The London Magazine

“ Cornhill is published by Smith, Elder & Co. All the Year Round is edited by Chas. Dickens, Jr., who is rated very high as a sketch writer, and is also well known as a rowing and yachting man. The London Society Magazine is published at 217 Piccadilly, and the most aristocratic of all the London magazines, being beautifully illustrated, and having excellent social, club, and fashionable sketches. The London Society is sold for a shilling, and has a number of lady artists who make drawings for its pages. ”

“ The work of a gentleman who knows every nook and corner of the empire city by personal observation, and who, by his large acquaintance with English authors and English literary history, is enabled to point out all the localities consecrated by genius and heroism; it is full of interesting and attractive matter to all readers. As a guide to London, it will be found a genial as well as a knowing companion to the tourist. We have been especially pleased with those portions which describe the shops of the booksellers and the residences of the authors. ”

“ No, sir; in London we see into, and see through, all sorts of pretension: the pretension of wealth or rank, whatever kind of quackery and imposture. When I say we, I speak of the vast multitudes forming the educated, discriminating, and thinking classes of London life. We pass on to what a man is, over who he is, and what he has ”

“ In this respect, no capital, no country on the face of the earth, resembles us; every where else you will find a leading class, giving a tone to society, and moulding it in some one or other direction; a predominating set, the pride of those who are in, the envy of those who are below it. There is nothing of this kind in London; here every man has his own set, and every man his proper pride. ”

“ Let an old gentleman of conservative tastes, who can remember the century's youth, talk to you at a club temporis acti—tell you wherein it is that from his own point of view London, as a residence for a gentleman, has done nothing but fall off for the last forty years. ”

“ He has all the sensitiveness of genius, with its sympathy, its versatility, its unexpected turns, its rapid transitions from grave to gay, its vivid appreciation of all that is beautiful in art and nature, literature and life. No man in London, I should think, has so many and such devoted friends in every class and station ”

“ When an example was set, the whole fraternity, fired with emulation, thrust each new one beyond his neighbour. Such were the impediments to walking so recently as 1766! The reader may imagine how a Londoner must have felt during a high wind and shower; a thousand signs swinging on rusty hinges above him, threatening ruin to his person at every step, and a thousand spouts pouring cascades at his luckless head. ”

“ By a young journalist, or an old one, there is always an adventure to be found in London, as in any great city of the world where the passions of men and women, the conflict of life, the heroism and crimes of human nature, its dreams, its madness, and its faith, are but thinly masked behind the commonplace aspect of modern streets, and beneath the drab cloak of dullness of modern civilization.
It was my hobby in those early Fleet Street days to explore the underworld of London and to get behind the scenes of its monstrous puppet show. ”

“ There is on the fringe of real English society, and chiefly, if not altogether, in London here, a sort of demi-monde, not composed, like that other in France, of simple courtesans, but of men and women of indolent habits and æsthetic tastes, artists, literary persons, novel writers, actors, men of genius and men of talent, butterflies and gadflies of the human kind, leading a lazy existence from hand to mouth. ”

“ There's a finish and a pleasantness about life in London; men have more leisure to take an interest in women's work; why, you've no idea how many interesting, clever, charming men I know in London! How many does one know here? ”

“ To the ordinary eye the moon and stars have at least prettiness, perhaps grandeur. To the trained astronomer, and the contemplative poet, the mighty firmament overwhelms the mind with the sense of human inability to grasp the vast. Knowing and loving the features and characteristics of London as a lover those of his mistress, it can be imagined how such a one despairs of doing justice, in a brief space, either to his subject or his own sane enthusiasm. ”

“ Then the great, dim city becomes bright and kind, the pall of smoke turns into a veil of haze carelessly worn, the air is coloured and almost scented by the presence of the biggest society in the world, and most of the things that meet the eye—or perhaps I should say more of them, for the most in London is, no doubt, ever the realm of the dingy—present themselves as “well appointed.” ”

“ The men have no style; the women, who are fidgety and talk too much, have it only in their coiffure, where they have it superabundantly. But I console myself with the greater bonhomie. Have you ever arrived at an English country-house in the dusk of a winter's day? Have you ever made a call in London, when you knew nobody but the hostess? People here are more expressive, more demonstrative; and it is a pleasure, when one comes back (if one happens, like me, to be no one in particular) , to feel one's social value rise. They attend to you more ”

“ But it is not only in remote country places that the superstition prevails, but here in London, among most of the upper middle classes. And after all, are not more ridiculous notions to be met with every day? ”

“ There is a calmness and fairness and depth in conversation here which one seldom meets with in London, where people are too much taken up by the present to dwell upon the past, or look forward to the future--and where consequently passion and prejudice are mixed up with most that one hears. ”

“ The idea that is almost always uppermost is the bigness and strangeness of this London world. Long as I have lived here,—the sixteenth anniversary of my marriage is only ten days off,—there is still a kind of novelty and excitement in it It is a great pull, as they say here, to have remained sensitive,—to have kept one’s own point of view. ”

“ She never sought out people merely for their rank or riches, but because she enjoyed their society. Her parties were the pleasantest in London, because they were exempt from the monotony that then brooded over the leaders of English fashion. ”

“ Londoners have no definiteness of any sort. Their most striking trait is, paradoxically, a vague uncertainty, and this is seen in everything connected with London, from the weather to the gauzy, undecided, wavering scarfs which the women universally wear. ”

“ For a month of preparation, while the house-fronts in the fashionable streets are escaladed by painters emulous of the perils of the samphire-gatherer's dreadful trade, the air is filled with the clean, turpentiny odor, and the eye is pleased with the soft colors in which the grimy walls remember the hopes of another spring, of another London season. ”

“ I have not been quite as regular in my habits as I ought to have been, but London is not the place for a man of my tastes—too many temptations for a fellow like me. When I come back we will go into the country, where you can have a garden, with flowers and chickens, and grow fat and pretty again. ”

“ For one who sees and thinks life in terms of shares and coupons, it is certainly overdrawn. But for one who sees and thinks life in terms of manhood and womanhood, it cannot be overdrawn. Such hordes of beastly wretchedness and inarticulate misery are no compensation for a millionnaire brewer who lives in a West End palace, sates himself with the sensuous delights of London's golden theatres, hobnobs with lordlings and princelings, and is knighted by the king. ”

“ Here will be one of the great meeting places of mankind. Here—I speak of Utopian London—will be the traditional centre of one of the great races in the commonality of the World State—and here will be its social and intellectual exchange. There will be a mighty University here, with thousands of professors and tens of thousands of advanced students, and here great journals of thought and speculation, mature and splendid books of philosophy and science, and a glorious fabric of literature will be woven and shaped, and with a teeming leisureliness, put forth. ”

“ But if she is in the country, then all the charm of existence is centred in London and its thoroughfares, and not the finest scenery in the world is to be compared with the attractions of the shops in Regent Street or the crowds thronging Cheapside. ”

“ To speak against London is no longer fashionable. The Earth as an artistic cult has had its day, and the literature of the near future will probably ignore the country and seek inspiration from the town. ”

“ And I think, as soon as you have seen all the exhibitions, and feel able to pack your country dresses and sacrifice London gaieties for monastic peace in art and nature, that you should really come; the roses will soon be here—and the gentians and hyacinths will certainly be here before you—and it is best, while all things bid fair for us, to take Fortune at her word. ”

“ The London year is studded with holidays, blessed little islands of comparative leisure—intervals of absence for good society. Then the wonderful English faculty for “going out of town for a little change” comes into illimitable play, and families transport their nurseries and their bath-tubs to those rural scenes which form the real substratum of the national life. Such moments as these are the paradise of the genuine London-lover, for he then finds himself face to face with the object of his passion; he can give himself up to an intercourse which at other times is obstructed by his rivals. ”

“ Where has spleen her food but in London—humour, interest, curiosity, suck at her measureless breasts without a possibility of being satiated. Nursed amid her noise, her crowds, her beloved smoke—what have I been doing all my life, if I have not lent out my heart with usury to such scenes?
Reader, in the course of my peregrinations about the great city, it is hard, if I have not picked up matter, which may serve to amuse thee, as it has done me, a winter evening long. ”

“ That is really the word for the period from Easter to midsummer; it is a fine, decorous, expensive, Protestant carnival, in which the masks are not of velvet or silk, but of wonderful deceptive flesh and blood, the material of the most beautiful complexions in the world. Holding that the great interest of London is the sense the place gives us of multitudinous life, it is doubtless an inconsequence not to care most for the phase of greatest intensity. But there is life and life, and the rush and crush of these weeks of fashion is after all but a tolerably mechanical expression of human forces. ”

“ Her enjoyment was keen and her curiosity insatiable, and, grateful in general for all her opportunities, she especially prized the privilege of meeting certain celebrated persons, authors and artists, philosophers and statesmen, of whose renown she had been a humble and distant beholder and who now, as part of the frequent furniture of London drawing-rooms, struck her as stars fallen from the firmament and become palpable—revealing also sometimes on contact qualities not to have been predicted of bodies sidereal. ”

“ One can entertain or not entertain, spend much or spend little, live on one's friends or be lived on by them, exactly as one finds most convenient: and unquestionably social freedom is a great element in human happiness.
For many natures London has an attractiveness which is all its own, and yet to indulge one's taste for it may be a grave dereliction of duty. ”

“ There are idylls of the slums and alleys as charming as ever poet penned; there are stories to be told of the dwellers in mean streets that lift our thoughts far above the sordid things of earth.
But these are romances pure and simple, and in them is no element of mystery. The romances I have in my mind as I write are those in which the poverty conceals from the eyes of the world a truth it would be greatly interested to learn.
When the London season is at its height the daily papers are filled with the gay or great doings of the aristocracy. ”

“ He is a sort of index to every thing, and every body; his knowledge of life and character, together with a facetiousness of whim and manner, which he has in delineating them, are what we call in London—Prime and bang up to the mark. There is scarcely a Lane, Court, Alley, or Street, in the Metropolis, but what he knows, from the remotest corners of Rag-Fair, to the open and elegant Squares of the West, even to Hyde Park Corner. Memory, mirth, and magic, seem at all times to animate his tongue, and, as the Song says,
“He is the hoy for bewitching 'em, Whether good-humour'd or coy.” ”

“ Yet with all these excellences combined, if the Alhambra and every Music-Hall-Hell like it in London were suddenly scorched up by a fire from Heaven, it would be the most incomparable benefit ever bestowed upon the English metropolis, and a saving grace to thousands of young English men and women—both in body and soul. ”

“ Her name is eternally before the public; she produces those gorgeous inanities, called Books of Beauty, and other trashy things of the same description, to get up which all the fashion and beauty, the taste and talent, of London are laid under contribution. The most distinguished artists and the best engravers supply the portraits of the prettiest women in London ”

“ Therefore perhaps the most general characteristic is the absence of insistence. Habits and inclinations flourish and fall, but intensity is never one of them. The spirit of the great city is not analytic, and, as 10 they come up, subjects rarely receive at its hands a treatment drearily earnest or tastelessly thorough. There are not many—of those of which London disposes with the assurance begotten of its large experience—that wouldn’t lend themselves to a tenderer manipulation elsewhere. ”