Fleet Street

“ MORNING IN FLEET STREET AGAIN. Another day has dawned upon the great city—another sun has risen upon the iniquities of hosts of men, but upon no amount of cold-blooded, hardened, pitiless criminality that could come near to that of Sweeney Todd. ”

“ The usual evening idler and aimless stroller always makes Fleet Street a part of his pleasant itinerary, and it matters little to him that the sidewalks are narrow and the crowd uncomfortably large, when he can beguile each yard or two by lingering glances up dim and fascinating little rookery courts full of mysterious corners and deep shadows whose paving-stones have reëchoed the tread of so many sons of fame. ”

“ Fleet Street was the course of the River Fleet. Walbrook was a winding stream, passing through the city into the Thames. And London Bridge was a structure covered with wooden houses on each side.
The houses of London, at that period, were built of wood thatched with straw, each story projecting forward, one above the other, until the houses nearly met over the middle of the streets. And many of these were narrow, without pavements, badly drained; constantly strewn with every kind of refuse and filth, engendering pestilential vapors. ”

“ We see part of Fleet-street, and as far as our eyes can reach, there is nothing but a dark, confused, quickly-moving mass of men, horses, and vehicles; not a yard of the pavement is to be seen—nothing but heads along the rows of houses, and in the road, too, an ocean of heads, the property of gentlemen on the roofs of omnibuses, which crowd the City more than any other part of the town.
These are the streets whose excess of traffic makes the strongest impression upon the stranger; and this part of London is moreover specially dear to the historian. ”

“ Sick with the din and soiled with the mud of Fleet Street—where the Benedick tradesmen are hurrying by, with ledger-lines ruled along their brows; thinking upon rise of bread and fall of babies—you adroitly turn a mystic corner—not a street—glide down a dim, monastic way, flanked by dark, sedate, and solemn piles, and still wending on, give the whole careworn world the slip, and, disentangled, stand beneath the quiet cloisters of the Paradise of Bachelors. ”

“ Fleet Street was a dirty, ill-ventilated alley full of scuffling men and harassed women. London itself was a great angry thing, a place of distrust and contention, where no one ever offered a friendly greeting to a stranger. He would go to Charing Cross station and he would stand patiently in front of the bookstall, but Eleanor would not come to meet him. ”

“ For all day long Fleet Street is a busy place, with thousands of people going up and down, and hundreds of carts, cabs, waggons, cars, and carriages, hustling in the roadway, and people who have only seen and heard it in the day-time are surprised to find how silent and deserted it is at midnight. ”

“ I have never walked up Fleet Street and the Strand yet without seeing a starving woman and child. The children are indeed dreadful; they run unguarded and unwatched out of the side courts into the broader and more lively Strand—the ceaseless world pushes past—they play on the pavement unregarded. ”

“ Paul's swelled dimly out of the fog as Elfrida turned into Fleet Street, and the railway bridge that hangs over the heads of the people at the bottom of Ludgate Hill seemed a curiously solid structure connecting space with space. Fleet Street, wet and brown, and standing in all unremembered fashions, lifted its antiquated head and waited for more rain ”

“ Humphrey smiled. He saw himself marching to fortune; he was twenty, and it never occurred to him that he could fail.
[44]
IV
You may call Fleet Street what you like, but the secret of it eludes you always. It has as many moods as a woman: it is the street of laughter and of tears, of adventure and dullness, of romance and reality, of promise and lost hopes, of conquest and broken men. Into its narrow neck are crammed all the hurrying life, the passions, the eager, beating hearts, the happiness and the sorrow of the broad streets East and West that lead to it. ”

“ At No. 17, Fleet Street, close to the ceaseless traffic of the Law Courts, is an unobtrusive timbered house. Through a low archway you see an eighteenth-century oaken stairway that leads to a sedate Jacobean room, where very few people ever come to disturb the peaceful, dignified atmosphere. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Honest Tradesman To the eyes of Mr. Jeremiah Cruncher, sitting on his stool in Fleet-street with his grisly urchin beside him, a vast number and variety of objects in movement were every day presented. Who could sit upon anything in Fleet-street during the busy hours of the day, and not be dazed and deafened by two immense processions, one ever tending westward with the sun, the other ever tending eastward from the sun, both ever tending to the plains beyond the range of red and purple where the sun goes down! ”

“ TRAFALGAR SQUARE TO FLEET STREET
“For such things do go on in Fleet Street as no man has
written yet.”
Richard Jefferies.
One of the most enthralling and endearing things about London is the way the memory of the great people, whose names are so familiar that you feel you would know their bearers if you met them, pervades the city and crops up in such very unexpected places. If business ever took you through that evil-smelling fishy Lower Thames Street, you would discover that Chaucer lived there for six years when he was Comptroller of the Petty Customs in the Port of London. ”

“ When the mystic midnight passes, the bustle of Fleet Street slackens; but on each side of the thoroughfare hundreds of workers with hand and brain are toiling with eager intensity. In tall buildings here and there the lights glitter on every floor, and throw their long shafts through the gloom; not much activity is plainly visible, and yet somehow the merest novice feels that there is a throb in the air, and that some mysterious forces are working around him. ”

“ At once from copse and heath arose Roundels and fugues and lyric prose, From shingles grey their nocturnes start, The bracken bush cries, `Art is Art', And every tuft of broom is rife With highly beastly views of life. I have met in meadows here some of the most terrible and beautiful people of Fleet Street. ”

“ Not on the south side of Fleet Street, whatever enthusiastic gentlemen of the law may say, nor on the west, nor on the east, for there too there is little to attract us except in the shop windows, and there is noise and turmoil and the roar of a restless multitude bewildering and disturbing us whether we move or halt on our way. ”

“ It is a highway that, if not quite so busy as London’s Fleet Street, is traversed almost daily by craft of one sort or another, bound either east or west; and something might come along at any moment and, if I could but attract attention to myself, pick me up. ”

“ The sun is shining brightly, and even that busy region of trade and commerce, Fleet-street, is looking gay and beautiful; but not for that poor spirit-stricken lad are any of the sights and sounds which used to make up the delight of his existence, reaching his eyes or ears now with their accustomed force. ”

“ They have grown with their burdens, but this has had vast burdens thrown upon it suddenly, and while it was immature. Oxford Street and Fleet Street are the roads of peace, and laden with wealth and luxury, law and literature--things that can wait. ”

“ There, in a tiny room, filled with the murmur of the sea, and the vulgar songs of seaside Pierrots, I wrote my novel, The Street of Adventure, in which I told, in the guise of fiction, the history of The Tribune newspaper, and gave a picture of the squalor, disappointment, adventure, insecurity, futility, and good comradeship of Fleet Street.
It was much to be desired that this novel of mine should be a success. Even my wife’s humorous contentment with poverty, which has always been a saving grace in my life, did not eliminate the need of a certain amount of ready money. ”

“ Fleet Street was full of people who crowded round the windows of newspaper offices, not with the eagerness of a general election crowd, but with a subdued surliness which ever and again broke out in spurts of violent temper. ”

“ If you climb the uncarpeted stairs of those Georgian houses, and read the names painted in block letters on the doors, you will find many whom the clanging presses of Fleet Street have made familiar--and many, many more to whom even the fame of Fleet Street has never come.
So far, Ronald Cavendish, who shared his chambers in Pump Court with three other barristers and Benjamin Bunce, their communal clerk--a little melancholy individual with a face like parchment, the clothes of a waiter off duty, and watery blue eyes which perpetually craved recognition--belonged to the latter category. ”

“ Fleet Street, with its Temple, is not unworthy of being contiguous to the Strand. The fire of London has deprived us of the delight of a real old quarter of the city; but some bits remain, and everywhere there is a stirring multitude, and a great crush and crash of carts and wains. The Inns of Court, and the quarters in the vicinity of the port, Thames Street, Tower Hill, Billingsgate, Wapping, Rotherhithe, are the best parts of London; they are full of character: the buildings bear a nearer relation to what the people are doing than in the more polished quarters. ”

“ Such a representative of one class of English employers is to be found in a little street, not a stone's throw from Fleet Street, the great newspaper centre, where all day long one meets authors, editors, and journalists of every degree. Toward eight in the morning, as at the same hour in the evening, another crowd is to be seen, made up of hundreds upon hundreds of girls hurrying to the countless printing establishments of every grade, which are to be found in every street and court opening from or near Fleet Street. ”

“ Fleet Market, at that time, was a long irregular row of wooden sheds and penthouses, occupying the centre of what is now called Farringdon Street. They were jumbled together in a most unsightly fashion, in the middle of the road; to the great obstruction of the thoroughfare and the annoyance of passengers, who were fain to make their way, as they best could, among carts, baskets, barrows, trucks, casks, bulks, and benches, and to jostle with porters, hucksters, waggoners, and a motley crowd of buyers, sellers, pick-pockets, vagrants, and idlers. ”

“ The very blackguards here are degenerate, the topping gentry stockbrokers; the passengers too many to insure your quiet, or let you go about whistling or gaping,—too few to be the fine indifferent pageants of Fleet Street. Confining, room-keeping, thickest winter is yet more bearable here than the gaudy months. Among one's books at one's fire by candle, one is soothed into an oblivion that one is not in the country ”

“ Indeed, the London traveller, or contemplative man, whether promenading or gazing listlessly from his “knife-board” as he frets against the stagnant progress of his vehicle, may furnish himself with plenty of entertainment by speculating on the names of the streets through which he passes. The whole life of the great city could be traced by the aid of its street names. Thus, Fleet Street and Holborn were called after two rivers which crossed those thoroughfares, the Fleet and the Bourne ”

“ I go to London and see the busy multitudes in Fleet Street and the Strand, and it comes across my mind that they are but the ghosts of the past, haunting the streets that I have seen silent and wretched, going to and fro, phantasms in a dead city, the mockery of life in a galvanised body. ”

“ Fleet Street has been hard hit, and the free-lancers who live outside Fleet Street hit harder still. Not that the writing profession has been beaten by the manipulators of public opinion. It is fighting hard in London and will ultimately win. ”

“ If an editor knows not peace, he knows power. In Fleet Street, as in other streets, the population divides itself into those who want something and those who have something to bestow; those who are anxious to give a lunch, and those who deign occasionally to accept a lunch; those who have an axe to grind, and those who possess the grindstone. ”

“ One is constantly being told—for the most part by people who know nothing about it—how beautiful London is in the early morning sun.
So soon as I was in Fleet Street I saw something which I had certainly not expected to see, at least, not there, just then—Miss Purvis. Fleet Street was deserted; she was the only living thing to be seen ”

“ But I cannot help observing, that Fleet-street, as it stands at present, is a crying evil, and a perfect disgrace to it. Is it not wonderful, that in these enlightened times, so little attention should be paid to the feelings of fair woman, at the crossings of this great metropolis? ”

“ THE MURDER IN FLEET STREET Ten A. M. is a comparatively quiet hour in Fleet Street. The sale of morning papers has practically dropped, and as the second edition of those afternoon journals, of which no one ever sees a first, has not yet been served out to the clamouring and hustling mob at the distributing centres, no vociferating newsboys, aproned with placards of “Sun,” “News,” “Echo” or “Star,” have as yet taken possession of the street corners and pavement kerbs. ”

“ Fleet Street is irregular in shape, the houses being nowhere in line; the courts of Whitefriars are still remaining. The Strand has all its great houses facing the river; their backs open upon a broad street, with a line of mean houses on the north side. On the south of the river there is a line of houses on the High Street, a line of houses along the river bank on either side, and another one running near Bermondsey Abbey. ”