I am rather out of conceit with Christmas boxes. I have been wished the compliments of the season by no less than six individuals this very morning, and for those good wishes I, poor man though I be, with family of my own to work for, have had to pay half-a-crown each. I grow suspicious of every smiling face I meet. I walk with my hands in my pocket, and my eyes cast down. I wonder how it fares with my strong-minded wife at home. I know she will have had a rare battle to fight. She will have had the Postman—and the Dustman—and the Waits—and the Sweep—and the Turncock—and the Lamplighter—and the Grocer’s lad—and the Butcher’s boy; and if she compounds with them at the rate of a shilling a-piece, she may bless her stars. I feel that I cannot stand much of this kind of work, and that for a merry Christmas and a happy New Year I shall have to pay rather handsomely. Stop at home—tie up yourknockers—say you are sick or dead, or a shareholder in the Royal British Bank, still you cannot escape the tender mercies of a London Boxing day. Mind, I have not one word to say of the various good wishes and gifts offered by friends and relatives to each other as pledges of esteem and goodwill. I would be the last to find fault with the customs originating in the warm heart of love, and honoured by the sanction of the whole civilized world. By all means let us reverence them ten-fold. But I have a right to complain that I am compelled to pay for mercenary goodwill, and that on me, or such as me, a tax is levied which does no good in most cases, and frequently does an immense amount of harm. When I read, as I am sure to do, in the police reports of the next day, that, “yesterday, being the day after Boxing day, the time of the magistrates was chiefly occupied with cases of drunkenness,” am I not right in wishing that I had kept the money in my own pocket? Some of my friends would do that, but then for the next twelve months they are hampered and inconvenienced in a thousand ways. As a wise man, I choose the least of two evils, but I am an unwilling victim nevertheless. Buta truce to my meditations; let us look at London on a Boxing night. By daylight you would scarce know London. A new race seems to have invaded the streets, filled the omnibuses, swarmed in the bazaars and the Arcade, choked up the eating-houses and the beer-shops. Smith with his Balmoral boots, Brown with his all-round collar, Jones with his Noah’s Ark coat, Robinson with the straight tile, which young England deems the cheese, delight us no more with their snobby appearance and gentish airs; to-day this is the poor man’s holiday. You can tell him by the awkwardness with which he wears his Sunday clothes, by the startling colour of his ties, by the audacious appearance of his waistcoat. If he would only dress as a gentleman dresses, he would look as well, but he must be fine. Well, it matters little so long as he be happy, whether he is so or not; and let him pass with his wife and children, all full of wonder and delight as they stare in at the shop windows and think everything—how happy are they in the delusion!—that all that glitter is gold. Let us wish them a merry Christmas and a happy New Year.
And now the dull, dark day, by the magic power of gas, has been transformed into gay andbrilliant night. The thousands who have spent the day sight-seeing are not satiated, and are flocking round the entrances of the various theatres. Let us stand on the stage of the Victoria, and see them to the number of fifteen hundred mounted upon the gallery benches. Through the small door near the ceiling they come down like a Niagara, and you expect to see them hurled by hundreds into the pit. What a Babel of sounds! It is in vain one cries “Horder!” “’Ats off!” “Down in front!” “Silence!” Boys in the gallery are throwing orange peel all over the pit; Smith halloos to Brown, and Brown to Smith; a sailor in a private box recognises some comrades beneath, and immediately a conversation ensues; rivals meet and quarrel; women treat each other to the contents of their baskets—full of undigestible articles, you may be sure, with a bottle of gin in the corner. The play—it is that refreshing drama, the “Battersea Brigand”—proceeds in dumb-show; but the pantomime, the subject of which is, “Wine, War, and Love, and Queen Virtue in the Vistas of Light or Glitter,”—with what a breathless calm, that is ushered in. It is an old silly affair. Harlequin, clown, andpantaloon, are they not all very dreary in their mirth? Yet the audience is in a roar of laughter, and little babes clap their tiny hands, and tears of laughter chase each other down the withered cheeks of age. This night in every theatre of London is a similar scene witnessed. The British public is supposed to be unusually weak at Christmas, and tricks that were childish and stale when George the Third was king, and jokes venerable even in Joe Miller’s time, are still supposed to afford the most uproarious amusement to a people boasting its Christianity, its civilisation, and enlightenment. Of all conventionalisms those of the stage are the most rigid, antiquated, and absurd.
But the thousands outside who did not get in—what are they about? Look at that respectable mechanic; you saw him in the morning as happy as a prince, and almost as fine; he stands leaning against the lamp-post, apparently an idiot. His hat is broken—his coat is torn—his face is bloody—his pockets are empty; not a friend is near, and he is far away from home. It is clear too what he has been about. Come on a few steps further—three policemen are carrying a woman to Bow-street. A hootingcrowd follow; she heeds them not, nor cares she that she has lost her bonnet—that her hair streams loosely in the wind—that her gown (it is her Sunday one) is all torn to tatters—or that her person is rudely exposed. The further we go, and the later it grows, the more of these sad pictures shall we see. Of course we do not look for such in Regent-street, or Belgravia, or Oxford-street, or the Strand. Probably in them we shall meet respectable people staggering along under the influence of drink—but they are not noisy or obstreperous—they do not curse and swear—they do not require the aid of the police. We must go into the low neighbourhoods—into St Giles’, or Drury-lane, or Ratcliffe-highway, or the New-cut, or Whitechapel—if we would see the miseries of London on Boxing night. We must take our stand by some gin-palace. We must stay there till the crowds it has absorbed and poisoned are turned loose and maddened into the streets. Then what horrible scenes are realized. Here an Irish faction meet, and men, women, and children engage in a generalmêlée, and cries of murder rend the air, and piercing shrieks vex the dull ear of night. There two mates are stripped andfighting, who but this morning were bosom friends, and who to-morrow would not harm a hair of each other’s heads. Here a mechanic with a bloody head is being borne to the neighbouring hospital, to lie there a few months at the public expense, while his family are maintained by the parish. Again, we meet two wives nursing young babes scared into unnatural silence, clenching their fists in each other’s faces, and with difficulty restrained from acts of more savage violence by their drunken husbands. Their day’s holiday has come to this. In the metropolis in 1853, the number of public-houses was 5729—the number of beer-shops 3613. These figures give a total of 9342. If on this night we suppose on an average one fight in the course of the evening takes place in each of these drinking shops, we can get some idea of what goes on in London on a Boxing night. In passing at midnight down Drury-lane, I see three fights in a five minutes’ walk. Enlightened native of Timbuctoo, will you not pity our London heathens and send a few missionaries here!
Not the Great Mogul in Thibet, but the Mogul in Drury-lane, is an increasingly popular place of public amusement. I was there a few years since, and it was not more than half full. The other night I could hardly get standing room, though I paid sixpence and went with the operative swells into the gallery. In these days the test of everything is success. We speak well of the tradesman who does the largest business—of the writer whose books sell the most—of the actor or preacher that draws the largest crowd. We do not stop to criticise the manner in which that business is done, the influence of the writer, the doctrine taught by the preacher, or the character of the acting. On the ordinary principle, then, the Mogul is a creditable establishment, for it is a successful one. Indeed, in the present state of society, it is hardly possible to conceive how a place that combines entertainment and drinking together can well beotherwise. In the course of last summer Vauxhall was open a few nights; I was credibly informed that on each night it was supposed not more than half the company paid for admission, the other half having been admitted by means of orders. It is calculated the sale of drink and refreshment to the crowd thus collected will yield a profit sufficient to cover all expenses. Thus it is such places as the Mogul pay. The entrance fee and the sale of intoxicating drinks must amount to a sum out of which a proprietor can extract a handsome profit.
Thus at the Mogul you have a double attraction. Are you a gin-drinker, you can go and get your quartern or half-quartern over the bar—or you can lounge into the concert-room and quietly sit soaking the whole evening; for, as the performance does not close till midnight, the time admits of a man getting “fou” between the commencement and the close of the entertainment. Drury-lane is what may be called a low neighbourhood, devoted principally to butchers’ and bakers’ shops, pawnbrokers’ establishments, and gin-palaces. Pass these latter any hour of the day you will, and you will findthem crowded by laundresses, and charwomen, and haggard old crones from the sister isle, and young wives whose husbands, it may be, are hard at work. There they stand in the streets, with babies in their arms and dirty children in rags by their side, gossiping with women as ill-conditioned as themselves; and as gossiping makes them thirsty, and as drinking makes people drunk, it is not difficult to imagine the state in which many of these women are. In the middle of the day it is very obvious that many of them have had more than enough. How they can afford it always puzzles me—I cannot, I know, and I believe my weekly earnings equal theirs. The pawnbrokers may help them—but their material guarantees cannot be perpetually forthcoming. These gin-drinkers live cheap, I grant. They herd in the horrid slums of Drury-lane—and people say sometimes, Can you wonder that such poor wretches drink? but they forget that it is the drink that makes them such poor wretches. The money these women spend in drink would pay for decent apartments and clothes that would be clean and comfortable, not ragged and filthy, and stinking with every abomination. It is not poverty that createsdrunkenness, but drunkenness that creates poverty, and the poverty thus created—the dreariest kind of all poverty—abounds in Drury-lane. Well, then, exclaims one of the new school, who believes mankind are to be regenerated by fiddling, does not such a place as the Mogul have a beneficial influence? I will answer this by describing the kind of amusement afforded at the Mogul. You are pent up in a room where the air is ten times worse than in any theatre—any crowded chapel—or worse than in the late Reading Room of the British Museum or the House of Commons. You see a little of the worst acting in London—broad farce, chiefly by artists, if I may term them such, who are more remarkable for their weakness than their strength. “Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounce it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as lief the town crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hands,” says Hamlet; but actors of the class you meet in the Mogul never seem to have heard of the Prince of Denmark. There are some people who doubt whether good acting has a beneficial effect, but there are none who doubt that the effect of badacting is altogether bad. But the dramatical part of the entertainment constitutes but a small part of the evening’s amusement. There is a lady who sings sentimental songs, and a gentleman who sings comic ones, and another gent, with dismal voice and weary mien, who declares—
“Thegurlsof dear Old EnglandAre thegurlsofgurlsfor me-e-eh.”
“Thegurlsof dear Old EnglandAre thegurlsofgurlsfor me-e-eh.”
I am not aware that any of these performers sing songs of an objectionable character; and if a sneer is now and then introduced at what common decent people believe to be good, and true, and righteous, and of beneficial tendency, it is only, perhaps, such as would be approved of by the patrons of the Haymarket. You tell me that this is better than sitting all night at a bar drinking; but, I ask, is not this entertainment itself an excuse for drinking? You see the room is full of men and women evidently belonging to the working classes; now of all men working men can least afford to waste time in such places. All their future emphatically depends upon themselves. More than most men are they called upon to exercise self-denial and to cultivate their powers, if they would achieve independence.But how can the working men who sit night after night in such places as the Mogul ever hope to rise? yet any night there must be a couple of hundred of such present, for they swarm like bees. They come professedly for the entertainment, but all the while it lasts they are doing a good deal in the drinking line. It is not one glass or two that will satisfy them; and the worst of it is, that many very clever fellows when once they begin drinking do not know when to leave off. In this respect they are like Dr Johnson, who could either feast or fast, but could never be a moderate drinker. They come to the Mogul—perhaps they would never think of sitting all night in a public-house—but they come to the Mogul for the entertainment, and they finish by drinking as if they had come for the drink alone. The Mogul is indeed an educational establishment, but unfortunately it educes the wrong set of faculties. In Drury-lane, of all lanes in the world, there is the least occasion to associate intoxicating drink with happiness. Everywhere the idea is a mischievous delusion and a remnant of barbarism, but there it is a positive curse. At the Mogul you will see the sweetheart with her lover, the mother withher child,—it may be the sucking babe,—till midnight, breathing an air of tobacco smoke, the husband and the wife, all you say enjoying themselves in a social way, but all, I say, encouraging an appetite which, if it gets the mastery,—and in the majority of cases it does,—will destroy them without mercy. Were the Mogul simply a gin-palace, it would have far less patronage, it would merely have its share of the general trade; but the fact that it provides musical and dramatic entertainments—that it gives decent people an excuse for drinking—that it attracts those whom a common gin-shop would repel—is that precisely which gives it its power for danger. Such places are decoy shops, the more dangerous as drinking in Drury-lane is really disgusting, and enough to make a man a teetotaller for life. The neighbourhood is rich in warnings, but thehabituéof the Mogul soon learns to heed them not.
A stranger, ignorant of our inner life, and unacquainted with our social system, knowing only that we call ourselves a Christian people, and that we boast that Christianity places woman in a peculiarly favoured position, might dwell among us for awhile, and, seeing how woman is flattered and followed, might imagine that our condition was perfect, and that here, at least, woman, the weak, was sheltered by man, the strong. In the dazzling ball-room—on the glittering promenade—he might meet the lovely and the fair, and deem that they were no brilliant exception, but as they were sheltered and loved, so were sheltered and loved all of their common sex. Grieved would he be to find out his mistake; yet more grieved would he be to know that the graceful drapery that added to the beauty that everywhere flashed upon his eye was wrought by tender and delicate women, who, pale and wan, slave at the needle frommorn till eve, and from eve till again the dim grey of morn gleamed in the east—by women withered before their prime—by women who, for no crime, but from their simple desire to live by the honest and honourable labour of their hands, are shut up in heated and unhealthy rooms, debarred from social duties and joys, and who know nothing of life but its wants and woes—by women who can find in slavery itself nothing more forlorn than their melancholy fate—by women to the majority of whom there is no honest way of escape from the lingering death that besets them, but the grave.
We would guard our readers against giving way to mawkish sentimentalism;thatit is not our aim to excite. There are employers who are all they should be; there are milliners’ and dressmakers’ assistants who find their labour what all healthy labour is, a blessing, and not a curse. Nor is every dressmaker shut up in these hot-houses of disease beautiful, nor the daughter of one who has seen better days. It is true that some of these unfortunate girls are the daughters of “clergymen, medical men, and officers;” but it is because they partake of our common humanity—because they have humanblood and human hearts—because life was given them that in it they might bless and be blessed—because, in their injuries and wrong, the human family and its Father above are injured and wronged—that we claim for them from society sympathy and redress. We say nothing of the moral danger to which, in a metropolis like this, they are peculiarly exposed. When sin offers so golden a bait, it shows that those who yet continue at their work deserve respect and aid. If some of them have fallen—if some of them, driven by despair, have walked our streets to gain their bread, let us blame the system which has made so infamous and wretched a mode of life seem a change to be desired. Let the cure be adopted; let the work now done be distributed among a larger number of hands; and in this country, at least, there is no lack of persons eager to be employed. In many of the fashionable establishments increased cost of production can be of but little moment. Let employers learn to practise humanity, and let our high-born and influential ladies see to it, that it is no thoughtlessness of theirs that compels their poorer sisters to toil with a sinking frame and a heavy heart. As a nation, we have worked outone problem in civilization; we have shown that the utmost wealth can exist side by side with the deepest poverty—the grossest ignorance with the most cultivated knowledge—the most elevating piety with the most debasing fetichism—the fairest virtue with the most revolting vice. Be it our nobler work to show to the nations of the earth how, while our higher classes live in refinement and wealth, there is no class, however humble, but can joy in the possession of social happiness and rights.
But what, you ask, has this to do with Caldwell’s? Only this, that of the class to which I have referred, I believe more may be found of an evening at Caldwell’s, than anywhere else in London. It is not all dressmakers who toil thus severely and unnaturally; and few of them are there who do not in the course of the year find time to pay Caldwell’s a visit. Who has not heard of Caldwell’sSoirées Dansantes? Are they not advertised in every paper? Are they not posted in gigantic bills in every street? In quiet country lanes, miles and miles away from town, do we not come across the coloured letters by which Mr Caldwell announces his entertainment to the world? Who is Mr John Caldwell?We will let him speak for himself. He has an establishment in Dean-street, Soho. The building cost him nearly four thousand pounds. On boxing-night he had as many as 600 customers, “and on average nights,” he tells us, “I have about 200.” The charge for admission is eight-pence. Mr Caldwell has a public-house just by, and from that supplies wine, and ale, and spirits. “I have never had a case of drunkenness in my place for years; I am very particular—I never let a drunken man remain.” On an average about thirty glasses of spirits are drunk in the dancing room in the course of an evening, and about forty glasses of beer. “I believe my place is carried on in as respectable a manner as can be. Some of the first noblemen come; there are some very respectable tradesmen round the neighbourhood, and a great many young people from the neighbourhood. The rooms are principally supported by the working classes.” The dancing saloon opens at eight, and is closed at a quarter to twelve. Such is the evidence given by Mr Caldwell himself before the select committee of the House of Commons on public-houses. As is perfectly natural, it is allcoleur de rose. The union of the first noblemenand theéliteof the working classes over spirits-and-water, or in the mazy dance, is a beautiful specimen of fraternisation, and the small quantity of beer and spirits drunk by 200 persons indicates an amount of sobriety rare in places of public amusement. I think Mr Caldwell has a little understated the case. I fear he forgot to tell the committee that the drinking at his place was in the refreshment-room down-stairs, not in the dancing-room above; while in the latter the small quantity he asserts is consumed, I am inclined to think, much more may be disposed of down-stairs. In the course of his own examination some disagreeable truths oozed out. We give a couple of questions and answers in proof of this.—Sir George Grey: “Do you mean to say that the dancing-saloon would have no sufficient attraction for the people unless there were connected with it the facility of obtaining spirituous liquors?” “I think not;the people want a glass of wine,or negus,or brandy-and-water”. Again, Mr Caldwell has been unable to procure a license on account of the opposition of the publicans in the neighbourhood. The Chairman asks, “Do you think the publicans would withdraw their opposition?” “Yes,they begin to find my house an advantage;when parties leave my rooms,they stand together at the corner of the streets,and say,We will have a parting glass.They do not all have it at my rooms.”
Now this answer does not well coincide with Mr Caldwell’s former evidence. It is quite as much the drink as the dancing that is the attraction, and as to his respectable tradesmen, and the fact of persons not being tipsy, and that of some of the first noblemen coming there, all these assertions are fairly open to criticism. It was only the other day I heard a London magistrate declare that publicans never could tell when a person was tipsy; and as to respectability, your Robsons, and Camerons, and Sadleirs are always considered highly respectable. Ask the first person you meet about your neighbours. What is the answer? Oh, they are a highly respectable family; they are immensely rich. And as to noblemen coming into such places, I imagine that would be precisely the reason why the judicious father of a pretty girl would prefer her dancing anywhere rather than in Mr Caldwell’s establishment in Dean-street. I have not much faith in the benefits of that speciesof the mixture of all ranks. Like the Irishman’s reciprocity, it is all on one side. Tennyson makes his hero tell Lady Clara Vere de Vere—
“At me you smiled, but unbeguiledI saw the snare and I retired,—The daughter of a hundred earls,You are not one to be desired.”
“At me you smiled, but unbeguiledI saw the snare and I retired,—The daughter of a hundred earls,You are not one to be desired.”
But perchance a young maiden, led away by the excitement of the hour, could not find it in her heart to address similar language to Lady Clara Vere de Vere’s brother. The last victim always believes that she is to be the exception to all general rules; she may transgress, but not pay the penalty—pluck the forbidden fruit, and for doing so not forfeit Eden—plunge wildly into sin, and sorrow, and shame, and yet find peace in her heart and the light of heaven lying on her path; but cause and effect are eternal, and, youth gone, and pleasure gone, and the power to attract gone, and the inward sense of right succeeded by the stings of conscience and the gnawing of remorse, what is left but to weep madly and in vain for
“The tender grace of a day that is dead”?
“The tender grace of a day that is dead”?
But we are in Caldwell’s,—let us go into the gallery and look down. I know not the name of the new dances, but how the women swim round the room, as the music now hurriedly hastens, now softly dies away. The girl that dances here so modestly to-night in twelve months will have lost her maiden shame, will be dressed in silks and satins, will be dancing at the Argyll, and supping at Scott’s or Quin’s. That girl they call Rose—and a rose she is, for she might shine in a Belgravian drawing-room, and walks in beauty as a fairy queen—might have lit up a home with her love, and made a brave heart proud; but here she comes, night after night, and domestic life is to her tame after music and dancing such as she has here. Beauty you will not find much of, nor that overdress which stamps the character of the women at the Casino or the Argyll in unmistakeable terms; and the men are the class you usually meet in these places. They may be pickpockets, or they may be peers; you can scared tell the difference in these levelling days. If I had not Mr Caldwell’s express assertion to the contrary, I should certainly say that that young fellow with a pint bottle of champagne in his hand was decidedly drunk,—at any rate,he has very much the appearance of a tipsy person; but the waiters seem to be of Mr Caldwell’s opinion, and are still offering him more drink, and the women around seem to think it is rather fun than otherwise. Ah! little do they reflect how such as he, under the influences of drink, forget the decencies of life, the claims of duty, forget even the common instincts of common humanity; so that the wife, whom he has vowed to love, honour, and protect, is abandoned, and the home forsaken, for the orgies of the public-house. Do the women around us ever expect to be the wives and mothers of such, or have they, young and fair as many of them seem, learnt already that recklessness as to the future which robs life of all its glory, and incarcerates the soul in a living grave? I can see, even here, a gaiety more sad than tears. But I need not continue my description; dancing in public rooms in the metropolis is much the same everywhere. Of course the place is all that Mr Caldwell says it is. I believe with him that it is as respectably conducted as establishments of the kind can be; but at the same time Mr Caldwell confesses it leads to drinking, and that is quitereason enough, independently of other obvious considerations, why I come away thankful that no wife or sister of mine is amongst the parties nightly to be met at Mr Caldwell’ssoirées dansantes.
“Ina set of pictures illustrative of Greek customs, it was quite impossible to leave out thehetæræwho gave such a peculiar colouring to Grecian levity, and exercised so potent a sway over the life of the younger members of the community. Abundant materials for such a sketch exist, for the Greeks made no secret of matters of this kind; the difficulty has been not to sacrifice the vividness of the picture of the ordinary intercourse with these women to the demands of our modern sense of propriety,” says Professor Becker, in his truly admirable work on the Private Life of the Ancient Greeks. In the same manner, and for the same reason, the modern sense of propriety is supposed to be in the way of any very graphic description of Cremorne; yet we have hetæræ almost as bewitching as Aspasia or the Corinthian Lais; and if our students, and learned clergy, and holy bishops write long articles about the Athenian Dionysiaonly held once a year, why should we not speak of ours which last all the summer, and the scene of which is Cremorne? At the Dionysia the most unbridled merriment and drunkenness were the order of the day, and were held quite blameless. For a while the most sober-minded bade adieu to the stringency of habit, following the well-known Greek maxim—
“Ne’er blush with drink to spice the feast’s gay hour,And, reeling, own the mighty wine-god’s power.”
“Ne’er blush with drink to spice the feast’s gay hour,And, reeling, own the mighty wine-god’s power.”
So it is in Cremorne. If Corinth had her groves sacred to Aphrodite, so has Cremorne. It offends our modern sense of propriety to speak of such matters. English people only see what they wish to see. If you are true—if you look at real life and say what you think of it, you shock our modern sense of propriety. We may talk about drainage and ventilation, and the advantages of soap, but there we must stop. Keep the outside clean, but don’t look within. Thus is it our writers make such blunders. For instance, good-meaning Mrs Stowe, after she had written Uncle Tom, came here to be lionized, and to write a book about us. She did so, and a very poor book it was. But I must quote one passagefrom “Sunny Memories.” In writing of a visit she paid to the Jardin Mobile in Paris, she writes, “Entrance to this Paradise can be had, for gentlemen a dollar, ladiesfree; this tells the whole story. Nevertheless, do not infer that there are not respectable ladies there; it is a place so remarkable that very few strangers stay long in Paris without taking a look at it. And though young ladies residing in Paris never go, and matrons very seldom, yet occasionally it is the case that some ladies of respectability look in. Nevertheless, aside from the impropriety inherent in the very nature of the waltzing, there was not a word, look, or gesture of immorality or impropriety. The dresses were all decent, and, if there was vice, it was vice masked under the guise of polite propriety. How different, I could not but reflect, is all this from the gin-palaces of London! There, there is indeed a dazzling splendour of gas-lights, but there is nothing artistic, nothing refined, nothing appealing to the imagination. There are only hogsheads and barrels, and the appliances for serving out strong drink; and there for one sole end—the swallowing of the fiery stimulant—come the nightly thousands, from the gay andwell-dressed to the haggard and tattered, in the last stage of debasement. The end is the same, by how different paths! Here they dance along the path to ruin with flowers and music—there they cast themselves bodily, as it were, into the lake of fire.” A more unfair comparison, I think, was never drawn; a drinking-shop is much the same everywhere, and in Paris as well as in London, people, to use Mrs Stowe’s own words, cast themselves bodily into the lake of fire. We have our Jardin Mobile, but of course Mrs Stowe never went there—as we have known good people confessing to entering theatres in Germany or France who on no account would have gone near one at home. If Mrs Stowe had confessed to going to Cremorne, she would have been cut, and so she went to the Paris Cremorne instead; but to write a true book on England, she should have gone to Cremorne. Look at Cremorne; is it not one, as Disraeli is reported to have said, of the institutions of the country?[194]The gardens are beautiful, are kept in fine order, are adorned with really fine trees, and are watered by the Thames, here almost a silver stream. Though near London, on a summer evening the air is fresh and balmy, the amusements are varied, the company are genteel in appearance, and here, as in Paris, they dance along the path to ruin with flowers and music. If Mrs Stowe gives the preference to the Parisians, she may be right, but I am inclined to dispute the grounds of that preference. The gin-palaces are filled with our sots, with our utter wrecks, with all that is loathsome and low in man or woman. Your son, fresh from home and its sacred influences, is shy of entering a gin-palace at first. He goes there with a blush upon his cheek, and a sense of shame at his heart. He shrinks from its foul companionship, and when he has come out he resolves never to be what he has seen under those accursed roofs. But you take him to Cremorne, or you send him to the Lowther Arcade, or the Holborn Casino, and he is surrounded by temptation that speaks to him with almost irresistible power. The women are well-dressed and well-behaved. The drink does not repel but merely stimulates thehot passions of youth, and lulls the conscience. For one man that is ruined in a gin-shop there are twenty that are ruined at Cremorne.
As to the morality of such places, that is not to be settled dogmatically by me or by any one else. Tennyson talks of men fighting their doubts, and gathering strength; in the same manner, men may fight temptation and gather strength, and one man may merely spend a pleasant evening where another may in the same interval of time ruin himself for life. The tares and the wheat, in this confused world of ours, grow side by side. Unnaturally, we bring up our sons only to pluck what we deem the wheat; and immediately they are left to themselves, they begin gathering the tares, which we have not taught them are such, and have for them at least the charm of novelty. It does not do to say there is no pleasure in the world; there is a great deal. The grass is green, though, it may be, sad sinners tread it. The sun shines as sweetly on carrion as on the Koh-i-noor. The lark high up at heaven’s gate sings as loud a song of praise, whether villains or lovers listen to its lays. Places are what we make them. I fear there are many blackguards at Cremorne;the women most of them are undoubtedly hetæræ, and yet what a place it is for fun! How jolly are all you meet! How innocent are all the amusements,—the ascent of the balloon—the dancing—the equestrian performances—the comic song—the illuminations—the fire-works—the promenade on the grass lawn or in the gas-lit paths; the impulses that come to us in the warm breath of the summer eve, how grateful are they all, and what a change from Cheap-side or from noisy manufactories still more confined! By this light the scene is almost a fairy one. Can there be danger here? Is there here nothing artistic—nothing refined—nothing appealing to the imagination? Come here, Mrs Stowe, and judge. You will scandalize, I know, that portion of the religious public that never yet has looked at man and society honestly in the face, but you will better understand the frightful hypocrisies of our domestic life; you will better understand how it is that a religion which we pay so much for, and to which we render so much outward homage, has so little hold upon the heart and life. There is no harm in Cremorne, if man is born merely to enjoy himself—to eat, drink, be merry, and die. I grant, itis rather inconvenient for a young man who has his way to fight in life to indulge a taste for pleasure, to launch out into expenses beyond his means, to mix with company that is more amusing than moral, and to keep late hours; and young fellows who go to Cremorne must run all these risks. It may do you, my good sir, no harm to go there. You have arrived at an age when the gaieties of life have ceased to be dangerous. You come up by one of the Citizen boats to Chelsea after business hours, and stroll into the garden and view the balloon, or sit out the ballet, or gaze with a leaden eye upon the riders, and the clowns, and the dancing, or the fireworks, and return home in decent time to bed; and if you waste a pound or two, you can afford it. But it is otherwise with inflammable youth—a clerk, it may be, in a merchant’s warehouse on 30s.a-week, and it is really alarming to think what excitements are thus held out to the passions, at all times so difficult to control. There are the North Woolwich Gardens—there is Highbury Barn—all rivalling Cremorne, and all capable of containing some thousands of idle pleasure-seekers. Vauxhall, with its drunken orgies, is gone never to return—the place thatknows it now will know it no more for ever—but such places are what thoughtless people call respectable, are frequented by respectable people; and amidst mirth and music, foaming up in the sparkling wine, looking out of dark blue eyes, reddening the freshest cheeks, and nestling in the richest curls, there lurks the great enemy of God and man. Young man, such an enemy you cannot resist; your only refuge is in flight. Ah, you think that face fair as you ask its owner to drink with you; it would have been fairer had it never gone to Cremorne. A father loved her as the apple of his eye; she was the sole daughter of his home and heart, and here she comes night after night to drink and dance; a few years hence and you shall meet her drinking and cursing in the lowest gin-palaces of St Giles’s, and the gay fast fellows around you now will be digging gold in Australia, or it may be walking the streets in rags, or it may be dying in London hospitals of lingering disease, or, which is worse than all, it may be living on year after year with all that is divine in man utterly blotted out and destroyed. The path that leads to life is strait and narrow, and few there be who find it.
Everyclass in London has its particular pleasures. The gay have their theatres—the philanthropic their Exeter Hall—the wealthy their “ancient concerts”—the costermongers what they term their sing-song.
I once penetrated into one of these dens. It was situated in a very low neighbourhood, not far from a gigantic brewery, where you could not walk a yard scarcely without coming to a public house. The costermongers are a numerous race. Walk the poor neighbourhoods on a Saturday night, and hear the cries,—“Chestnuts all ’ot a penny a score,” “Three a penny, Yarmouth bloaters,” “Penny a lot fine russets, a penny a lot,” “Now’s your time, fine whelks, a penny a lot.” Well, the itinerant vendors of these delicacies are costermongers. Or in the daytime see the long carts drawn by donkies loaded with greens and other vegetables, all announced to the public in stentorian lungs—these men are costermongers.Listen to those boys calling, “Ho, ho, hi, hi,—what do you think of this here? a penny a bunch, a penny a bunch. Here’s your turnips!” Those boys are costermongers’ lads. It is seldom they last long as men. They soon lose their voice, and how they pick up a living then no one can tell. Their talk is peculiar. Mr Mayhew tells us their slang consists merely in pronouncing each word as if spelt backwards. “I say, Curly, will you do atopofreeb(pot of beer)?” one costermonger may say to another. “It’son doog, Whelkey,on doog” (no good, no good), the second may reply; “I’ve had a regulartroseno(bad sort) to-day; I’ve been doingdab(bad) with mytol(lot)—han’t made ayennep(penny), s’ elp me—.” “Why, I’ve cleared aflatchenorc(half a crown) a’ ready.” Master Whelkey will answer perhaps, “Butkooltheesilop(look at the police),kool him(look at him). Curly:Nommus(be off), I am goingto do the tightner” (have my dinner). Would you know more of them, come with me.
Just look at the people in this public-house. A more drunken, dissipated, wretched lot you never saw. There are one or two little tables in front of the bar and benches, and on thesebenches are the most wretched men and women possible to imagine. They are drinking gin and smoking, and all have the appearance of confirmed sots. They are shoemakers in the neighbourhood, and these women with them are their wives. “Lor’ bless you, sir,” exclaims the landlord, “they spend all they has in drink. They live on a penny roll and a ha’porth of sprats or mussels, and they never buy any clothes, except once in three or four years, and then they get some second-hand rubbish.” And here, when they are not at work, they sit spending their money. Are there none to save them?—none to come here and pluck these brands from the burning? I know they are short-lived; I see in their pale, haggard, blotched, and bloated faces premature death. The first touch of illness will carry them off as rotten leaves fall in November; but ere this be the case, can you not reveal to them one glimpse of a truer and diviner life? But come up-stairs into this concert-room, where about a hundred costermongers and shoemakers are listening to the charms of song. Talk about the refining influence of music! it is not here you will find such to be the case. The men and women and lads sitting round these shabbylooking tables have come here to drink, for that is their idea of enjoyment; and whilst we would not grudge them one particle of mirth, we cannot but regret that their standard of enjoyment should be so low. The landlord is in the chair, and a professional man presides at the piano. As to the songs, they are partly professional and partly by volunteers. I cannot say much for their character. The costermongers have not very strict notions ofmeumandtuum; they are not remarkable for keeping all the commandments; their reverence for the conventional ideas of decency and propriety is not very profound; their notions are not peculiarly polished or refined, nor is the language in which they are clothed, nor the mode in which they are uttered, such as would be recognised in Belgravia. Dickens makes Mrs General in “Little Dorrit” remark, “Society never forms opinions, and is never demonstrative.” Well, the costermongers are the reverse of all this, and as the pots of heavy and the quarterns of juniper are freely quaffed, and the world and its cares are forgotten, and the company becomes hourly more noisy and hilarious, you will perceive the truth of my remarks. Anybody sings who likes; sometimes aman, sometimes a female, volunteers a performance, and I am sorry to say it is not the girls who sing the most delicate songs. The burdens of these songs are what you might expect. In one you were recommended not to go courting in the kitchen when the master was at home, but, instead, to choose the “airey.” One song, with a chorus, was devoted to the deeds of “those handsome men, the French Grenadiers.” Another recommended beer as a remedy for low spirits; and thus the harmony of the evening is continued till twelve, when the landlord closes his establishment, to the great grief of the few who have any money left, who would only be too happy to keep it up all night. Let me say a word about costermonger literature. I see Mr Manby Smith calculates its pecuniary value at twelve thousand a year. It is wretched in every way,—in composition, in printing, in cuts, and paper. These street ballads—we are all familiar with them—are sold by a class of men called patterers, and are written so as to bear on the events of the day. Thus, at the last Lord Mayor’s day we had a song sung in the streets, of which the following is a specimen:—
“Away they go, the high and low,Such glorious sights was never seen,But still the London Lord Mayor’s showIs not as it has former been,When old Dick Whittington was mayor,And our forefathers had to go;They had not got no Peelers there,To guard great London’s Lord Mayor’s show.”
“Away they go, the high and low,Such glorious sights was never seen,But still the London Lord Mayor’s showIs not as it has former been,When old Dick Whittington was mayor,And our forefathers had to go;They had not got no Peelers there,To guard great London’s Lord Mayor’s show.”
And we are told in another verse that—
“They will talk of Russia, France, and that,And mention how the money goes;Each man will eat a pect of sprats,That’s the fashion at the Lord Mayor’s show.”
“They will talk of Russia, France, and that,And mention how the money goes;Each man will eat a pect of sprats,That’s the fashion at the Lord Mayor’s show.”
Some of these songs are indecent; almost all of them have a morbid sympathy with criminals. Thus Redpath in the following lines is almost made a martyr to his benevolence and Christian life.
“Alas! I am convicted, there’s no one to blame—I suppose you all know Leopold Redpath is my name;I have one consolation, perhaps I’ve more,All the days of my lifeI ne’er injured the poor.“I procured for the widow and orphan their bread,The naked I clothed, and the hungry I fed;But still I am sentenced, you must understand,Because I had broken the laws of the land.“A last fond adieu to my heart-broken wife—Leopold Redpath, your husband, ’s transported for life;Providence will protect you, love, do not deplore,Since your husband never hurted or injured the poor.* * * * *“In London and WeybridgeI in splendour did dwell,By the rich and the poor was respected right well;But now I’m going—oh! where shall I say—A convict from England, oh! far, far away.* * * * *“I might have lived happy with my virtuous wife,Kept away from temptation, from tumult and strife,I’d enough to support me in happiness to live,But I wanted something more poor people for to give.”
“Alas! I am convicted, there’s no one to blame—I suppose you all know Leopold Redpath is my name;I have one consolation, perhaps I’ve more,All the days of my lifeI ne’er injured the poor.
“I procured for the widow and orphan their bread,The naked I clothed, and the hungry I fed;But still I am sentenced, you must understand,Because I had broken the laws of the land.
“A last fond adieu to my heart-broken wife—Leopold Redpath, your husband, ’s transported for life;Providence will protect you, love, do not deplore,Since your husband never hurted or injured the poor.
* * * * *
“In London and WeybridgeI in splendour did dwell,By the rich and the poor was respected right well;But now I’m going—oh! where shall I say—A convict from England, oh! far, far away.
* * * * *
“I might have lived happy with my virtuous wife,Kept away from temptation, from tumult and strife,I’d enough to support me in happiness to live,But I wanted something more poor people for to give.”
The street singers of the metropolis seized upon the Waterloo Bridge Tragedy as a fit subject for the exercise of their dismal strains. The following is printed verbatim, from an illustrated broadsheet vended “at the charge of one halfpenny:”—
“Oh such a year for dreadful murdersAs this before was never seen;In England, Ireland, Britain over,Such horrid crimes has never been.But this which now has been discoveredVery far exceeds the whole,The very thought makes men to shudder,How horrible for to unfold.“See and read in every paperThis dreadful crime, this mystery,Worse, far worse, than James Greenacre’sIs the London mystery.“His body it was cut to pieces—Oh how dreadful was his fate!Then placed in brine and hid in secret—Horrible for to relate.The head and limbs had been divided—Where parts was taken no one knows;In a carpet bag they packed the body,Over Waterloo bridge they did it throw.“It is supposed that a female monsterHer victim’s body onward dragged,With no companion to assist her,All packed within a carpet bag.Justice determined is to take her,When without doubt she’ll punished be,The atrocious female GreenacreOf the Waterloo Bridge Tragedy.”
“Oh such a year for dreadful murdersAs this before was never seen;In England, Ireland, Britain over,Such horrid crimes has never been.But this which now has been discoveredVery far exceeds the whole,The very thought makes men to shudder,How horrible for to unfold.
“See and read in every paperThis dreadful crime, this mystery,Worse, far worse, than James Greenacre’sIs the London mystery.
“His body it was cut to pieces—Oh how dreadful was his fate!Then placed in brine and hid in secret—Horrible for to relate.The head and limbs had been divided—Where parts was taken no one knows;In a carpet bag they packed the body,Over Waterloo bridge they did it throw.
“It is supposed that a female monsterHer victim’s body onward dragged,With no companion to assist her,All packed within a carpet bag.Justice determined is to take her,When without doubt she’ll punished be,The atrocious female GreenacreOf the Waterloo Bridge Tragedy.”
The reader will see from these specimens how alien the costermonger race is in sympathy and life from the respectable and the well-to-do. Their songs are not ours, nor their aims nor conventional observances. What wonder is it that they leave their wretched cellars all dirt and darkness, and crowd round the public-house; or that at the costermongers’ house of call—in the midst of an atmosphere of gin and tobacco-smoke, and under the influence of songs of very questionable merit—the poor lads receive the education which is to stamp their character and to teach them to grow up Ishmaelites, with their hands against every one, and every one’s hand against them. Society will not educate its poor; wonder not then that they educate themselves, and that after a fashion not very desirable in the eyes of the friends of morality, of order, and of law.
Is an attractive lounge to the seedy, the disreputable, the unwashed. Evidently it is a grand and refreshing and popular sight to see justice doled out in small parcels—to see the righteous flourish, and the wicked put to shame. I fear, however, it is a feeling of a more personal nature that is the chief attraction, after all. Jones goes to see what a mess Davis gets into; Smithes to see if Scroggins keeps “mum” like a brick; the many, to retail a little scandal at the expense of their neighbours,—if at the expense of a friend, of course so much the better. A little before ten a crowd is ranged round the police-office, waiting to see the prisoners, who have been locked up all night, marched into the court, which generally commences its operations at ten. The court itself offers very little accommodation to the most thinking public. At one end of the room is the presiding magistrate; below him is the clerk; on the right of the magistrate is thebox for complainant and witnesses. Opposite him is the dock in which the defendant is placed; behind some boards, over which only tall people can see, is the public; and on the magistrate’s right are the reporters—or, rather, the penny-a-liners—who write on “flimsy,” and leave “copy” on spec. at all the daily paper offices. Let me say a word about these exceedingly seedy-looking individuals connected with the fourth estate. That they are not better dressed is, I take it, their own fault, and arises from that daring defiance of conventionalism which is so great a characteristic of the lower orders of gentlemen connected with the press. Let me say,en passant, the public owe these men much. It is they who labour with a perseverance worthy of a better cause, and that deserves to be successful, to describe the cases heard in the police-courts in the most racy and tempting terms. In their peculiar phraseology, every bachelor who gets into a scrape is a gay Lothario, and every young woman that appeals to justice is lady-like in manners and interesting in appearance. The poor wretch that crawls along the street, all rouged and decked out in finery not her own, is “a dashing Cyprian.”Every Irishman is described as “a native of the Green Isle;” every man in a red coat, “a brave son of Mars;” every sailor, “a jolly tar;” and a man with a little hair on his chin, or under it, is invariably “bearded like the pard;” and if anything causing a smile occurs,—and sometimes on the gravest occasions justice will even grin,—the court is—so they always put it—convulsed with laughter. Knights of the pen, a police-case loving-to-read public should be grateful to you! By the side of the reporters often sit some three or four of those mischief-makers, pettifogging attorneys; men who, in their own opinion, only require a clear stage and no favour, and the mere formality of a call to the bar, to rival, if not surpass, the fame of a Scarlett, or a Brougham, or a Lyndhurst, or an Erskine, or even of a Coke himself; and truly if to bully, to suppress what is true, and insinuate what is false—if to gloss over the injustice done by a client, and to proclaim aloud that of the opposite party—if to speak in an emphatic manner and at a most unmerciful length—if to browbeat witnesses, mislead the court, and astonish the weak nerves of their hearers, constitute a fitness for legal greatness, these gentlemenhave only to enter their names at any of the Inns of Court, and eat the requisite number of dinners, to win at once undying reputation. At the dock appears the trembling culprit, guarded sedulously by the police, who quietly assume his or her guilt, and do all they can in endeavouring to make out a case,—occasionally going so far in their zeal as to state things not exactly true, theesprit de corpsof course leading them to aid each other whenever they have a chance.
In a low neighbourhood the principal cases heard are those arising from intoxication. On this particular morning we will suppose the court opens with what is very common, an assault case between two Irish families who were hereditary foes, and who, emigrating, or rather, like Eneas, “driven by fate,” from the mother country at the same time, locate, unfortunately for themselves, in the same neighbourhood,—and who, in accordance with the well-known remark of Horace, continue in St Giles’s the amicable quarrels of Tipperary, to the amusement of a congenial neighbourhood, which likes a good fight rather than not, but to the intense terror and annoyance of all such of her Majesty’s lieges asare well disposed. As generally happens, the case, after a considerable amount of hard swearing on both sides, is dismissed, leaving to each party the inestimable privilege of paying costs. This case creates great interest; complainants and defendants are well-known performers, and the mob comes to see them as people go to see Wright at the Adelphi. When it terminates, the Guelphs and Ghibelines leave the court to discuss the oft-told tale in the nearest public-house. The remaining cases are those of sailors and navvies, charged with being drunk and disorderly, of robberies committed by prostitutes when their victims were stupified by beer, and of ragged urchins with precocious developments, the head and front of whose offending was that they “heaved” stones, or that they declined to “move on” when particularly requested to do so by the police. Poor little outcasts, they are better off in jail than on the streets; and they know it, and own to an astonishing number of convictions, and gladly look forward to the time when they shall be able to achieve greater enormities and manlier offences against law. These cases are soon disposed of; in the majority the magistrate hears the complaint, and simply tellsthe little urchin he “may go down.” But let us not leave yet. That is a publican, and he has a charge against this decent-looking woman,—she is not a drunkard;—let us listen.
“Call Phil. Bird,” says the superintendent.
As Phil. Bird is in court, there is no need to call him, but he is called in stentorian tones nevertheless. Policemen, like other men, love to hear the sound of their own voices. Phil. immediately steps into the witness-box. That he is a favourite with the beer-drinking public around is clear as soon as he kisses the Bible, and promises—a promise lightly made, and lightly broken—to speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, “So help me God.”
“Well, Bird,” says the magistrate, “will you state your complaint?”
“Certainly, your honour,” is the reply. “I was in my shop on Saturday, when that woman (pointing to the trembling female in the dock) came in kicking up a row, and asking for her husband; well, she spoke to her husband, and wanted to get him away, but her husband did not choose to go; and as she would not leave quietly, I was obliged to go and speak to her,upon which she turned round, abusing me, saying I had robbed her of her husband, that I had got his money, and kept making a great many remarks which I was not going to submit to, especially as she had got quite a crowd of people together, and it was interfering with my business; so I called in policeman Brown, and gave her in charge.”
Policeman Brown corroborates the testimony. He has yet to win his spurs, and is glad of an opportunity of distinguishing himself; besides, he has drunk too much of Phil. Bird’s fine sparkling ales to refuse to do him a little friendly turn when he has a chance.
“Mr Bird’s house is a well-conducted house, I believe, Mr Superintendent?” says the magistrate, more from habit than with any view of eliciting information.
“Good, your worship,” is the answer,—“impossible to be better.” The superintendent, perhaps, has received a small cask of Devonshire cyder, as a mark of private friendship and personal esteem, from the complainant, and this might, though I would fain hope not—but flesh is grass, and a superintendent of police is but flesh after all—have influenced the nature ofhis reply. This is the more probable, as one bystander whispers to another, that he believes Phil. Bird’s is the worst house in the street, a remark which seems to excite the cordial approbation of the party to whom it is addressed—a remark also which the superintendent hears, and which leads him to cry “silence” in his loudest voice and sternest manner. The whisperer is cowed at once.
Phil. Bird looks gratefully at the superintendent; the latter is grateful in O’Connell’s sense, and has a lively sense of favours to come.
“And the woman, what about her?” asks the magistrate.
“I believe generally she’s very well behaved,” says policeman Brown, as if on the present occasion she had been guilty of an enormous offence.
“Do you know anything against her?”
“Not as I know of, yer worship.”
“Well,” says the magistrate, addressing the poor washerwoman, nervous and “all of a tremble,” as she afterwards confidentially informs a friend, looking as if she expected immediate sentence of death passed upon her, “what do you say to the charge? Mr Bird says you went andcreated a disturbance in his shop; now you had no business to do that, you know.”
“I know I hadn’t, sir,” said the poor woman; but here she burst into tears.
Had she been alone with the magistrate, who is a kind-hearted man, and wishes to do what is right, she would soon have found her tongue, and her warm appeal, told with natural eloquence, because told out of a full heart, would soon have reached his own; but she is frightened—her energies are paralysed,—she cannot speak at all.
“Oh, Brown,” says the magistrate, as if a bright thought struck him, “was the woman sober?”
“Well, I can’t swear that she was drunk,” said Brown, reluctantly.
This by no means helps to soothe the poor woman’s nerves, but it drives her to speak in her own behalf.
“Your worship,” she exclaims, “I was as sober as you are now”—she might have added, but she did not, “and a good deal more sober than policeman Brown.” “I did go to Phil. Bird’s, but it was to fetch my husband out, who had been inveigled in there, and had been ledinto spending all the money he had, and getting drunk.”
“Well, my good woman, the publican must be protected. You should not have created a disturbance. I shan’t inflict a fine, but you must pay the costs. You may go down.”
And so the time of the magistrate is taken up; not one case out of ten comes to anything; but the officiousness of the police is shown; the lazy and good-for-nothing part of the public have a gratuitous entertainment provided for them, and the criminal class get an initiation into the secrets of the law, which robs it of its terrors, as in such matters it is especially true familiarity breeds contempt. Most of the lads and girls—especially the latter—placed at the bar, rather seem to like the excitement, and go before the bench in their best clothes and with their best looks, as they go to the gallery of the Victoria or the Sunday tea-garden.
Is situated in an appropriate locality in the City-road, not far from a lunatic asylum, and contiguous to a workhouse. From time immemorial the Cockneys have hastened thither to enjoy themselves. Children are taught to say—
“Up and down the City-road,In and out the Eagle,That’s the way the money goes,Pop goes the weasel.”
“Up and down the City-road,In and out the Eagle,That’s the way the money goes,Pop goes the weasel.”
And the apprentice or clerk, fresh from the country, and anxious to see life, generally commences with a visit to the Grecian Saloon—Eagle Tavern. As a rule, I do not think what are termed fast men go much to theatres. To sit out a five-act tragedy and then a farce is a bore which only quiet old fogies and people of a domestic turn can endure; and even where, as in the Grecian Saloon, you have dancing, and singing, and drinking added, it is not the fast men, but the family parties, that make it pay.There you see Smith, Brown, Jones, and Robinson, with their respective partners and the dear pledges of their well-regulated loves. They come early, sit outJack Shepherdwith a resolution worthy of a better cause, listen to the singing from the Music Hall, return again to witness the closing theatrical performances, and enjoy all the old stage tricks as if they had not heard them for the last fifty years. These worthy creatures see a splendour in the Grecian Saloon which I do not. Then there are the juvenile swells. Anxious mothers in the country, fearing the contaminations of London and the ruin it has brought on other sons, lodge them in remote Islington, or Hoxton, still more remote. It is in vain they do so. The Haymarket may be far off, but the Grecian Saloon is near; and the young hopefuls come in at half-price, for sixpence, and smoke their cigars, and do their pale ale, and adopt the slang and the vices of their betters with too much ease. And then there are the unfortunates from the City-road, with painted faces, brazen looks, and gorgeous silks; mercenary in every thought and feeling, and with hearts hard as adamant. God help the lad that gets entangled with such as they!It requires no prophet to foretell his career. Embezzlement—first with a view to replace the sum appropriated to guilty pleasures,—then, embezzlement hopelessly continued because once begun,—then discovery, and punishment, and shame, and despair. Youth must have its pleasures, I know. Young blood is not torpid like that of age; and song and woman will ever be dear till time furrows the brow and silvers the hair. But why need we seek them where the air is contaminated—where the evening’s amusement will not bear the morning’s reflection—where, though pleasure lead the way, scattering sweet flowers, vice and shame and premature old age bring up the rear? Look at those lads; they cannot have been long emancipated from school. The erect collar, the straight hat, the long coat, indicate the fact that they belong to the Young England party; and here, listening to indifferent songs, and witnessing inferior dramatic performances, and associating with the refuse of the other sex, they are learning to be men. What a manhood to look forward to! And if there be no excuse for them, there is still less for what I may call the domestic part of the audience,—the fat old women with their basketsfilled with prog, the pursy old tradesmen that drop in to smoke a pipe, and the various tribes of gents and bagsmen on their way home from the city.
Let me say a word on our domestic life. When there is so little difference between the majority of men and women, why should the line of demarcation be so severely drawn? We talk very prettily about home, sweet home, and poets sing its love and purity and charms; and a popular picture is that which the artist draws when he groups together the gray-haired grandfather and grandmother, seated by the fire, and father and mother by their side, and brave lads and graceful girls around listening, by the warm light of the lamp, to some tale of manly struggle or Christian chivalry, or lifting up together the glad voice of song. But why should your son or mine, immediately he goes out into the world and leaves the parental roof, become a stranger to all this? If the Englishman’s home be his castle, why should we cast out into the ditch, to lie down and die in its mire, all who are not of the family? Think of the thousands and thousands of young men who yearly come up to town, strangers to every one,and with no chance of getting into female society, except such as they find at such places as the Eagle. These women are not lovelier than you meet with in respectable houses—not better educated nor more correct in their principles; yet, as by natural instinct one sex seeks the society of the other, we condemn our youth to the company of such. Paterfamilias is afraid the young men will pay attention to his daughters. Perhaps the young lady-daughters fancy it to be beneath them to be civil to their father’s young men. Perhaps the young men themselves believe that an honourable connexion is beyond their means, and deliberately pursue a career of vice. In all these cases, in my humble opinion, very serious blunders are involved. The life of a bachelor under the circumstances I here allude to is quite as costly as that of a married man, without the stimulus to exertion which the latter has. Paterfamilias forgets that the young man he fears may be the suitor for his daughter’s hand, though he is poor to-day, may be comparatively rich to-morrow; and the young ladies should remember that it is rather too much to expect that a young man just entering upon life will be able to launch out in the same style as those who for thirty orforty years have been pursuing a successful commercial career. It is our false pride that eats us up,—that makes us sneer at love in a cottage,—that turns our women into cross old maids, and our men into gay Lotharios, very disreputable and, to a certain extent, deliriously gay. I admit that we have much more outside respectability, but is society the better? Have we more true happiness? If Wordsworth is correct, “plain living and high thinking” go together. But our aim is high living, and I fear the thinking is very, very plain in consequence. We nurse up in our midst, and reverently worship—and denounce as worse than an infidel every one who utters the truth respecting it—an aristocracy the richest and most luxurious in the world,—an aristocracy which would long ere this have become intellectually effete, did it not recruit its ranks from successful adventurers in the shape of lawyers; and the commercial classes vying with this aristocracy in outward show, the effects are manifest all over the land, in the general attempts to live beyond one’s means, and to get into a circle supposed to be superior to that in which originally we moved. In Germany they manage better; the noble and the trading classes neverhave a rivalry, the gulf is impassable, and hence the home life is less pretentious and happier than ours. In England “the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier, he galls his kibe.” What we want is a return to the plain living and high thinking of an age gone by; less show and more reality; the destruction of the wall of partition, either of poverty or of false pride, and the widening and enhancing the charms of the domestic circle. If now and then the result is a marriage not very intelligible on pecuniary principles, let us consider even that as a lesser evil than that resulting from the companionship, on the part of our youths, with the women who infest such places as the Eagle, and without which it is clear such places could not pay.
I will call evidence as to the character of the amusements at the Eagle Tavern. In the parliamentary report on public-houses, I find Mr Balfour is examined respecting it. He says, “The most detrimental place of which I know, as far as women are concerned, is the Eagle Tavern in the City-road. There are gardens, and statues round the gardens, and everything to attract. There is a large theatre, and thereare theatrical representations during the week. I have seen women there whom I have recognised next day as common street-walkers. The gardens are open, with alcoves and boxes on each side, and lads and young persons are taken in there and plied with drink. The house is opened on Sunday evening, but on Sunday evening there is no dramatic representation nor music. I have seen gentlemen come out drunk.” On a Sunday night when Mr Balfour visited the place, he said, “There were various rooms. There is what is called the Chinese-room, the ball-room, and the concert-room. They were all filled with persons drinking, and I saw a great number of female servants, and females of a certain description; there is no doubt upon that subject at all.” Now, Mr Conquest, the present proprietor, must have read all this evidence, yet I do not see that he has taken any steps to reform the evil complained of. It pays, I suppose, and that is enough. Much money has been made by it. The late proprietor retired a wealthy man. The present proprietor, we presume, trusts to do the same, and if the establishment panders to vice, if women date their ruin to Sunday evenings there, if mothers seetheir sons robbed of all that would make them decent men owing to their visits there, what’s the odds? cries the dram-seller, who, like another Cain, asks if he be his brother’s keeper.
The regular attendants see this not. “It’s a beautiful place,” says Mrs Smith to Mrs Robinson, “a’nt it, my dear?” as they sit eating questionable sausage rolls, and indulging in bottled beer. They see the pictures in the balcony, and think the gas jets quite miraculous, and admire the weak fountains and ambitious grottoes—and they laugh even at the comic singer, a feat I cannot achieve anyhow. Evidently the Eagle Tavern audience is of the same genus as an Adelphi audience, a people easily moved to laughter, and much given to taking their meals with them,—a people not prone to look before or after,—who would be drowned rather than get up and walk into the Ark, and who see no chance of their own house being burnt down in the fact that their neighbour’s house is in flames. I don’t believe naturally men or women are these dull clods, but custom makes them such, and they see no danger, nor perhaps is there where they are concerned.