Part 8 (1/2)
And, since London Bridge, that natural dividing-line of peoples, was pa.s.sed, have not the very streets changed in some subtle and unconscious manner, to a more sordid character; the shops to a more blatant kind,--even the people to a different and lower type? It may be partly fancy; yet, is not this often the effect produced by the ”Surrey side”? The big thoroughfare called the Borough High Street, or more simply, the ”Borough”--(this part of Southwark has fairly earned the right to be called the ”Borough,” having returned two members to Parliament for 500 years),--this was the great highway, even in Roman times, between the city and the southern counties. East of the Borough, the long, narrow, busy, dirty Tooley Street leads to Bermondsey; this street is famous for its ”three tailors” of the political legend, according to which they addressed the House of Commons as ”We, the People of England.” Here, from mediaeval days, was the only bridge; here, therefore, were, naturally, stationed all the mediaeval inns and hostelries. This way did the ”Canterbury Pilgrims”
pa.s.s out of London; here they would stop and refresh themselves at the ”Tabard,” the ”White Hart,” and their compeers.... What now remains of these? The ”Tabard,” rebuilt in Charles II.'s time, and for long the finest old house of its kind in London, was burnt down in 1873; it now only exists in its name, still flaunted bravely above a commonplace modern inn. The ”Queen's Head,” the ”White Hart,” the ”King's Head,”
exist now only as hideous railway-yards or equally hideous modern edifices; the only remaining relic of them all is the ”George” Inn, where a solitary fragment, a long block of ancient buildings, with picturesque, sloping, dormer roofs, and bal.u.s.traded wooden galleries, is yet, by the mercy of the Great Northern Railway Company, spared to us, to tell of its former glories. The present hosts of the ”George,”--two ladies,--are pleasant, hospitable people, and their small, dark, panelled rooms are clean and comfortable. They seem, however, to entertain a mild feeling of boredom for the constant accession of reverent pilgrims who flock annually to their shrine.
”And it's only for the last few years,” the younger lady remarks, somewhat sadly, ”only since the last inn, the 'Queen's Head,' you know was pulled down, that so many people have come. A great many Americans ... oh, I suppose they come out of curiosity, like; one can't blame 'em. Do people stay here in the summer? Yes, a good few--some business men, but mostly artists and tourists; it's just curiosity. Then, it's, 'Would you mind if I take a photograph?' or 'Have I your leave to sit in the yard and sketch?' Do I let them do it?... oh, yes” (with a sigh), ”it doesn't matter to me. I suppose they may be going to put it in some book or some article; but it's nothing to me.... I never read the article!”
[Ill.u.s.tration: _Cricket in the Street. The lost Ball._]
If this lady be not a cynic, she at any rate embodies a great deal of the philosophy of life!
What the other Inns were like, can be more or less seen from this small portion of one. They have mostly vanished with the march of progress of recent years, for fifty years ago d.i.c.kens could still write:
”In the Borough there still remain some half-dozen old inns which have preserved their external features unchanged.
Great rambling queer old places, with galleries and pa.s.sages and staircases wide enough and antiquated enough to furnish materials for a hundred ghost stories.”
At the old ”White Hart,” now destroyed, d.i.c.kens first introduced to the world the immortal Sam Weller, as he appeared cleaning the spinster aunt's boots after that sentimental lady's elopement with the deceiving Mr. Jingle. These old inns, in the heyday of their prime, were made still more famous by the open-air theatrical representations that took place in their balconied courtyards. Toil and trouble, the eternal struggle-for-life, may be the portion of ”the Surrey Side”
to-day, but in Shakespeare's time it was princ.i.p.ally noted for its amus.e.m.e.nts and its junketings. Now, the chief buildings of Southwark and Walworth are gaols and asylums, and its best-known localities are the omnibus terminuses, dignified mysteriously by names of public-houses,--such as the ”Elephant,” &c. Even the dramatic tastes of the people ”over the water” are now supposed to be primitive; and ”transpontine” is the adjective applied to melodrama that is too crude for the superior taste of northern London. Yet here, in Shakespeare's day, were all the most fas.h.i.+onable theatres--theatres, too, frequented by all the literary and dramatic lights of the day. Here stood that small martello-tower-like theatre, the ”Globe,” the ”round wooden 'O'”
alluded to in _Henry V._, where Shakespeare and his companions played; here also were the ”Rose,” the ”Hope,” and the ”Swan.” And below St.
Saviour's, and its neighbouring Bishops' Palace and park, were the localities known as ”Bankside” and ”Paris Garden,” the former famous for its bull and bear-baiting (”a rude and nasty pleasure,” says Pepys), the latter for its theatre, and also for its somewhat doubtful reputation. There were, of course, a few plague-spots, inseparable from places of public amus.e.m.e.nt; but the Southwark of Elizabeth's day was a centre of national jollity and merry-making.
Open gardens fringed the river-banks, by which flowed a clear and yet unsullied Thames, and their salubrious walks were the favourite resort of citizens. Certainly, Shakespeare and his a.s.sociates would hardly recognize Southwark now: Messrs. Barclay and Perkins's famous brewery now covers the site of the Globe Theatre; the ancient gardens have given place to wharves and warehouses; the fas.h.i.+onable promenade to railway lines and goods offices; the green turfy banks to streets and lanes of sticky Southwark mud. And Southwark mud is surely of a quite peculiar stickiness! The big brewery, covering some twelve acres, is not exactly an improvement on the landscape. It belonged, in 1758, to Mr. Thrale, husband of the witty lady whom Johnson loved as a daughter. And though some among us have, as Dr. Johnson prophesied at the sale of the brewery in its early days, ”grown rich beyond the dreams of avarice,” yet the source of riches is seldom in itself beautifying.
Winchester House, the ancient palace of the Bishops of Winchester, stood in Tudor days between St. Saviour's and the river; ”a very fair house, with a large wharf and a landing-place.” Here Bishop Gardiner lived in great state, and here, to please his patron the Duke of Norfolk, he arranged ”little banquets at which it was contrived that Henry VIII. should meet the Duke's niece, Katherine Howard, then a 'lovely girl in her teens.'” Poor thing! in a short year or two her head was destined to fall, by the headsman's axe, within the precincts of the gloomy Tower, on the river's opposite bank! The extent of the old palace is uncertain; its remains are now nearly all destroyed, except an old window and arch, built up into the surrounding warehouses. The name, however, of the ”Clink,” the prison used by the Bishops for the punishment of heretics, still exists in the modern Clink Street. In the same way, ”Mint Street,” Borough, recalls an ancient and forgotten mint, established here by Henry VIII. for coinage; and Lant Street--but Lant Street recalls nothing so much as d.i.c.kens, and his creation Mr. Bob Sawyer. d.i.c.kens lived in Lant Street himself as a boy, while his insolvent family were rusticating in the neighbouring Marshalsea; hence he knew it well.
[Ill.u.s.tration: _A County Court._]
”A bed and bedding” (he writes) ”were sent over for me”
(from the Marshalsea), ”and made up on the floor. The little window had a pleasant prospect of a timber-yard; and when I took possession of my new abode, I thought it was a Paradise.”
”The Crown Revenues,” d.i.c.kens further adds (in describing the abode of Mr. Bob Sawyer), ”are seldom collected in this happy valley; the rents are dubious, and the water communication is very frequently cut off.”
If Southwark contained many doubtful characters in Shakespeare's time, it contains, as Mr. Charles Booth's book shows us, some ”black spots”
of crime still! The old Marshalsea and the King's Bench Prisons must always have been a centre of drifting and s.h.i.+ftless population. All parts of the ”Borough” do not enjoy a thoroughly good reputation; bad sanitation, overcrowding, all the worst sins of the much-abused ”East End,” may here too be seen. ”Is any one,” asks a recent writer, ”ever young in the Borough? Is not carking care their birthright?” In crowded Southwark and Walworth, round the ”Elephant,”--the mysterious ”Elephant,” to which all roads lead,--”aflare, seething, roaring with mult.i.tudinous life,” are miserable human rabbit-warrens, where they even live ten in a room. ”Pore, sir,” cries Mrs. Pullen (one of the submerged), ”pore! why, the Mint, sir, the Mint, sir, is known for it; you've 'erd on it your ways, ain't you?” Mrs. Pullen held up her hands and laughed, as if she was really proud of ”the Mint and its poverty.”
But, though the Borough children--poor little wastrels--are still wild,--Education, it seems, is slowly taming them.
Those who are interested in the children of the poor,--and who is not?--should read Mr. Charles Morley's sympathetic ”Studies in Board Schools,” a considerable portion of which refers to Walworth and the Borough. The redeeming of the infant population of London is surely a n.o.ble work, and nowhere are the parental methods of the Board Schools so well set forth as in that delightful volume, real with the reality of life, and, like life itself, something between laughter and tears.
Life has few mysteries for the Borough child, whose garments are strange and weird, whose voice ”soon loses any infantine sweetness it may possess. Some of the ragged mites of girls of the Borough will even rap out an oath which would shock your ears who live over the water. But they mean nothing. It is like sailors' language, only sound and a little temper. Why, even the chirrup of the Borough sparrow has a minatory ring about it.” Mr. Morley goes on to tell of a kindly inst.i.tution dubbed ”the Farm House” (strange name in such surroundings!), where, owing to Mr. G. R. Sims and the ”Referee,” six or seven hundred hungry school-children are, like the sparrows and sea-gulls, fed daily during the long winter:
”The Farm House” (he says), ”is a strange mansion to find in the heart of the Marshalsea--just over the way is the site of the famous prison. The graveyard of St. George the Martyr is now a public garden, grim enough, to be sure, with its black tombstones and soot-laden balsam poplars. On one of the walls is placed a board on which is printed the legend: 'This stands on the site of the Marshalsea Prison described (or words to this effect) in Charles d.i.c.kens's well-known novel, _Little Dorrit_.' The Farm House was once the town dwelling of the Earls of Winchester. It has an ancient time-worn front, a court, mysterious chambers, old oak panels upon which you can just make out some of the old Winchester ladies and gentlemen; a curious old staircase; and I daresay a ghost or two if one went into the matter.
But for a long time past it has been a common lodging-house.
Beds in a haunted chamber may be had at fourpence a night.
Many a strange history could those white-washed walls tell if they could speak, I dare say--of the good old days in Henry the Eighth's time, and even of more recent years. Many a man who began life with the hopefullest prospects has been glad to hide his head in the old Farm House, down Marshalsea way, Borough.”
”Misery,” continues this writer, ”is strangely prolific; every hovel, every court, every alley teems with children,” ”little mothers”
carrying heavy babies, like Miss Dorothy Tennant's tender picture, _A Load of Care_ ... that heavy, heavy baby, weighing down that tiny, tiny nurse.... _Nota Bene_: There always _is_ a baby. By the time a little wool appears on the head of number one, number two appears, and so on--well, nearly _ad infinitum_. There is no doubt whatever that babies are the bugbears of the Borough ratepayers.”