EXETER CHANGE
Here comes the Paddington omnibus, the first omnibus of all, started seven years ago by Mr. Shillibeer, the father of all those which have driven the short stages off the road, and now ply in every street. You will not fail to observe that the knifeboard has not yet been invented. There are twelve passengers inside and none out. The conductor is already remarkable for his truthfulness, his honesty, and his readiness to take up any lady and to deposit her within ten yards of wherever she wishes to be. The fare is sixpence, and you must wait for ten years before you get a twopenny ’bus.
THE PARISH ENGINE
(From a Drawing by George Cruikshank in ‘Sketches by Boz’)
Now let us resume our walk. The Strand is very little altered, you think. Already Exeter Change is gone; Exeter Hall is already built; the shops are less splendid, and plate glass is as yet unknown; in Holywell Street I can show you one or two of the old signs still on the house walls; Butcher Row, behind St. Clement Danes, is pulled down and the street widened; on the north side there is standing a nest of rookeries and mean streets, where you will have your Law Courts; here is Temple Bar, which you will miss; close to Temple Bar is the little fish shop which once belonged to Mr. Crockford, the proprietor of the famous club; the street messengers standing about in their white aprons will be gone in your time; for that matter, so will the aprons; at present every other man in the street wears an apron. It is a badge of his rank and station; the apron marks the mechanic or the serving-man; some wear white aprons and some wear leather aprons; I am afraid you will miss the apron.
IN FLEET STREET—PROCLAIMING THE QUEEN.
Fleet Street is much more picturesque than the Strand, is it not? Even in your day, Eighty-seven, when so many old houses will have perished, Fleet Street will still be the most picturesque street in all London. The true time to visit it is at four o’clock on a summer morning, when the sun has just risen on the sleeping city. Look at the gables of it, the projecting stories of it, the old timber work of it, the glory and the beauty of it. As you see Fleet Street, so Dr. Johnson saw it.
CROCKFORD’S FISH SHOP
(From a Drawing by F. W. Fairholt)
There is a good deal more crowd and animation in Fleet Street than in the Strand. That is because we are nearer the City, of course; the traffic is greater; the noise is much greater. As for this ring before us, let us avoid it. A coachman fighting a ticket-porter is a daily spectacle in this thoroughfare; those who crowd round often get bloody noses for their pains, and still more often come away without their purses. Look! The pickpockets are at their work almost openly. They have caught one. Well, my friend, our long silk purses—yours will be square leather things—are very easily stolen. I do not think it will repay you for the loss of yours to see a poor devil of a pickpocket pumped upon.
You are looking again at the plain windows with the small square panes. The shops make no display as yet, you see. First, it would not be safe to put valuable articles in windows protected by nothing but a little thin pane of glass—which reminds me that in the matter of street safety you will be a good deal ahead of us; next, an honest English tradesman loves to keep his best out of sight. The streets are horribly noisy. That is quite true. You have heard of the roar of the mighty city. Your London, Eighty-seven, will not know how to roar. But you can now understand what its roaring used to be. An intolerable stir and uproar, is it not? But then your ears are not, like ours, used to it. First, the road is not macadamised, or asphalted, or paved with wood. Next, the traffic of wagons, carts, and wheelbarrows, and hand-carts, is vastly greater than you had ever previously imagined; then there is a great deal more of porter work done in the street, and the men are perpetually jostling, quarrelling, and fighting; the coaches, those of the short stages with two horses, and the long stages with four, are always blowing their horns and cracking their whips. Look at yonder great wagon. It has come all the way from Scotland. It is piled thirty feet high with packages of all kinds: baskets hang behind, filled with all kinds of things. In front there sit a couple of Scotch lasses who have braved a three weeks’ journey from Edinburgh in order to save the expense of the coach. Brave girls! But such a wagon with such a load does not go along the street in silence. It is not in silence either that the women who carry baskets full of fish on their heads go along the street, nor is the man silent who goes with a pack-donkey loaded on either side with small coal; and the wooden sledge on which is the cask of beer, dragged along by a single horse, makes by itself as much noise as all your carriages together, Eighty-seven.
And there is nothing, you observe, for the protection and convenience of passengers who wish to cross the road. Nothing at all. No policeman stands in the middle of the road to regulate the traffic; the drivers pay no heed to the foot passengers; at the corner of Chancery Lane, where the press is the thickest, the boys and the clerks slip in and out among the horses and the wheels without hurt: but how will those ladies be able to get across? They never would but for the crossing-sweeper—the most remunerative part of the work, in fact, is to convoy the ladies across the road; if he magnifies the danger of this service, and expects silver for saving the lives of his trembling clients, who shall blame him?
There are still left some of the old posts which divided the footway from the roadway, though the whole is now paved and—what, Eighty-seven? You have stepped into a dandy-trap and splashed your feet. Well, perhaps, in your day they will have learned to pave more evenly, but just at present our paving is a little rough, and the stones sometimes small, so that here and there, after rain, these things will happen.
THOMAS CHATTERTON
Here we are at Blackfriars. This is the Gate of Bridewell, where they used to flog women, and still flog the ’prentices. Yonder is the Fleet Prison, of which we have just read an account in the ‘Pickwick Papers.’ They have cleared away the old Fleet Market, which used to stand in the middle of the street, and they have planted it behind the houses opposite the Prison. Come and look at it. Let us tread softly over the stones of Farringdon Market, for somewhere beneath our feet lie the bones of poor young Chatterton. No monument has been erected here to his memory, nor is the spot known where he lies, but it is somewhere in this place, which is a tragic and mournful spot, being crammed beneath its pavement with the bones of the poor, the outcast, the broken down, the wrecks and failures of life, and littered above the pavement with the wreckage and refuse of the market. This place was formerly the burial-ground of the Shoe Lane Workhouse.
We can walk down to the Bridge and look at the river. No Embankment yet, Eighty-seven. No penny steamers, either. Yet the watermen grumble at the omnibuses which have cut into their trade.
Here comes the lamplighter, with his short ladder and his lantern.
Gas, of course, has been introduced for ever so long. They have blindly followed the old plan of lighting, and have stuck up a gas lamp wherever there used to be an oil lantern. The theatres and places of amusement are brilliant with gas, and it is gas which makes the splendour of the gin-palace. The shops took to it slowly, but they are now beginning to understand how to brighten their appearance after dark. Go into any little thoroughfare, however, and you will see the shops lit with two or three candles still.
In the small houses and the country towns the candles linger still. And such candles! For the most part they are tallow: they need constant
