Part 14 (1/2)
KENSINGTON AND CHELSEA
”In old days ... the hawthorn spread across the fields and market gardens that lay between Kensington and the river.
Lanes ran to Chelsea, to Fulham, to North End, where Richardson once lived and wrote in his garden-house. The mist of the great city hid the horizon and dulled the sound of the advancing mult.i.tude; but close at hand ... were country corners untouched--blossoms instead of bricks in spring-time, summer shade in summer.”--_Miss Thackeray, Old Kensington._
”There is not a step of the way, from ... Kensington Gore to ... Holland House, in which you are not greeted with the face of some pleasant memory. Here, to 'mind's eyes' ...
stands a beauty, looking out of a window; there, a wit, talking with other wits at a garden gate; there, a poet on the green sward, glad to get out of the London smoke and find himself among trees. Here come De Veres of the times of old; Hollands and Davenants, of the Stuart and Cromwell times; Evelyn peering about him soberly, and Samuel Pepys in a bustle.... Here, in his carriage, is King William the Third, going from the Palace to open Parliament ... and there, from out of Kensington Gardens, comes bursting, as if the whole recorded polite world were in flower at one and the same period, all the fas.h.i.+on of the gayest times of those sovereigns, blooming with chintzes, full-blown with hoop-petticoats, towering topknots and toupees.... Who is to know of all this company, and not be willing to meet it?”--_Leigh Hunt._
”Faith, and it's the old Court suburb that you spoke of, is it? Sure, an' it's a mighty fine place for the quality.”--_Old Play._
[Ill.u.s.tration: _Anglers in the Parks._]
The great highway of Knightsbridge,--on the southern side of the Park,--leads, as everybody knows, from Hyde Park Corner to Kensington.
Kensington, as it is now, is an all-embracing name, a generic term; it comprises not only Old Kensington, but both ”West Kensington,” a new and quickly increasing district of tall flats and ”Queen Anne”
houses, as far removed from London proper, for all practical purposes, as St. Albans; and ”South Kensington,” a dull and uninteresting quarter, but close to all the big West-end museums and collections, and where no self-respecting lady or gentleman of the professional or ”middle cla.s.ses” can really help living. He, or she, must, nevertheless, beware lest they stray too far from the sacred precincts. For, on the west, South Kensington degenerates into Earl's Court; on the south, a belt of ”mean streets” divides it from equally select Chelsea (and, in London, the difference of but one street may divide the green enclosure of the elect from the dusty Sahara of the vulgar); while on the east, its glories fade into the dull, unlovely streets of Pimlico, brighten into the red-brick of the Cadogan Estate, or solidify into the gloomy pomp of Belgravia.
These, however, are but Kensington's later excrescences, due to the enormous increase of London's population, and to the consequent building craze of the last century. It was the Great Exhibition of 1851 that gave building, in this direction, its great impetus. The original village of Kensington, the ”Old Court Suburb” of Leigh Hunt's anecdotes, lies in and about the Kensington High Street, the Gardens, and the Palace. It is pre-eminently of eighteenth century renown; Pepys hardly mentions it; its glory was after his day. It is reached from London by the Knightsbridge Road, a thoroughfare that, crowded as it is to-day by the world of fas.h.i.+on, was, only at the end of the eighteenth century, so lonely as to be unsafe from the ravages of thieves and footpads; a road ”along which,” Mr. Hare remarks plaintively, ”London has been moving out of town for the last twenty years, but has never succeeded in getting into the country.” So solitary, indeed, was this road that, even at the close of the eighteenth century, a bell used to be rung on Sunday evenings to summon the people returning to London from Kensington Village, and to allow them to set out together under mutual protection. London is not, even now, well lit as compared with large foreign cities; in old days, however, the darkness was such as to draw down the well-deserved strictures of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Such was the insecurity of that courtly highway, the Kensington or Knightsbridge Road, that it was the first place to adopt, in 1694, oil lamps with glazed lights, in preference to the older fas.h.i.+on of lanterns and wicks of cotton.
Some of London's finest mansions are now to be found in this Knightsbridge Road. On the left, as you go towards Kensington, are Kent House (Louisa, Lady Ashburton), once lived in by the Duke of Kent, Queen Victoria's father; Stratheden House, and Alford House,--this last a fine modern building of brick and terra-cotta, with high roofs. Beyond Kensington Gore (so called from ”Old Gore House,” that once occupied the site of the Albert Hall), is the attractive and strangely rural-looking Lowther Lodge, now so cruelly dominated by tall ”mansions”; and further still, the vast ”Albert Hall,” a red Colosseum of music. This, in spring, is a delightful drive; indeed, London wears here such a semi-suburban air that it is with almost the feeling of entering a new townlet that we presently approach the charming ”High Street” of Old Kensington. Charming it is still, with still something of an old-world air; and yet, during the last fifty years or so, it has terribly altered. In the old days, the days when ”the shabby tide of progress” had not yet spread to this quiet old suburb of which Miss Thackeray wrote so lovingly;--had not yet engulfed ”one relic after another, carrying off many and many a landmark and memory,”--there were ”gardens, and trees, and great walls along the high road that came from London, pa.s.sing through the old white turnpike.... In those days the lanes spread to Fulham, white with blossom in spring, or golden with the yellow London sunsets that blazed beyond the cabbage-fields.... There were high brown walls along Kensington Gardens, reaching to the Palace Gate: elms spread their shade and birds chirruped, and children played behind them.”
Yet, even for sweet Dolly Vanborough, Miss Thackeray confesses, Old Kensington was already vanis.h.i.+ng. Already for her ”the hawthorn bleeds as it is laid low and is transformed year after year into iron railings and areas, for particulars of which you are requested to apply to the railway company, and to Mr. Taylor, the house-agent.” How much, alas, is left of it now? True, Holland House, and Kensington Palace, and Gardens, are left inviolate, but Campden Hill is adorned by the aspiring chimneys of waterworks, the peace of quiet Kensington Square is invaded by model lodging-houses, the underground railway defiles the pleasant High Street, and where of old the hawthorn bloomed, tall placards now advertise ”Very Desirable Mansions to be Let on Exceptional Terms.”
[Ill.u.s.tration: _Kensington Palace and the Round Pond._]
But Kensington has not changed in essentials. In those old days it was already, as it is now, a great Roman Catholic quarter, with convents and shops for the sale of sacred objects. No great cathedral had as yet been built there; no Newman as yet looked steadfastly from his marble alcove over the noisy Brompton Road; the tendencies in that direction were, however, already paramount.
When a London suburb has once become crowded with houses, what was once picturesque becomes speedily squalid and sordid; the pretty village street soon changes to a murky alley, and the ivy-grown tavern converts itself into a mere disreputable-looking public-house. Of this sad fact, Miss Thackeray's pleasant lanes, running from Kensington to Chelsea and Fulham, furnish at the present day abundant proof. The charming village lanes that at the beginning of last century filled Kensington and Chelsea,--the dairies such as that where pretty Emma Penfold dispensed curds and whey,--the cottages with damask rose-trees,--the tea-gardens, rural as now those on Kew Green,--what is now their latter end? Their modern realisations--Sydney Street, Smith Street, Manor Street--are not exactly attractive or savoury byways. No, it requires palaces and big mansions to keep up the ”rus-in-urbe”; mere cottages cannot do it without degenerating into drying-grounds, unspeakable back yards, or slums. But, if the old beauty has gone from Kensington, another beauty, of a different kind, awaits it. Of such beauty the imposing dome of the ”Brompton Oratory,”
seen against a lurid sunset at the end of a vista in the Brompton Road, is an effective instance. This church, so dramatically placed in close proximity with the Anglican parish church, is a very striking object in the landscape; especially striking, too, when the light ”that London takes the day to be,” has softened and blended its more salient architectural features into one dimly glorified ma.s.s.
If Kensington is somewhat addicted to ”cliques” and to social exclusiveness, it is, after all, only following out its ancient traditions. For in older days it was always prim and conservative, governed by its own laws.
”There was” (says Miss Thackeray) ”a Kensington world ...
somewhat apart from the big uneasy world surging beyond the turnpike--a world of neighbours bound together by the old winding streets and narrow corners in a community of venerable elm trees and traditions that are almost levelled away. Mr. Awl, the bootmaker in High Street, exhibited peculiar walking-shoes long after high heels and kid brodekins had come into fas.h.i.+on in the metropolis. The last time I was in his shop I saw a pair of the old-fas.h.i.+oned, flat, sandalled shoes, directed to Miss Vieuxtemps, in Palace Green. Tippets, poke-bonnets, even a sedan chair, still existed among us long after they had been discarded by more active minds.”
It all suggests nothing so much as one of Mr. G. D. Leslie's pictures.
The poetic fancy of the writer of _Old Kensington_ is, indeed, conceived in much the same pleasant minor key as the artist's--the author of _School Revisited_ and kindred idylls,--both evoking visions of girls in short waists, lank, frilled skirts, and sandals, amid cool suburban walled gardens, gra.s.s plots, and fountains.
Thackeray lived at three Kensington houses:--first, at that known as ”The Cottage”:--No. 13 (now No. 16), Young Street,--from 1847 to 1853; secondly, at No. 36, Onslow Square, from 1853 to 1862; and thirdly, at No. 2, Palace Green, where he died. The great writer's daughters, who must have been quite little children when he first came here, no doubt knew and loved well their home of so many years. From the daughter's very vivid reminiscences, we get charming sketches of the life and the different abodes of the family. _The Newcomes_, _The Virginians_, and the _Four Georges_ were written in Onslow Square, where, says Miss Thackeray, ”I used to look up from the avenue of old trees and see my father's head bending over his work in the study window, which was over the drawing-room.” But Onslow Square is close to South Kensington Station, and the Young Street house, which was the earlier residence, was certainly in a prettier neighbourhood. Also, it has double-fronted bay windows, and enjoyed, moreover, the honour of inspiring its tenant's _magnum opus_, for here Thackeray wrote _Vanity Fair_, as well as _Esmond_ and _Pendennis_. Most of his work was done in a second-story room, overlooking an open s.p.a.ce of orchards and gardens. A tablet now distinguishes the window where the novelist worked, with the initials W. M. T. grouped in a monogram between the dates of his residence here; the names of the three books of this period being inscribed in the border.
Artists, who in the early part of last century were still more or less faithful to the northern suburbs, have, during the last three or four decades flocked to Kensington and Chelsea. Millais, Leighton, and others led the way; and now fine studios abound in all the newer and airy streets of red brick houses. At No. 6, The Terrace, Campden Hill, poor John Leech, who moved hither from Bloomsbury street afflictions, died in 1864 from spasm of the heart, at the comparatively early age of forty-seven. On Campden Hill, also, is ”Holly Lodge,” Lord Macaulay's residence; the place, too, where he died, and where he ”loved to entertain all his youthful nephews and nieces.” Campden Hill has still a certain charm, a charm of gardens, terraces, and irregular houses; it has, too, so many winding ways, that it is easier to lose one's bearings here, than almost anywhere in London.
Leigh Hunt, the gossiping chronicler of Kensington Court scandals and celebrities, lived for eleven years, and more successfully than elsewhere, in Edwardes Square, a charming enclosure, a little way back from the Kensington Road beyond High Street, and opposite the grounds of Holland House. Here the versatile writer, the ill starred ”Skimpole” of d.i.c.kens's satire, lived with his numerous family,--now older than in the Cheyne Row period of their existence,--and, possibly, less addicted to litter, and to borrowing the long-suffering neighbours' tea-cups. Leigh Hunt's son, Thornton Hunt, thus describes the Square at this time:--
”Our square, with its pretty houses and rustic enclosure, left with its natural undulations, very slight, but sufficient to diminish the formal look, its ivy-covered backs of houses on one side, and gardens and backs of houses on the other, was a curiosity which, when I first saw it, I could not account for on English principles, uniting as it did something decent, pleasant, and cheap, with such anti-_comme il faut_ anomalies--such aristocratic size and verdure in the ground plot, with so plebeian a smallness in the tenements. But it seems a Frenchman invented it.”
Edwardes Square is, like Kensington Square, still pretty and rural and attractive. At one end of it, and looking on to the Kensington Road, is Earl's Terrace, a row of attractive, old-fas.h.i.+oned houses, set back from the street, with little front gardens. Here, not so very long ago, lived Walter Pater, continuing the literary a.s.sociations of the neighbourhood; a lover of beauty, he, too, but very different from Leigh Hunt. In Hunt's time, Mrs. Elizabeth Inchbald lived ”as a boarder” at No. 4 in this terrace. Her chief claim to fame is _The Simple Story_, a work which few people now read, though many have heard of it. She appears to have been a charming and eccentric as well as a talented lady. Here is a diary jotting of hers, quoted by Leigh Hunt:--”On the 29th of June (Sunday) dined, drank tea, and supped with Mrs. Whitfield. At dark, she and I and her son William walked out, and I rapped at doors in New Street and King Street and ran away.” ”This was in the year 1788,” says Hunt, ”when she was five-and-thirty. But such people never grow old.... Divine Elizabeth Inchbald, qualified to be the companion of every moment of human life, grave or gay, from a rap at the street door in a fit of mirth to the deepest phases of sympathy.”
Yes, _The Simple Story_ must have been a real work of genius, for no one, surely, but a genius, could afford so absolutely to disregard _les convenances_. Though, for that matter, our feminine geniuses of to-day take themselves a trifle more seriously. Imagine, for instance, our George Eliots of the twentieth century, our presidents of writers'
unions and clubs, going out late at night to ring people's doorbells and run away! Such ”eternal childishness” really out-Skimpoles Skimpole. If Providence had seen fit to place the two in contemporary residence in Edwardes Square, would not Mrs. Inchbald have been a neighbour after Leigh Hunt's own heart? The lady, it is further recorded, died--at sixty-eight, too--of ”tight-lacing.”