Dickens's England (31 page)

The great solicitors and attorneys, men who may be termed the princes of law, who are at the head of vast establishments in Bedford Row and Lincoln's Inn Fields, and whose practice is hereditary, dash along in tearing cabs . . . The briefless barristers would like to patronise cabs, but they can't afford those luxuries. They walk down Parliament Street arm in arm, mostly men with bold noses of the approved Slawkenbergius pattern, and very large red or sandy whiskers. . . .

In with ye, then, my merry men all, to the Hall of Westminster, for the Court of Queen's Bench is sitting. It is not a handsome court; it is not an imposing court. . . . The bench looks but an uncomfortable settle! The floor of the court is a ridiculous little quadrangle of oak, like a pie-board; the witness box is so small that it seems capable of holding nothing but the shooting ‘Jack' of our toyshop experience; and the jury-box has a strong family likeness to one of the defunct Smithfield sheep-pens, where sit the intelligent jury, who have an invincible propensity, be the weather hot or cold, for wiping their foreheads with blue cotton pocket handkerchiefs. . . . But the usher has sworn them in that they ‘shall well and truly try' the matter before them; and try it they must. . . .

But only wait till the chiefs on both sides have concluded their eloquent bamboozling of the jury; mark my Lord Owlett settle his wig and his petticoats, then sort and unfold the notes he has lazily (or so it seemed) scrawled from time to time, and in a piping, quavering voice begin to read from them. You marvel at the force, the clarity, the perspicuity of the grand old man; you stand abashed before the intellect, clear as crystal, at an age when man's mind as well as his body is oft-time but labour and sorrow; you are astonished that so much vigour, so much shrewdness, so much eloquence, should exist in that worn and tottering casket.

Eleven o'clock a.m. – Street Life

So sure as the clock of St Martin's strikes eleven, so sure does my quiet street become a pandemonium of discordant sounds. My teeth are on edge to think of them. The ‘musicianers' . . . begin to penetrate through the vaster thoroughfares and make their hated appearance at the head of my street. First, Italian organ-grinder, hirsute, sunburnt, and saucy, who grinds airs from the ‘Trovatore' six times over, follows with a selection from the ‘Traviata' repeated half a dozen times, finishes up with the ‘Old Hundredth' and the ‘Postman's Knock', and then begins again. Next, shivering Hindu, his skin apparently just washed in walnut juice, with a voluminous turban, dirty white caftan, worsted stockings and hobnailed shoes, sings a dismal ditty in the Hindustani language, and beats the tomtom with fiendish monotony. Next comes a brazen woman in a Scotch cap, to which is fastened a bunch of rusty black feathers, apparently culled from a mourning coach past service. She wears a faded tartan kilt, fleshings [a close-fitting flesh-coloured garment], short calico trews, a velveteen jacket, tin buckles in her shoes, and two patches of red brick-dust on her haggard cheeks, and is supposed to represent a Scottish highlander. She dances an absurd fling, interpolated occasionally with a shrill howl to the music of some etiolated bagpipes screeded by a shabby rogue of the male sex, her companion, arrayed in similar habiliments. Next come the acrobats – drum, clarinet and all. You know what these nuisances are like, without any extended description on my part. Close on their heels follows the eloquent beggar, with his numerous destitute but scrupulously clean family, who has, of course, that morning parted with his last shirt. Then a lamentable woman with a baby begins to whimper ‘Old Dog Tray'. Then swoop into the street an abominable band of ruffians, six in number. They are swarthy villains, dressed in the semblance of Italian goatherds, and are called, I believe,
pifferari.
They play upon a kind of bagpipes – a hideous pig-skin-and-walking-stick-looking affair, and accompany their droning by a succession of short yelps and a spasmodic pedal movement that would be a near approach to a sailor's hornpipe if it did not bear a much closer resemblance to the wardance of a wild Indian. Add to these the Jews crying ‘Clo'!', the man who sells hearthstones and the woman who buys rabbit-skins, the butcher, the baker, and the boys screaming shrill Nigger melodies and rattling pieces of slate between their fingers in imitation of the ‘bones', and you will be able to form an idea of the quietude of our street.

Noon – The Justice Room at the Mansion House

Did it never strike you, in a criminal court of assize – ‘the judges all ranged, a terrible show', the solemn clerk of the assigns gazing over the indictment, the spectators almost breathless with excited curiosity, rays from opera glasses refracted from the gallery, Regent Street bonnets and artificial flowers relieving the dark mass of the menfolk's dress, the bar bewigged, the eloquent advocate for the defence thundering forth genteel philippics against the eloquent counsel for the prosecution – did it never strike you, I say, what a terrible fuss and bother, and calling on Jupiter to lift a waggon wheel out of a rut, what a waste of words, and show, and ceremonial all this became when its object, the End to all these imposing means, was one miserable creature in the dock, with spikes, and rue, and rosemary before him, accused of having purloined a quart pot? As for the prisoner who is this day arraigned before the mighty Lord Mayor – but first stand on tiptoe. There he is, God help him and us all! A miserable, wizened, ragged, unkempt child, whose head, the police reports will tell us tomorrow, ‘scarcely reached to the railing of the dock'. He has been caught picking pockets. It is not his first, his second, his third offence. He is an incorrigible thief. The great Lord Mayor tells him so with a shake of his fine head of hair. He must go to jail. To jail with him. He has been there before. It is the only home he ever had. It is his preparatory home for the hulks [prison ship]. The jail nursing-mother to thousands, and not so stonyhearted a stepmother as the streets. He is nobody's child . . .

One o'clock p.m. – Dock London

I speak of Dock London in its entirety: of the London and St Katherine's, of the East and West India, and the Victoria Docks – what huge reservoirs are they of wealth and energy and industry! See those bonding warehouses, apoplectic with the produce of three worlds, congested with bales of tobacco and barrels of spices; with serons [animal-hide packages] of cochineal and dusky, vapid-smelling chests of opium from Turkey or India; with casks of palm-oil and packages of vile chemicals, ill-smelling oxides and alkalis dug from the bowels of mountains thousands of miles away, and which, ere long, will be transformed into glowing pigments and exquisite perfumes . . . See the sugar warehouses, dripping, perspiring, crystallising with sugar in casks, and bags, and boxes (free-grown sugar in the first two; slave-grown sugar in boxes). How many million cups of tea will be sweetened with these cases when the sugar is refined! . . . And the multitudinous, almost uncataloguable, mass of other produce: shellac, sulphur, gum-benzoin . . . muslin from Smyrna; flour from the United States . . . timber from Canada and Sweden . . . saffron, magnesia, leeches, basket-work and wash-leather! The ships vomit these on the dock quays, and the warehouses swallow them up again like ogres. . . .

But the ships! Who shall describe those white-sailed camels? Who shall tell in graphic words of the fantastic interlacing of their masts and rigging, of the pitchy burliness of their bulging sides; of the hives of human ants who in barges and lighters surround them, or swarm about their cargo-cumbered decks? Strange sight to see, these mariners from every quarter of the globe; of every variety of stature and complexion, from the swarthy Malay to the almost albino Finn; in every phase of picturesque costume, from the Suliote of the fruitship in his camise and capote, to the Yankee foremast-man in his red shirt, tarry trousers, and case-knife hung by a strand of lanyard to his girdle. But not alone of the maritime genus are the crowds who throng the docks. There are lightermen, stevedores, bargees and ‘lumpers'; there are passengers flocking to their narrow berths on board emigrant ships; there are entering and wharfingers' clerks travelling about in ambulatory counting-houses mounted on wheels; there are land rats and water rats, ay, and some that may be called pirates of the long-shore, and over whom it behoves the dock policemen and the dock watchmen to exercise a somewhat rigid supervision . . .

But a clanging bell proclaims the hour of one, and the dock labourers, from Tower Hill to the far-off Isle of Dogs, are summoned back to their toil. Goodness and their own deplenished pockets only know how they have been lunching, or on what coarse viands they have fed since noon. Many have not fed at all.

Two o'clock p.m. – Regent Street and High 'Change

Regent Street is an avenue of superfluities – a great trunk-road in Vanity Fair. Fancy watchmakers, haberdashers and photographers; fancy stationers, fancy hosiers and fancy staymakers; music shops, shawl shops, jewellers, French glove shops, perfumery and point lace shops; confectioners and milliners; creamily, these are the merchants whose wares are exhibited in this Bezesteen [bazaar] of the world.

Now, whatever can her ladyship, who has been shopping in Regent Street, have ordered the stalwart footman, who shut the carriage door with a resounding bang, to instruct the coachman to drive her to the Bank for? . . . She has a very simple reason for going into the City: Sir John, her liege lord, is on 'Change. He will be there from half-past two to three, at which hour High 'Change, as it may be called, closes, and she intends to call for him, and drive him to the West End again. . . .

Going on 'Change seems to be but a mechanical and mercantile occupation, and one that might with safety be entrusted to some confidential clerk; yet it is not so; and the greatest magnates of commerce and finance, the Rothschilds, the Barings, the Huths, the legions of London's merchant princes, are to be found chaffering in the quadrangle every day. In the old Exchange, they used to point out the particular column against which the elder Rothschild was wont to lean. They called the old man, too – marvellous diplomatist in financial combinations as he was – the Pillar of the Exchange. . . .

Three o'clock strikes – or rather chimes – from the bell-tower of Mr Tite's new building. The quadrangle of the Exchange is converted into an accurate model of the Tower of Babel. The mass of black-hatted heads – with here and there a white one, like a fleck of foam on the crest of a wave – eddies with violence to and fro. Men shout, and push, and struggle, and jostle, and shriek bargains into one another's ears. A stranger might imagine that these money and merchandise dealers had fallen out, and were about to fight; but the beadle of the Exchange looks on calmly; he knows that no breach of the peace will be committed, and that the merchants and financiers are merely singing their ordinary paean of praise to the great god Mammon.

Three o'clock p.m. – Debenham and Storr's Auction Rooms

Perhaps you would like to know what they are selling by auction at Debenham and Storr's this sultry July afternoon. . . . And such a sale! Before I have been in the room a quarter of an hour, I witness the knocking down of at least twenty dress coats . . . six satin dresses, twelve boxes of artificial flowers, a couple of opera glasses, a set of ivory chessmen, eighteen pairs of patent leather boots . . . nine church services richly bound, a carved oak cabinet, a French bedstead . . . three boxes of watercolours, eight pairs of stays, a telescope, a box of cigars, an enamel miniature of Napoleon . . . a parrot cage, a Turkey carpet, a tent by Benjamin Edgington, two dozen sheepskin coats warranted from the Crimea, a silver-mounted dressing-case . . . a cornet-à-piston, a buhl inkstand . . . a poonah-painted screen, a papier-maché workbox, an assortment of variegated floss-silk, seven German flutes, an ivory casket, two girandoles for wax candles, an ebony fan, five flat-irons and an accordion . . .

The articles sold this afternoon are all
pawnbrokers' pledges unredeemed,
and this is one of Messrs Debenham and Storr's quarterly sales, which the law hath given, and which the court awards. . . . There is not much difficulty in discerning who the people are who are really bidding and really buying. Here they come, bagged and bundled, and gesticulating and jabbering. . . . They nod and chuckle, and utter Hebrew ejaculations, and seem, all the while that the sale is proceeding, to be in an overboiling state of tremor and nervous excitement. A sale by auction is to them as good – better – than a play.

Four o'clock p.m. – The Park

Rotten Row, into which I wander . . . and where, leaning over the wooden rails, I contemplate the horsemen and horsewomen caracoling along the spongy road with admiration . . . I am glad to say that I am not by any means alone as I lean over the rails. Whether it is that they can't or won't ride, I know not; but I find myself surrounded by groups of exquisites, who, to judge by their appearance, must be the greatest dandies in London. . . . Such peg-top trousers! such astounding waistcoat patterns! such lofty heels to the varnished boots! such Brobdignagian moustaches and whiskers! . . . Ladies, too – real ladies – promenade in an amplitude of crinoline difficult to imagine and impossible to describe; some of them with stalwart footmen following them, whose looks beam forth conscious pride at the superlative toilettes of their distinguished proprietresses; some escorted by their bedizened beaux. Little foot-pages; swells walking three, sometimes four abreast; gambolling children; severe duennas; wicked old bucks . . . And the green trees wave around, around, around; and the birds are on the boughs; and the blessed sun is in the heavens, and rains gold upon the beauteous Danaës, who prance and amble, canter and career, on their graceful steeds throughout the length of Rotten Row.

The Danaës! the Amazons! the lady cavaliers! the horsewomen! can any scene in the world equal Rotten Row at four in the afternoon, and in the full tide of the season? . . . Rotten Row is a very Peri's garden for beautiful women on horseback. . . . Watch the sylphides as they fly or float past in their ravishing riding-habits and intoxicatingly delightful hats: some with the orthodox cylindrical beaver with the flowing veil; others with roguish little wide-awakes, or pertly cocked cavaliers' hats and green plumes. . . .