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Contents List of Illustrations ix Introduction by Peter Ackroyd xvii Preface xxi Introduction 1 I London Bridge 9 II The Busy River-Side 17 III The Docks 27 IV Above Bridge to Westminster 35 V All London at A Boat Race 49 VI The Race 61 VII The Derby 67 VIII London on the Downs 78 IX The West End 88 X In the Season 96 XI By the Abbey 105 XII London, Under Green Leaves 114 XIII With the Beasts 121 XIV Work-A-Day London 128 XV Humble Industries 140 XVI The Town of Malt 151 XVII Under Lock and Key 157 XVIII Whitechapel and Thereabouts 166 XIX In The Market Places 178 XX London at Play 191 XXI London Charity 212 List of Illustrations Frontispiece i 1. A Morning Ride xx 2. The Row xxi 3. Greenwich - In the Season xxiii 4. A Greenwich Boat Traveller xxiv 5. The Docks - The Concordia xxvii 6. The Tide of Business in the City xxix 7. Resting on the Bridge xxxi 8. Hampstead Heath in the Olden Time 1 9. The British Lion 1 10. London Stone 4 11. Hayboats on the Thames 5 12. Tower of London 6 13. The Two Pilgrims at Highgate 9 14. Victoria Tower 9 15. London Bridge, 1872 13 16. London Bridge, 1694 14 17. The Houses of Parliament by Night 16 18. A Waterman's Family 17 19. A River Side Street 19 20. Porters at Work 20 21. Warehouses by the Thames 22 22. A City Thoroughfare 23 23. Pickle Herring Street 24 24. Dark House Lane - Billingsgate 25 List of Illustrations 25. Bull Dogs 26 26. The Great Warehouse - St. Katherine's Dock 27 27. St. Katherine's Dock 29 28. Poplar Dock 30 29. The Docks - Night Scene 32 30. Limehouse Dock 33 31. Between Bridges 35 32. Victoria Embankment 36 33. Lavender Girl 36 34. Orange Woman 37 35. Lemonade Vendor 38 36. In the Abbey - Westminster 41 37. Lambeth Potteries 42 38. The Devil's Acre - Westminster 44 39. Hansom Cab 48 40. Westminster Stairs - Steamers Leaving 49 41. Perched in the Trees 50 42. The Limes - Mortlake 52 43. A Penny Sweepstake 53 44. The River Bank - Under the Trees 55 45. Barnes Bridge 57 46. The Race 58 47. The Crews 61 48. The Oysterman 62 49. Putney Bridge - The Return 63 50. Barnes Common - Calling the Carriages 66 51. A Penny Sweepstake 67 52. A Balcony Scene 67 53. Provincials in Search of Lodgings 68 54. A Sale at Tattersall's 69 55. On the Road 70 56. At Lunch 71 57. Bible Hawker 73 58. Refreshments by the Way 73 59. The Noble Art 74 60. A Sketch on the Downs 75 61. The Derby - Tattenham Corner 77 62. Outside the Ring 78 63. Three Sticks a Penny 79 64. The Winner 80 65. A Block on the Road 81 66. Finish of the Race 82 67. Trial of Strength 83 68. Returning Home 84 69. Amenities of the Road 85 70. Caught in the Branches 86 71. A Chiswick Fete 87 72. The Christy Minstrels 88 73. The Horse Guards 89 74. The Stalls - Covent Garden Opera 90 75. The West End Dog Fancier 91 76. The Fly Paper Merchant 91 77. The Drive 92 78. Buckingham Gate 93 List of Illustrations 79. The Ladies' Mile 95 80. The Bear Pit - Zoological Gardens 96 81. Home - From Holland House 97 82. Holland House - A Garden Party 98 83. A Weddingat the Abbey 99 84. The Goldsmiths at Dinner 100 85. The Early Riser 103 86. Dean's Yard, Westminster 105 87. Westminster Abbey - Confirmation Of Westminster Boys .... 106 88. Westminster - The Round of the Abbey 107 89. Westminster Abbey - The Choir 110 90. The Fountain - Broad Sanctuary 111 91. Under the Trees - Regent's Park 113 92. St. James's Park - Feeding the Ducks 114 93. Hyde Park Corner - Piccadilly Entrance 115 94. Afternoon in the Park 116 95. The Great Tree - Kensington Gardens 118 96. Hyde Park Corner - The Row 119 97. The Animated Sandwich 120 98. The Opera 121 99. Zoological Gardens - Sunday Promenade 122 100. Zoological Gardens - The Parrot Walk 123 101. Zoological Gardens - The Monkey House 124 102. The Flower Hawker 126 103. The Workmen's Train 127 104. Advertising Board-Man 128 105. Baked Potato Man 129 106. Warehousing in the City 130 107. Orange Court - Drury Lane 131 108. Bishopsgate Street 132 109. Broken Down 134 110. Ludgate Hill - A Block in the Street 135 111. The Monument to George Peabody 136 112. The Match Seller 137 113. Over London -By Rail 139 114. Roofless! 140 115. The Royal Exchange 141 116. Coffee Stall - Early Morning 142 117. The RagMerchant's Home - Coulston Street 143 118. Jewish Butchers - Aldgate 143 119. Wentworth Street, Whitechapel 145 120. The Old Clothesman 146 121. A Flower Girl 146 122. Houndsditch 147 123. The Ginger Beer Man 149 124. In the Brewery 151 125. Mixing the Malt 152 126. St. Paul's from the Brewery Bridge 153 127. The Great Vats 154 128. Brewer's Men 155 129. Brewer's Dray 156 130. The Turnkey 157 131. Newgate - Exercise Yard 158 132. Thieves Gambling 159 133. Bluegate Fields 161 134. Whitechapel Refreshments 163 135. A Whitechapel Coffee House 165 136. Asleep in the Streets 166 137. Waifs and Strays 167 138. Scripture Reader in a Night Refuge 168 139. A House of Refuge - In the Bath 169 140. The Bull's-eye 170 141. Whitechapel - A Shady Place 171 142. Opium Smoking - The Lascar's Room in "Edwin Drood" .... 173 143. Turn Him Out! - Ratcliff 175 144. Coffee Shop - Petticoat Lane 176 145. Billingsgate - Early Morning 177 146. Columbia Market 178 147. Billingsgate - Opening of the Market 179 148. Billingsgate - Landing the Fish 180 149. Borough Market 182 150. Covent Garden Market - Early Morning 183 151. Gloucester Street - Old Clothes Mart 184 152. Off Billingsgate 186 153. Hardware Dealer - New Cut Market 187 154. Dudley Street, Seven Dials 188 155. The Butcher - Newport Market Alley 190 156. At Evans's 191 157. Hampstead Heath 192 158. Home From Hampton Court Races 194 159. The Penny Gaff 195 160. Penny Gaff Frequenters 195 161. Blondin at Shoreditch 197 162. Lord's 200 163. Croquet 202 164. A Ball at the Mansion House 204 165. The Milkwoman 206 166. The Organ in the Court 207 167. A Cold Resting Place 208 168. Punch and Judy 209 169. Asleep under the Stars 211 170. The Angel and the Orphan 212 171. Marlborough House - Expecting the Prince 213 172. Refuge - Applying for Admittance 214 173. Found in the Street 218 174. Under the Arches 219 Introduction By Peter Ackroyd In 1869 the young English writer and journalist, Blanchard Jerrold, approached the French illustrator, Gustave Doré, with a proposition. Doré was on one of his periodic visits to London, where he supervised the workings of the newly opened Doré Gallery in New Bond Street. Jerrold had conceived an idea. Would Doré be willing to work with him on an illustrated guide, or description, of London? He had in mind the model of a much earlier volume, The Microcosm of London, which had been illustrated by Thomas Rowlandson. The time for a new venture was propitious. In the latter half of the nineteenth century London had become the wonder and the horror of the age, a vast new city for which the term cosmopolis might have been coined. Engels and Marx had arrived in London as observers of a new world of labour and of suffering. The city represented the future of the human race. Only a few years before, in the period from 1851 to 1872, Henry Mayhew had published the volumes of London Labour and the London Poor in which the inhabitants of 'Babylon' or 'The Great Wen' had for the first time been given a recognisable voice. So the city was news, "piping hot" as the newspaper-sellers used to proclaim it. Jerrold had chosen his artist wisely. At the age of thirty seven Gustave Doré was the most famous and successful illustrator of the day. He had been born in Strasbourg but had quickly moved to Paris, where his skills as a draughtsman and artist were recognised at the young age of thirteen. By the time he was fifteen he was employed as a contributor on the French periodical, Journal pour Rire. But his great and enduring popularity rested upon his book illustrations. He had illustrated the works of Lord Byron in 1853, thus forming his association with the Romantic movement which was of signal importance for the intensity of his London engravings. He was even called "the last of the Romantics". He had then gone to illustrate the Bible, Dante's Inferno and Cervantes's Don Quixote. These volumes, too, are an apt precursor to his work on the most benighted and quixotic of all cities. The project of illustrating London was contracted for four years, during which period Doré was paid an advance of £10,000 per year. This was an enormous sum by any standard, but Doré's acclaim and success were now so great that it seemed merely appropriate. He guaranteed that he would spend at least three months of every year in the capital, and would work intensely with Blanchard Jerrold. Jerrold had his own qualifications for the role of reporter. He was a dramatist, best known for his farce Cool as a Cucumber, as well as a novelist and biographer. He would require all of these talents to do justice to the great city. He was also the editor of Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper, and his journalistic eye and ear did not desert him in his peregrinations with Doré. Jerrold had also been closely associated with Charles Dickens, in particular as one of his contributors on the novelist's weekly periodical Household Words, and he understood at first hand the Dickensian vision of the city. London : A Pilgrimage was first published in 1872 and, despite the reservations of contemporary reviewers, soon came to be recognised as the greatest of all Doré's achievements in illustration. The book contained one hundred and eighty of his engravings (he used a team of engravers to work from his images, painted directly onto the wood) which ranged from scenes of Covent Garden Market to the London Docks, from Kensington Gardens to Whitechapel. He was the true observer of urban humanity, in all its garishness and squalor, and indeed Vincent Van Gogh described him as the "Artist of the People". Van Gogh paid him the greater compliment of closely copying Doré's illustration, of the exercise yard in Newgate, for one of his own paintings. The images of London haunted the artistic imagination. And why should they not? The subtitle of the book was "A Pilgrimage", and indeed the text and illustrations reveal a journey through a sacred place, a place of religious awe and terror where the secrets of the human world stand revealed. In the scenes of the tumbled down tenements, in Whitechapel or in St Giles-in-the Fields, there are terrible images of suffering and despair. In the scenes of coarse labour, at the docks or in the gigantic breweries, the dark anonymous figures are like votaries tending to the monstrous demands of the giant city. These are pictures worthy of Dante's Inferno, which Doré had already depicted. No artist has better used the techniques of chiaroscuro to reveal the shadow world of London. In that sense Doré is very close in spirit to the illustrations of Dickens' Bleak House, published a few years before, which conveyed the image of a city worn down by an oppression of spirit no less intense than the darkness of mud and decay. When one reviewer accused Doré of "inventing" rather than "copying" he was simply referring to the fact that Doré has instinctively created a symbolic world, of the fantastic and the grotesque, as the apt accompaniment of a city built in the shadows of power and of money. Here are close, compacted streets filled with teeming and struggling life. Here are vast throngs innumerable, many of them turned to the dark so that they seem to have no faces. The city itself becomes a kind of prison in which they are immured, and there are occasions when Doré seems to borrow his effects from Piranesi's imagined gaols. But this is also recognisably mid-nineteenth century London. It could be nowhere else. Even in the images of London entertainment, such as Derby Day and the Boat Race, there is a subdued and melancholy pressure of thousands of citizens crowded within a tight space. The conditions of the city determine everything. The first engraving in this wonderful book is of Whittington at Highgate, and the last is of a New Zealander observing the ruins of the city in some future fallen London; the vision of hope is succeeded by the vision of despair, and in that polarity London: The Pilgrimage lives. Peter Ackroyd Preface How many?" the Brighton landlord asks, as the loaded carriages drive to the door. The din of arrivals for Goodwood - of the opening of the Sussex fortnight - is all around me while I prepare to give the patient reader some account of the original conception, and, I fear, the imperfect carrying out, of this Pilgrimage through the Great World of London. It was in the early morning, such a morning as broke upon Wordsworth, in September about seventy years ago - that it was first conceived. Also it was in the happier days of France, when war seemed nearly as far off from Paris as the New-Zealander appears to be still from the ruins of London Bridge, that the plan of a Pilgrimage through the mighty City was discussed seriously. The idea grew upon the Pilgrims day by day. Notes accumulated upon notes. As we sailed, the sea seemed still to broaden. There would be no end to it. It would be the toil of a lifetime to gather in the myriad shapes of interminable London. I proposed that we should open with a general description of the river from Sheerness to Maidenhead; and we were to arrive by the London boat from Boulogne. I insisted it was the only worthy way. As the English coast is made, a white fog is thrown about the ship, daintily as a bride is veiled. The tinkling of bells is heard around. We anchor. Our whistle answers the screams of other ships. We are of a fleet in a fog: undoubtedly near England. It is a welcome and an exquisite sight when the first faint beaming of the morning light smiles through imprisoning vapor. The lifting of the silver veil, as I have watched it, vanishing into the blue above, leaving the scene crystal clear, is a transformation that would give the Pilgrims, it seemed to me, the best first glimpse of Albion, and the broad mouth of the silent highway to London. The water alive with ships; the ancient ports nested in the chalk; the Reculvers brought to the edge of the rock; the flaunting braveries of Ramsgate and Margate, with the ship- loads of holiday folks passing to and from the Pool; the lines of ocean ships and coasting vessels bearing, as far as the eye can reach, out from the immortal river, with the red Nore light at the mouth; the war monsters lying in the distance by Sheerness; the scores of open fishing boats working for Billingsgate Market; the confusion of flags and the astonishing varieties of build and rigging ¿ are a surprise absolutely bewildering to all who have the faculty of observation, and pass to London, this way, for the first time. The entrance to the Thames, which calls to the mind of the lettered Englishman Spenser's "Bridal of Thames and Medway," is a glorious scene, with Sheerness fronted by guard-ships for central point of interest. Between the Nore and Gravesend are places of interest, as the bygone fishing station, Leigh, that once rivalled Hamburg with the luscious sweetness of its grapes. Unlikelier spot to woo the sun to the vine was never seen. Then there is Cliffe, that was Bishop's Cliffe in the time of William the Conqueror. But spots of antiquarian and of human interest come and go, to the pulses of the paddles, at every bend of the stream. Higham, the ancient corn station; Tilbury; the anchored merchant fleet off Gravesend; Gadshill, that lies away from the shore, full of pleasant and sad memories; Long Reach, where the united Cray and Darent fall into the Thames; Purfleet; Erith, gay with river yachts; Hornchurch, where are famous pasturages; Woolwich and Shooter's Hill, whither the Tudor princes went a-Maying; Blackwall and Greenwich, redo-lent of whitebait. A tempting way to travel, had we not been in haste to open upon the heart of London. But by Greenwich we have often lingered and lounged over our work. We watched, one lazy day, the ebb and flow of London's commerce by water from the windows of the "Ship." While the pencil worked - upon the figure of a traveller by Greenwich boat among others ¿ we ran through vast series of subjects to be done. Before us the tugs went to and fro in quest of Indiamen, or towing clippers that were rich with gold from the Antipodes. The hay and straw barges went gently with the tide; and we talked of a sleep upon the hay, under the moon's light, along the silent highway. The barges of stone and grain went in the wake of the hay. The passenger steamboats cleverly rounded them, now and then with the help of a little bad language. The boatmen ashore, fumbling in their dog's- eared pockets, leaned over the railings of the embankment fronting the Hospital, and exchanged occasional gruff words. The Greenwich boys were busy in the mud below, learning to be vagabond men by the help of the thoughtless diners, flushed with wine, who were throwing pence to them. The "Dreadnought" was a splendid bulk of shade against the sky, and looked all the gloom which she folded in her brave wooden walls, big enough to accomplish the Christian boast upon her bulwarks ¿ that her gangways were open to the sick seamen of all nations. Greenwich without the pensioners is like the Tower without the beef-eaters. The happy, peaceful old men who used to bask against the walls upon the stone benches, realizing Francis Crossley's derivation of the old place - the city of the sun, or Grian-wich - were pleasant fellows to chat with. And they were picturesque withal, and gave a meaning to the galleries under which they hobbled. The Invalides cleared of pensioners, Chelsea without a red coat, the National Gallery pictureless - these would be parallel places to the Hospital at Greenwich as it appeared tenantless. "It is the socket of an eye!" was once a companion's observation. The Bellot Memorial fronting the Hospital I take to be the finest lesson that could be carved in stone by the banks of the river along which the sailors of all nations are forever passing. It expresses the gratitude of a great maritime nation towards an intrepid foreign sailor, who put his life deliberately in peril, and who lost it, on a mission of help to an illustrious brother sailor. With the name of Franklin that of Bellot will live. This simple obelisk was a suggestive and humanizing fact to look upon by Pilgrims of the two nations concerned in it. It was on our list; but we end our Pilgrimage without it after all. A happier or sunnier spot is not near London - and I cling to Crossley's definition -than the river front of Greenwich on an early summer evening, when the whitebait eaters are arriving, and the cooks are busy in the remote recesses of the "Ship" and the "Trafalgar." During our planning I cited Isaac Disraeli on local descriptions: "The great art, perhaps, of local description is rather a general than a particular view; the details must be left to the imagination; it is suggestive rather than descriptive." He gives us a good illustration of the writer who mistakes detail for pictorial force, Senderg, who, in the "Alaric," gives five hundred verses to the description of a palace, "commencing at the facade, and at length finishing with the garden." If mere detail were descriptive power, an inventory would be a work of high art. The second illustration advanced by Mr. Disraeli is better than the first, because its value has been tested, and by it the feebleness of mere details as agents for the production of a picture to the mind is demonstrated. Mr. Disraeli takes the "Laurentinum" of Pliny. "We cannot," he justly remarks, "read his letter to Gallus, which the English reader may, in Melmoth's elegant version, without somewhat participating in the delight of the writer in many of its details; but we cannot with the writer form the slightest conception of his villa while he is leading us over from apartment to apartment, and pointing to us the opposite wing, with a 'beyond this,' and a 'not far from thence,' and 'to this apartment another of the same sort,' etc." The details of a Roman villa appear to be laboriously complete - as complete as a valuer could make his statement of the spoons and forks and glasses of the "Trafalgar," the curtains of which are flapping lazily, making the setting sun wink upon our table, while we are talking about the province of the pen and that of the pencil. Careful translators have bared all the mysteries and recesses of Pliny's meaning to architects, who hereupon have aspired to raise a perfect Roman villa.1 "And," says Mr. Disraeli, "this extraordinary fact is the result - that not one of them but has given a representation different from the other!" I remember an instance given me by a writer on London. He had commissioned a colleague to visit Covent Garden early in the morning, and write a faithful and comprehensive description of the scene. The whole produced was minute as the "Laurentinum," and, for power to produce a vivid picture in the mind, as useless. "I assure you," my friend said, "he dwelt on the veins in the cabbageleaves!" Lounging and chatting against the railings of the "Ship," with the afterdinner cigar, the artist catches the suggestion that will realize the scene. A striking pictorial fact is enough. Selection is the artistic faculty. Who that is river-wise does not remember this loaded barge gliding upon the tide into the golden west, or under the beams of the lady moon, when the water was speckled with the lights of the boats and ships, and the larboard and starboard steamer lanterns gave such happy touches of color in the gray blue of the cold scene? We agreed that London had nothing more picturesque to show than the phases of her river and her immense docks. And hereabouts we tarried week after week, never wearying of the rich variety of form and color and incident. My note-books were filled with the studies that were to be made before we entered the streets of London. Smacks, barges, shrimp-boats; the entrance to the Pool; the Thames Police; the ship - building yards; sailors' homes and publichouses; a marine store; groups of dock laborers; the Boulogne boat at St. Catherine's Wharf; the river-side porters; St. Paul's from the river - these are a few of our subjects - selected, and then rejected for others. The art of excision has been throughout a difficult one to practise. Our accumulated material might have filled half a dozen volumes; but herein is the cream ¿ the essence of it. It is impossible, indeed, to travel about London in search of the picturesque, and not accumulate a bulky store of matter after only a few mornings. The entrance to Doctors' Commons; Paternoster Row; the drinking-fountain in the Minories surrounded with ragged urchins; the prodigious beadle at the Bank; the cows in the Mall, with the nurses and children round about; an election in the hall of the Reform Club; clerks at a grill in the City; the "Cheshire Cheese;" Poets' Corner; inside Lincoln's Inn Fields; the old houses in Wych Street; Barnard's Inn; a London cab stand; a pawnbroker's shop on Saturday; the turning out of the police at night; the hospital waiting- room for out-patients outside the casual ward; the stone-yard in the morning; the pigeons among the lawyers in Guildhall Yard; a London funeral; frozen-out gardeners; a drawingroom; a levee; a sale at Christie's; a mock auction; the happy family; London from the summit of St. Paul's; the Blue-coat boys; Chelsea pensioners; Waterman's Hall, St. Mary-at-Hill, in Lower Thames Street; the costermongers; the newsboys-these are only a few of the subjects set down. We repeat, we have taken the cream of them. London an ugly place, indeed! We soon discovered that it abounded in delightful nooks and corners, in picturesque scenes and groups, in light and shade of the most attractive character. The work-a-day life of the metropolis, that to the careless or inartistic eye is hard, angular, and ugly in its exterior aspects, offered us pictures at every street corner. I planned several chapters on work-a-day London, of which the workman's train and the crowds pressing over London Bridge were to be the keynotes. We were to analyze the crowds of toilers, and present to the reader galleries of types: as, the banker, the stockbroker, the clerk, the shop-boy. Instead of a gallery of types, we have given comprehensive pictures. A day's business in the City was another subject; and we were to lunch at Lloyd's, go on 'Change, see the Bank cellars, attend the Lord Mayor's Court, note the skippers in Jerusalem Coffee-House, describe St. Martin's-le- Grand at the closing of the boxes; and then to see the weary host retire home by every City artery to the suburbs. Presently we were to study the departments of the State, with the statesmen, judges, peers, and commoners in the neighborhood of Westminster Hall. Sunday in London was a tempting subject on my list. "The excursion train; the Crystal Palace on an Odd-Fellows' day and on a fashionable Saturday; a trial at the Old Bailey; a Cow Cross audience; an Irish funeral; a green-grocer's shop, and other picturesque shops; the London butcher and his boy; a dustcart and dust-men; street musicians; the boys of London contrasted with the gamins of Paris!" There are abundant studies of the picturesque in Paris ¿ in the Marais, at Montmartre, and in the neighborhood of the Montagne-Sainte-Genevieve; but I am not sure that there is so much more to tempt the artist's pencil and the writer's pen by the banks of the Seine than we have found lying thick upon our way in our Pilgrimage through the Land of Cockayne. In the narrow streets and lanes of the City, for instance, we found tumultuous episodes of energetic, money- making life in the most delightful framework. Such places as Carter Lane, spanned by bridges from warehouse to warehouse, and pierced with cavernous mouths that are helped to bales of food by noisy cranes, lie in a hundred directions amid the hurly-burly of the City. There is a passage leading from Paternoster Row to St. Paul's Churchyard. It is a slit, through which the Cathedral is seen more grandly than from any other point I can call to mind. It would make a fine, dreamy picture, as we saw it one moonlight night, with some belated creatures resting against the walls in the foreground, mere spots set against the base of Wren's mighty work, that, through the narrow opening, seemed to have its cross set against the sky. But we had no room for it. It is impossible to put a world in a nut-shell. To the best of our judgment we have selected the most striking types, the most completely representative scenes, and the most picturesque features of the greatest city on the face of the globe-given to us to be reduced within the limits of a volume. We have touched the extremes of London life. The valiant work, the glittering wealth, the misery and the charity which assuages it, the amusements and sports of the people, and the diversions of the great and rich, are gathered together between these covers, interpreted by one whose imagination and fancy have thrown new lights upon the pages of Milton, of Cervantes, of Dante, of Hood, of Tennyson, in the companionship of an old friend whose lot has been cast along the highways and byways of the two greatest cities of the earth for many years. The two Pilgrims (whose earliest travel in company was to see the Queen of England land at Boulogne in 1855) have belted London with their footprints, and have tarried in many strange places, unfamiliar to thousands who have been life-long dwellers within the sound of Bow-Bells. Wherever human creatures congregate there is interest, in the eye of the artist and the literary observer; and the greatest study of mankind may be profitably pursued on any rung of the social ladder-at the work-house threshold or by the gates of a palace. 1 "Montfaucon, a most faithful antiquary, in his close translation of the description of this villa, in comparing it with Felibien's plan of the villa itself, observes 'that the architect accommodated his edifice to his translation, but that their notions are not the same; unquestionably,' he adds, 'if the skilful translators were to perform their task separately, there would not be one who agreed with another.' " Isaac Disraeli. Introduction WE are Pilgrims, wanderers, gipsy-loiterers in the great world of London -not historians of the ancient port and capital to which Dinanters, of Dinant on the Meuse, carried their renowned brass vessels six hundred years ago. Upon the bosom of old Thames, now churned with paddle and screw, cargoes were borne to the ancestors of Chancer. It is indeed an ancient tide of business and pleasure: ancient in the fabled days of the boy Whittington, listening to the bells at Highgate. We are true to remote amicable relations between the two foremost nations of the earth; we, French artist and English author, when we resolve to study some of the salient features of the greatest city of the world, together. Under the magic influence of its vastness; its prodigious unwieldy life, and its extraordinary varieties of manners, character, and external picturesqueness; a few pleasant days' wanderings through the light and shade of London, became the habit of two or three seasons. Our excursions in quest of the picturesque and the typical, at last embraced the mighty city, from the Pool to the slopes of Richmond. We are wanderers; not, I repeat, historians. And we approach London by the main artery that feeds its unflinching vigour. We have seen the Titan awake and asleep ¿ at work and at play. We have paid our court to him in his brightest and his happiest guises: when his steadfastness to the Old is illustrated by the dress of the Yeoman of the Guard, or his passion for the New is shown in the hundred changes of every passing hour. Hawthorne has observed that "human destinies look ominous without some perceptible intermixture of the sable or the grey." We have looked upon the Titan sick and hungering, and in his evil-doing; as well as in his pomp and splendour in the West, and in the exercise of his noble charities and sacrifices. We have endeavoured to seize representative bits of each of the parts of the whole. Our way has lain in the wake of Leigh Hunt and Charles Lamb, rather than in that of Cunningham or Timbs. In his pleasant recollections connected with the Metropolis, Hunt observes in his usual light and happy manner: - "One of the best secrets of enjoyment is the art of cultivating pleasant associations. It is an art that of necessity increases with the stock of our knowledge; and though in acquiring our knowledge we must encounter disagreeable associations also, yet, if we secure a reasonable quantity of health by the way, these will be far less in number than the agreeable ones: for, unless the circumstances which gave rise to the associations press upon us, it is only from want of health that the power of throwing off their burdensome images becomes suspended." This is Hunt's cheery, speculative custom. He is, hereupon, off into the quarters that in his day were, to the ordinary man, the dreariest and most repulsive in London. But Leigh Hunt bore his own sunshine with him. The fog was powerless upon him. In vain the rain pattered upon his pleasant, handsome face. I think it is R.H. Horne who wrote "Tis always sunrise somewhere in the world." In the heart of Hunt, Orion was for ever purpling the sky. He is in St. Giles's - as St. Giles's was in his time: - "We can never go through St. Giles's, but the sense of the extravagant inequalities in human condition presses more forcibly upon us; but some pleasant images are at hand even there to refresh it. They do not displace the others, so as to injure the sense of public duty which they excited; they only serve to keep our spirits fresh for their task, and hinder them from running into desperation or hopelessness. In St. Giles's Church lie Chapman, the earliest and best translator of Homer; and Andrew Marvell, the wit and patriot, whose poverty Charles II could not bribe. We are as sure to think of these two men, and of all the good and pleasure they have done to the world, as of the less happy objects about us. The steeple of the church itself, too, is a handsome one; and there is a flock of pigeons in that neighbourhood, which we have stood with great pleasure to see careering about it of a fine afternoon, when a western wind had swept back the smoke towards the city, and showed the white of the stone steeple piercing up into a blue sky. So much for St Giles's, whose very name is a nuisance with some." And so the happy spirit trudges through the shadiest places; or will linger to gossip by London Stone of the mighty tides of life that have passed by it. Fletcher and Massinger lying in one grave at St. Saviour's in the Borough; Gower, Chaucer's contemporary hard by ¿ these give sunshine (with memories folded about the Tabard) to Southwark. Spenser was born in Smithfield. It is a hard spot - but the poet, pacing Lombard Street, remembers that it is the birth-place of Pope, that Gray first saw the light in Cornhill, and that Milton was born in Bread Street, Cheapside. Fleet Street holds a crowd of delightful associations. It is not the Queen's Highway, it is that of Johnson and Goldsmith, and all their goodly fellowship. The genius of Lord Bacon haunts Gray's Inn, that if Selden the Inner Temple: Voltaire appears in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, Congreve in Surrey Street, Strand: John of Gaunt in Hattan Garden: and all the wits of Queen Anne's time in Russell Street by Drury Lane. As Hunt observes (he never went into a market, as he affectedly remarked, except to buy an apple or a flower), "the whole of Covent Garden is classic ground from its association with the dramatic and other wits of the times of Dryden and Pope. Butler lived, perhaps died, in Rose Street, and was buried in Covent Garden Churchyard; where Peter Pindar the other day followed him." This amiable, scholarly outlook upon London, is, as Hunt insists at the opening of his essay, a healthy habit of association. "It will relieve us, even when a painful sympathy with the distresses of others becomes a part of the very health of our minds." We have taken care that the happy images of the past which people the dreariest corners of London "never displaced the others, so as to injure the sense of public duty which they excite:" but we have leant to the picturesque - the imaginative - side of the great city's life and movement. I apprehend that the lesson which Doré's pictorial renderings of our mercantile centre will teach, or discover, is that London, artistically regarded, is not, as the shallow have said so often, an ugly place, given up body and soul to money- grubbing. London, as compared with Paris, has a business air which tires the pleasure seeker, and revolts many sentimental observers who will not be at the pains of probing our life. All classes and ranks of Englishmen in London have the air of men seriously engaged in the sordid cares of commercial life. Selden's remark that "there is no Prince in Christendom but is directly a Tradesman" is that of a purely English mind. We are not prone to the picturesque side of anything. We seldom pause to contemplate the proportions of St. Paul's, the grandeur of the Abbey, the beauty of the new Bridge at Westminster. How many have paused to watch one of these familiar hay or straw boats floating to London in the moonlight? How few turn out of Fleet Street (it is but a child's stone's-throw) to mark the quiet, neglected corner in the Temple where the mortal part of Oliver Goldsmith is laid! The mind of Hunt, in its exquisite sensibility and kindly vivacity, was Italian. He saw in our dismal alleys the cradle of the poet, the grand death-bed of the historian, the final agony of the forlorn boy who had nothing but a slate between his head and the thunder cloud. One Sunday night (we had been talking over a morning we had spent in Newgate, and of our hazardous journeys through the Dens and Kitchens of Whitechapel and Limehouse) Doré suddenly suggested a tramp to London Bridge. He had been deeply impressed with the groups of poor women and children we had seen upon the stone seats of the bridge one bright morning on our way to Shadwell. By night, it appeared to his imagination, the scene would have a mournful grandeur. We went. The wayfarers grouped and massed under the moon's light, with the ebon midnight stillness, there was a most impressive solemnity upon the whole, which penetrated the nature of the artist. "And they say London is an ugly place!" was the exclamation. "We shall see," I answered.
Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication:
London (England) -- Social life and customs.
London (England) -- Description and travel.