The booklover's London

Preface

GOING up Cornhill a year or two ago, on a day when snow was falling, I happened to remember that somewhere about there was the court in which Scrooge, of Dickens's Christmas Carol, had his home and business premises, and that coming from his bleak tank of an office one cutting, wintry night Scrooge's clerk, Bob Cratchit, was so carried away by the joyous spirit of the season that he " went down a slide on Cornhill, at the end of a lane of boys, twenty times in honour of its being Christmas Eve ; " and somehow Bob Cratchit became as real to me in that moment as were any of the obvious people swarming on the pavement around me. As a matter of fact, he and his like are much more real than most of us ; for in a few years we shall have passed away like shadows, and our places will have forgotten us, but he will still be going down that slide on Cornhill, as he has been going down it already for exactly seventy years. If any so-called real person, walking audibly in undeniable boots, dared to indulge in a sk vi THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON

similar pastime upon Cornhill nowadays, he would be promptly stopped by a policeman, and probably locked up ; but Bob Cratchit is so potent a reality that no transitory policeman born of woman has power to check his happy outlawry and take him off that slide.

Surely here be truths sufficient to justify the making of this volume. Why should we differentiate between people who were once clay and are now dreams, and people who have never had to pass through that gross period of probation but have been dreams from the beginning ? Many books have been written about London's associations with men and women of the more solid kind, who had to pay rent for their houses ; I have written two myself ; there have been books about Dickens's London and Thackeray's London, but T do not think there has been any book on a large scale devoted to London's associations with the imaginary folk of the novelists and dramatists — with those familiar citizens who are literally free of the city and live where they will in it unfretted by landlords or tax-collectors, and who having once walked into one or another of its streets through certain books are walking in it always for whoever actually knows London. For you know very little of London if you do not know more than you can see of it. So T hope to be forgiven for making this humble and perhaps inadequate

PREFACE vii

contribution to a branch of history that has been rather neglected.

I have not attempted anything in the way of research. As a fairly miscellaneous reader, my plan has been simply to select a route and to go along it gossiping of what memories I have of the imaginary men and women connected with the places we pass by the way. It was wrong of me to allow divers sometime real people haunting the same ground to intrude upon our visionary company, but I have done so partly for the sake of contrast, and partly because I am equally interested in them and could not resist the temptation to let them come in. If I have gone on any principle at all it has been one of including what appeals to me and leaving out what does not. The banks that stand in Lombard Street are so many dead and unattractive piles of stone so far as I am concerned, but if I knew which particular one Thackeray had in mind when he sent Becky Sharp in a coach to Lombard Street to cash the cheque Lord Steyne had given her I should take an interest in that bank. Even before I was aware that Shakespeare lodged for several years in a house that has been replaced by a tavern at the corner of Silver Street and Monkwell Street, I had a sort of sentimental regard for that spot, because Ben Jonson in his Staple of News puts Pennyboy, Senr., to live " in Silver Street, the region of money, a good seat for viii THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON

an usurer/' I am not indifferent to the fact that Samuel Titmarsh was a clerk in an Insurance office in Cornhill ; that Mr Carker, showing all his teeth, used to ride up Cheapside ona" gleaming bay " on his road home of evenings from Mr. Dombey's warehouse, which lay in a byway towards Leadenhall Street ; that Dobbin and Joe Sedley stayed at Slaughter's Coffee House in St. Martin's Lane ; that Ferdinand Armine, of Henrietta Temple, and old Sedley, with little George Osborn, of Vanity Fair, were fond of roaming in Kensington Gardens ; that Clem Peckover and Bob Hewett, of Gissing's Nether World, loitered on the Embankment and leaned over the parapet between Waterloo Bridge and Temple Pier looking at the river, whilst Clem was subtly tempting Hewett to murder her husband, so that the two might go off together with his money — I am not indifferent to those and scores of other such memories though I have said nothing about them in these pages. I could take you to Tower Hill and show you where Vincent Scattergood, of Albert Smith's Scattergood Family, gazed about him and ruminated, leaning up against the railings of Trinity Square ; and the last time T crossed Waterloo Bridge and noticed the shot tower, I remembered that, in the same story, Fogg, the dramatist, who lived in a blind court off Drury Lane, used to cross it too, on his way to the Surrey Theatre, in Blackfriars

PREFACE ix

Road, and invariably " became preoccupied with endeavouring to render the shot tower available " in his next melodrama. But I wondered whether many were now intimate enough with Albert Smith and his world to take pleasure in such records. It is a long time since I read him myself, and I confess I shall never read him again ; therefore you will find I have said little about him. I have omitted other associations for the same reason. Indeed, it is probable that I have omitted a great deal ; some things knowingly, for lack of space ; some because I forgot them until too late ; and some, of course, from sheer ignorance. But for all my sins of omission I offer no excuse, except a frank acknowledgment that, even though I may know as much as anyone else, I do not know all about anything, certainly not about London, and let only him who does cast the first stone !

A. ST. J. A.

Contents

CHAP.

I. Personal and General

II. " The Saracen's Head " and Newgate

Chapter I

EVERY man finds his own charm in London, and unfortunately it too often blinds him to all the charms that other men have found in it. "I see that the Londoner is also, like me, a stranger in London," wrote Emerson in one of his Journals ; 1 1 have a good deal to tell him of it." It is curious, how complacently the visitor or new resident assumes that the mystery, the wonder, the beauty, the fascination of London that is new to him has never been discovered before, and that certainly the poor Cockney takes no interest in his native city and knows nothing about it. In the same spirit of surprise at his own discovery a writer (evidently one of these excited new-comers) noted in my newspaper the other morning that " the average Londoner will not take the trouble to find out that on a very clear day if he looks straight down Bouverie Street he will have a view of the Crystal Palace over in Surrey." Well, I am a Cockney and an average Londoner, but I shall never go out of my way to obtain that distracting vision, not because I am indifferent to the charm of London but simply because I do not want to see the Crystal Palace, and do not count any

T 1 prospect of it among the thousand and one reasons why I love my birthplace and keep an unfailing

interest in it.

You may be irresistibly attracted to London by its glamorous literary or historical associations ; by the fulness, variety, and eagerness of its life ; by the homely sense of human neighbourhood that enfolds you in its crowded thoroughfares ; by the bizarre splendour and pulsing movement of it when all the lamps are alight and the shop-windows flood the tumultuous streets with golden fire ; by the mystery and stranger beauty of it when it lies lifeless under the quiet stars and so lonely that you can hear the echo of your footsteps as you go ; by the countless real and imaginary romances of men and women who have died and men and women who have never lived that fill its highways and byways, day and night, with dreams and ghosts ;— there is such a magic in the very names of many of its streets that, if you know it, when you read them and say them to yourself the long rows of big modern buildings grow as unsubstantial as a mist and fade away and rows of smaller, quainter, more picturesque houses rise in their stead and all old London as it used to be but will never be again closes in about you as by enchantment. ,

Perhaps this large and general apprehension ot the city's witchery is coloured and intensified by feelings and intimate memories peculiar to yourself, and once you are fully susceptible to its manifold, indescribable charm, that view of the Crystal Palace on a clear day really does not seem a joy worth troubling about. It may be well enough for the casual explorer to make acquaintance with all those "places of interest" listed in the guide-book and then go away and boast that he has seen more of London and has more regard for it than the average Londoner who confesses he has never been up the Monument; but the Cockney, as a rule, looks upon those places of interest as convenient objects intended mainly for the amusement of visitors— the things that he loves London for are not such common public property. When he is exiled and home-sick, far off in Canada or Australia, it is not the Duke of York's column, or even Nelson's, that lifts a beckoning finger in his dreams to lure him back ; it is no mental picture of the British Museum or the National Gallery that brings the longing to his heart or the tears to his eyes,— I know what London means to him because I know what it means to me, who was born in it and have grown to manhood in it, so that now I can scarcely walk down any of its streets but my boyhood or my younger manhood has been there before me ; something of my past has been trodden into its stones and is as inseparable from it, though none knows anything of this but myself, as all its older, greater memories.

So it comes to pass that the charm of London is largely incommunicable. I cannot realise all that it is to you, nor you all that it is to me, because our experiences, our personal associations with it are not identical. If I were to tell you why a certain doorway in Southampton Street, out of Holborn, is the saddest place in all London to me, and why it is I can never think of St. Swithin's Lane without ieeing it paved with sunshine, you would understand my feelings but could not share them ; you could still pass both places without being touched by that secret spell they can always cast upon me. Therefore, I am not attempting anything so hopeless as to distil into these pages the whole ineffable charm of London, but shall be satisfied if I can extract from that some one of its many enchantments to which we are all amenable, blending with it, for purposes of comparison and sharper emphasis, just so little of its more exclusively personal elements as one man may easily communicate to another.

It does not matter where we make a beginning ; you cannot go down any street of the city without walking into the past ; but I have a private fancy to start from Smithfield Market, partly because I am drawn to it by curious personal ties, chiefly because it looks the least but is really one of the most romantic parts of London. Take the train to Farringdon Street, and as you come out of the station you will see inscribed on the wall facing you " Cow Cross Street, Leading to Turnmill Street," and the sight of that name may remind you that this is the street that was in old days known colloquially as Turnbull Street : it was a shockingly disreputable place of brothels and gambling dens, as you have gathered from frequent references to it in the plays of the Elizabethan dramatists. " Lord, Lord ! " says Falstaff, talking of Justice Shallow, in Henry the Fourth, " how subject we old men are to this vice of lying. This same starved Justice hath done nothing but prate to me of the wildness of his youth and the feats he hath done about Turnbull Street ; and every third word a lie." Ursula, in Ben i

Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, cries out against Knockem, the horse-courser, " You are one of those horseleaches that gave out I was dead in Turnbull Street of a surfeit of bottle-ale and tripes ? " One of the characters in Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside exclaims, on stealing a basket of provisions and finding nothing but veal in it,

I promised faithfully To send this morning a fat quarter of lamb To a kind gentlewoman in Turnbull Street.

Justice Nimis, counting up his estate in Randolph's The Muses' Looking-Glass, says,

The yearly value Of my fair manor of Clerkenwell is pounds So many, besides new-year's capons, the lordship Of Turnbull, so — which, with my Pict-hatch grange And Shoreditch farm, and other premises Adjoining — very good, a pretty maintenance To keep the Justice of Peace, and coram too.

Pict-hatch was an infamous establishment in Turnbull Street, and you have Falstaff again, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, rating Pistol, with " Go : a short knife and a throng ! — to your manor of Pict-hatch ! go " ; and Randolph starts the young gallant, Neanias, singing, in Hey for Honesty, Down with Knavery,

Come, beldame, follow me, And in my footsteps tread, Then set up shop in Turnbull Street . . .

Well, if you walk a few yards to the left as you come out of the railway station, here you are in that same Turnmill, otherwise Turnbull Street ; but there is no sign of a brook here now, nor any of the mills that Stow says used to stand hereabouts, nor any of those rascally haunts with which the playwrights of Shakespeare's time were so familiar. One side of the street is occupied by a blank wall that shuts off the underground railway, and the other by towering warehouses and severely decorous business premises. There is a narrow byway out of it, with a brood of furtive, squalid alleys and quaint frowsy courts, in which Falstaff might still feel comparatively at home, but we are for Smithfield, and will turn back and along Cow Cross Street to get there. But I cannot pass by Peter Lane, which was formerly Peter Street, in Cow Cross Street, without remembering that unhappy urchin, young St. Giles, in Douglas Jerrold's almost forgotten novel of St. Giles and St. James : he had been led by the cunning Tom Blast into stealing a horse, which he rode into Smithfield.

" He then walked the pony slowly up Long Lane, and soon as he espied the Blue Posts, faithful to his orders, he dismounted, looking anxiously about him for his friend and instructor, Tom Blast. A quarter of an hour passed, and still he came not. And then, and for the first time, he looked at the stolen goods with lowering eyes, and his heart felt leaden. . . . Anything to be well clear of the pony. With this thought St. Giles had his foot in the stirrup, when he was tapped upon the shoulder by a man plainly and comfortably dressed in a darkgrey suit, wearing a light flaxen wig in tight curls, surmounted by a large beaver hat, scrupulously sleek. He had a broad fat face, with a continual smile laid like lacquer upon it. And when he spoke, he spoke very gently and very softly, as with lips of butter.

" ' My dear little boy,' said the stranger, patting St. Giles affectionately on the back, ' where have you been so long ? '

" St. Giles looked — he could not help it — very suspiciously at the stranger ; then scratching his head, he observed, ' Don't know you, sir.'

" ' I dare say not ; how should you, my dear ? But you will know me, and for a friend. I've waited for you these ten

This kindly stranger gently twitched the bridle from his hand, and St. Giles felt that the stolen pony was being stolen from him ; but his suspicions were quieted ; he was rewarded with a guinea, and roamed about London and lived on this for over a week.

" It was on the ninth day of St. Giles's absence from his maternal home, and the pilgrim of London stood before a house of humble entertainment in Cow Cross. The time was noon ; and St. Giles, feeling the last threepence in his pocket — turning them over one by one — was endeavouring to arbitrate between pudding and a bed. If he bought a cut of pudding — and through the very window-pane he seemed to nose its odour — he had not wherewithal to buy a lodging. What of that ? London had many doorways — hospitable stone-steps — for nothing ; and pudding must be paid for. Still he hesitated ; when the cook-shop man removed the pudding from the window. This removal decided St. Giles. He rushed into the shop, and laid down his last worldly stake upon the counter. ' Threepennorth o' puddin', and a good threepennorth,' said St. Giles. With a look of half-reproof and half-contempt the tradesman silently executed the order ; and in a few moments St. Giles stood upon the King's highway, devouring with great relish his last threepence. Whilst thus genially employed, he heard a far-off voice roar through the muggy air : his heart beat, and he ate almost to choking as he listened to these familiar words :— c A Most True and Particular Account of the Horrible Circumstance of a Bear that has been Fed upon Five Young

Children in a Cellar in Westminster ! ' It was the voice of Blast ; and St. Giles swallowed his pudding, hurriedly used the back of his hand for a napkin, and following the sound of the crier, was in a trice in Peter Street, and one of the mob that circled the marvel-monger of Hog Lane."

Half of Cow Cross Street still remains very much what it was when St. Giles knew it ; there is still an old cook-shop there that might well be the very one he patronised, and two doors beyond it is Peter Street. We emerge from Cow Cross Street, and across the road, all along the other side of Charterhouse Street, stretches the heavy, red length of Smithfield Market ; the yawning central arcade takes you at a gulp, and mid-way through we glance in at the great gateways to right and left of us and see white-robed butchers moving about in cool, far-reaching groves of gross mutton and beef ; trucks loaded with meat pass and repass us ; and outside, all round the building, butchers' carts and vans cluster closely, like flies on a bone. Coming out at the other end of the arcade, before us is the broad open space of West Smithfield, and immediately on our left is that Long Lane into which St. Giles rode on his stolen horse. In the centre of the open space a road winds down to a Goods Station of the Midland Railway that is out of sight under the ground upon which the martyrs used to be burned at the stake ; beyond, the dull stone buildings of St. Bartholomew's Hospital gloom all along the opposite side of the square and extend into Giltspur Street, and if you say that name to yourself properly the sordid, red Market loses its solidity and rolls away like a cloud ; the huge Hospital dwindles to less than a quarter its present size ; the fountain and railed-in garden go from the middle of the square, and the subterranean Goods Station with them ; the big new banks and taverns and warehouses shrink and vanish and their places are filled by a picturesque huddle of quaint old red-tiled houses and inns from the windows of which crowds of laughing ladies and gallant gentlemen look out upon a broad green field from which noisy swarms of the common city folk are shut off by stout wooden barriers ; and presently up this same Giltspur Street a company of knights, flashing the sun back from their armour, ride in to a tournament. The one familiar object of modern London that rose before them familiarly as they rode in is the glorious old church of St. Bartholomew, that stands at the eastern corner of Smithfield.

But you may read all about this in Stow's Survey of London. The church has undergone numerous restorations but much of it remains as when it was first built in 1102 by Rahere, King Henry the First's jester, who turned monk and became its first Prior. Stow tells you, too, of the tournaments, " For example to note : — In the year 1357, the 31st. of Edward III., great and royal jousts were there holden in Smithfield ; there being present the Kings of England, France and Scotland, with many other nobles and great estates of divers lands," and after several such records he comes to, " In the 14th. of Richard II., after Froisart, royal jousts and tournaments were proclaimed to be done in Smithfield, to begin on Sunday next after the feast of St. Michael. ... At the day appointed there issued forth of the Tower, about the third hour of the day, sixty coursers, apparelled for the jousts, and upon every one an esquire of honour, riding a soft pace ; then came forth sixty ladies of honour, mounted upon palfreys, riding on the one side, richly apparelled, and every lady led a knight with a chain of gold, those knights being on the king's party had their harness and apparel garnished with white harts, and crowns of gold about the harts' necks, and so they came riding through the streets of London to Smithfield, with a great number of trumpets and other instruments of music before them. The king and queen, who were lodged in the bishop's palace of London, were come from thence, with many great estates, and placed in chambers to see the jousts ; the ladies that led the knights were taken down from their palfreys, and went up to chambers prepared for them. Then alighted the esquires of honour from their coursers, and the knights in good order mounted upon them ; and after their helmets were set on their heads, and being ready in all points, proclamation made by the heralds, the jousts began, and many commendable courses were run, to the great pleasure of the beholders. These jousts continued many days, with great feasting, as ye may read in Froisart." And Will Catur, the armourer, was not the only man accused of treason who brought his innocence to the trial by combat and fought his accuser and slew him or was slain by him in Smithfield.

Already, in those years, a horse and cattle market was held in Smithfield every Friday, and already the annual Fair of Bartholomew had beeen started : part of it, devoted entirely to the sale of goods, was held in the churchyard and in the Close surrounding the church, and part of it, given over to amusements, shows, feastings and general frivolity was scattered all about the open plain of Smithfield itself. The Fairs outlasted the Tournaments, and when the tournament had become a barbarous thing of the past, the London mob made holiday in Smithfield to see the stake driven into the earth here, the faggots piled, smoke rise and many a stubborn martyr burnt alive in the great name of Christianity. Scores of such victims to the childish dogmas of conceited theologians went up to heaven in their chariots of fire from this same ground, but more readily than any other I recall the martyrdom of Anne Askew, less on account of poor Anne herself, perhaps, than because of a certain detailed and amazingly vivid picture that is part of Foxe's narrative of her sufferings. Her chief offence was that she differed with the Bishop of London and his priests concerning the doctrine of transubstantiation ; she refused to agree that the sacramental bread was the veritable body of Christ. " As for what ye call your god," she said boldly, according to Foxe, "it is a piece of bread ; for a more proof thereof, mark it when you list, let it but lie in the box three months and it will be mouldy and so turn to nothing that is good. Whereupon I am persuaded that it cannot be God." They imprisoned her in the Tower and piously endeavoured to change her mind by stretching her limbs on the rack, till she was so maimed and warped that she could not use her feet ; then, as she still failed to see eye to eye with them, they decided that there was only one way left in which they could get the best of the argument, so, as Foxe has it :

" The day of her execution being appointed, she was brought into Smithfield in a chair, because she could not go on her feet, by means of her great torments. When she was brought to the stake, she was tied by the middle with a chain that held up her body. When all things were thus prepared to the fire, Dr. Shaxton, who was then appointed to preach, began his sermon. Anne Askew, hearing and answering again unto him, where he said well, confirmed the same ; where he said amiss, there, said she, he misseth and speaketh without the book.

" The sermon being finished, the other martyrs (John Lacels, John Adams, and Nicholas Belenian), standing there tied to three several stakes, ready to their martyrdom, began their prayers. The multitude and concourse of the people were exceeding, the place where they stood being railed about to keep out the press. Upon the bench, under St. Bartholomew's church, sat Wrisley, chancellor of England, the old Duke of Norfolk, the Lord Mayor, with divers other more. Before the fire should be set unto them, one of the bench hearing that they had gunpowder about them and being afraid the faggots by the strength of the gunpowder would come flying about their ears, began to be afraid : but the Earl of Bedford, declaring unto him the gunpowder was not laid under the faggots, but only about their bodies to rid them out of their pain, which having vent, there was no danger to them of the faggots, so diminished their fear.

" Then Wrisley, Lord Chancellor, sent to Anne Askew letters, offering to her the King's pardon if she would recant. Who refusing once to look upon them, made this answer again : That she came not thither to deny her Lord and Master. Then were the letters likewise offered unto the other, who in like manner, following the constancy of the woman, denied not only to receive them, but also to look on them. Whereupon the Lord Mayor commanding fire to be put to them, cried with a loud voice, Fiat justitia.

" And thus the good Anne Askew, with these blessed martyrs, being troubled so many manner of ways, and having passed through so many torments, having now ended the long course of her agonies, being compassed in with flames of fire, as a blessed sacrifice unto God, she slept in the Lord, anno 1546, leaving behind her a singular example for all men to follow."

These things do not pass away ; and I can never cross Smithfield nowadays without hearing that loud cry of the Lord Mayor's thrilling above the dense mob again, without seeing the flames rise about the chained figures of the four martyrs, without seeing on the bench in front of this same old St. Bartholomew's church that little group of elderly, gorgeously attired dignitaries, discussing the probable action of the gunpowder mercifully fastened round the waists of the sufferers and fussily agitated by fears for their own safety. So long as Smithfield remains they keep their place in it for those who know where to look for them and how to see them.

But Smithfield is haunted by other and happier memories. For certain August days of every year, during several centuries and down to less than a century ago, it was all aroar with the business and revelry of Bartholomew Fair. Sometimes the Fair would begin only a day after one of the martyrdoms, and the roistering London crowd would swarm in to make merry and riot among the stalls and booths over earth that was still blackened from yesterday's fires. Look round and you shall note ancient landmarks of those days in the old church, the hospital, and in the names of the streets : in Long Lane, Cloth Fair, Bartholomew Close, Little Britain (though this end of it was Duck Lane in the Fair time), Giltspur Street, Hosier Lane and Cock Lane, the corner of which is the veritable Pie Corner which was once occupied by a famous eating-house of that name and surrounded by cooks' stalls and refreshment tents whilst the Fair was on. The Great Fire of London, which began at Pudding Lane, in Eastcheap, ended by burning down the ancient hostelry at Pie Corner, and a tavern called " The Fortune of War," which stood on the site until about a year ago, exhibited the gilded figure of an obese boy above its doorway, with an inscription to the effect that it was erected in memory of " the late Fire of London, occasioned by the sin of gluttony, 1666." I am glad that the new building now reared on the spot preserves this historic boy in a niche at his familiar corner. There used to be many inns hereabouts that were closely associated with the Fair, but all these are demolished or have been rebuilt and changed their names, except The Crown, two doors from Hosier Lane, where, according to Stow, writing in 1589, " the hosiers of old time " carried on their businesses.