Soho, London

“ If we were asked which part of London contains the most varied material for the weaving of modern romance we should unhesitatingly point to the region of Soho. A careless stroller through those thoroughfares little dreams of the strange and wondrous life which beats beneath the apparently placid, the undeniably squalid, aspect of this pregnant locality. The elderly woman, poorly clad and closely veiled, who glides past him is a prominent member of a Royal family who for a long period held the reins of power in one of the greatest European nations ”

“ Where shall we have tea?"
"Where you like."
"I know a funny little shop off Soho Square where there aren't many people."
"Don't you like people, then?"
"Not always."
Soho Square held the heart of autumn that afternoon. London had surrendered this quiet corner to pastoral meditation. Here, among the noise of many sparrows and sibilance of dead leaves on the unfrequented pavement, one realized in the perishable hour's flight the immortality of experience.
"More birds," said Jenny. ”

“ Men and women may live there for years, and their antecedents and present modes of life shall be as little known as if they lived in the most remote corner of the earth. Soho is the molehill of the Great City. You may have a thousand pounds a year and spend it in Soho, and your neighbours not only shall not notice it, but shall be as utterly indifferent to you as if you lived on tenpence a day--as hundreds of poor fellows are doing at this present moment. Hard-working mechanics live there ”

“ Sometimes towards the west bevies of cloud, dazzling in the sunshine, were piled upon one another, and at sundown, all rosy and golden, would fill the street with their effulgence, so that the smoky vapours took a gorgeous opalescence, and the heart beat with sheer delight of this goodly London town.
One balmy night in May, when the air was suave and fragrant, so that the heavy step was lightened and the tired mind eased by a strange sad gaiety, Jenny dined with Basil at the little restaurant in Soho where now they were well known. ”

“ Some of the most forlorn and dismal places are those curious squares found in the long roads that lead out of London. There is one such near the Old Kent Road, built in a pretentious style and now utterly gone to seed and decay. All the doorways, of a curious pattern, are the same, so are all the windows. No one walks there, no custom appears to visit it. It seems one mass of abandonment and we hurry away depressed. Soho Square is really quaint and interesting: it is in a sound and flourishing condition ”

“ After my interview was over I got into my sedan-chair and went to Soho
Square. A man in court dress cannot walk the streets of London without
being pelted with mud by the mob, while the gentleman look on and laugh.
All customs must be respected; they are all at once worthy and absurd. ”

“ Soho exists only to feed the drab suburban population of London on the spree. That artificial atmosphere of Montmartre, those little touches of a false Bohemia are all cunningly spread from the brains of the restaurateurs as a net to catch the young bank clerk and the young Fabian girl. Indeed, one establishment has overplayed the game to the extent of renaming itself "The Bohemia." The result is that one dare not go there for fear of dining amid the minor clergy and the Fabians and the girl-typists. ”

“ Though actors and actresses live, nowadays, in all parts of London, yet, perhaps, they most incline to Bloomsbury and Soho, which classic region they have, indeed, haunted for centuries. In old Tudor and Shakespearean times Shoreditch and Bankside were the favoured spots, just as, later on, Covent Garden with its "Piazza," its Opera-houses, and its general air of Bohemianism, became the chosen locality. The histrionic art is no longer solely associated with Covent Garden and Bohemianism; indeed, the stars of the profession now belong, rather, to the smartest "set" in society ”

“ Wondrous is the inner life of Soho. It is the abode of much seediness and much suffering. Many a poor gentleman eats his bread-and-dripping there, and, if he can afford it, cooks his herring there, and thinks sadly of times, gone by, when his life had its days of sunshine. ”

“ How many thousand of provincials, seeing London, have been drawn to those odourous byways that thrust themselves so briskly through the staid pleasure-land of the West End—Greek Street, Frith Street, Dean Street, Old Compton Street: a series of interjections breaking a dull paragraph—where they might catch the true Latin temper and bear away to the smoking-rooms of country Conservative clubs fulsome tales that have made Soho already a legend. ”

“ Nothing is more pleasing than the sudden glimpse that is obtained of it from Oxford Street, or from Dean Street, its fine old trees spreading out umbrageously. The old houses have a quaint, solid air, notably those at the corners. Still flourishes the old Soho Bazaar at one corner, a visit to which in days gone by was thought a treat and a wonder for children. The houses, with the streets surrounding, are valuable as suggesting how old London of a hundred and fifty years back must have looked. ”

“ For this is, so to speak, one of the main doorways of the immense ant-heap; like ants, too, people seem to swarm incessantly, to go and come, in inconsequent but feverishly active sequence. Here is a blaze of light, a perpetual throng of "London's gondola," the hansom-cab, a confused medley of many sounds, that ceases not, but fades only after midnight; when the "heart of London," that never sleeps, subsides in the early hours of the morning into a dulled and general hum.
At Piccadilly, the foreign element from Leicester Square and Soho meets the native one. ”

“ I was to the life a decayed gentleman; an unobtrusively rakish, elderly degenerate. I was remarkable in nothing except height, and even that singularity departed as I learned to stoop. In such guise I returned to London by way of Boulogne and Folkestone, and I took up residence immediately in a tenement-house in Soho, to which I had been recommended by my friend, the costumier. ”

“ It has been said that, as far north as Seven Dials, the organ-grinders still find the "Marseillaise" the most lucrative tune to play; and this may well be so, though I myself have generally found, at least among the rising generation, the latest music-hall song or dance to be in the ascendant. There is another subject I would fain touch on here, at the risk even of irrelevance; it refers to the Soho style of coiffure. That there is a special fashion in ladies' hair-dressing peculiar to every district in London, is a fact which every passing visitor must soon recognize ”

“ Middlesex Street holds nothing picturesque or national; even its open-air market on Sunday morning can be paralleled by any Saturday afternoon scene in the little streets of Edgware Road, or in Walker’s Court, Soho. It is a street mainly of warehouses; Widegate Street and Sandys Row exhibit the oddity of narrow crookedness and no more. Petticoat Lane, where the shops are paltry, and the folk divide into too fat and too lean, is not even a mean street. ”

“ You will remember that I referred to this neighbourhood of Soho when I spoke of those old French refugees who came and made industrial colonies in London after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. This is the only really foreign quarter of London which has lasted until to-day; but that is to be accounted for by the fact that it became representative of no particular industry, and that, probably from the fact of many of the patrons of literature and art having then town houses about Leicester and Soho Squares, the more artistic refugees took up their abode in the adjacent streets. ”

“ We have not yet done with this wonderful district of Soho. It is one of those attractive quarters of London, which is interesting alike for its historical associations and for memorable houses that were once inhabited by famous men. In essays, letters, fiction—all through that period which has been called the Augustan age of English literature—we find allusions to it; and after that time it continued to be the favourite resort of artists, men of letters, wealthy merchants, and not a few statesmen and eminent politicians. In Leicester Square, Hogarth laughed, moralised, and painted. ”

“ Not far away, just out of Soho Square, is to be seen another grimed and neglected-looking edifice, a stretch of gloomy brickwork, with rows of windows, having the general air of a disused Assembly room. This, curious to say, was actually its original function. For, over a hundred and twenty years ago, it was the well-known “Mrs. Cornelys’,” where her masquerades and ridottos, the most brilliant in London, were held. Mrs. Cornelys, after being patronized by all “the nobility and gentry,” came at last to “selling asses’ milk” in the suburbs, and died in a wretched way. ”

“ Soho has always been the abode of the French immigrant. But Time, combined with a squabbling County Council, has affected even cosmopolitan London; and Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road have now opened up the more inaccessible haunts, rendering them more conventional, if less interesting. ”

“ I do not begrudge him his concocted dish of thrills. I only mention [Pg 59] this trick of his because it proves again the strange resurrective powers of an oft-buried lie. You may sweep, you may garnish Soho if you will; but the scent of adventure will hang round it still.
But to-day the scent is very faint. The streets that once rang with laughter and prodigal talk are in A.D. 1917 charged with gloom; their gentle noise is pitched in the minor key. These morsels of the South, shovelled into the swart melancholies of central London, have lost their happy summer tone. ”

“ In Newman Street jutting from Oxford to the north Benjamin West the Anglo-American painter lived at No. 14 and here he died. Fanny Kemble the actress was born in this street.
The Soho neighbourhood lies enclosed by Charing Cross Road, Leicester Square, Warwick Street and Oxford Street. The name is a reminder of the old cry of the harriers—Co, ho! The Square of Soho was part of the garden of the Duke of Monmouth whose home was what [Pg 172] is now the south side of the square and occupied almost the entire space between the present Greek and Frith streets. ”

“ Among old boys may be [Pg 24] mentioned Postlethwaite, afterwards Master of St. Paul's; Charles Mathews, when very young; Horne Tooke a former Lord Mayor of London; and Liston who was for a time usher.
As stated above, the northern half of the square is in the parish of St. Anne's, Soho, a parish now tenanted to a very large extent by foreigners, chiefly French and Italians. Shaftesbury Avenue, running diagonally through the parish, is of very recent origin.
Soho has been derived from the watchword of Monmouth at Sedgemoor, because the Duke had a house in Soho, then King's Square. ”

“ CARLTON HOUSE AND SCREEN.
And then for the stranger there is such a pleasant commingling of the old and the new at this point. The wilds [Pg 77] of Soho, with its historic Square, its streets that defy the most exact logical definition, its church, its memories of Dr. Manette and the sweet Lucy; Leicester Square where once was a royal palace, and the homes of Reynolds, and Hunter, and Hogarth, and our one and only Sir Isaac; and where the Empire, and the Alhambra (awhile the home of that most dreary Panopticon) compete nightly with all the bravery of illumination and gigantic “chuckers out.” ”

“ This Englishman, satisfied as to the bona fides of the newcomer, lost no time in making his acquaintance, and very obligingly "showed him London"—the side of it which is not in the guide-books. One night the young American was taken by his friend to a club in a side street in Soho, which he was told was a gambling club. ”

“ But, apart from the invasion of Soho by the girl-clerk and the book-keeper, one cannot but love it. I love it because, in my early days of scant feeding, it was the one spot in London where I could gorge to repletion for a shilling. There was a little place in Wardour Street, the Franco-Suisse—it is still there—whose shilling table d'hôte was a marvel: And I always had my bob's worth, I can assure you; for those were the days when one went hungry all day in order to buy concert tickets. ”

“ And into the chilly kiss he placed on her forehead, Soames put more than his usual warmth.
“I have to go down to Robin Hill to-morrow,” he said, “to see young Jolyon on business. He's got a boy at Oxford. I'd like to take Val with me and introduce him. Come down to 'The Shelter' for the week-end and bring the children. Oh! by the way, no, that won't do; I've got some other people coming.” So saying, he left her and turned towards Soho.
CHAPTER IV—SOHO
Of all quarters in the queer adventurous amalgam called London, Soho is perhaps least suited to the Forsyte spirit. ”

“ London, the "stony-hearted stepmother," as De Quincey called Oxford Street—has many a time given her children stones for bread. Many are the men and women, poets, authors, journalists, actors, who come up to the vast city, attracted by "the deceitful lights of London," to starve in Soho or Bloomsbury garrets (Bloomsbury, to which place, it is said, more MSS. are returned than to any other locality in the British Isles) . Too proud to beg, too sensitive to fight, they soon become ousted in the struggle for life, and very often get pushed altogether out of the ranks ”