Days and Nights in London: or, Studies in Black and Gray

Оглавление

James Ewing Ritchie. Days and Nights in London: or, Studies in Black and Gray

PREFACE

I. – THE WORLD OF LONDON

II. – THE AMUSEMENTS OF THE PEOPLE

III. – OUR MUSIC-HALLS

IV. – MORE ABOUT MUSIC-HALLS

V. – SUNDAYS WITH THE PEOPLE

VI. – THE LOW LODGING-HOUSE

VII. – STUDIES AT THE BAR

VIII. – IN AN OPIUM DEN

IX. – LONDON’S EXCURSIONISTS

X. – ON THE RIVER STEAMERS

XI. – STREET SALESMEN

XII. – CITY NUISANCES

XIII. – OUT OF GAOL

XIV. – IN A GIPSY CAMP

XV. – THE STREET BOYS OF LONDON

Отрывок из книги

London, for a “village,” as old Cobbett used to call it, is a pretty large one; and, viewed from the lowest stand-point – that of the dull gospel according to Cocker – may well be described as truly wonderful. It eats a great deal of beef, and drinks a great deal of beer. You are staggered as you explore its warehouses. I stood in a granary the other day in which there were some eighty thousand sacks of wheat; and in the Bank of England I held in my hand, for a minute – all too brief – a million of pounds. It is difficult to realise what London is, and what it contains. Figures but little assist the reader.

Perhaps you best realise what the city is as you come up the Thames as far as London Bridge. Perhaps another way is to stand on that same bridge and watch the eager hordes that cross of a morning and return at night, and then, great as that number is, to multiply it a hundredfold. A dozen miles off gardeners tell you that there are plants that suffer from London air and London fog. Indeed it is difficult to say where London begins and where it ends. If you go to Brighton, undoubtedly it is there in all its glory; when yachting far away in the western islands of Scotland and the Hebrides, the first signature I found in the strangers’ book at a favourite hotel was that of Smith, of London. There he was, as large as life, just as we see him any day in Cheapside. One bitter cold winter day I revisited, not exactly my childhood’s happy home, but a neighbouring sea port to which I was once much attached. “Oh,” said I to myself, as I rushed along in the train, “how glad people will be to see me; how bright will be the eyes into which I once loved to look, and how warm the clasp of the hand which once thrilled through all my being!” Alas! a generation had risen who knew not Joseph. I dined sadly and alone at the hotel, and after dinner made my way to the pier to mingle my melancholy with that of the melancholy ocean. The wind was high; the sand in clouds whirled madly along the deserted streets. At sea even nothing was to be seen; but at the far end of the pier, with his back turned to me, gazing over as if he wanted to make out the coast of Holland – some hundred and fifty miles opposite – was a short man, whom I knew at once from his apoplectic back – Brown, of Fleet Street – come there all the way from the congenial steak puddings and whisky toddy of The Cheshire Cheese for a little fresh air! I felt angry with Brown. I was ready almost to throw him over into the raging surf beneath, but I knew that was vain. There were “more to follow.” Nowadays London and London people are everywhere. What is London? It covers, says one, within a fifteen-miles’ radius of Charing Cross, so many hundred square miles. It numbers more than four million inhabitants. It comprises a hundred thousand foreigners from every quarter of the globe. It contains more Roman Catholics than there are in all Rome; more Jews than there are in all Palestine; and, I fear, more rogues than there are even in America. On a Sunday you will hear Welsh in one church, Dutch in another, the ancient dialect of St. Chrysostom in another; and on a Saturday you may plunge into low dancing-houses at the East-End which put to shame anything of the kind in Hamburg or Antwerp or Rotterdam. In many of the smoking-rooms bordering on Mark Lane and Cheapside you hear nothing but German. I know streets and squares inhabited by Dutch and German Jews, or dark-eyed Italians, or excitable Frenchmen, where is as little understood as Sanscrit itself. At any moment I like I can rush away from all European civilisation, and sit in a little room and smoke opium with the heathen Chinee – whose smile all the while is “childlike and bland” – as if I were thousands of miles away. On the other side of St. Paul’s I have supped with hundreds of thieves at a time, who carry on their work as if there was no such institution as that of the police; I have listened to the story of the crowded lodgers, and I can believe anything you like to tell me of the wealth, of the poverty, of the virtue, of the vice of London. People say the metropolis has seven thousand miles of streets. I have no doubt it has. People say it has on Sunday sixty miles of shops open, and they may be right; at least I have neither the time nor the inclination to test these figures. It also rejoices, I hear, in as many public-houses as, if set in a line, would reach from Charing Cross to Portsmouth. The people of London read or write in the course of a year as many as two hundred and forty millions of letters. All these letters are written, all these public-houses supported, all these streets lined with houses inhabited by men who more or less are connected with the city. It is there they live, if they sleep fifty miles away, and it is a hard life some of them have assuredly. A little while ago a poor woman was charged with pawning shirts entrusted to her to make by an East-End merchant clothier. The woman pleaded that her children were so hungry that she was tempted to pawn some of the work in the hope of being able to redeem it by the time the whole was completed. The work was machine-sewing. She hired the machine at half-a-crown a week, and was paid by the prosecutor a shilling a dozen for his shirts.

.....

In speaking of London we sometimes mean Smaller London and sometimes Greater London. To avoid confusion we must clearly understand what is meant by each. Smaller London comprises 28 Superintendent Registrars’ Districts, 20 of them being in Middlesex, 5 in Surrey, and 3 in Kent; viz. Kensington, Chelsea, St. George, Hanover Square, Westminster, Marylebone, Hampstead, Pancras, Islington, Hackney, St. Giles, Strand, Holborn, London City, Shoreditch, Bethnal Green, Whitechapel, St. George in the East, Stepney, Mile End and Poplar in Middlesex; St. Saviour, Southwark, St. Olave, Southwark, Lambeth, Wandsworth, and Camberwell in Surrey; and Greenwich, Lewisham, and Woolwich in Kent. It had an estimated population in the middle of 1878 of 3,577,304. Greater London comprises in addition to the above 14 Superintendent Registrars’ Districts, 6 of them being in Middlesex, 4 in Surrey, 2 in Kent, and 2 in Essex; viz. Staines, Uxbridge, Brentford, Hendon, Barnet, and Edmonton in Middlesex; Epsom, Croydon, Kingston, and Richmond in Surrey; Bromley and Bexley in Kent; and West Ham and Romford in Essex. It comprises the whole of Middlesex, and such parishes of Surrey, Kent, Essex, and Herts as are within 12 miles of Charing Cross. These additional districts had an estimated population of 872,711 in the middle of the year 1878, so that Greater London has therefore at the present time a population of 4,450,015. The population of the United Kingdom in the middle of 1878 was estimated at 33,881,966. Greater London had therefore considerably more than an eighth of the population of Great Britain and Ireland, and more than a sixth of the population of England and Wales. This large population is constantly and rapidly increasing; the estimated increase in 1878 being 82,468. It is important to note that the increase is not equal in all parts. The population is decreasing within the City; within Smaller London it goes on increasing but at a decreasing rate, and in the outer ring the population increases steadily at an increasing rate. The population of the outer circle has increased more than 50 per cent. in the last ten years.

Even in its narrowest definition – as the small plot of ground between Temple Bar and Aldgate pump – what a history London has! Of what scenes of glory and of shame it has been the theatre! What brave men and lovely women have played their part, heroic or the reverse, upon its stage! When the City’s greatest architect dug deep into the earth to build the foundations of his matchless cathedral, he laid bare the remains of nations and generations that one after another had held the City as its own. First he uncovered the graves of the early medieval Londoners; then he came to the remains of our Saxon forefathers, of Ethelbert and St. Augustine; next were found the remains of Romans and ancient Britons, and last of all were found the mouldering remains of those who knew not Cæsar and the city they call Rome. Again, the London of Victoria faintly resembles the London of Queen Anne, as faintly perhaps as does the Jerusalem of to-day represent the city in which our Saviour dwelt. No wonder that our old chroniclers romanced not a little, and that many of them did believe, as Geoffrey of Monmouth writes, that London was founded by Brute, a descendant of Eneas, eleven hundred years before Christ, and that he called it Troy Novant, whence came the name of the people to be called Trinobantes. Equally widespread and equally unfounded was the belief that from London were shipped away eleven thousand – some say seventy thousand – British virgins (as an admirer of the virtues of my countrywomen I stick to the highest figure) – whose bones may yet be seen in Cologne – to the British warriors compelled to settle in Armorica. What is clear, however, is that in London Diana had a temple, that the Saxons won the city from the Britons, that the Tower of London is one of the oldest buildings in Christendom, and that here Roman and Dane, and Saxon and Norman have all more or less left their mark. Our early monarchs trembled as they saw how the great city grew. When that slobbering James came to the throne – whom his courtiers denominated the British Solomon – of whom bishops and archbishops testified that his language was that of inspiration, he exclaimed, “England will shortly be London, and London England,” as he saw how people were adding house to house and street to street, and flocking to them from all parts of England and Scotland; yet the London of the Stuarts, neither in extent or magnificence or wealth, bore the faintest resemblance to the London of to-day.

.....