Dickens's England (32 page)

Only, from time to time, while you gaze upon these fair young daughters of the aristocracy disporting themselves on their fleet coursers, you may chance to have with you a grim town Diogenes, who has left his tub for an airing in the park; and who, pointing with the finger of a hard buckskin glove towards the graceful
écuyères,
will say: ‘Those are not all countesses or earls' daughters, my son. She on the bay, yonder, is Laïs. Yonder goes Aspasia, with Jack Alcibiades on his black mare Timon: see, they have stopped at the end of the ride to talk to Phryne in her brougham. Some of those dashing delightful creatures have covered themselves with shame, and their mothers with grief, and have brought their fathers' grey hair with sorrow to the grave. All is not gold that glitters, my son.'

Five o'clock p.m. – The Club and the Van

A modern London club is the very looking-glass of the time; of the gay, glittering, polished, improved utilitarian, material age. . . . A member may live on the fatness of the land, and like a lord of the creation, for twenty guineas' entrance fee, and a subscription of ten guineas a year. He has a joint-stock proprietorship in all this splendour; in the lofty halls and vestibules; in the library, coffee-rooms, newspaper and card-rooms; in the secretary's office in the basement, and in the urbane secretary himself; in the kitchen, fitted with every means and appliance, every refinement of culinary splendour, and from whence are supplied to him at cost price dishes that would make Lucullus wild with envy, and that are cooked for him, besides, by the great
chef
from Paris, Monsieur Nini Casserole . . . A man may, if he be so minded, make his club his home; living and lounging luxuriously, and grazing to his heart's content on the abundant club-house literature, and enjoying the conversation of club friends. . . . Thus it is that, in the present generation, has been created a type peculiar thereunto – the clubman. . . .

About five p.m. the ladies and gentlemen who, through the arbitrations of Mr Hall, Mr Jardine or Mr Henry, stipendiary magistrates, have settled their little differences with Justice, are conveyed to those suburban residences in which, for the benefit of their health and in the interests of society, it is judged necessary,
par qui de droit,
they shall for a stated term abide. The vehicle which bears them to their temporary seclusion enjoys different names, some technical, others simply humorous. By some it is called ‘Her Majesty's Carriage', from the fact that the crown and the initials ‘V.R.' are painted on the panels. More far-fetched wags call it ‘Long Tom's Coffin'. The police and the reporters, for shortness, call it ‘The Van' . . . In that celebrated collection of dishonest epics, the ‘Drury Lane Garland', in fit companionship with ‘Sam Hall', ‘County Jail', ‘Seven years I got for prigging [stealing]', and the ‘Leary Man [crafty or con-man]', I find a ballad on the subject of the Bow Street chariot of disgrace, of which the refrain is

Sing Wentilator, separate cell,

It's long, and dark, and hot as well.

Sing locked-up doors – git out if you can,

There's a crusher
[policeman]
outside the prisoners' wan.

And now the passengers destined for the lugubrious journey come tumbling out of the court door, and down the steps towards the van. Some handcuffed, some with their arms folded, or their hands thrust in their pockets in sullen defiance; some hiding their faces in their grimy palms for very shame. There are women as well as men, starved sempstresses and brazen courtesans in tawdry finery. There are wicked greybeards, and children on whose angel faces the devil has already set his indelible hand. . . .

The Pharisee thanked Heaven that he was not ‘as that publican'. Down on your knees, well-nurtured, well-instructed youth, and thank Heaven for the parents and friends, for the pastors and masters, to whose unremitting care and tenderness, from your cradle upwards, you owe it that you are not like one of these . . . trundled with manacles on your wrists into this moving pest-house, whose halfway house is the jail, and whose bourne is the gallows.

Six o'clock p.m. – To Dinner

I am on the top of an omnibus, looking down on the people in the broughams and the cabs. Admire that youthful exquisite, curled and oiled, and scented into a sufficient semblance of the ‘Nineveh Bull' . . . That gold-rimmed lorgnon you see screwed into his face, to the damaging distortion of his muscles, will not be removed therefrom – not during dinner, nor during the ‘little music', the dancing, the supper, the shawling, the departure and the drive home to his chambers. He will eat in his eyeglass, and drink in his eyeglass, and flirt and polk in his eyeglass. I am almost persuaded that he will sleep in his eyeglass . . .

Down and down again, glance from the omnibus summit, and see in that snug, circular-fronted brougham a comfortable couple, trotting out to dinner in the Alpha Road, St John's Wood. Plenty of lobster sauce they will have with their salmon, I wager; twice of boiled chicken and white sauce they will not refuse, and oyster patties will they freely partake of. A jovial couple, rosy, chubby, middle-aged, childless, I opine . . . There is another couple, stiff, starched, angular, acrimonious-looking . . . After dinner the men will talk dreary politics, redolent of stupid retrogression, and the women will talk about physic and the whooping-cough. Yet another couple – husband and wife? A severe swell, with drooping moustaches of immense length, but which are half whiskers. Transparent deceit! A pretty lady – gauzy bonnet and artificial flowers, muslin jacket, skirts and flounces oozing out at the sides of the carriage; hair
à la
Eugenie, and a Skye terrier with a pink ribbon. I know what
this
means.

Seven o'clock p.m. – A Theatre Green-Room, ‘Behind the Scenes'

The walls are of a pale sea-green, of the famous Almack's pattern; and the floor is covered with a carpet of remarkably curious design and texture, offering some noteworthy specimens of worsted vegetation run to seed . . . In one corner is a pianoforte with keys that are yellow and worn down, like the teeth of an old horse. There is a cheval glass, too, in tolerably good repair . . .

There are yet a few green-rooms where the genus ‘swell' still finds a rare admittance. See here a couple in full evening costume, talking to the pretty young lady in the low-necked dress on the settee; but the swell is quite a fish out of water in the green-room of these latter days. . . . Now and then a wicked old lord of the unrighteous evil-living school of British peers, now happily becoming rarer and rarer every day, will come sniggering and chuckling into a green-room, hanging on the arm of the manager, with whom he is on the most intimate terms, and who ‘My Lords' him most obsequiously. He rolls his scandalous old eyes in his disreputable, puckered face, seeking some pretty, timid, blushing little flower, whom he may blight with his Upas gaze, and then totters away to his stage-box.

Eight o'clock p.m. – A Pawnbroker's Shop

Now let us plunge into a labyrinth of narrow streets to attain our unfashionable goal, for, upon my word, our destination is a pawnbroker's shop.

Where the long lane from St Giles's to the Strand divides the many-branching slums; where flares the gas over coarse scraps of meat in cheap butchers' shops; where brokers pile up motley heaps of second-hand wares . . . where linen-drapers are invaded by poorly-clad women and girls demanding penn'orths of needles, ha'porths of buttons, and farthingworths of thread; where jean stays flap against the door-jambs and ‘Men's Stout Hose' gleam gaunt in the shop-windows; where grimy dames sit in coal and potato-sheds, and Jew clothesmen wrestle for the custom of passengers who don't want to buy anything; where little dens, reeking with the odours of fried fish, sausages and baked potatoes, or steaming with reminders of à-la-mode beef and hot eel soup, offer suppers, cheap and nasty, to the poor in pocket; where, in low coffee-shops, newspapers a fortnight old, with coffee-cup rings on them, suggest an intellectual pabulum combined with bodily refreshment; where gaping public houses receive or disgorge their crowds of tattered topers; where ‘general shops' are packed to overflowing with heterogenous odds and ends . . . where you have to elbow and jostle your way through a teeming, ragged, ill-favoured, shrieking, fighting population – by oyster-stalls and costermongers' barrows – by orange-women and organ-grinders – by flower-girls and match-sellers – by hulking labourers and brandy-faced viragos, squabbling at tavern doors – by innumerable children in every phase of wizened, hungry semi-nakedness, who pullulate at every street-corner, and seem cast up on the pavement like pebbles on the seashore. Here, at last, we find the hostelry of the three golden balls, where the capitalist whom men familiarly term ‘my uncle' lends money on the security of plate, jewellery, linen, wearing apparel, furniture, bedding, books . . .

It is Saturday night, and they are deliriously anxious to redeem their poor little remnants of wearing apparel for that blessed Sunday that comes tomorrow, to be followed, however, by a Black Monday, when father's coat, and Polly's merino frock, nay the extra petticoat, nay the Lilliputian boots of the toddling child, will have to be pawned again. . . . The poor are
so
poor, they have at the best of times so very little money, that pawning with them is an absolute necessity; and the pawnbroker's shop, that equitable mortgage on a small scale, is to them rather a blessing than a curse. Without that fourpence on the flat-iron, there would be very frequently no bread in the cupboard.

Nine o'clock p.m. – In the New Cut

There is a transpontine theatre, situated laterally towards the Waterloo Road, and having a northern front towards an anomalous thoroughfare that runs from Lambeth to Blackfriars, for which I have had, during a long period of years, a great esteem and admiration. This is the Royal Victoria Theatre [now called The Old Vic]. . . . These poor people can't help misplacing their h's, and fighting combats of six with tin broadswords. They haven't been to the University of Cambridge . . . they can't even afford to purchase a ‘Shilling Handbook of Etiquette'. Which is best? That they should gamble in low coffee-shops, break each other's heads with pewter pots in public houses, fight and wrangle . . . or that they should pay their threepence for admission into the gallery of the ‘Vic.' – witness the triumph of a single British sailor over twelve armed ruffians, who are about to carry off the Lady Maud to outrage worse than death; see the discomfiture of the dissolute young nobleman, and the restitution of the family estates (through the timely intervention of a ghost in a table-cloth) to the oppressed orphan? And of this nature are the vast mass of transpontine melodramas. The very ‘blood-and-murder' pieces, as they are termed, always end with the detection of the assassin and his condign punishment. . . .

It is nine o'clock precisely, and while the half-price [audience] is pouring into the Victoria Theatre, the whole-price . . . is pouring out with equal and continuous persistence, and are deluging the New Cut. Whither, you may ask, are they bound? They are in quest of their Beer. . . . The great pressure is outwards, and the great gulf stream of this human ocean flows towards a gigantic ‘public' opposite the Victoria, and which continually drives a roaring trade.

I wish that I had a more savoury locality to take you to than the New Cut. . . . it is simply Low. It is sordid, squalid and, the truth must out, disreputable. . . . Everything is second-hand, except the leviathan gin-shops, which are ghastly in their newness and richness of decoration. The broad pavement presents a mixture of Vanity Fair and Rag Fair. It is the paradise of the lowest of costermongers, and often the saturnalia of the most emerited thieves. Women appear there in their most unlovely aspect: brazen, slovenly, dishevelled, brawling, muddled with beer or fractious with gin. The howling of beaten children and kicked dogs, the yells of ballad-singers . . . the fumes of the vilest tobacco, of decaying vegetables, of escaping (and frequently surreptitiously tapped) gas, of deceased cats, of ancient fish, of cagmag [old, decaying] meat, of dubious mutton pies, and of unwashed, soddened, unkempt, reckless humanity; all these make the night hideous and the heart sick.

Ten o'clock p.m. – An Oratorio at Exeter Hall

Prithee pull up the collar of thy coat, stiffen thy neckcloth as much as possible, take that wicked cigar from thy mouth, cast down thy eyes, and assume a decorum if thou have it not. We are going to Exeter Hall. . . .

There would seem to be in an oratorio something essentially germane to the English mind and character. The sounding recitative and swelling hymns, the rolling choruses and triumphant bursts of exultant music, have a strange affinity with the solemn, earnest, energetic English people, slow to move to anger or to love, but, when moved, passionately enthusiastic in their love, bloody and terrible in their great wrath. . . .

To the seriously-inclined middle classes the oratorio supplies the place of the opera. And it behoves you to consider what a vast power in the state those serious middle-class men and women are. It is all very well for us, . . . travelled and somewhat cynical as we may be, to pretend that the ‘serious' world is an amalgam of bigotry, hypocrisy and selfishness, and to ignore the solemn religious journals that denounce hot dinner on Sundays, or a walk after it, or the perusal of a secular book on the sacred day, as intolerable sins. Yet how many thousands – how many millions – of sober, sincere, conscientious citizens are there, who are honestly persuaded of the sinfulness of many things which we consider harmless recreations! . . . Who look upon dancing as an irreligious and Babylonish pastime! Whose only light reading consists of tracts, missionary chronicles, and memoirs of sainted cheesemongers and the beautiful daughters of dairymen! . . .

But the serious world, and that section who are worldly, meet on neutral ground at an Exeter Hall oratorio. The religionists see no sin in listening to sacred music; the mundane come to listen with delight to the immortal strains of Handel, of Haydn, and of Mendelssohn. ‘When shall their glory fade?' asked Tennyson, singing of the Six Hundred at Balaclava. When shall the glory of our great oratorio writers decay? Never – I hope.