M. F. Mansfield

“ To-day one journeys, by a not very progressive or up-to-date railway, by much the same route as did Mr. Pickwick and his friends, and reaches the Medway at Strood and Rochester through a grime and gloom which hardly existed in Dickens' time to the same compromising extent that it does to-day. Bricks, mortar, belching chimneys, and roaring furnaces line the route far into the land of hops.
Twenty miles have passed before those quiet scenes of Kentish life, which imagination has led one to expect, are in the least apparent. ”

“ One who knows his London is amused at the disappointment that the visitor often feels when comparing his impression of London, as it really is, with the London of his imagination.
As they ride down Fleet Street they are surprised at the meanness of the buildings as compared with those which had existed in their mind's eye. This might not be the case were but their eyes directed to the right quarter. Often and often one has seen the stranger on a bus gazing at the houses in Fleet Street instead of looking, as he should, right ahead. ”

“ What the Lake District is to Wordsworthians, Melrose to lovers of Scott, and Ayr to Burns, Rochester and its neighbourhood is to Dickens enthusiasts throughout the English-speaking world.
The very subtlety of the spell in the former cases holds aloof many an average mortal who grasps at once the home thrusts, the lightly veiled satire, the poor human foibles, fads, and weaknesses in the characters of Dickens. The ordinary soul, in whom the "meanest flower that grows" produces no tears, may possibly be conscious of a lump in his throat as he reads of the death of Jo or Little Nell. ”

“ Blackwall, with its iron-works; Woolwich, with its arsenal; and Greenwich, with its hospital and observatory, are all landmarks by which the traveller to London, by sea, takes his reckoning of terra firma.
The shipping of the Orient, the Baltic, the Continent, or the mere coaster, with that unique species of floating thing, the Thames barge, all combine in an apparently inextricable tangle which only opens out in the estuary below Gravesend, which, with its departed glory and general air of decay, is the real casting-off point of seagoing craft. ”

“ On such a day as that on which the immortal Pickwick "bent over the balustrades of Rochester Bridge contemplating nature and waiting for breakfast," the club (in June, 1903) had journeyed to Rochester to do homage to the fame of their master. The mediæval, cramped High Street, "full of gables, with old beams and timbers carved into strange faces," seems to bask and grow sleepier than ever in the glaring sunlight. ”

“ Things are different to-day, and yet many people from the remoter parts of England are bewildered, distressed, and crazed by a visit to London. One meets them drifting wearily and anxiously toward King's Cross or St. Pancras at the end of their stay. They will be happy again when they see the utensils glitter on their old kitchen wall; when they have peeped into their best room and found the shade of stuffed squirrels resting undisturbed on the family Bible ”

“ The demand for originality in street architecture is to be seen in the tall, important blocks of residential flats and new hotels now rising up in every quarter. Not beautiful and in many cases not even intelligible, they are unmistakable signs of the times, showing the process of transformation which is going on rapidly, sweeping away much that is beautiful to meet the requirements of modern life.
London is perhaps never to be doomed to the curse of the sky-scraper, as it is known in America ”

“ DICKENS' CONTEMPORARIES When Scott was at the height of his popularity and reputation, cultivated and imaginative prose was but another expression of the older poesy. But within twenty-five years of Scott's concluding fictions, Dickens and Thackeray, and still later, George Eliot and Kingsley, had come into the mart with an entirely new brand of wares, a development unknown to Scott, and of a tendency which was to popularize literature far more than the most sanguine hopes of even Scott's own ambition. ”

“ Within a half-mile on either side of this blind alley leading off Fleet Street, from Ludgate Hill on the east—redolent of memories of the Fleet, its Prison, and its "Marriages"—to Somerset House on the west, is that unknown land, that terra incognita, whereon so many ships of song are stranded, or what is more, lost to oblivion which is blacker than darkness itself. ”

“ Coming to London proper, from "Westminster" to the "Tower," there is practically an inexhaustible store of reminiscence to be called upon, if one would seek to enumerate or picture the sights, scenes, and localities immortalized by even the authors contemporary with Dickens.
Not all have been fictionists,—a word which is used in its well meant sense,—some have been chroniclers, like the late Sir Walter Besant and Joseph Knight, whose contributions of historical résumé are of the utmost value. ”

“ What Hampstead Heath is to the coster, the Crystal Palace is to the middle-class Londoner, who repairs there, or did in Dickens' time, on every possible auspicious occasion. This structure itself, though it can hardly be called beautiful by the most charitably disposed, is in many respects one of the most remarkable in the world, and owes its existence to the Great Exhibition of 1851 in Hyde Park. ”

“ There was an unmistakable class in Dickens' time, and there is to-day, whose only recourse, in their moments of ease, is to the public house,—great, strong, burly men, with "a good pair of hands," but no brain, or at least no development of it, and it is to this class that your successful middle-Victorian novelist turned when he wished to suggest something unknown in polite society. This is the individual who cares little for public [Pg 238] improvements, ornamental parks. Omnibuses or trams, steamboats or flying-machines, it's all the same to him. ”

“ Nowhere else is there a long mile of such an atmosphere, redolent of printers' ink and the bustle attendant upon the production and distribution of the printed word. And nowhere else is the power of the press more potent.
Its historian has described it as "a line of street, with shops and houses on either side, between Temple Bar and Ludgate Hill, one of the largest thoroughfares in London, and one of the most famous." ”

“ As the historian of London Bridge has said, "a magnificent bridge is a durable expression of an ideal in art, whether it be a simple arch across an humble brook, or a mighty structure across a noble river." ”

“ If the latter, there seems no reason why London might not well be thought to include pretty much all of Kent and Surrey,—the home counties lying immediately south of the Thames,—though in reality one very soon gets into green fields in this direction, and but for the ominous signs of the builder and the enigmatic references of the native to the "city" or "town," the stranger, at least, might think himself actually far from the madding throng. ”

“ The police system, as remodelled by Sir Robert Peel in 1829, was, of course, the foundation of the present admirable body of constabulary, of which the London "Bobby" must be admitted by all as ranking at the very head of his contemporaries throughout the civilized world. Certainly no more affable and painstaking servants of the public are anywhere to be found; they are truly the "refuge of the inquiring stranger and timid women." ”

“ In old coaching days the custom was perhaps more of a consolation than it proves to-day, and whether the Londoner was on pleasure bent, to the Derby or Epsom, or coaching it to Ipswich or Rochester,—as did Pickwick,—the mile-stones were always a cheerful link between two extremes.
To-day their functions are no less active; the advent of the bicycle and the motor-car makes it more necessary than ever that they should be there to mark distance and direction. ”

“ Finsbury and Islington are covered with long rows of dull-looking houses which have existed for a matter of fifty or seventy-five years, with but little change except an occasional new shop-front and a new street cut through here and there. Spring Gardens, near Trafalgar Square, is no longer a garden, and is as dull and gloomy a place as any flagged courtyard in a less aristocratic neighbourhood. ”

“ And thus it is that the scale runs from grave to gay, from poverty to purse full, and ever London,—the London of the past as well as the present, of Grub Street as well as Grosvenor Square. The centre of the world's literary activities, where, if somewhat conventional as to the acceptation of the new idea in many of the marts of trade, it is ever prolific in the launching of some new thing in literary fashions. ”

“ On the whole, until recently, London could not have been an exceedingly well-lighted metropolis, and even now there is many a dark court and alley, which would form in itself a fitting haunt for many a lower-class ruffian of the type Dickens was wont to depict.
The mortality among the old inns of Holborn has been very high of late, and still they vanish. "The Black Bull," known well to Dickens, is the last to come under sentence. Its sign, a veritable bull of Bashan, sculptured in black and gold, has been familiar to all who go down to the City in omnibuses. ”

“ Seeing the lamps of that outlying village, the countryman imagined that he was at his journey's end, but as mile after mile of illumination went on, he asked, in alarm, "Are we not yet in London, and so many miles of lamps?" At last, at Hyde Park Corner, he was told that this was London; but still on went the lamps, on and on the streets, until the poor stranger subsided into a coma of astonishment. When at last they entered Lad Lane, the great Cheapside coaching centre, a travelling companion bade the West Countryman remain in the coffee-room while he made inquiries. ”

“ The memory of old London is in no way kept more lively than by the numerous City Companies or Guilds. Established with a good purpose, they rendered useful enough service in their day, but within the last half-century their power and influence has waned, until to-day but three, of the eighty or more, are actually considered as Trading Companies,—the Goldsmiths', the Apothecaries' and the Stationers'.
The first companies, or fraternities, of Anglo-Saxon times gradually evolved themselves into the positive forms in which they have endured till to-day. ”

“ London now frightens the countryman more by its size than anything else. And yet the bigger London grows the more it must lose even this power to intimidate. Its greatest distances, its vast suburban wildernesses, are seen by him only through a railway carriage window. He is shot into the centre, and in the centre he remains, [Pg 234] where help and convenience are increased every year. It was different in the old days, when the countryman rolled into London by coach, and was robbed on Hounslow Heath before he had seen more than the light of London in the sky. ”

“ Other population than we have indicated, our watering-place has none. There are a few old used-up boatmen who creep about in the sunlight with the help of sticks, and there is a poor imbecile shoemaker who wanders his lonely life away among the rocks, as if he were looking for his reason—which he will never find. Sojourners in neighbouring watering-places come occasionally in flys to stare at us, and drive away again. ”

“ PAST AND PRESENT The American is keenly alive to all the natural and added beauties of English life, and even more so of London. He does not like to have his ideals dispelled, or to find that some shrine at which he would worship has disappeared for ever, like some "solemn vision and bright silver dream," as becomes a minstrel. ”

“ No one nowadays is in danger of being driven mad by the mere spectacle of London opening out before him, yet this was the fate of a West Country traveller who saw London for the first time from a coach early in the nineteenth century. ”

“ Poverty and its allied crime, not necessarily brutalized inherent criminal instinct, but crime nevertheless, are the questions which have got to be met broadly, boldly, and on the most liberal lines by those who are responsible for London's welfare.
During the first half of the nineteenth century the economists will tell one that England's commercial industries stagnated, but perhaps the prodigious leaps which it was taking in the new competitive forces of the new world made this theory into a condition. ”

“ Of this the stranger is probably more observant than the Londoner born and bred. The gloomy, crowded streets—for they are gloomy, decidedly, most of the time during five months of the year—do not suggest to the native emotions as vivid as to the stranger, who, with a fund of reading for his guide, wanders through hallowed ground [Pg 133] which is often neglected or ignored by the Londoner himself.
As for the general architectural effect of London as a type of a great city, it is heightened or lowered accordingly as one approves or disapproves of the artistic qualities of soot and smoke. ”

“ It has always been the city's fate to have its past overgrown and stifled by the enthralling energy and life of the present. It is as a hive that has never been emptied of its successive swarms. This is more or less the fate of all towns that live.
The first map of London was published in 1563 by Ralph Ugga; it shows the same main arteries as exist to-day—the Strand, "Chepe," and Fleet. In a later map of 1610, London and Westminster appear as small neighbouring towns with fields around them ”