotted with barristers' and solicitors' clerks carrying blue and crimson bags plethoric with papers. Smart attorneys, too, with shoe-ribbon, light vests, swinging watch-guards and shiny hats (they have begun to wear moustaches even, the attorneys!) bustle past, papers beneath their arms, open documents in their hands, which they sort and peruse as they walk. The parti-coloured fastenings of these documents flutter, so that you would take these men of law for so many conjurors about to swallow red and green tape. And they do conjure, and to a tune, the attorneys! . . .