Daniel Joseph Kirwan

“ The charge to see the Tower of London is only sixpence in these days, and for a sixpence a visitor may see everything; dungeon and trap door, axe and scaffold, crown jewels and prison bars, the cages and the dungeons and graves of those who suffered and died here during the long night of centuries,—and all this for a paltry sixpence.
Amid the tramp and thunder of a hundred battles it has stood unshaken; it is too strong for the destroying hand of man; and time, as if in reverence, has trod lightly as he has stepped over its massive walls. ”

“ IDDEN in the bosoms of the sewers of every Great City lies a world of romance. The secrets of thousands of human beings, with their hopes and aspirations, their defeats and disappointments, are garnered, in the relics of myriad households, whose rubbish is shot through drains, to be imbedded in the accumulated masses at the bottom of the soggy sewerage.
London has two thousand miles of bricked sewers, and the entire metropolis is honey-combed by these effluvious passages. ”

“ All are bent on pleasure, and in many of the boats they are singing the slang songs of the London streets; and now and then are warbled the cheering chants of the boatmen immortalized by Dibdin and Taylor, the water poets. A couple of miles more and we are in sight of Putney Bridge, which towers aloft, rickety, worn, and decayed, thousands crossing to and fro on its frail planks to get positions for the race. ”

“ Be that as it may, it is old enough to have earned a lasting infamy, only once deserved in history by another grim fortress,—its twin brother and accomplice in blood and oppression, the Bastile Of Paris. That foul excresence on the fair face of the Earth has been swept away by the stormy sea of a people's vengeance, while the Tower of London still remains as a lesson of tradition, to tell of the crimes that God has permitted kings and dwellers in high places to perpetrate against the people, who have suffered and died and made no sign. ”

“ I went into the kitchen of Newgate and found it to be a commodious and well-fitted apartment, very like the kitchen of the Reform Club, only not so luxurious, from its want of French dishes, and I found here boilers, stoves, ranges, saucepans, kettles, and all that a chef could need for his cuisine. This was not the kitchen of the Old Newgate of which Ainsworth delights to tell, where the hangman used to seethe in a cauldron of molten pitch the heads and quarters of victims executed for treason, whose several members were afterwards affixed to the spikes of Temple Bar or London Bridge. ”

“ Twelve hundred unfortunate women in one place of amusement—and half a dozen other places like this, but of an inferior class, are open this rainy, unpleasant night, with a like complement of wretched females recklessly passing the hours that intervene before the dens close at midnight. The crash of sixty pieces of fine music falls on the ear, the glare, the gas, the tinsel on the stage, the well-dressed, fine-faced women around cannot shut out my thoughts of the "Legion of the Lost" who are so merry, so thoughtless, so careless of the morrow—deep in the fallacies of sin and despair. ”

“ George Wilkes, I find my way to the Press boat, which is lying at the foot of the Temple Pier, off the Embankment. She is a long, double-ender, with a red streak on the upper part of her keel, and a black hull. Her steam funnel is made to be lowered at the base, working on hinges, when going under a bridge. Like all Thames boats to-day, there are two flags hoisted on her twin flag-staffs—the American and English. There is no awning, no upper-deck, to shade us from the August sun, which is now beginning to burn with an intensity peculiarly un-English. ”

“ No city that I have ever visited will compare with London for the number of its street peddlers, hawkers, booth proprietors, open-air performers, ballad singers, mountebanks, and other street itinerants.
From daybreak until dark, and long into the night, in the ramification of Streets and Lanes, Squares, Mews, and Ovals, the ear of the stranger is saluted with the harshest and most discordant sounds which emanate from the throats of a street-selling population of both sexes, large enough alone to make the population of a fifth-rate city. ”

“ Five hundred thousand people of both sexes had turned out in holiday attire, that ever memorable day, to do honor to a foreign prince, whose government, since that thoughtless hour, sought during the terrible confusion of a civil war, by every means in its power, by money, influence, by Alabama pirates, by unceasing and bitterly hostile journalistic attacks, by speeches in and out of Parliament—through the pulpit and the rostrum, to destroy the Republic of the West. In fact that government moved Heaven and Earth to annihilate and obliterate the liberty, union, and might of the American people. ”

“ Be it known to all my readers that the Mansion House, or Guildhall, is to London what the City Hall is to New York—the Hotel de Ville to Paris or Brussels—and the Stadt Haus to Amsterdam. It is here that the Lord Mayor of London lives and here he deals out justice to his constituents. The Guildhall or Mansion House of London is one of the finest public buildings in the city, and has a noble gallery, dining hall, and a service of municipal gold and silver plate, which is used by the Lord Mayor on state occasions, besides a splendid collection of paintings. ”

“ While we are standing looking at her and her friends, the room is darkened, the gas being almost extinguished, and a chemical, light-colored flame irradiates the room like a twilight at sea, and the entire female population rush below to join in the last, wild, mad shadow-dance of the night. Around and around they go in each other's arms, whirling in the dim, uncertain, graveyard light, these unclean things of the darkness, shouting and shrieking, totally lost to shame—their gestures wanton as the movements of an Egyptian Almee and mad as the capers of a dancing dervish. ”

“ He was the darkest-skinned and darkest-eyed man in the Oxford boat, besides being a fine oarsman and a victor of many college matches. His nose was of the snub order, and the chin dimpled, the forehead being broad and white, and the hair, like Darbishire's, inclined to curl. He was what would be a "big small" man, and was as compact and tough as a hickory nut.
Tinne was, however, the giant of the crew. I never saw a more glorious looking fellow than this clear-skinned, handsome Cornwall lad, with his splendid clearly cut profile, frank, merry face, laughing eyes, and thoroughbred look. ”

“ Down in the quiet and aristocratic dwellings of Pimlico, you shall find such ladies as "Nelly Holmes," or "Skittles," and in St. John's Wood a "Mabel Gray," and in a delicious villa at Fulham, a "Formosa," spending in one night's Corinthian revelry the yearly salary of a bank clerk, or hazarding at a game of cards the life-time pittance of a sewing woman. And with these painted women shall be found night after night the curled darlings of the Pall Mall clubs, some of them mere youths who bear names as old as Magna Charta, and once as spotless perhaps as those of Sidney or Hampden. ”

“ In Westminster Abbey rival statesmen rest in peace, the tongue of the orator is mute, side by side rest the Crowned head and the Chancellor with his great seal, the Archbishop and the Play-actor, the philanthropist and the seaman, who died by his guns on the deck of the vessel of war, the divine and the physician, the Princess and the Soubrette, all mingle common dust together. ”

“ Yonder, stopping to ask for a noggin of gin from one of the proprietors of the numerous ginger beer and refreshment stands, is the London prize fighter—a model, in his way—thick set, broad in the loins, and having a murderous forehead and a battered face, from some recent encounter, one of those dangerous-looking, suspicious fellows, whom you may meet with any night wandering about the docks in Wapping, or lounging at the notched doorway of a tavern in Shoreditch, or Whitechapel. ”

“ There was a large fireplace in the center of the cellar, around which fifty or sixty persons sat, of all ages and of both sexes. The floor was of damp clay, smooth and trodden by the feet of countless thieves, vagabonds, and prostitutes. The corners of the cellar were buried in darkness, while the center of the cavern, near the fireplace, was bright with the flames of a fire of logs, which threw a flickering light on the wooden beams, the broken chairs and stools, the pewter pots in the hands of the lodgers, and on many faces stained with dirt and ploughed up with crime and misery. ”

“ I who had seen so many caricatures of the great orator in Punch, which has always depicted him as a fat, pursy, vulgar-looking person, sans breeding, sans ceremonie, failed at the first glance to identify the noble-looking old man in evening dress, with an irreproachable white neck-tie, and a decidedly polished exterior, who halted at the refreshment bar to slowly sip a strawberry ice after the heat of the debate. ”

“ Fifteen of the finest structures of their kind in the world span with mighty and enduring arches, the surface of the Thames; in a distance of seven miles on the river from London Bridge, to the Suspension Bridge, at Hammersmith. Paris alone can rival London in her super-aqueous structures, but in massiveness and grandeur there is no bridge covering the Seine, and having such a magnificent roadway and arches as Waterloo Bridge. ”

“ No sooner has a street seller made a round of custom for himself and advertised his wares sufficiently, than the blue-coated policeman is sure to appear, armed with the authority which cannot be disobeyed, and he is compelled to move his stand or barrow.
The hawker or peddler is forced to pay four or five pounds a year for a license to sell in this precarious way, and yet in London he has no legal right to occupy a stand or booth. He has always to move on, like the boy Joe in Bleak House.
It is more than wonderful to think of the shifts made by the poor classes of London to make a living. ”

“ The waiters who bring the drinks and cigars from the bar, wear black dress-coats and red plush waist coats.
When I descended to the Canteen, the ballet was still on above us, and I could hear the tramping of the feet of the dancers as they bounded to and fro on the stage boards over my head. There were no ballet girls in the Canteen, but in a few minutes the strains of the dance music died away and down came the coryphees, trooping by twos and threes, their faces painted and chalked, and their white slippers and tights peeping out from the bottoms of the gray waterproof cloaks which they wore. ”

“ In a great city with a population of over three millions of Englishmen, it was but natural and just that Oxford should hold high ascendancy, and that Oxford favors should be worn almost exclusively, and that the superiority of Oxford rowing, should be with high and low a question of orthodoxy. Night settled down on the myriad roofs and church steeples of London, and ten young lads, down at the little village of Putney, with its narrow streets and old-fashioned church, braced themselves, before going to sleep, for the greatest athletic conflict that the Nineteenth century has known. ”

“ The night has closed, a full English moon floats silently in the heavens, white snowy powder hangs over our heads like a film of lace—the clock-tower at Westminster Palace booms out the hour of midnight over the dark surface of the Thames, and we escape from the bustle of that vile dancing hall with gladness. ”

“ The gentle hum of human life reaching me from the distance, is no more injurious to the effect than the rustling of the trees, or the chirping of the birds. The quiet bustle down at the stone bridge, the shouts of the bargemen—heard several seconds after their utterance,—the plashing of the oars of stray boats, the cricketers over there in their play-ground, where reposes some of the dust of Arthur's blood ”

“ It is four o'clock of a summer morning at Billingsgate market and all London is as yet solitary, and the streets are unpeopled by traffic or pedestrians. The sight from London Bridge is magnificent on such a morning. ”

“ Afar off we could observe, through yawning gaps in the ancient and stately trees, which were pierced by the ruddy beams of sunlight, the tall towers and fair proportions of Goodwood House, the magnificent mansion of the Duke of Richmond. Twenty to twenty-five thousand people were gathered in the noble old Park whose vistas stretched off into dells, copses, and woodland nooks, for thousands of acres. ”

“ There are one hundred and three hospitals in London in which all the complaints, frailties, and mishaps of poor human nature are supposed to be provided for, and yet it will be much easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, or a rich man to get a free pass into paradise, than that a poor wretch without friends or influence should be able to find a bed in an hospital, unless he can succeed by a miracle in dodging the sentinels which red tape has placed at every entrance to these vaunted institutions. ”

“ A decently-dressed man is not safe in this street, and the only sound of civilization to cheer him, once lost in the mazes of these festering lanes and alleys, teeming with low pot-houses, tap-rooms, and wild-looking children, bold, bad-looking desperadoes of men, and reckless, obscene women, is the low, rumbling sound coming like the approaching thunder to his ears every few minutes as the loaded passenger trains dash to and fro on the Northwestern and Southeastern Railways. ”

“ The Queen has been a good wife and mother, but in these two qualities she is more than equaled by thousands of American women. She is no better and no worse than the average married woman; has her faults, her weaknesses, and her good qualities, and it is among her own people that her failings find their loudest trumpeters.
In honestly dealing with these stories I shall not stop to give the gross yarns which are spun by the Jenkinses of the press, who make what they call an honest penny by chronicling all the loose street scandal that is poured into their ears. ”