Fifty Years Ago - Walter Besant

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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 snuffing: they drop their detestable grease everywhere—on the tablecloth, on your clothes, on the butter and on the bread. You, Eighty-seven, will be saying hard things of gas, but you do not know from what darkness, and misery of darkness, it saved your ancestors.

      As for the churches, they are not yet generally provided with gas. There is some strange prejudice against it in the minds of the clergy. Yet it is not Papistical, or even freethinking. In most of them, where they have evening service, the pews are provided with two candles apiece, stuck in tin candlesticks, with four candles for the pulpit and four for the reading-desk. The effect is not unpleasing, but the candles continually require snuffing, and the operation is constantly attended with accidents, so that the church is always filled with the fragrance of smouldering tallow wicks. The repugnance to gas is so great, indeed, in some quarters, that one clergyman, the Rector of Holy Trinity, Marylebone, is going to commit all his vestrymen to the Ecclesiastical Courts because they have attempted to light the church with gas.

      Here is a City funeral in one of the burial-grounds close to the crowded street; the clergyman reads the Service, and the mourners in their long black cloaks stand round the open grave, and the coffin is lowered into it, and outside there is no cessation at all to the bustle and the noise; the wagoner cracks his whip, the drover swears at his cattle, the busy men run to and fro as if the last rites were not being performed for one who has heard the call of the Messenger, and, perforce, obeyed it. And look—the mould in which the grave is dug is nothing but bits of bones and splinters of coffins. The churchyard is no longer a field of clay: it is a field of dead citizens. You, friend Eighty-seven, will manage these things better.

      Here goes one of the long stages. Saw you ever a finer coach, more splendidly appointed, with better cattle? Ten miles an hour that coachman reckons upon as soon as he is clear of London. They say that in a year or two, when all the railways are opened, the stage coaches will be ruined, the horses all sold, and the English breed of horses ruined. We shall travel twenty miles an hour without stopping to change horses; the accidents will be frightful, but those who meet with none will get from London to Edinburgh in less than twenty-four hours. Next year they promise to open the London and Birmingham Railway.

      3rd REGIMENT OF BUFFS

      Here comes a soldier. You find his dress absurd? To be sure, his tight black stock makes his red cheeks seem swollen; his queer tall hat, with the neat red ball at the top, might be more artistic; the red shoulder roll, not the least like an epaulette, would hardly ward off a sword-cut; the coat with its swallow tail is no protection to the body or the legs; the whitened belt must cost an infinite amount of trouble to keep it fit for inspection, and a working-man’s breeches and stockings would be more serviceable than those long trousers. There are always brave fellows, however, ready to enlist; the soldier’s life is attractive, though the discipline is hard and the floggings are truly awful.

      DOUGLAS JERROLD

      (From the Bust by the late E. H. Bailey, R.A.)

      My friend, it is half-past five, and you are tired. Let us get back to Temple Bar and dine at the Mitre, where we can take our cut off the joint for eighteen-pence. About this time most men are thinking of dinner. Buy an evening paper of the boy.

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