When I was a very small boy indeed, both in years and stature, I got lost one day in the City of London. I was taken out by Somebody (shade of Somebody forgive me for remembering no more of thy identity!), as an immense treat, to be shown the outside of Saint Giles’s Church. I had romantic ideas in connexion with that religious edifice; firmly believing that all the beggars who pretended through the week to be blind, lame, one-armed, deaf and dumb, and otherwise physically afflicted, laid aside their pretences every Sunday, dressed themselves in holiday clothes, and attended divine service in the temple of their patron saint. I had a general idea that the reigning successor of Bamfylde Moore Carew acted as a sort of church-warden on these occasions, and sat in a high pew with red curtains.
It was in the spring-time when these tender notions of mine, bursting forth into new shoots under the influence of the season, became sufficiently troublesome to my parents and guardians to occasion Somebody to volunteer to take me to see the outside of Saint Giles’s Church, which was considered likely (I suppose) to quench my romantic fire, and bring me to a practical state. We set off after breakfast. I have an impression that Somebody was got up in a striking manner - in cord breeches of fine texture and milky hue, in long jean gaiters, in a green coat with bright buttons, in a blue neckerchief, and a monstrous shirt-collar. I think he must have newly come (as I had myself) out of the hop-grounds of Kent. I considered him the glass of fashion and the mould of form: a very Hamlet without the burden of his difficult family affairs.
We were conversational together, and saw the outside of Saint Giles’s Church with sentiments of satisfaction, much enhanced by a flag flying from the steeple. I infer that we then went down to Northumberland House in the Strand to view the celebrated lion over the gateway. At all events, I know that in the act of looking up with mingled awe and admiration at that famous animal I lost Somebody.
The child’s unreasoning terror of being lost, comes as freshly on me now as it did then. I verily believe that if I had found myself astray at the North Pole instead of in the narrow, crowded, inconvenient street over which the lion in those days presided, I could not have been more horrified. But, this first fright expended itself in a little crying and tearing up and down; and then I walked, with a feeling of dismal dignity upon me, into a court, and sat down on a step to consider how to get through life.
To the best of my belief, the idea of asking my way home never came into my head. It is possible that I may, for the time, have preferred the dismal dignity of being lost; but I have a serious conviction that in the wide scope of my arrangements for the future, I had no eyes for the nearest and most obvious course. I was but very juvenile; from eight to nine years old, I fancy.
I had one and fourpence in my pocket, and a pewter ring with a bit of red glass in it on my little finger. This jewel had been presented to me by the object of my affections, on my birthday, when we had sworn to marry, but had foreseen family obstacles to our union, in her being (she was six years old) of the Wesleyan persuasion, while I was devotedly attached to the Church of England. The one and fourpence were the remains of half-a-crown presented on the same anniversary by my godfather - a man who knew his duty and did it.
Armed with these amulets, I made up my little mind to seek my fortune. When I had found it, I thought I would drive home in a coach and six, and claim my bride. I cried a little more at the idea of such a triumph, but soon dried my eyes and came out of the court to pursue my plans. These were, first to go (as a species of investment) and see the Giants in Guildhall, out of whom I felt it not improbable that some prosperous adventure would arise; failing that contingency, to try about the City for any opening of a Whittington nature; baffled in that too, to go into the army as a drummer.
So, I began to ask my way to Guildhall: which I thought meant, somehow, Gold or Golden Hall; I was too knowing to ask my way to the Giants, for I felt it would make people laugh. I remember how immensely broad the streets seemed now I was alone, how high the houses, how grand and mysterious everything. When I came to Temple Bar, it took me half an hour to stare at it, and I left it unfinished even then. I had read about heads being exposed on the top of Temple Bar, and it seemed a wicked old place, albeit a noble monument of architecture and a paragon of utility. When at last I got away from it, behold I came, the next minute, on the figures at St. Dunstan’s! Who could see those obliging monsters strike upon the bells and go? Between the quarters there was the toyshop to look at - still there, at this present writing, in a new form - and even when that enchanted spot was escaped from, after an hour and more, then Saint Paul’s arose, and how was I to get beyond its dome, or to take my eyes from its cross of gold? I found it a long journey to the Giants, and a slow one.
I came into their presence at last, and gazed up at them with dread and veneration. They looked better-tempered, and were altogether more shiny-faced, than I had expected; but they were very big, and, as I judged their pedestals to be about forty feet high, I considered that they would be very big indeed if they were walking on the stone pavement. I was in a state of mind as to these and all such figures, which I suppose holds equally with most children. While I knew them to be images made of something that was not flesh and blood, I still invested them with attributes of life - with consciousness of my being there, for example, and the power of keeping a sly eye upon me. Being very tired I got into the corner under Magog, to be out of the way of his eye, and fell asleep.
When I started up after a long nap, I thought the giants were roaring, but it was only the City. The place was just the same as when I fell asleep: no beanstalk, no fairy, no princess, no dragon, no opening in life of any kind. So, being hungry, I thought I would buy something to eat, and bring it in there and eat it, before going forth to seek my fortune on the Whittington plan.
I was not ashamed of buying a penny roll in a baker’s shop, but I looked into a number of cooks’ shops before I could muster courage to go into one. At last I saw a pile of cooked sausages in a window with the label ‘Small Germans, A Penny.’ Emboldened by knowing what to ask for, I went in and said, ‘If you please will you sell me a small German?’ which they did, and I took it, wrapped in paper in my pocket, to Guildhall.
The giants were still lying by, in their sly way, pretending to take no notice, so I sat down in another corner, when what should I see before me but a dog with his ears cocked. He was a black dog, with a bit of white over one eye, and bits of white and tan in his paws, and he wanted to play - frisking about me, rubbing his nose against me, dodging at me sideways, shaking his head and pretending to run away backwards, and making himself goodnaturedly ridiculous, as if he had no consideration for himself, but wanted to raise my spirits. Now, when I saw this dog I thought of Whittington, and felt that things were coming right; I encouraged him by saying, ‘Hi, boy!’ ‘Poor fellow!’ ‘Good dog!’ and was satisfied that he was to be my dog for ever afterwards, and that he would help me to seek my fortune.
Very much comforted by this (I had cried a little at odd times ever since I was lost), I took the small German out of my pocket, and began my dinner by biting off a bit and throwing it to the dog, who immediately swallowed it with a one-sided jerk, like a pill. While I took a bit myself, and he looked me in the face for a second piece, I considered by what name I should call him. I thought Merrychance would be an expressive name, under the circumstances; and I was elated, I recollect, by inventing such a good one, when Merrychance began to growl at me in a most ferocious manner.
I wondered he was not ashamed of himself, but he didn’t care for that; on the contrary he growled a good deal more. With his mouth watering, and his eyes glistening, and his nose in a very damp state, and his head very much on one side, he sidled about on the pavement in a threatening manner and growled at me, until he suddenly made a snap at the small German, tore it out of my hand, and went off with it. He never came back to help me seek my fortune. From that hour to the present, when I am forty years of age, I have never seen my faithful Merrychance again.
I felt very lonely. Not so much for the loss of the small German, though it was delicious (I knew nothing about highly-peppered horse at that time), as on account of Merrychance’s disappointing me so cruelly; for I had hoped he would do every friendly thing but speak, and perhaps even come to that. I cried a little more, and began to wish that the object of my affections had been lost with me, for company’s sake. But, then I remembered that she could not go into the army as a drummer; and I dried my eyes and ate my loaf. Coming out, I met a milkwoman, of whom I bought a pennyworth of milk; quite set up again by my repast, I began to roam about the City, and to seek my fortune in the Whittington direction.
When I go into the City, now, it makes me sorrowful to think that I am quite an artful wretch. Strolling about it as a lost child, I thought of the British Merchant and the Lord Mayor, and was full of reverence. Strolling about it now, I laugh at the sacred liveries of state, and get indignant with the corporation as one of the strongest practical jokes of the present day. What did I know then, about the multitude who are always being disappointed in the City; who are always expecting to meet a party there, and to receive money there, and whose expectations are never fulfilled? What did I know then, about that wonderful person, the friend in the City, who is to do so many things for so many people; who is to get this one into a post at home, and that one into a post abroad; who is to settle with this man’s creditors, provide for that man’s son, and see that other man paid; who is to ‘throw himself’ into this grand Joint-Stock certainty, and is to put his name down on that Life Assurance Directory, and never does anything predicted of him? What did I know, then, about him as the friend of gentlemen, Mosaic Arabs and others, usually to be seen at races, and chiefly residing in the neighbourhood of Red Lion Square; and as being unable to discount the whole amount of that paper in money, but as happening to have by him a cask of remarkable fine sherry, a dressing-case, and a Venus by Titian, with which he would be willing to make up the balance? Had I ever heard of him, in those innocent days, as confiding information (which never by any chance turned out to be in the remotest degree correct) to solemn bald men, who mysteriously imparted it to breathless dinner tables? No. Had I ever learned to dread him as a shark, disregard him as a humbug, and know him for a myth? Not I. Had I ever heard of him as associated with tightness in the money market, gloom in consols, the exportation of gold, or that rock ahead in everybody’s course, the bushel of wheat? Never. Had I the least idea what was meant by such terms as jobbery, rigging the market, cooking accounts, getting up a dividend, making things pleasant, and the like? Not the slightest. Should I have detected in Mr. Hudson himself, a staring carcase of golden veal? By no manner of means. The City was to me a vast emporium of precious stones and metals, casks and bales, honour and generosity, foreign fruits and spices. Every merchant and banker was a compound of Mr. Fitz-Warren and Sinbad the Sailor. Smith, Payne, and Smith, when the wind was fair for Barbary and the captain present, were in the habit of calling their servants together (the cross cook included) and asking them to produce their little shipments. Glyn and Halifax had personally undergone great hardships in the valley of diamonds. Baring Brothers had seen Rocs’ eggs and travelled with caravans. Rothschild had sat in the Bazaar at Bagdad with rich stuffs for sale; and a veiled lady from the Sultan’s harem, riding on a donkey, had fallen in love with him.
Thus I wandered about the City, like a child in a dream, staring at the British merchants, and inspired by a mighty faith in the marvellousness of everything. Up courts and down courts - in and out of yards and little squares - peeping into counting-house passages and running away - poorly feeding the echoes in the court of the South Sea House with my timid steps - roaming down into Austin Friars, and wondering how the Friars used to like it - ever staring at the British merchants, and never tired of the shops - I rambled on, all through the day. In such stories as I made, to account for the different places, I believed as devoutly as in the City itself. I particularly remember that when I found myself on ‘Change, and saw the shabby people sitting under the placards about ships, I settled that they were Misers, who had embarked all their wealth to go and buy gold-dust or something of that sort, and were waiting for their respective captains to come and tell them that they were ready to set sail. I observed that they all munched dry biscuits, and I thought it was to keep off sea-sickness.
This was very delightful; but it still produced no result according to the Whittington precedent. There was a dinner preparing at the Mansion House, and when I peeped in at a grated kitchen window, and saw the men cooks at work in their white caps, my heart began to beat with hope that the Lord Mayor, or the Lady Mayoress, or one of the young Princesses their daughters, would look out of an upper apartment and direct me to be taken in. But, nothing of the kind occurred. It was not until I had been peeping in some time that one of the cooks called to me (the window was open) ‘Cut away, you sir!’ which frightened me so, on account of his black whiskers, that I instantly obeyed.
After that, I came to the India House, and asked a boy what it was, who made faces and pulled my hair before he told me, and behaved altogether in an ungenteel and discourteous manner. Sir James Hogg himself might have been satisfied with the veneration in which I held the India House. I had no doubt of its being the most wonderful, the most magnanimous, the most incorruptible, the most practically disinterested, the most in all respects astonishing, establishment on the face of the earth. I understood the nature of an oath, and would have sworn it to be one entire and perfect chrysolite.
Thinking much about boys who went to India, and who immediately, without being sick, smoked pipes like curled-up bell-ropes, terminating in a large cut-glass sugar basin upside down, I got among the outfitting shops. There, I read the lists of things that were necessary for an India-going boy, and when I came to ‘one brace of pistols,’ thought what happiness to be reserved for such a fate! Still no British merchant seemed at all disposed to take me into his house. The only exception was a chimney-sweep - he looked at me as if he thought me suitable to his business; but I ran away from him.
I suffered very much, all day, from boys; they chased me down turnings, brought me to bay in doorways, and treated me quite savagely, though I am sure I gave them no offence. One boy, who had a stump of black-lead pencil in his pocket, wrote his mother’s name and address (as he said) on my white hat, outside the crown. MRS . BLORES , WOODEN LEG WALK , TOBACCO-STOPPER ROW , WAPPING . And I couldn’t rub it out.
I recollect resting in a little churchyard after this persecution, disposed to think upon the whole, that if I and the object of my affections could be buried there together, at once, it would be comfortable. But, another nap, and a pump, and a bun, and above all a picture that I saw, brought me round again.
I must have strayed by that time, as I recall my course, into Goodman’s fields, or somewhere thereabouts. The picture represented a scene in a play then performing at a theatre in that neighbourhood which is no longer in existence. It stimulated me to go to that theatre and see that play. I resolved, as there seemed to be nothing doing in the Whittington way, that on the conclusion of the entertainments I would ask my way to the barracks, knock at the gate, and tell them that I understood they were in want of drummers, and there I was. I think I must have been told, but I know I believed, that a soldier was always on duty, day and night, behind every barrack-gate, with a shilling; and that a boy who could by any means be prevailed on to accept it, instantly became a drummer, unless his father paid four hundred pounds.
I found out the theatre - of its external appearance I only remember the loyal initials G. R. untidily painted in yellow ochre on the front - and waited, with a pretty large crowd, for the opening of the gallery doors. The greater part of the sailors and others composing the crowd, were of the lowest description, and their conversation was not improving; but I understood little or nothing of what was bad in it then, and it had no depraving influence on me. I have wondered since, how long it would take, by means of such association, to corrupt a child nurtured as I had been, and innocent as I was.
Whenever I saw that my appearance attracted attention, either outside the doors or afterwards within the theatre, I pretended to look out for somebody who was taking care of me, and from whom I was separated, and to exchange nods and smiles with that creature of my imagination. This answered very well. I had my sixpence clutched in my hand ready to pay; and when the doors opened, with a clattering of bolts, and some screaming from women in the crowd, I went on with the current like a straw. My sixpence was rapidly swallowed up in the money-taker’s pigeon-hole, which looked to me like a sort of mouth, and I got into the freer staircase above and ran on (as everybody else did) to get a good place. When I came to the back of the gallery, there were very few people in it, and the seats looked so horribly steep, and so like a diving arrangement to send me, headforemost, into the pit, that I held by one of them in a terrible fright. However, there was a good-natured baker with a young woman, who gave me his hand, and we all three scrambled over the seats together down into the corner of the first row. The baker was very fond of the young woman, and kissed her a good deal in the course of the evening.
I was no sooner comfortably settled, than a weight fell upon my mind, which tormented it most dreadfully, and which I must explain. It was a benefit night - the benefit of the comic actor - a little fat man with a very large face and, as I thought then, the smallest and most diverting hat that ever was seen. This comedian, for the gratification of his friends and patrons, had undertaken to sing a comic song on a donkey’s back, and afterwards to give away the donkey so distinguished, by lottery. In this lottery, every person admitted to the pit and gallery had a chance. On paying my sixpence, I had received the number, fortyseven; and I now thought, in a perspiration of terror, what should I ever do if that number was to come up the prize, and I was to win the donkey!
It made me tremble all over to think of the possibility of my good fortune. I knew I never could conceal the fact of my holding forty-seven, in case that number came up, because, not to speak of my confusion, which would immediately condemn me, I had shewn my number to the baker. Then, I pictured to myself the being called upon to come down on the stage and receive the donkey. I thought how all the people would shriek when they saw it had fallen to a little fellow like me. How should I lead him out - for of course he wouldn’t go? If he began to bray, what should I do? If he kicked, what would become of me? Suppose he backed into the stage-door, and stuck there, with me upon him? For I felt that if I won him, the comic actor would have me on his back, the moment he could touch me. Then if I got him out of the theatre, what was I to do with him? How was I to feed him? Where was I to stable him? It was bad enough to have gone astray by myself, but to go astray with a donkey, too, was a calamity more tremendous than I could bear to contemplate.
These apprehensions took away all my pleasure in the first piece. When the ship came on - a real man-of-war she was called in the bills - and rolled prodigiously in a very heavy sea, I couldn’t, even in the terrors of the storm, forget the donkey. It was awful to see the sailors pitching about, with telescopes and speaking trumpets (they looked very tall indeed aboard the man-of-war), and it was awful to suspect the pilot of treachery, though impossible to avoid it, for when he cried - ‘We are lost! To the raft, to the raft! A thunderbolt has struck the mainmast!’ - I myself saw him take the main-mast out of its socket and drop it overboard; but even these impressive circumstances paled before my dread of the donkey. Even, when the good sailor (and he was very good) came to good fortune, and the bad sailor (and he was very bad) threw himself into the ocean from the summit of a curious rock, presenting something of the appearance of a pair of steps, I saw the dreadful donkey through my tears.
At last the time came when the fiddlers struck up the comic song, and the dreaded animal, with new shoes on, as I inferred from the noise they made, came clattering in with the comic actor on his back. He was dressed out with ribbons (I mean the donkey was) and as he persisted in turning his tail to the audience, the comedian got off him, turned about, and sitting with his face that way, sang the song three times, amid thunders of applause. All this time, I was fearfully agitated; and when two pale people, a good deal splashed with the mud of the streets, were invited out of the pit to superintend the drawing of the lottery, and were received with a round of laughter from everybody else, I could have begged and prayed them to have mercy on me, and not draw number forty-seven.
But, I was soon put out of my pain now, for a gentleman behind me, in a flannel jacket and a yellow neckkerchief, who had eaten two fried soles and all his pocketsfull of nuts before the storm began to rage, answered to the winning number, and went down to take possession of the prize. This gentleman had appeared to know the donkey, rather, from the moment of his entrance, and had taken a great interest in his proceedings; driving him to himself, if I use an intelligible phrase, and saying, almost in my ear, when he made any mistake, ‘Kum up, you precious Moke. Kum up!’ He was thrown by the donkey on first mounting him, to the great delight of the audience (including myself), but rode him off with great skill afterwards, and soon returned to his seat quite calm. Calmed myself by the immense relief I had sustained, I enjoyed the rest of the performance very much indeed. I remember there were a good many dances, some in fetters and some in roses, and one by a most divine little creature, who made the object of my affections look but commonplace. In the concluding drama, she re-appeared as a boy (in arms, mostly), and was fought for, several times. I rather think a Baron wanted to drown her, and was on various occasions prevented by the comedian, a ghost, a Newfoundland dog, and a church bell. I only remember beyond this, that I wondered where the Baron expected to go to, and that he went there in a shower of sparks. The lights were turned out while the sparks died out, and it appeared to me as if the whole play - ship, donkey, men and women, divine little creature, and all - were a wonderful firework that had gone off, and left nothing but dust and darkness behind it.
It was late when I got out into the streets, and there was no moon, and there were no stars, and the rain fell heavily. When I emerged from the dispersing crowd, the ghost and the baron had an ugly look in my remembrance; I felt unspeakably forlorn; and now, for the first time, my little bed and the dear familiar faces came before me, and touched my heart. By daylight, I had never thought of the grief at home. I had never thought of my mother. I had never thought of anything but adapting myself to the circumstances in which I found myself, and going to seek my fortune.
For a boy who could do nothing but cry, and run about, saying, ‘O I am lost!’ to think of going into the army was, I felt sensible, out of the question. I abandoned the idea of asking my way to the barracks - or rather the idea abandoned me - and ran about, until I found a watchman in his box. It is amazing to me, now, that he should have been sober; but I am inclined to think he was too feeble to get drunk.
This venerable man took me to the nearest watchhouse; - I say he took me, but in fact I took him, for when I think of us in the rain, I recollect that we must have made a composition, like a vignette of Infancy leading Age. He had a dreadful cough, and was obliged to lean against a wall, whenever it came on. We got at last to the watch-house, a warm and drowsy sort of place embellished with great-coats and rattles hanging up. When a paralytic messenger had been sent to make inquiries about me, I fell asleep by the fire, and awoke no more until my eyes opened on my father’s face. This is literally and exactly how I went astray. They used to say I was an odd child, and I suppose I was. I am an odd man perhaps.
Shade of Somebody, forgive me for the disquiet I must have caused thee! When I stand beneath the Lion, even now, I see thee rushing up and down, refusing to be comforted. I have gone astray since, many times, and farther afield. May I therein have given less disquiet to others, than herein I gave to thee!
There are some small out-of-the-way landing-places on the Thames and the Medway, where I do much of my summer idling. Running water is favourable to day-dreams, and a strong tidal river is the best of running water for mine. I like to watch the great ships standing out to sea or coming home richly laden, the active little steam-tugs confidently puffing with them to and from the sea-horizon, the fleet of barges that seem to have plucked their brown and russet sails from the ripe trees in the landscape, the heavy old colliers, light in ballast, floundering down before the tide, the light screw barks and schooners imperiously holding a straight course while the others patiently tack and go about, the yachts with their tiny hulls and great white sheets of canvas, the little sailing-boats bobbing to and fro on their errands of pleasure or business, and - as it is the nature of little people to do - making a prodigious fuss about their small affairs. Watching these objects, I still am under no obligation to think about them, or even so much as to see them, unless it perfectly suits my humour. As little am I obliged to hear the plash and flop of the tide, the ripple at my feet, the clinking windlass afar off, or the humming steam-ship paddles further away yet. These, with the creaking little jetty on which I sit, and the gaunt high-water marks and low-water marks in the mud, and the broken causeway, and the broken bank, and the broken stakes and piles leaning forward as if they were vain of their personal appearance and looking for their reflection in the water, will melt into any train of fancy. Equally adaptable to any purpose or to none, are the pasturing sheep and kine upon the marshes, the gulls that wheel and dip around me, the crows (well out of gunshot) going home from the rich harvest-fields, the heron that has been out a-fishing and looks as melancholy, up there in the sky, as if it hadn’t agreed with him. Everything within the range of the senses will, by the aid of the running water, lend itself to everything beyond that range, and work into a drowsy whole, not unlike a kind of tune, but for which there is no exact definition.
One of these landing-places is near an old fort (I can see the Nore Light from it with my pocket-glass), from which fort mysteriously emerges a boy, to whom I am much indebted for additions to my scanty stock of knowledge. He is a young boy, with an intelligent face burnt to a dust colour by the summer sun, and with crisp hair of the same hue. He is a boy in whom I have perceived nothing incompatible with habits of studious inquiry and meditation, unless an evanescent black eye (I was delicate of inquiring how occasioned) should be so considered. To him am I indebted for ability to identify a Custom-house boat at any distance, and for acquaintance with all the forms and ceremonies observed by a homeward-bound Indiaman coming up the river, when the Custom-house officers go aboard her. But for him, I might never have heard of ‘the dumbague,’ respecting which malady I am now learned. Had I never sat at his feet, I might have finished my mortal career and never known that when I see a white horse on a barge’s sail, that barge is a lime barge. For precious secrets in reference to beer, am I likewise beholden to him, involving warning against the beer of a certain establishment, by reason of its having turned sour through failure in point of demand: though my young sage is not of the opinion that similar deterioration has befallen the ale. He has also enlightened me touching the mushrooms of the marshes, and has gently reproved my ignorance in having supposed them to be impregnated with salt. His manner of imparting information, is thoughtful, and appropriate to the scene. As he reclines beside me, he pitches into the river, a little stone or piece of grit, and then delivers himself oracularly, as though he spoke out of the centre of the spreading circle that it makes in the water. He never improves my mind without observing this formula.
With the wise boy - whom I know by no other name than the Spirit of the Fort - I recently consorted on a breezy day when the river leaped about us and was full of life. I had seen the sheaved corn carrying in the golden fields as I came down to the river; and the rosy farmer, watching his labouring-men in the saddle on his cob, had told me how he had reaped his two hundred and sixty acres of long-strawed corn last week, and how a better week’s work he had never done in all his days. Peace and abundance were on the country-side in beautiful forms and beautiful colours, and the harvest seemed even to be sailing out to grace the never-reaped sea in the yellowladen barges that mellowed the distance.
It was on this occasion that the Spirit of the Fort, directing his remarks to a certain floating iron battery lately lying in that reach of the river, enriched my mind with his opinions on naval architecture, and informed me that he would like to be an engineer. I found him up to everything that is done in the contracting line by Messrs. Peto and Brassey - cunning in the article of concrete - mellow in the matter of iron - great on the subject of gunnery. When he spoke of pile-driving and sluice-making, he left me not a leg to stand on, and I can never sufficiently acknowledge his forbearance with me in my disabled state. While he thus discoursed, he several times directed his eyes to one distant quarter of the landscape, and spoke with vague mysterious awe of ‘the Yard.’ Pondering his lessons after we had parted, I bethought me that the Yard was one of our large public Dockyards, and that it lay hidden among the crops down in the dip behind the windmills, as if it modestly kept itself out of view in peaceful times, and sought to trouble no man. Taken with this modesty on the part of the Yard, I resolved to improve the Yard’s acquaintance.
My good opinion of the Yard’s retiring character was not dashed by nearer approach. It resounded with the noise of hammers beating upon iron; and the great sheds or slips under which the mighty men-of-war are built, loomed business-like when contemplated from the opposite side of the river. For all that, however, the Yard made no display, but kept itself snug under hill-sides of cornfields, hop-gardens, and orchards; its great chimneys smoking with a quiet - almost a lazy - air, like giants smoking tobacco; and the great Shears moored off it, looking meekly and inoffensively out of proportion, like the Giraffe of the machinery creation. The store of cannon on the neighbouring gun-wharf, had an innocent toy-like appearance, and the one red-coated sentry on duty over them was a mere toy figure, with a clock-work movement. As the hot sunlight sparkled on him he might have passed for the identical little man who had the little gun, and whose bullets they were made of lead, lead, lead.
Crossing the river and landing at the Stairs, where a drift of chips and weed had been trying to land before me and had not succeeded, but had got into a corner instead, I found the very street posts to be cannon, and the architectural ornaments to be shells. And so I came to the Yard, which was shut up tight and strong with great folded gates, like an enormous patent safe. These gates devouring me, I became digested into the Yard; and it had, at first, a clean-swept holiday air, as if it had given over work until next war-time. Though indeed a quantity of hemp for rope was tumbling out of store-houses, even there, which would hardly be lying like so much hay on the white stones if the Yard were as placid as it pretended.
Ding, Clash, Dong, BANG , Boom, Rattle, Clash, BANG , Clink, BANG , Dong, BANG , Clatter, BANG BANG BANG! What on earth is this! This is, or soon will be, the Achilles, iron armour-plated ship. Twelve hundred men are working at her now; twelve hundred men working on stages over her sides, over her bows, over her stern, under her keel, between her decks, down in her hold, within her and without, crawling and creeping into the finest curves of her lines wherever it is possible for men to twist. Twelve hundred hammerers, measurers, caulkers, armourers, forgers, smiths, shipwrights; twelve hundred dingers, clashers, dongers, rattlers, clinkers, bangers bangers bangers! Yet all this stupendous uproar around the rising Achilles is as nothing to the reverberations with which the perfected Achilles shall resound upon the dreadful day when the full work is in hand for which this is but note of preparation - the day when the scuppers that are now fitting like great dry thirsty conduit-pipes, shall run red. All these busy figures between decks, dimly seen bending at their work in smoke and fire, are as nothing to the figures that shall do work here of another kind in smoke and fire, that day. These steam-worked engines alongside, helping the ship by travelling to and fro, and wafting tons of iron plates about, as though they were so many leaves of trees, would be rent limb from limb if they stood by her for a minute then. To think that this Achilles, monstrous compound of iron tank and oaken chest, can ever swim or roll! To think that any force of wind and wave could ever break her! To think that wherever I see a glowing red-hot iron point thrust out of her side from within - as I do now, there, and there, and there! - and two watching men on a stage without, with bared arms and sledge-hammers, strike at it fiercely, and repeat their blows until it is black and flat, I see a rivet being driven home, of which there are many in every iron plate, and thousands upon thousands in the ship! To think that the difficulty I experience in appreciating the ship’s size when I am on board, arises from her being a series of iron tanks and oaken chests, so that internally she is ever finishing and ever beginning, and half of her might be smashed, and yet the remaining half suffice and be sound. Then, to go over the side again and down among the ooze and wet to the bottom of the dock, in the depths of the subterranean forest of dog-shores and stays that hold her up, and to see the immense mass bulging out against the upper light, and tapering down towards me, is, with great pains and much clambering, to arrive at an impossibility of realising that this is a ship at all, and to become possessed by the fancy that it is an enormous immovable edifice set up in an ancient amphitheatre (say, that at Verona), and almost filling it! Yet what would even these things be, without the tributary workshops and the mechanical powers for piercing the iron plates - four inches and a half thick - for rivets, shaping them under hydraulic pressure to the finest tapering turns of the ship’s lines, and paring them away, with knives shaped like the beaks of strong and cruel birds, to the nicest requirements of the design! These machines of tremendous force, so easily directed by one attentive face and presiding hand, seem to me to have in them something of the retiring character of the Yard. ‘Obedient monster, please to bite this mass of iron through and through, at equal distances, where these regular chalk-marks are, all round.’ Monster looks at its work, and lifting its ponderous head, replies, ‘I don’t particularly want to do it; but if it must be done--!’ The solid metal wriggles out, hot from the monster’s crunching tooth, and it is done. ‘Dutiful monster, observe this other mass of iron. It is required to be pared away, according to this delicately lessening and arbitrary line, which please to look at.’ Monster (who has been in a reverie) brings down its blunt head, and, much in the manner of Doctor Johnson, closely looks along the line - very closely, being somewhat near-sighted. ‘I don’t particularly want to do it; but if it must be done—!’ Monster takes another near-sighted look, takes aim, and the tortured piece writhes off, and falls, a hot tighttwisted snake, among the ashes. The making of the rivets is merely a pretty round game, played by a man and a boy, who put red-hot barley sugar in a Pope Joan board, and immediately rivets fall out of window; but the tone of the great machines is the tone of the great Yard and the great country: ‘We don’t particularly want to do it; but if it must be done—!’
How such a prodigious mass as the Achilles can ever be held by such comparatively little anchors as those intended for her and lying near her here, is a mystery of seamanship which I will refer to the wise boy. For my own part, I should as soon have thought of tethering an elephant to a tentpeg, or the larger hippopotamus in the Zoological Gardens to my shirt-pin. Yonder in the river, alongside a hulk, lie two of this ship’s hollow iron masts. They are large enough for the eye, I find, and so are all her other appliances. I wonder why only her anchors look small.
I have no present time to think about it, for I am going to see the workshops where they make all the oars used in the British Navy. A pretty large pile of building, I opine, and a pretty long job! As to the building, I am soon disappointed, because the work is all done in one loft. And as to a long job - what is this? Two rather large mangles with a swarm of butterflies hovering over them? What can there be in the mangles that attracts butterflies?
Drawing nearer, I discern that these are not mangles, but intricate machines, set with knives and saws and planes, which cut smooth and straight here, and slantwise there, and now cut such a depth, and now miss cutting altogether, according to the predestined requirements of the pieces of wood that are pushed on below them: each of which pieces is to be an oar, and is roughly adapted to that purpose before it takes its final leave of far-off forests, and sails for England. Likewise I discern that the butterflies are not true butterflies, but wooden shavings, which, being spirited up from the wood by the violence of the machinery, and kept in rapid and not equal movement by the impulse of its rotation on the air, flutter and play, and rise and fall, and conduct themselves as like butterflies as heart could wish. Suddenly the noise and motion cease, and the butterflies drop dead. An oar has been made since I came in, wanting the shaped handle. As quickly as I can follow it with my eye and thought, the same oar is carried to a turning lathe. A whirl and a nick! Handle made. Oar finished.
The exquisite beauty and efficiency of this machinery need no illustration, but happen to have a pointed illustration to-day. A pair of oars of unusual size chance to be wanted for a special purpose, and they have to be made by hand. Side by side with the subtle and facile machine, and side by side with the fast-growing pile of oars on the floor, a man shapes out these special oars with an axe. Attended by no butterflies, and chipping and dinting, by comparison as leisurely as if he were a labouring Pagan getting them ready against his decease at threescore and ten, to take with him as a present to Charon for his boat, the man (aged about thirty) plies his task. The machine would make a regulation oar while the man wipes his forehead. The man might be buried in a mound made of the strips of thin broad wooden ribbon torn from the wood whirled into oars as the minutes fall from the clock, before he had done a forenoon’s work with his axe.
Passing from this wonderful sight to the Ships again - for my heart, as to the Yard, is where the ships are - I notice certain unfinished wooden walls left seasoning on the stocks, pending the solution of the merits of the wood and iron question, and having an air of biding their time with surly confidence. The names of these worthies are set up beside them, together with their capacity in guns - a custom highly conducive to ease and satisfaction in social intercourse, if it could be adapted to mankind. By a plank more gracefully pendulous than substantial, I make bold to go aboard a transport ship (iron screw) just sent in from the contractor’s yard to be inspected and passed. She is a very gratifying experience, in the simplicity and humanity of her arrangements for troops, in her provision for light and air and cleanliness, and in her care for women and children. It occurs to me, as I explore her, that I would require a handsome sum of money to go aboard her, at midnight by the Dockyard bell, and stay aboard alone till morning; for surely she must be haunted by a crowd of ghosts of obstinate old martinets, mournfully flapping their cherubic epaulettes over the changed times. Though still we may learn from the astounding ways and means in our Yards now, more highly than ever to respect the forefathers who got to sea, and fought the sea, and held the sea, without them. This remembrance putting me in the best of tempers with an old hulk, very green as to her copper, and generally dim and patched, I pull off my hat to her. Which salutation a callow and downy-faced young officer of Engineers, going by at the moment, perceiving, appropriates - and to which he is most heartily welcome, I am sure.
Having been torn to pieces (in imagination) by the steam circular saws, perpendicular saws, horizontal saws, and saws of eccentric action, I come to the sauntering part of my expedition, and consequently to the core of my Uncommercial pursuits.
Everywhere, as I saunter up and down the Yard, I meet with tokens of its quiet and retiring character. There is a gravity upon its red brick offices and houses, a staid pretence of having nothing worth mentioning to do, an avoidance of display, which I never saw out of England. The white stones of the pavement present no other trace of Achilles and his twelve hundred banging men (not one of whom strikes an attitude) than a few occasional echoes. But for a whisper in the air suggestive of sawdust and shavings, the oar-making and the saws of many movements might be miles away. Down below here, is the great reservoir of water where timber is steeped in various temperatures, as a part of its seasoning process. Above it, on a tramroad supported by pillars, is a Chinese Enchanter’s Car, which fishes the logs up, when sufficiently steeped, and rolls smoothly away with them to stack them. When I was a child (the Yard being then familiar to me) I used to think that I should like to play at Chinese Enchanter, and to have that apparatus placed at my disposal for the purpose by a beneficent country. I still think that I should rather like to try the effect of writing a book in it. Its retirement is complete, and to go gliding to and fro among the stacks of timber would be a convenient kind of travelling in foreign countries - among the forests of North America, the sodden Honduras swamps, the dark pine woods, the Norwegian frosts, and the tropical heats, rainy seasons, and thunder-storms. The costly store of timber is stacked and stowed away in sequestered places, with the pervading avoidance of flourish or effect. It makes as little of itself as possible, and calls to no one ‘Come and look at me!’ And yet it is picked out from the trees of the world; picked out for length, picked out for breadth, picked out for straightness, picked out for crookedness, chosen with an eye to every need of ship and boat. Strangely twisted pieces lie about, precious in the sight of shipwrights. Sauntering through these groves, I come upon an open glade where workmen are examining some timber recently delivered. Quite a pastoral scene, with a background of river and windmill! and no more like War than the American States are at present like an Union.
Sauntering among the ropemaking, I am spun into a state of blissful indolence, wherein my rope of life seems to be so untwisted by the process as that I can see back to very early days indeed, when my bad dreams - they were frightful, though my more mature understanding has never made out why - were of an interminable sort of ropemaking, with long minute filaments for strands, which, when they were spun home together close to my eyes, occasioned screaming. Next, I walk among the quiet lofts of stores - of sails, spars, rigging, ships’ boats - determined to believe that somebody in authority wears a girdle and bends beneath the weight of a massive bunch of keys, and that, when such a thing is wanted, he comes telling his keys like Blue Beard, and opens such a door. Impassive as the long lofts look, let the electric battery send down the word, and the shutters and doors shall fly open, and such a fleet of armed ships, under steam and under sail, shall burst forth as will charge the old Medway - where the merry Stuart let the Dutch come, while his not so merry sailors starved in the streets - with something worth looking at to carry to the sea. Thus I idle round to the Medway again, where it is now flood tide; and I find the river evincing a strong solicitude to force a way into the dry dock where Achilles is waited on by the twelve hundred bangers, with intent to bear the whole away before they are ready.
To the last, the Yard puts a quiet face upon it; for I make my way to the gates through a little quiet grove of trees, shading the quaintest of Dutch landing-places, where the leaf-speckled shadow of a shipwright just passing away at the further end might be the shadow of Russian Peter himself. So, the doors of the great patent safe at last close upon me, and I take boat again: somehow, thinking as the oars dip, of braggart Pistol and his brood, and of the quiet monsters of the Yard, with their ‘We don’t particularly want to do it; but if it must be done—!’ Scrunch.
My day’s no-business beckoning me to the East-end of London, I had turned my face to that point of the metropolitan compass on leaving Covent-garden, and had got past the India House, thinking in my idle manner of Tippoo-Sahib and Charles Lamb, and had got past my little wooden midshipman, after affectionately patting him on one leg of his knee-shorts for old acquaintance’ sake, and had got past Aldgate Pump, and had got past the Saracen’s Head (with an ignominious rash of posting bills disfiguring his swarthy countenance), and had strolled up the empty yard of his ancient neighbour the Black or Blue Boar, or Bull, who departed this life I don’t know when, and whose coaches are all gone I don’t know where; and I had come out again into the age of railways, and I had got past Whitechapel Church, and was - rather inappropriately for an Uncommercial Traveller - in the Commercial Road. Pleasantly wallowing in the abundant mud of that thoroughfare, and greatly enjoying the huge piles of building belonging to the sugar refiners, the little masts and vanes in small back gardens in back streets, the neighbouring canals and docks, the India vans lumbering along their stone tramway, and the pawnbrokers’ shops where hard-up Mates had pawned so many sextants and quadrants, that I should have bought a few cheap if I had the least notion how to use them, I at last began to file off to the right, towards Wapping.
Not that I intended to take boat at Wapping Old Stairs, or that I was going to look at the locality, because I believe (for I don’t) in the constancy of the young woman who told her sea-going lover, to such a beautiful old tune, that she had ever continued the same, since she gave him the ‘baccer-box marked with his name; I am afraid he usually got the worst of those transactions, and was frightfully taken in. No, I was going to Wapping, because an Eastern police magistrate had said, through the morning papers, that there was no classification at the Wapping workhouse for women, and that it was a disgrace and a shame, and divers other hard names, and because I wished to see how the fact really stood. For, that Eastern police magistrates are not always the wisest men of the East, may be inferred from their course of procedure respecting the fancy-dressing and pantomime-posturing at St.George’s in that quarter: which is usually, to discuss the matter at issue, in a state of mind betokening the weakest perplexity, with all parties concerned and unconcerned, and, for a final expedient, to consult the complainant as to what he thinks ought to be done with the defendant, and take the defendant’s opinion as to what he would recommend to be done with himself.
Long before I reached Wapping, I gave myself up as having lost my way, and, abandoning myself to the narrow streets in a Turkish frame of mind, relied on predestination to bring me somehow or other to the place I wanted if I were ever to get there. When I had ceased for an hour or so to take any trouble about the matter, I found myself on a swing-bridge looking down at some dark locks in some dirty water. Over against me, stood a creature remotely in the likeness of a young man, with a puffed sallow face, and a figure all dirty and shiny and slimy, who may have been the youngest son of his filthy old father, Thames, or the drowned man about whom there was a placard on the granite post like a large thimble, that stood between us.
I asked this apparition what it called the place? Unto which, it replied, with a ghastly grin and a sound like gurgling water in its throat:
‘Mr. Baker’s trap.’
As it is a point of great sensitiveness with me on such occasions to be equal to the intellectual pressure of the conversation, I deeply considered the meaning of this speech, while I eyed the apparition - then engaged in hugging and sucking a horizontal iron bar at the top of the locks. Inspiration suggested to me that Mr. Baker was the acting coroner of that neighbourhood.
‘A common place for suicide,’ said I, looking down at the locks.
‘Sue?’ returned the ghost, with a stare. ‘Yes! And Poll. Likewise Emily. And Nancy. And Jane;’ he sucked the iron between each name; ‘and all the bileing. Ketches off their bonnets or shorls, takes a run, and headers down here, they doos. Always a headerin’ down here, they is. Like one o’clock.’
‘And at about that hour of the morning, I suppose?’
‘Ah!’ said the apparition. ‘They an’t partickler. Two ’ull do for them. Three. All times o’ night. On’y mind you!’ Here the apparition rested his profile on the bar, and gurgled in a sarcastic manner. ‘There must be somebody comin’. They don’t go a headerin’ down here, wen there an’t no Bobby nor gen’ral Cove, fur to hear the splash.’
According to my interpretation of these words, I was myself a General Cove, or member of the miscellaneous public. In which modest character I remarked:
‘They are often taken out, are they, and restored?’
‘I dunno about restored,’ said the apparition, who, for some occult reason, very much objected to that word; ‘they’re carried into the werkiss and put into a ‘ot bath, and brought round. But I dunno about restored,’ said the apparition; ‘blow that !’ - and vanished.
As it had shown a desire to become offensive, I was not sorry to find myself alone, especially as the ‘werkiss’ it had indicated with a twist of its matted head, was close at hand. So I left Mr. Baker’s terrible trap (baited with a scum that was like the soapy rinsing of sooty chimneys), and made bold to ring at the workhouse gate, where I was wholly unexpected and quite unknown.
A very bright and nimble little matron, with a bunch of keys in her hand, responded to my request to see the House. I began to doubt whether the police magistrate was quite right in his facts, when I noticed her quick active little figure and her intelligent eyes.
The Traveller (the matron intimated) should see the worst first. He was welcome to see everything. Such as it was, there it all was.
This was the only preparation for our entering ‘the Foul wards.’ They were in an old building squeezed away in a corner of a paved yard, quite detached from the more modern and spacious main body of the workhouse. They were in a building most monstrously behind the time - a mere series of garrets or lofts, with every inconvenient and objectionable circumstance in their construction, and only accessible by steep and narrow staircases, infamously ill-adapted for the passage up-stairs of the sick or down-stairs of the dead.
A-bed in these miserable rooms, here on bedsteads, there (for a change, as I understood it) on the floor, were women in every stage of distress and disease. None but those who have attentively observed such scenes, can conceive the extraordinary variety of expression still latent under the general monotony and uniformity of colour, attitude, and condition. The form a little coiled up and turned away, as though it had turned its back on this world for ever; the uninterested face at once lead-coloured and yellow, looking passively upward from the pillow; the haggard mouth a little dropped, the hand outside the coverlet, so dull and indifferent, so light, and yet so heavy; these were on every pallet; but when I stopped beside a bed, and said ever so slight a word to the figure lying there, the ghost of the old character came into the face, and made the Foul ward as various as the fair world. No one appeared to care to live, but no one complained; all who could speak, said that as much was done for them as could be done there, that the attendance was kind and patient, that their suffering was very heavy, but they had nothing to ask for. The wretched rooms were as clean and sweet as it is possible for such rooms to be; they would become a pest-house in a single week, if they were ill-kept.
I accompanied the brisk matron up another barbarous staircase, into a better kind of loft devoted to the idiotic and imbecile. There was at least Light in it, whereas the windows in the former wards had been like sides of school-boys’ bird-cages. There was a strong grating over the fire here, and, holding a kind of state on either side of the hearth, separated by the breadth of this grating, were two old ladies in a condition of feeble dignity, which was surely the very last and lowest reduction of self-complacency, to be found in this wonderful humanity of ours. They were evidently jealous of each other, and passed their whole time (as some people do, whose fires are not grated) in mentally disparaging each other, and contemptuously watching their neighbours. One of these parodies on provincial gentlewomen was extremely talkative, and expressed a strong desire to attend the service on Sundays, from which she represented herself to have derived the greatest interest and consolation when allowed that privilege. She gossiped so well, and looked altogether so cheery and harmless, that I began to think this a case for the Eastern magistrate, until I found that on the last occasion of her attending chapel she had secreted a small stick, and had caused some confusion in the responses by suddenly producing it and belabouring the congregation.
So, these two old ladies, separated by the breadth of the grating - otherwise they would fly at one another’s caps - sat all day long, suspecting one another, and contemplating a world of fits. For, everybody else in the room had fits, except the wards-woman; an elderly, ablebodied pauperess, with a large upper lip, and an air of repressing and saving her strength, as she stood with her hands folded before her, and her eyes slowly rolling, biding her time for catching or holding somebody. This civil personage (in whom I regretted to identify a reduced member of my honourable friend Mrs. Gamp’s family) said, ‘They has ’em continiwal, sir. They drops without no more notice than if they was coach-horses dropped from the moon, sir. And when one drops, another drops, and sometimes there’ll be as many as four or five on ’em at once, dear me, a rolling and a tearin’, bless you! - this young woman, now, has ’em dreadful bad.’
She turned up this young woman’s face with her hand as she said it. This young woman was seated on the floor, pondering in the foreground of the afflicted. There was nothing repellant either in her face or head. Many, apparently worse, varieties of epilepsy and hysteria were about her, but she was said to be the worst here. When I had spoken to her a little, she still sat with her face turned up, pondering, and a gleam of the mid-day sun shone in upon her.
- Whether this young woman, and the rest of these so sorely troubled, as they sit or lie pondering in their confused dull way, ever get mental glimpses among the motes in the sunlight, of healthy people and healthy things? Whether this young woman, brooding like this in the summer season, ever thinks that somewhere there are trees and flowers, even mountains and the great sea? Whether, not to go so far, this young woman ever has any dim revelation of that young woman - that young woman who is not here and never will come here; who is courted, and caressed, and loved, and has a husband, and bears children, and lives in a home, and who never knows what it is to have this lashing and tearing coming upon her? And whether this young woman, God help her, gives herself up then and drops like a coach-horse from the moon?
I hardly knew whether the voices of infant children, penetrating into so hopeless a place, made a sound that was pleasant or painful to me. It was something to be reminded that the weary world was not all aweary, and was ever renewing itself; but, this young woman was a child not long ago, and a child not long hence might be such as she. Howbeit, the active step and eye of the vigilant matron conducted me past the two provincial gentlewomen (whose dignity was ruffled by the children), and into the adjacent nursery.
There were many babies here, and more than one handsome young mother. There were ugly young mothers also, and sullen young mothers, and callous young mothers. But, the babies had not appropriated to themselves any bad expression yet, and might have been, for anything that appeared to the contrary in their soft faces, Princes Imperial, and Princesses Royal. I had the pleasure of giving a poetical commission to the baker’s man to make a cake with all despatch and toss it into the oven for one red-headed young pauper and myself, and felt much the better for it. Without that refreshment, I doubt if I should have been in a condition for ‘the Refractories,’ towards whom my quick little matron - for whose adaptation to her office I had by this time conceived a genuine respect - drew me next, and marshalled me the way that I was going.
The Refractories were picking oakum, in a small room giving on a yard. They sat in line on a form, with their backs to a window; before them, a table, and their work. The oldest Refractory was, say twenty; youngest Refractory, say sixteen. I have never yet ascertained in the course of my uncommercial travels, why a Refractory habit should affect the tonsils and uvula; but, I have always observed that Refractories of both sexes and every grade, between a Ragged School and the Old Bailey, have one voice, in which the tonsils and uvula gain a diseased ascendency.
‘Five pound indeed! I hain’t a going fur to pick five pound,’ said the Chief of the Refractories, keeping time to herself with her head and chin. ‘More than enough to pick what we picks now, in sich a place as this, and on wot we gets here!’
(This was in acknowledgment of a delicate intimation that the amount of work was likely to be increased. It certainly was not heavy then, for one Refractory had already done her day’s task - it was barely two o’clock - and was sitting behind it, with a head exactly matching it.)
‘A pretty Ouse this is, matron, ain’t it?’ said Refractory Two, ‘where a pleeseman’s called in, if a gal says a word!’
‘And wen you’re sent to prison for nothink or less!’ said the Chief, tugging at her oakum as if it were the matron’s hair. ‘But any place is better than this; that’s one thing, and be thankful!’
A laugh of Refractories led by Oakum Head with folded arms - who originated nothing, but who was in command of the skirmishers outside the conversation.
‘If any place is better than this,’ said my brisk guide, in the calmest manner, ‘it is a pity you left a good place when you had one.’
‘Ho, no, I didn’t, matron,’ returned the Chief, with another pull at her oakum, and a very expressive look at the enemy’s forehead. ‘Don’t say that, matron, cos it’s lies!’
Oakum Head brought up the skirmishers again, skirmished, and retired.
‘And I warn’t a going,’ exclaimed Refractory Two, ‘though I was in one place for as long as four year - I warn’t a going fur to stop in a place that warn’t fit for me - there! And where the family warn’t ’spectable characters - there! And where I fort’nately or hunfort’nately, found that the people warn’t what they pretended to make theirselves out to be - there! And where it wasn’t their faults, by chalks, if I warn’t made bad and ruinated - Hah!’
During this speech, Oakum Head had again made a diversion with the skirmishers, and had again withdrawn.
The Uncommercial Traveller ventured to remark that he supposed Chief Refractory and Number One, to be the two young women who had been taken before the magistrate?
‘Yes!’ said the Chief, ‘we har! and the wonder is, that a pleeseman an’t ’ad in now, and we took off agen. You can’t open your lips here, without a pleeseman.’
Number Two laughed (very uvularly), and the skirmishers followed suit.
‘I’m sure I’d be thankful,’ protested the Chief, looking sideways at the Uncommercial, ‘if I could be got into a place, or got abroad. I’m sick and tired of this precious Ouse, I am, with reason.’
So would be, and so was, Number Two. So would be, and so was, Oakum Head. So would be, and so were, Skirmishers.
The Uncommercial took the liberty of hinting that he hardly thought it probable that any lady or gentleman in want of a likely young domestic of retiring manners, would be tempted into the engagement of either of the two leading Refractories, on her own presentation of herself as per sample.
‘It ain’t no good being nothink else here,’ said the Chief.
The Uncommercial thought it might be worth trying.
‘Oh no, it ain’t,’ said the Chief.
‘Not a bit of good,’ said Number Two.
‘And I’m sure I’d be very thankful to be got into a place, or got abroad,’ said the Chief.
‘And so should I,’ said Number Two. ‘Truly thankful, I should.’
Oakum Head then rose, and announced as an entirely new idea, the mention of which profound novelty might be naturally expected to startle her unprepared hearers, that she would be very thankful to be got into a place, or got abroad. And, as if she had then said, ‘Chorus, ladies!’ all the Skirmishers struck up to the same purpose. We left them, thereupon, and began a long walk among the women who were simply old and infirm; but whenever, in the course of this same walk, I looked out of any high window that commanded the yard, I saw Oakum Head and all the other Refractories looking out at their low window for me, and never failing to catch me, the moment I showed my head.
In ten minutes I had ceased to believe in such fables of a golden time as youth, the prime of life, or a hale old age. In ten minutes, all the lights of womankind seemed to have been blown out, and nothing in that way to be left this vault to brag of, but the flickering and expiring snuffs.
And what was very curious, was, that these dim old women had one company notion which was the fashion of the place. Every old woman who became aware of a visitor and was not in bed hobbled over a form into her accustomed seat, and became one of a line of dim old women confronting another line of dim old women across a narrow table. There was no obligation whatever upon them to range themselves in this way; it was their manner of ‘receiving.’ As a rule, they made no attempt to talk to one another, or to look at the visitor, or to look at anything, but sat silently working their mouths, like a sort of poor old Cows. In some of these wards, it was good to see a few green plants; in others, an isolated Refractory acting as nurse, who did well enough in that capacity, when separated from her compeers; every one of these wards, day room, night room, or both combined, was scrupulously clean and fresh. I have seen as many such places as most travellers in my line, and I never saw one such, better kept.
Among the bedridden there was great patience, great reliance on the books under the pillow, great faith in GOD . All cared for sympathy, but none much cared to be encouraged with hope of recovery; on the whole, I should say, it was considered rather a distinction to have a complication of disorders, and to be in a worse way than the rest. From some of the windows, the river could be seen with all its life and movement; the day was bright, but I came upon no one who was looking out.
In one large ward, sitting by the fire in arm-chairs of distinction, like the President and Vice of the good company, were two old women, upwards of ninety years of age. The younger of the two, just turned ninety, was deaf, but not very, and could easily be made to hear. In her early time she had nursed a child, who was now another old woman, more infirm than herself, inhabiting the very same chamber. She perfectly understood this when the matron told it, and, with sundry nods and motions of her forefinger, pointed out the woman in question. The elder of this pair, ninety-three, seated before an illustrated newspaper (but not reading it), was a bright-eyed old soul, really not deaf, wonderfully preserved, and amazingly conversational. She had not long lost her husband, and had been in that place little more than a year. At Boston, in the State of Massachusetts, this poor creature would have been individually addressed, would have been tended in her own room, and would have had her life gently assimilated to a comfortable life out of doors. Would that be much to do in England for a woman who has kept herself out of a workhouse more than ninety rough long years? When Britain first, at Heaven’s command, arose, with a great deal of allegorical confusion, from out the azure main, did her guardian angels positively forbid it in the Charter which has been so much besung?
The object of my journey was accomplished when the nimble matron had no more to show me. As I shook hands with her at the gate, I told her that I thought Justice had not used her very well, and that the wise men of the East were not infallible.
Now, I reasoned with myself, as I made my journey home again, concerning those Foul wards. They ought not to exist; no person of common decency and humanity can see them and doubt it. But what is this Union to do? The necessary alteration would cost several thousands of pounds; it has already to support three workhouses; its inhabitants work hard for their bare lives, and are already rated for the relief of the Poor to the utmost extent of reasonable endurance. One poor parish in this very Union is rated to the amount of FIVE AND SIXPENCE in the pound, at the very same time when the rich parish of Saint George’s, Hanover-square, is rated at about SEVENPENCE in the pound, Paddington at about FOURPENCE , Saint James’s, Westminster, at about TENPENCE ! It is only through the equalisation of Poor Rates that what is left undone in this wise, can be done. Much more is left undone, or is ill-done, than I have space to suggest in these notes of a single uncommercial journey; but, the wise men of the East, before they can reasonably hold forth about it, must look to the North and South and West; let them also, any morning before taking the seat of Solomon, look into the shops and dwellings all around the Temple, and first ask themselves ‘how much more can these poor people - many of whom keep themselves with difficulty enough out of the workhouse - bear?’
I had yet other matter for reflection as I journeyed home, inasmuch as, before I altogether departed from the neighbourhood of Mr. Baker’s trap, I had knocked at the gate of the workhouse of St. George’s-in-the-East, and had found it to be an establishment highly creditable to those parts, and thoroughly well administered by a most intelligent master. I remarked in it, an instance of the collateral harm that obstinate vanity and folly can do. ‘This was the Hall where those old paupers, male and female, whom I had just seen, met for the Church service, was it?’ - ‘Yes.’ - ‘Did they sing the Psalms to any instrument?’ - ‘They would like to, very much; they would have an extraordinary interest in doing so.’ - ‘And could none be got?’ - ‘Well, a piano could even have been got for nothing, but these unfortunate dissensions—’ Ah! better, far better, my Christian friend in the beautiful garment, to have let the singing boys alone, and left the multitude to sing for themselves! You should know better than I, but I think I have read that they did so, once upon a time, and that ‘when they had sung an hymn,’ Some one (not in a beautiful garment) went up unto the Mount of Olives.
It made my heart ache to think of this miserable trifling, in the streets of a city where every stone seemed to call to me, as I walked along, ‘Turn this way, man, and see what waits to be done!’ So I decoyed myself into another train of thought to ease my heart. But, I don’t know that I did it, for I was so full of paupers, that it was, after all, only a change to a single pauper, who took possession of my remembrance instead of a thousand.
‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ he had said, in a confidential manner, on another occasion, taking me aside; ‘but I have seen better days.’
‘I am very sorry to hear it.’
‘Sir, I have a complaint to make against the master.’
‘I have no power here, I assure you. And if I had—’
‘But, allow me, sir, to mention it, as between yourself and a man who has seen better days, sir. The master and myself are both masons, sir, and I make him the sign continually; but, because I am in this unfortunate position, sir, he won’t give me the countersign!’
I had been looking, yesternight, through the famous ‘Dance of Death,’ and to-day the grim old woodcuts arose in my mind with the new significance of a ghastly monotony not to be found in the original. The weird skeleton rattled along the streets before me, and struck fiercely; but it was never at the pains of assuming a disguise. It played on no dulcimer here, was crowned with no flowers, waved no plume, minced in no flowing robe or train, lifted no winecup, sat at no feast, cast no dice, counted no gold. It was simply a bare, gaunt, famished skeleton, slaying his way along.
The borders of Ratcliff and Stepney, eastward of London, and giving on the impure river, were the scene of this uncompromising dance of death, upon a drizzling November day. A squalid maze of streets, courts, and alleys of miserable houses let out in single rooms. A wilderness of dirt, rags, and hunger. A mud-desert, chiefly inhabited by a tribe from whom employment has departed, or to whom it comes but fitfully and rarely. They are not skilled mechanics in any wise. They are but labourers, - dock-labourers, water-side labourers, coal-porters, ballast-heavers, such-like hewers of wood and drawers of water. But they have come into existence, and they propagate their wretched race.
One grisly joke alone, methought, the skeleton seemed to play off here. It had stuck election-bills on the walls, which the wind and rain had deteriorated into suitable rags. It had even summed up the state of the poll, in chalk, on the shutters of one ruined house. It adjured the free and independent starvers to vote for Thisman and vote for Thatman; not to plump, as they valued the state of parties and the national prosperity (both of great importance to them, I think); but, by returning Thisman and Thatman, each naught without the other, to compound a glorious and immortal whole. Surely the skeleton is nowhere more cruelly ironical in the original monkish idea!
Pondering in my mind the far-seeing schemes of Thisman and Thatman, and of the public blessing called Party, for staying the degeneracy, physical and moral, of many thousands (who shall say how many?) of the English race; for devising employment useful to the community for those who want but to work and live; for equalising rates, cultivating waste lands, facilitating emigration, and, above all things, saving and utilising the oncoming generations, and thereby changing ever-growing national weakness into strength: pondering in my mind, I say, these hopeful exertions, I turned down a narrow street to look into a house or two.
It was a dark street with a dead wall on one side. Nearly all the outer doors of the houses stood open. I took the first entry, and knocked at a parlour-door. Might I come in? I might, if I plased, sur.
The woman of the room (Irish) had picked up some long strips of wood, about some wharf or barge; and they had just now been thrust into the otherwise empty grate to make two iron pots boil. There was some fish in one, and there were some potatoes in the other. The flare of the burning wood enabled me to see a table, and a broken chair or so, and some old cheap crockery ornaments about the chimney-piece. It was not until I had spoken with the woman a few minutes, that I saw a horrible brown heap on the floor in the corner, which, but for previous experience in this dismal wise, I might not have suspected to be ‘the bed.’ There was something thrown upon it; and I asked what that was.
‘’Tis the poor craythur that stays here, sur; and ’tis very bad she is, and ’tis very bad she’s been this long time, and ’tis better she’ll never be, and ‘tis slape she does all day, and ’tis wake she does all night, and ’tis the lead, sur.’
‘The what?’
‘The lead, sur. Sure ‘tis the lead-mills, where the women gets took on at eighteen-pence a day, sur, when they makes application early enough, and is lucky and wanted; and ’tis lead-pisoned she is, sur, and some of them gets lead-pisoned soon, and some of them gets lead-pisoned later, and some, but not many, niver; and ‘tis all according to the constitooshun, sur, and some constitooshuns is strong, and some is weak, and her constitooshun is lead-pisoned, bad as can be, sur; and her brain is coming out at her ear, and it hurts her dreadful; and that’s what it is, and niver no more, and niver no less, sur.’
The sick young woman moaning here, the speaker bent over her, took a bandage from her head, and threw open a back door to let in the daylight upon it, from the smallest and most miserable back-yard I ever saw.
‘That’s what cooms from her, sur, being lead-pisoned; and it cooms from her night and day, the poor, sick craythur; and the pain of it is dreadful; and God he knows that my husband has walked the streets these four days, being a labourer, and is walking them now, and is ready to work, and no work for him, and no fire and no food but the bit in the pot, and no more than ten shillings in a fortnight; God be good to us! and it is poor we are, and dark it is and could it is indeed.’
Knowing that I could compensate myself thereafter for my self-denial, if I saw fit, I had resolved that I would give nothing in the course of these visits. I did this to try the people. I may state at once that my closest observation could not detect any indication whatever of an expectation that I would give money: they were grateful to be talked to about their miserable affairs, and sympathy was plainly a comfort to them; but they neither asked for money in any case, nor showed the least trace of surprise or disappointment or resentment at my giving none.
The woman’s married daughter had by this time come down from her room on the floor above, to join in the conversation. She herself had been to the lead-mills very early that morning to be ‘took on,’ but had not succeeded. She had four children; and her husband, also a water-side labourer, and then out seeking work, seemed in no better case as to finding it than her father. She was English, and by nature of a buxom figure and cheerful. Both in her poor dress and in her mother’s there was an effort to keep up some appearance of neatness. She knew all about the sufferings of the unfortunate invalid, and all about the lead-poisoning, and how the symptoms came on, and how they grew, - having often seen them. The very smell when you stood inside the door of the works was enough to knock you down, she said: yet she was going back again to get ‘took on:’ What could she do? Better be ulcerated and paralyzed for eighteen-pence a day, while it lasted, than see the children starve.
A dark and squalid cupboard in this room, touching the back door and all manner of offence, had been for some time the sleeping-place of the sick young woman. But the nights being now wintry, and the blankets and coverlets ‘gone to the leaving shop,’ she lay all night where she lay all day, and was lying then. The woman of the room, her husband, this most miserable patient, and two others, lay on the one brown heap together for warmth.
‘God bless you, sir, and thank you!’ were the parting words from these people, - gratefully spoken too, - with which I left this place.
Some streets away, I tapped at another parlour-door on another ground-floor. Looking in, I found a man, his wife, and four children, sitting at a washing-stool by way of table, at their dinner of bread and infused tea-leaves. There was a very scanty cinderous fire in the grate by which they sat; and there was a tent bedstead in the room with a bed upon it and a coverlet. The man did not rise when I went in, nor during my stay, but civilly inclined his head on my pulling off my hat, and, in answer to my inquiry whether I might ask him a question or two, said, ‘Certainly.’ There being a window at each end of this room, back and front, it might have been ventilated; but it was shut up tight, to keep the cold out, and was very sickening.
The wife, an intelligent, quick woman, rose and stood at her husband’s elbow; and he glanced up at her as if for help. It soon appeared that he was rather deaf. He was a slow, simple fellow of about thirty.
‘What was he by trade?’
‘Gentleman asks what are you by trade, John?’
‘I am a boilermaker;’ looking about him with an exceedingly perplexed air, as if for a boiler that had unaccountably vanished.
‘He ain’t a mechanic, you understand, sir,’ the wife put in: ‘he’s only a labourer.’
‘Are you in work?’
He looked up at his wife again. ‘Gentleman says are you in work, John?’
‘In work!’ cried this forlorn boilermaker, staring aghast at his wife, and then working his vision’s way very slowly round to me: ‘Lord no!’
‘Ah, he ain’t indeed!’ said the poor woman, shaking her head, as she looked at the four children in succession, and then at him.
‘Work!’ said the boilermaker, still seeking that evaporated boiler, first in my countenance, then in the air, and then in the features of his second son at his knee: ‘I wish I was in work! I haven’t had more than a day’s work to do this three weeks.’
‘How have you lived?’
A faint gleam of admiration lighted up the face of the would-be boilermaker, as he stretched out the short sleeve of his threadbare canvas jacket, and replied, pointing her out, ‘On the work of the wife.’
I forget where boilermaking had gone to, or where he supposed it had gone to; but he added some resigned information on that head, coupled with an expression of his belief that it was never coming back.
The cheery helpfulness of the wife was very remarkable. She did slopwork; made pea-jackets. She produced the pea-jacket then in hand, and spread it out upon the bed, - the only piece of furniture in the room on which to spread it. She showed how much of it she made, and how much was afterwards finished off by the machine. According to her calculation at the moment, deducting what her trimming cost her, she got for making a peajacket tenpence half-penny, and she could make one in something less than two days.
But, you see, it come to her through two hands, and of course it didn’t come through the second hand for nothing. Why did it come through the second hand at all? Why, this way. The second hand took the risk of the given-out work, you see. If she had money enough to pay the security deposit, - call it two pound, - she could get the work from the first hand, and so the second would not have to be deducted for. But, having no money at all, the second hand come in and took its profit, and so the whole worked down to tenpence half-penny. Having explained all this with great intelligence, even with some little pride, and without a whine or murmur, she folded her work again, sat down by her husband’s side at the washing-stool, and resumed her dinner of dry bread. Mean as the meal was, on the bare board, with its old gallipots for cups, and what not other sordid makeshifts: shabby as the woman was in dress, and toning down towards the Bosjesman colour, with want of nutriment and washing, - there was positively a dignity in her, as the family anchor just holding the poor shipwrecked boilermaker’s bark. When I left the room, the boilermaker’s eyes were slowly turned towards her, as if his last hope of ever again seeing that vanished boiler lay in her direction.
These people had never applied for parish relief but once; and that was when the husband met with a disabling accident at his work.
Not many doors from here, I went into a room on the first floor. The woman apologised for its being in ‘an untidy mess.’ The day was Saturday, and she was boiling the children’s clothes in a saucepan on the hearth. There was nothing else into which she could have put them. There was no crockery, or tinware, or tub, or bucket. There was an old gallipot or two, and there was a broken bottle or so, and there were some broken boxes for seats. The last small scraping of coals left was raked together in a corner of the floor. There were some rags in an open cupboard, also on the floor. In a corner of the room was a crazy old French bedstead, with a man lying on his back upon it in a ragged pilot jacket, and rough oil-skin fantail hat. The room was perfectly black. It was difficult to believe, at first, that it was not purposely coloured black, the walls were so begrimed.
As I stood opposite the woman boiling the children’s clothes, - she had not even a piece of soap to wash them with, - and apologising for her occupation, I could take in all these things without appearing to notice them, and could even correct my inventory. I had missed, at the first glance, some half a pound of bread in the otherwise empty safe, an old red ragged crinoline hanging on the handle of the door by which I had entered, and certain fragments of rusty iron scattered on the floor, which looked like broken tools and a piece of stove-pipe. A child stood looking on. On the box nearest to the fire sat two younger children; one a delicate and pretty little creature, whom the other sometimes kissed.
This woman, like the last, was woefully shabby, and was degenerating to the Bosjesman complexion. But her figure, and the ghost of a certain vivacity about her, and the spectre of a dimple in her cheek, carried my memory strangely back to the old days of the Adelphi Theatre, London, when Mrs. Fitzwilliam was the friend of Victorine.
‘May I ask you what your husband is?’
‘He’s a coal-porter, sir,’ - with a glance and a sigh towards the bed.
‘Is he out of work?’
‘Oh, yes, sir! and work’s at all times very, very scanty with him; and now he’s laid up.’
‘It’s my legs,’ said the man upon the bed. ‘I’ll unroll ’em.’ And immediately began.
‘Have you any older children?’
‘I have a daughter that does the needle-work, and I have a son that does what he can. She’s at her work now, and he’s trying for work.’
‘Do they live here?’
‘They sleep here. They can’t afford to pay more rent, and so they come here at night. The rent is very hard upon us. It’s rose upon us too, now, - sixpence a week, - on account of these new changes in the law, about the rates. We are a week behind; the landlord’s been shaking and rattling at that door frightfully; he says he’ll turn us out. I don’t know what’s to come of it.’
The man upon the bed ruefully interposed, ‘Here’s my legs. The skin’s broke, besides the swelling. I have had a many kicks, working, one way and another.’
He looked at his legs (which were much discoloured and misshapen) for a while, and then appearing to remember that they were not popular with his family, rolled them up again, as if they were something in the nature of maps or plans that were not wanted to be referred to, lay hopelessly down on his back once more with his fantail hat over his face, and stirred not.
‘Do your eldest son and daughter sleep in that cupboard?’
‘Yes,’ replied the woman.
‘With the children?’
‘Yes. We have to get together for warmth. We have little to cover us.’
‘Have you nothing by you to eat but the piece of bread I see there?’
‘Nothing. And we had the rest of the loaf for our breakfast, with water. I don’t know what’s to come of it.’
‘Have you no prospect of improvement?’
‘If my eldest son earns anything to-day, he’ll bring it home. Then we shall have something to eat to-night, and may be able to do something towards the rent. If not, I don’t know what’s to come of it.’
‘This is a sad state of things.’
‘Yes, sir; it’s a hard, hard life. Take care of the stairs as you go, sir - they’re broken, - and good day, sir!’
These people had a mortal dread of entering the workhouse, and received no out-of-door relief.
In another room, in still another tenement, I found a very decent woman with five children, - the last a baby, and she herself a patient of the parish doctor, - to whom, her husband being in the hospital, the Union allowed for the support of herself and family, four shillings a week and five loaves. I suppose when Thisman, M.P., and Thatman, M.P., and the Public-blessing Party, lay their heads together in course of time, and come to an equalisation of rating, she may go down to the dance of death to the tune of sixpence more.
I could enter no other houses for that one while, for I could not bear the contemplation of the children. Such heart as I had summoned to sustain me against the miseries of the adults failed me when I looked at the children. I saw how young they were, how hungry, how serious and still. I thought of them, sick and dying in those lairs. I think of them dead without anguish; but to think of them so suffering and so dying quite unmanned me.
Down by the river’s bank in Ratcliff, I was turning upward by a side street, therefore, to regain the railway, when my eyes rested on the inscription across the road, ‘East London Children’s Hospital.’ I could scarcely have seen an inscription better suited to my frame of mind; and I went across and went straight in.
I found the children’s hospital established in an old sail-loft or storehouse, of the roughest nature, and on the simplest means. There were trap-doors in the floors, where goods had been hoisted up and down; heavy feet and heavy weights had started every knot in the well-trodden planking: inconvenient bulks and beams and awkward staircases perplexed my passage through the wards. But I found it airy, sweet, and clean. In its seven and thirty beds I saw but little beauty; for starvation in the second or third generation takes a pinched look: but I saw the sufferings both of infancy and childhood tenderly assuaged; I heard the little patients answering to pet playful names, the light touch of a delicate lady laid bare the wasted sticks of arms for me to pity; and the claw-like little hands, as she did so, twined themselves lovingly around her wedding-ring.
One baby mite there was as pretty as any of Raphael’s angels. The tiny head was bandaged for water on the brain; and it was suffering with acute bronchitis too, and made from time to time a plaintive, though not impatient or complaining, little sound. The smooth curve of the cheeks and of the chin was faultless in its condensation of infantine beauty, and the large bright eyes were most lovely. It happened as I stopped at the foot of the bed, that these eyes rested upon mine with that wistful expression of wondering thoughtfulness which we all know sometimes in very little children. They remained fixed on mine, and never turned from me while I stood there. When the utterance of that plaintive sound shook the little form, the gaze still remained unchanged. I felt as though the child implored me to tell the story of the little hospital in which it was sheltered to any gentle heart I could address. Laying my world-worn hand upon the little unmarked clasped hand at the chin, I gave it a silent promise that I would do so.
A gentleman and lady, a young husband and wife, have bought and fitted up this building for its present noble use, and have quietly settled themselves in it as its medical officers and directors. Both have had considerable practical experience of medicine and surgery; he as housesurgeon of a great London hospital; she as a very earnest student, tested by severe examination, and also as a nurse of the sick poor during the prevalence of cholera.
With every qualification to lure them away, with youth and accomplishments and tastes and habits that can have no response in any breast near them close begirt by every repulsive circumstance inseparable from such a neighbourhood, there they dwell. They live in the hospital itself, and their rooms are on its first floor. Sitting at their dinner-table, they could hear the cry of one of the children in pain. The lady’s piano, drawing-materials, books, and other such evidences of refinement are as much a part of the rough place as the iron bedsteads of the little patients. They are put to shifts for room, like passengers on board ship. The dispenser of medicines (attracted to them not by self-interest, but by their own magnetism and that of their cause) sleeps in a recess in the diningroom, and has his washing apparatus in the sideboard.
Their contented manner of making the best of the things around them, I found so pleasantly inseparable from their usefulness! Their pride in this partition that we put up ourselves, or in that partition that we took down, or in that other partition that we moved, or in the stove that was given us for the waiting-room, or in our nightly conversion of the little consulting-room into a smoking-room! Their admiration of the situation, if we could only get rid of its one objectionable incident, the coal-yard at the back! ‘Our hospital carriage, presented by a friend, and very useful.’ That was my presentation to a perambulator, for which a coach-house had been discovered in a corner down-stairs, just large enough to hold it. Coloured prints, in all stages of preparation for being added to those already decorating the wards, were plentiful; a charming wooden phenomenon of a bird, with an impossible top-knot, who ducked his head when you set a counter weight going, had been inaugurated as a public statue that very morning; and trotting about among the beds, on familiar terms with all the patients, was a comical mongrel dog, called Poodles. This comical dog (quite a tonic in himself) was found characteristically starving at the door of the institution, and was taken in and fed, and has lived here ever since. An admirer of his mental endowments has presented him with a collar bearing the legend, ‘Judge not Poodles by external appearances.’ He was merrily wagging his tail on a boy’s pillow when he made this modest appeal to me.
When this hospital was first opened, in January of the present year, the people could not possibly conceive but that somebody paid for the services rendered there; and were disposed to claim them as a right, and to find fault if out of temper. They soon came to understand the case better, and have much increased in gratitude. The mothers of the patients avail themselves very freely of the visiting rules; the fathers often on Sundays. There is an unreasonable (but still, I think, touching and intelligible) tendency in the parents to take a child away to its wretched home, if on the point of death. One boy who had been thus carried off on a rainy night, when in a violent state of inflammation, and who had been afterwards brought back, had been recovered with exceeding difficulty; but he was a jolly boy, with a specially strong interest in his dinner, when I saw him.
Insufficient food and unwholesome living are the main causes of disease among these small patients. So nourishment, cleanliness, and ventilation are the main remedies. Discharged patients are looked after, and invited to come and dine now and then; so are certain famishing creatures who were never patients. Both the lady and the gentleman are well acquainted, not only with the histories of the patients and their families, but with the characters and circumstances of great numbers of their neighbours: of these they keep a register. It is their common experience, that people, sinking down by inches into deeper and deeper poverty, will conceal it, even from them, if possible, unto the very last extremity.
The nurses of this hospital are all young, - ranging, say, from nineteen to four and twenty. They have even within these narrow limits, what many well-endowed hospitals would not give them, a comfortable room of their own in which to take their meals. It is a beautiful truth, that interest in the children and sympathy with their sorrows bind these young women to their places far more strongly than any other consideration could. The best skilled of the nurses came originally from a kindred neighbourhood, almost as poor; and she knew how much the work was needed. She is a fair dressmaker. The hospital cannot pay her as many pounds in the year as there are months in it; and one day the lady regarded it as a duty to speak to her about her improving her prospects and following her trade. ‘No,’ she said: she could never be so useful or so happy elsewhere any more; she must stay among the children. And she stays. One of the nurses, as I passed her, was washing a baby-boy. Liking her pleasant face, I stopped to speak to her charge, - a common, bullet-headed, frowning charge enough, laying hold of his own nose with a slippery grasp, and staring very solemnly out of a blanket. The melting of the pleasant face into delighted smiles, as this young gentleman gave an unexpected kick, and laughed at me, was almost worth my previous pain.
An affecting play was acted in Paris years ago, called ‘The Children’s Doctor.’ As I parted from my children’s doctor, now in question, I saw in his easy black necktie, in his loose buttoned black frock-coat, in his pensive face, in the flow of his dark hair, in his eyelashes, in the very turn of his moustache, the exact realisation of the Paris artist’s ideal as it was presented on the stage. But no romancer that I know of has had the boldness to prefigure the life and home of this young husband and young wife in the Children’s Hospital in the east of London.
I came away from Ratcliff by the Stepney railway station to the terminus at Fenchurch Street. Any one who will reverse that route may retrace my steps.
It is one of my fancies, that even my idlest walk must always have its appointed destination. I set myself a task before I leave my lodging in Covent-garden on a street expedition, and should no more think of altering my route by the way, or turning back and leaving a part of it unachieved, than I should think of fraudulently violating an agreement entered into with somebody else. The other day, finding myself under this kind of obligation to proceed to Limehouse, I started punctually at noon, in compliance with the terms of the contract with myself to which my good faith was pledged.
On such an occasion, it is my habit to regard my walk as my beat, and myself as a higher sort of police-constable doing duty on the same. There is many a ruffian in the streets whom I mentally collar and clear out of them, who would see mighty little of London, I can tell him, if I could deal with him physically.
Issuing forth upon this very beat, and following with my eyes three hulking garrotters on their way home, - which home I could confidently swear to be within so many yards of Drury-lane, in such a narrow and restricted direction (though they live in their lodging quite as undisturbed as I in mine), - I went on duty with a consideration which I respectfully offer to the new Chief Commissioner, - in whom I thoroughly confide as a tried and efficient public servant. How often (thought I) have I been forced to swallow, in police-reports, the intolerable stereotyped pill of nonsense, how that the police-constable informed the worthy magistrate how that the associates of the prisoner did, at that present speaking, dwell in a street or court which no man dared go down, and how that the worthy magistrate had heard of the dark reputation of such street or court, and how that our readers would doubtless remember that it was always the same street or court which was thus edifyingly discoursed about, say once a fortnight.
Now, suppose that a Chief Commissioner sent round a circular to every division of police employed in London, requiring instantly the names in all districts of all such much-puffed streets or courts which no man durst go down; and suppose that in such circular he gave plain warning, ‘If those places really exist, they are a proof of police inefficiency which I mean to punish; and if they do not exist, but are a conventional fiction, then they are a proof of lazy tacit police connivance with professional crime, which I also mean to punish’ - what then? Fictions or realities, could they survive the touchstone of this atom of common sense? To tell us in open court, until it has become as trite a feature of news as the great gooseberry, that a costly police-system such as was never before heard of, has left in London, in the days of steam and gas and photographs of thieves and electric telegraphs, the sanctuaries and stews of the Stuarts! Why, a parity of practice, in all departments, would bring back the Plague in two summers, and the Druids in a century!
Walking faster under my share of this public injury, I overturned a wretched little creature, who, clutching at the rags of a pair of trousers with one of its claws, and at its ragged hair with the other, pattered with bare feet over the muddy stones. I stopped to raise and succour this poor weeping wretch, and fifty like it, but of both sexes, were about me in a moment, begging, tumbling, fighting, clamouring, yelling, shivering in their nakedness and hunger. The piece of money I had put into the claw of the child I had overturned was clawed out of it, and was again clawed out of that wolfish gripe, and again out of that, and soon I had no notion in what part of the obscene scuffle in the mud, of rags and legs and arms and dirt, the money might be. In raising the child, I had drawn it aside out of the main thoroughfare, and this took place among some wooden hoardings and barriers and ruins of demolished buildings, hard by Temple Bar.
Unexpectedly, from among them emerged a genuine police constable, before whom the dreadful brood dispersed in various directions, he making feints and darts in this direction and in that, and catching nothing. When all were frightened away, he took off his hat, pulled out a handkerchief from it, wiped his heated brow, and restored the handkerchief and hat to their places, with the air of a man who had discharged a great moral duty, - as indeed he had, in doing what was set down for him. I looked at him, and I looked about at the disorderly traces in the mud, and I thought of the drops of rain and the footprints of an extinct creature, hoary ages upon ages old, that geologists have identified on the face of a cliff; and this speculation came over me: If this mud could petrify at this moment, and could lie concealed here for ten thousand years, I wonder whether the race of men then to be our successors on the earth could, from these or any marks, by the utmost force of the human intellect, unassisted by tradition, deduce such an astounding inference as the existence of a polished state of society that bore with the public savagery of neglected children in the streets of its capital city, and was proud of its power by sea and land, and never used its power to seize and save them!
After this, when I came to the Old Bailey and glanced up it towards Newgate, I found that the prison had an inconsistent look. There seemed to be some unlucky inconsistency in the atmosphere that day; for though the proportions of St. Paul’s Cathedral are very beautiful, it had an air of being somewhat out of drawing, in my eyes. I felt as though the cross were too high up, and perched upon the intervening golden ball too far away.
Facing eastward, I left behind me Smithfield and Old Bailey, - fire and faggot, condemned hold, public hanging, whipping through the city at the cart-tail, pillory, branding-iron, and other beautiful ancestral landmarks, which rude hands have rooted up, without bringing the stars quite down upon us as yet, - and went my way upon my beat, noting how oddly characteristic neighbourhoods are divided from one another, hereabout, as though by an invisible line across the way. Here shall cease the bankers and the money-changers; here shall begin the shipping interest and the nautical-instrument shops; here shall follow a scarcely perceptible flavouring of groceries and drugs; here shall come a strong infusion of butchers; now, small hosiers shall be in the ascendant; henceforth, everything exposed for sale shall have its ticketed price attached. All this as if specially ordered and appointed.
A single stride at Houndsditch Church, no wider than sufficed to cross the kennel at the bottom of the Canongate, which the debtors in Holyrood sanctuary were wont to relieve their minds by skipping over, as Scott relates, and standing in delightful daring of catchpoles on the free side, - a single stride, and everything is entirely changed in grain and character. West of the stride, a table, or a chest of drawers on sale, shall be of mahogany and French-polished; east of the stride, it shall be of deal, smeared with a cheap counterfeit resembling lip-salve. West of the stride, a penny loaf or bun shall be compact and self-contained; east of the stride, it shall be of a sprawling and splay-footed character, as seeking to make more of itself for the money. My beat lying round by Whitechapel Church, and the adjacent sugar-refineries, - great buildings, tier upon tier, that have the appearance of being nearly related to the dock-warehouses at Liverpool, - I turned off to my right, and, passing round the awkward corner on my left, came suddenly on an apparition familiar to London streets afar off.
What London peripatetic of these times has not seen the woman who has fallen forward, double, through some affection of the spine, and whose head has of late taken a turn to one side, so that it now droops over the back of one of her arms at about the wrist? Who does not know her staff, and her shawl, and her basket, as she gropes her way along, capable of seeing nothing but the pavement, never begging, never stopping, for ever going somewhere on no business? How does she live, whence does she come, whither does she go, and why? I mind the time when her yellow arms were naught but bone and parchment. Slight changes steal over her; for there is a shadowy suggestion of human skin on them now. The Strand may be taken as the central point about which she revolves in a half-mile orbit. How comes she so far east as this? And coming back too! Having been how much farther? She is a rare spectacle in this neighbourhood. I receive intelligent information to this effect from a dog - a lop-sided mongrel with a foolish tail, plodding along with his tail up, and his ears pricked, and displaying an amiable interest in the ways of his fellow-men, - if I may be allowed the expression. After pausing at a pork-shop, he is jogging eastward like myself, with a benevolent countenance and a watery mouth, as though musing on the many excellences of pork, when he beholds this doubled-up bundle approaching. He is not so much astonished at the bundle (though amazed by that), as the circumstance that it has within itself the means of locomotion. He stops, pricks his ears higher, makes a slight point, stares, utters a short, low growl, and glistens at the nose, - as I conceive with terror. The bundle continuing to approach, he barks, turns tail, and is about to fly, when, arguing with himself that flight is not becoming in a dog, he turns, and once more faces the advancing heap of clothes. After much hesitation, it occurs to him that there may be a face in it somewhere. Desperately resolving to undertake the adventure, and pursue the inquiry, he goes slowly up to the bundle, goes slowly round it, and coming at length upon the human countenance down there where never human countenance should be, gives a yelp of horror, and flies for the East India Docks.
Being now in the Commercial Road district of my beat, and bethinking myself that Stepney Station is near, I quicken my pace that I may turn out of the road at that point, and see how my small eastern star is shining.
The Children’s Hospital, to which I gave that name, is in full force. All its beds are occupied. There is a new face on the bed where my pretty baby lay, and that sweet little child is now at rest for ever. Much kind sympathy has been here since my former visit, and it is good to see the walls profusely garnished with dolls. I wonder what Poodles may think of them, as they stretch out their arms above the beds, and stare, and display their splendid dresses. Poodles has a greater interest in the patients. I find him making the round of the beds, like a housesurgeon, attended by another dog, - a friend, - who appears to trot about with him in the character of his pupil dresser. Poodles is anxious to make me known to a pretty little girl looking wonderfully healthy, who had had a leg taken off for cancer of the knee. A difficult operation, Poodles intimates, wagging his tail on the counterpane, but perfectly successful, as you see, dear sir! The patient, patting Poodles, adds with a smile, ‘The leg was so much trouble to me, that I am glad it’s gone.’ I never saw anything in doggery finer than the deportment of Poodles, when another little girl opens her mouth to show a peculiar enlargement of the tongue. Poodles (at that time on a table, to be on a level with the occasion) looks at the tongue (with his own sympathetically out) so very gravely and knowingly, that I feel inclined to put my hand in my waistcoat-pocket, and give him a guinea, wrapped in paper.
On my beat again, and close to Limehouse Church, its termination, I found myself near to certain ‘Lead-Mills.’ Struck by the name, which was fresh in my memory, and finding, on inquiry, that these same lead-mills were identified with those same lead-mills of which I made mention when I first visited the East London Children’s Hospital and its neighbourhood as Uncommercial Traveller, I resolved to have a look at them.
Received by two very intelligent gentlemen, brothers, and partners with their father in the concern, and who testified every desire to show their works to me freely, I went over the lead-mills. The purport of such works is the conversion of pig-lead into white-lead. This conversion is brought about by the slow and gradual effecting of certain successive chemical changes in the lead itself. The processes are picturesque and interesting, - the most so, being the burying of the lead, at a certain stage of preparation, in pots, each pot containing a certain quantity of acid besides, and all the pots being buried in vast numbers, in layers, under tan, for some ten weeks.
Hopping up ladders, and across planks, and on elevated perches, until I was uncertain whether to liken myself to a bird or a bricklayer, I became conscious of standing on nothing particular, looking down into one of a series of large cocklofts, with the outer day peeping in through the chinks in the tiled roof above. A number of women were ascending to, and descending from, this cockloft, each carrying on the upward journey a pot of prepared lead and acid, for deposition under the smoking tan. When one layer of pots was completely filled, it was carefully covered in with planks, and those were carefully covered with tan again, and then another layer of pots was begun above; sufficient means of ventilation being preserved through wooden tubes. Going down into the cockloft then filling, I found the heat of the tan to be surprisingly great, and also the odour of the lead and acid to be not absolutely exquisite, though I believe not noxious at that stage. In other cocklofts, where the pots were being exhumed, the heat of the steaming tan was much greater, and the smell was penetrating and peculiar. There were cocklofts in all stages; full and empty, half filled and half emptied; strong, active women were clambering about them busily; and the whole thing had rather the air of the upper part of the house of some immensely rich old Turk, whose faithful seraglio were hiding his money because the sultan or the pasha was coming.
As is the case with most pulps or pigments, so in the instance of this white-lead, processes of stirring, separating, washing, grinding, rolling, and pressing succeed. Some of these are unquestionably inimical to health, the danger arising from inhalation of particles of lead, or from contact between the lead and the touch, or both. Against these dangers, I found good respirators provided (simply made of flannel and muslin, so as to be inexpensively renewed, and in some instances washed with scented soap), and gauntlet gloves, and loose gowns. Everywhere, there was as much fresh air as windows, well placed and opened, could possibly admit. And it was explained that the precaution of frequently changing the women employed in the worst parts of the work (a precaution originating in their own experience or apprehension of its ill effects) was found salutary. They had a mysterious and singular appearance, with the mouth and nose covered, and the loose gown on, and yet bore out the simile of the old Turk and the seraglio all the better for the disguise.
At last this vexed white-lead, having been buried and resuscitated, and heated and cooled and stirred, and separated and washed and ground, and rolled and pressed, is subjected to the action of intense fiery heat. A row of women, dressed as above described, stood, let us say, in a large stone bake-house, passing on the baking-dishes as they were given out by the cooks, from hand to hand, into the ovens. The oven, or stove, cold as yet, looked as high as an ordinary house, and was full of men and women on temporary footholds, briskly passing up and stowing away the dishes. The door of another oven, or stove, about to be cooled and emptied, was opened from above, for the uncommercial countenance to peer down into. The uncommercial countenance withdrew itself, with expedition and a sense of suffocation, from the dull-glowing heat and the overpowering smell. On the whole, perhaps the going into these stoves to work, when they are freshly opened, may be the worst part of the occupation.
But I made it out to be indubitable that the owners of these lead-mills honestly and sedulously try to reduce the dangers of the occupation to the lowest point.
A washing-place is provided for the women (I thought there might have been more towels), and a room in which they hang their clothes, and take their meals, and where they have a good fire-range and fire, and a female attendant to help them, and to watch that they do not neglect the cleansing of their hands before touching their food. An experienced medical attendant is provided for them, and any premonitory symptoms of lead-poisoning are carefully treated. Their teapots and such things were set out on tables ready for their afternoon meal, when I saw their room; and it had a homely look. It is found that they bear the work much better than men: some few of them have been at it for years, and the great majority of those I observed were strong and active. On the other hand, it should be remembered that most of them are very capricious and irregular in their attendance.
American inventiveness would seem to indicate that before very long white-lead may be made entirely by machinery. The sooner, the better. In the meantime, I parted from my two frank conductors over the mills, by telling them that they had nothing there to be concealed, and nothing to be blamed for. As to the rest, the philosophy of the matter of lead-poisoning and workpeople seems to me to have been pretty fairly summed up by the Irish-woman whom I quoted in my former paper: ‘Some of them gets lead-pisoned soon, and some of them gets lead-pisoned later, and some, but not many, niver; and ‘tis all according to the constitooshun, sur; and some constitooshuns is strong and some is weak.’
Retracing my footsteps over my beat, I went off duty.
In one sporting newspaper for Sunday, June the fourteenth, there are nine-and-twenty advertisements from Prophets, who have wonderful information to give - for a consideration ranging from one pound one, to two-and-sixpence - concerning every ‘event’ that is to come off upon the Turf. Each of these Prophets has an unrivalled and unchallengeable ‘Tip,’ founded on amazing intelligence communicated to him by illustrious unknowns (traitors of course, but that is nobody’s business) in all the racing stables. Each, is perfectly clear that his enlightened patrons and correspondents must win; and each, begs to guard a too-confiding world against relying on the other. They are all philanthropists. One Sage announces ‘that when he casts his practised eye on the broad surface of struggling society, and witnesses the slow and enduring perseverance of some, and the infatuous rush of the many who are grappling with a cloud, he is led with more intense desire to hold up the lamp of light to all.’ He is also much afflicted, because ‘not a day passes, without his witnessing the public squandering away their money on worthless rubbish.’ Another, heralds his re-appearance among the lesser stars of the firmament with the announcement, ‘Again the Conquering Prophet comes!’ Another moralist intermingles with his ‘Pick,’ and ‘Tip,’ the great Christian precept of the New Testament. Another, confesses to a small recent mistake which has made it ‘a disastrous meeting for us,’ but considers that excuses are unnecessary (after making them), for, ‘surely, after the unprecedented success of the proofs he has lately afforded of his capabilities in fishing out the most carefully-hidden turf secrets, he may readily be excused one blunder.’ All the Prophets write in a rapid manner, as receiving their inspiration on horseback, and noting it down, hot and hot, in the saddle, for the enlightenment of mankind and the restoration of the golden age.
This flourishing trade is a melancholy index to the round numbers of human donkeys who are everywhere browzing about. And it is worthy of remark that the great mass of disciples were, at first, undoubtedly to be found among those fast young gentlemen, who are so excruciatingly knowing that they are not by any means to be taken in by Shakespeare, or any sentimental gammon of that sort. To us, the idea of this would-be keen race being preyed upon by the whole Betting-Book of Prophets, is one of the most ludicrous pictures the mind can imagine; while there is a just and pleasant retribution in it which would awaken in us anything but animosity towards the Prophets, if the mischief ended here.
But, the mischief has the drawback that it does not end here. When there are so many Picks and Tips to be had, which will, of a surety, pick and tip their happy owners into the lap of Fortune, it becomes the duty of every butcher’s boy and errand lad who is sensible of what is due to himself, immediately to secure a Pick and Tip of the cheaper sort, and to go in and win. Having purchased the talisman from the Conquering Prophet, it is necessary that the noble sportsman should have a handy place provided for him, where lists of the running horses and of the latest state of the odds, are kept, and where he can lay out his money (or somebody else’s) on the happy animals at whom the Prophetic eye has cast a knowing wink. Presto! Betting-shops spring up in every street! There is a demand at all the brokers’ shops for old, fly-blown, coloured prints of race-horses, and for any odd folio volumes that have the appearance of Ledgers. Two such prints in any shop-window, and one such book on any shop-counter, will make a complete Betting-office, bank, and all.
The Betting-shop may be a Tobacconist’s, thus suddenly transformed; or it may be nothing but a Bettingshop. It may be got up cheaply, for the purposes of Pick and Tip investment, by the removal of the legitimate counter, and the erection of an official partition and desk in one corner; or, it may be wealthy in mahogany fittings, French polish, and office furniture. The presiding officer, in an advanced stage of shabbiness, may be accidentally beheld through the little window - whence from the inner mysteries of the Temple, he surveys the devotees before entering on business - drinking gin with an admiring client; or he may be a serenely condescending gentleman of Government Office appearance, who keeps the books of the establishment with his glass in his eye. The Institution may stoop to bets of single shillings, or may reject lower ventures than half-crowns, or may draw the line of demarcation between itself and the snobs at five shillings, or seven-and-sixpence, or half-a-sovereign, or even (but very rarely indeed), at a pound. Its note of the little transaction may be a miserable scrap of limp pasteboard with a wretchedly printed form, worse filled up; or, it may be a genteelly tinted card, addressed ‘To the Cashier of the Aristocratic Club,’ and authorising that important officer to pay the bearer two pounds fifteen shillings, if Greenhorn wins the Fortunatus’s Cup; and to be very particular to pay it the day after the race. But, whatever the Betting-shop be, it has only to be somewhere - anywhere, so people pass and repass - and the rapid youth of England, with its slang intelligence perpetually broad awake and its weather eye continually open, will walk in and deliver up its money, like the helpless Innocent that it is.
Pleased to the last, it thinks its wager won, And licks the hand by which it’s surely Done
We cannot represent the head quarters of Household Words as being situated peculiarly in the midst of these establishments, for, they pervade the whole of London and its suburbs. But, our neighbourhood yields an abundant crop of Betting-shops, and we have not to go far to know something about them. Passing the other day, through a dirty thoroughfare, much frequented, near Drury Lane Theatre, we found that a new Betting-shop had suddenly been added to the number under the auspices of Mr. Cheerful.
Mr. Cheerful’s small establishment was so very like that of the apothecary in Romeo and Juliet, unfurnished, and hastily adapted to the requirements of secure and profitable investment, that it attracted our particular notice. It burst into bloom, too, so very shortly before the Ascot Meeting, that we had our suspicions concerning the possibility of Mr. Cheerful having devised the ingenious speculation of getting what money he could, up to the day of the race, and then - if we may be allowed the harsh expression - bolting. We had no doubt that investments would be made with Mr. Cheerful, notwithstanding the very unpromising appearance of his establishment; for, even as we were considering its exterior from the opposite side of the way (it may have been opened that very morning), we saw two newsboys, an incipient baker, a clerk, and a young butcher, go in, and transact business with Mr. Cheerful in a most confiding manner.
We resolved to lay a bet with Mr. Cheerful, and see what came of it. So we stepped across the road into Mr. Cheerful’s Betting-shop, and, having glanced at the lists hanging up therein, while another noble sportsman (a boy with a blue bag) laid another bet with Mr. Cheerful, we expressed our desire to back Tophana for the Western Handicap, to the spirited amount of half-a-crown. In making this advance to Mr. Cheerful, we looked as knowing on the subject, both of Tophana and the Western Handicap, as it was in us to do: though, to confess the humiliating truth, we neither had, nor have, the least idea in connexion with those proper names, otherwise than as we suppose Tophana to be a horse, and the Western Handicap an aggregate of stakes. It being Mr. Cheerful’s business to be grave and ask no questions, he accepted our wager, booked it, and handed us over his railed desk the dirty scrap of pasteboard, in right of which we were to claim - the day after the race; we were to be very particular about that - seven-and-sixpence sterling, if Tophana won. Some demon whispering us that here was an opportunity of discovering whether Mr. Cheerful had a good bank of silver in the cash-box, we handed in a sovereign. Mr. Cheerful’s head immediately slipped down behind the partition, investigating imaginary drawers; and Mr. Cheerful’s voice was presently heard to remark, in a stifled manner, that all the silver had been changed for gold that morning. After which, Mr. Cheerful reappeared in the twinkling of an eye, called in from a parlour the sharpest small boy ever beheld by human vision, and dispatched him for change. We remarked to Mr. Cheerful that if he would obligingly produce half-a-sovereign (having so much gold by him) we would increase our bet, and save him trouble. But, Mr. Cheerful, sliding down behind the partition again, answered that the boy was gone, now - trust him for that; he had vanished the instant he was spoken to - and it was no trouble at all. Therefore, we remained until the boy came back, in the society of Mr. Cheerful, and of an inscrutable woman who stared out resolutely into the street, and was probably Mrs. Cheerful. When the boy returned, we thought we once saw him faintly twitch his nose while we received our change, as if he exulted over a victim; but, he was so miraculously sharp, that it was impossible to be certain.
The day after the race, arriving, we returned with our document to Mr. Cheerful’s establishment, and found it in great confusion. It was filled by a crowd of boys, mostly greasy, dirty, and dissipated; and all clamouring for Mr. Cheerful. Occupying Mr. Cheerful’s place, was the miraculous boy; all alone, and unsupported, but not at all disconcerted. Mr. Cheerful, he said, had gone out on ‘’tickler bizniz’ at ten o’clock in the morning, and wouldn’t be back till late at night. Mrs. Cheerful was gone out of town for her health, till the winter. Would Mr. Cheerful be back to-morrow? cried the crowd. ‘He won’t be here, to-morrow,’ said the miraculous boy. ‘Coz it’s Sunday, and he always goes to church, a’ Sunday.’ At this, even the losers laughed. ‘Will he be here a’ Monday, then?’ asked a desperate young green-grocer. ‘A’ Monday?’ said the miracle, reflecting. ‘No, I don’t think he’ll be here, a’ Monday, coz he’s going to a sale a’ Monday.’ At this, some of the boys taunted the unmoved miracle with meaning ‘a sell instead of a sale,’ and others swarmed over the whole place, and some laughed, and some swore, and one errand boy, discovering the book - the only thing Mr. Cheerful had left behind him - declared it to be a ‘stunning good ’un.’ We took the liberty of looking over it, and found it so. Mr. Cheerful had received about seventeen pounds, and, even if he had paid his losses, would have made a profit of between eleven and twelve pounds. It is scarcely necessary to add that Mr. Cheerful has been so long detained at the sale that he has never come back. The last time we loitered past his late establishment (over which is inscribed Boot and Shoe Manufactory), the dusk of evening was closing in, and a young gentleman from New Inn was making some rather particular enquiries after him of a dim and dusty man who held the door a very little way open, and knew nothing about anybody, and less than nothing (if possible) about Mr. Cheerful. The handle of the lower door-bell was most significantly pulled out to its utmost extent, and left so, like an Organ stop in full action. It is to be hoped that the poor gull who had so frantically rung for Mr. Cheerful, derived some gratification from that expenditure of emphasis. He will never get any other, for his money.
But the public in general are not to be left a prey to such fellows as Cheerful. O, dear no! We have better neighbours than that, in the Betting-shop way. Expressly for the correction of such evils, we have The Tradesmen’s Moral Associative Betting Club; the Prospectus of which Institution for the benefit of tradesmen (headed in the original with a racing woodcut), we here faithfully present without the alteration of a word.
‘The Projectors of the Tradesmen’s Moral Associative Betting Club, in announcing an addition to the number of Betting Houses in the Metropolis, beg most distinctly to state that they are not actuated by a feeling of rivalry towards old established and honourably conducted places of a similar nature, but in a spirit of fair competition, ask for the support of the public, guaranteeing to them more solid security for the investment of their monies, than has hitherto been offered.
‘The Tradesmen’s Moral Associative Betting Club is really what its name imports, viz., an Association of Tradesmen, persons in business, who witnessing the robberies hourly inflicted upon the humbler portion of the sporting public, by parties bankrupt alike in character and property, have come to the conclusion that the establishment of a club wherein their fellow-tradesmen, and the speculator of a few shillings, may invest their money with assured consciousness of a fair and honourable dealing, will be deemed worthy of public support.
‘The Directors of this establishment feel that much of the odium attached to Betting Houses (acting to the prejudice of those which have striven hard by honourable means to secure public confidence), has arisen from the circumstance, that many offices have been fitted up in a style of gaudy imitative magnificence, accompanied by an expense, which, if defrayed, is obviously out of keeping with the profits of a legitimate concern. Whilst, in singular contrast, others have presented such a poverty stricken appearance, that it is evident the design of the occupant was only to receive money of all, and terminate in paying none.
‘Avoiding these extremes of appearance, and with a determination never to be induced to speculate to an extent, that may render it even probable that we shall be unable “to pay the day after the race.”
‘The business of club will be carried on at the house of a highly respectable and well-known tradesman, situate in a central locality, the existence of an agreement with whom, on the part of the directors, forms the strongest possible guarantee of our intention to keep faith with the public.
‘The market odds will be laid on all events, and every ticket issued be signed by the director only, the monies being invested,’ &c. &c.
After this, Tradesmen are quite safe in laying out their money on their favourite horses. And their families, like the people in old fireside stories, will no doubt live happy ever afterwards!
Now, it is unquestionable that this evil has risen to a great height, and that it involves some very serious social considerations. But, with all respect for opinions which we do not hold, we think it a mistake to cry for legislative interference in such a case. In the first place, we do not think it wise to exhibit a legislature which has always cared so little for the amusements of the people, in repressive action only. If it had been an educational legislature, considerate of the popular enjoyments, and sincerely desirous to advance and extend them during as long a period as it has been exactly the reverse, the question might assume a different shape; though, even then, we should greatly doubt whether the same notion were not a shifting of the real responsibility. In the second place, although it is very edifying to have honorable members, and right honorable members, and honorable and learned members, and what not, holding forth in their places upon what is right, and what is wrong, and what is true, and what is false - among the people - we have that audacity in us that we do not admire the present Parliamentary standard and balance of such questions; and we believe that if those be not scrupulously just, Parliament cannot invest itself with much moral authority. Surely the whole country knows that certain chivalrous public Prophets have been, for a pretty long time past, advertising their Pick and Tip in all directions, pointing out the horse which was to make everybody’s fortune! Surely we all know, howsoever our political opinions may differ, that more than one of them ‘casting his practised eye,’ exactly like the Prophet in the sporting paper, ‘on the broad surface of struggling society,’ has been possessed by the same ‘intense desire to hold up the lamp of light to all,’ and has solemnly known by the lamp of light that Black was the winning horse - until his Pick and Tip was purchased; when he suddenly began to think it might be White, or even Brown, or very possibly Grey. Surely, we all know, however reluctant we may be to admit it, that this has tainted and confused political honesty; that the Elections before us, and the whole Government of the country, are at present a great reckless Betting-shop, where the Prophets have pocketed their own predictions after playing fast and loose with their patrons as long as they could; and where, casting their practised eyes over things in general, they are now backing anything and everything for a chance of winning!
No. If the legislature took the subject in hand it would make a virtuous demonstration, we have no doubt, but it would not present an edifying spectacle. Parents and employers must do more for themselves. Every man should know something of the habits and frequentings of those who are placed under him; and should know much, when a new class of temptation thus presents itself. Apprentices are, by the terms of their indentures, punishable for gaming; it would do a world of good, to get a few score of that class of noble sportsmen convicted before magistrates, and shut up in the House of Correction, to Pick a little oakum, and Tip a little gruel into their silly stomachs. Betting clerks, and betting servants of all grades, once detected after a grave warning, should be firmly dismissed. There are plenty of industrious and steady young men to supply their places. The police should receive instructions by no means to overlook any gentleman of established bad reputation - whether ‘wanted’ or not - who is to be found connected with a Betting-shop. It is our belief that several eminent characters could be so discovered. These precautions, always supposing parents and employers resolute to discharge their own duties instead of vaguely delegating them to a legislature they have no reliance on, would probably be sufficient. Some fools who are under no control, will always be found wandering away to ruin; but, the greater part of that extensive department of the commonalty are under some control, and the great need is, that it be better exercised.
Several years have now elapsed since it began to be clear to the comprehension of most rational men, that the English people had fallen into a condition much to be regretted, in respect of their Funeral customs. A system of barbarous show and expense was found to have gradually erected itself above the grave, which, while it could possibly do no honor to the memory of the dead, did great dishonor to the living, as inducing them to associate the most solemn of human occasions with unmeaning mummeries, dishonest debt, profuse waste, and bad example in an utter oblivion of responsibility. The more the subject was examined, and the lower the investigation was carried, the more monstrous (as was natural) these usages appeared to be, both in themselves and in their consequences. No class of society escaped. The competition among the middle classes for superior gentility in Funerals - the gentility being estimated by the amount of ghastly folly in which the undertaker was permitted to run riot - descended even to the very poor: to whom the cost of funeral customs was so ruinous and so disproportionate to their means, that they formed Clubs among themselves to defray such charges. Many of these Clubs, conducted by designing villains who preyed upon the general infirmity, cheated and wronged the poor, most cruelly; others, by presenting a new class of temptations to the wickedest natures among them, led to a new class of mercenary murders, so abominable in their iniquity, that language cannot stigmatise them with sufficient severity. That nothing might be wanting to complete the general depravity, hollowness, and falsehood, of this state of things, the absurd fact came to light, that innumerable harpies assumed the titles of furnishers of Funerals, who possessed no Funeral furniture whatever, but who formed a long file of middlemen between the chief mourner and the real tradesman, and who hired out the trappings from one to another - passing them on like water-buckets at a fire - every one of them charging his enormous percentage on his share of the ‘black job.’ Add to all this, the demonstration, by the simplest and plainest practical science, of the terrible consequences to the living, inevitably resulting from the practice of burying the dead in the midst of crowded towns; and the exposition of a system of indecent horror, revolting to our nature and disgraceful to our age and nation, arising out of the confined limits of such burial-grounds, and the avarice of their proprietors; and the culminating point of this gigantic mockery is at last arrived at.
Out of such almost incredible degradation, saving that the proof of it is too easy, we are still very slowly and feebly emerging. There are now, we confidently hope, among the middle classes, many, who having made themselves acquainted with these evils through the parliamentary papers in which they are described, would be moved by no human consideration to perpetuate the old bad example; but who will leave it as their solemn injunction on their nearest and dearest survivors, that they shall not, in their death, be made the instruments of infecting, either the minds or the bodies of their fellow-creatures. Among persons of note, such examples have not been wanting. The late Duke of Sussex did a national service when he desired to be laid, in the equality of death, in the cemetery of Kensal Green, and not with the pageantry of a State Funeral in the Royal vault at Windsor. Sir Robert Peel requested to be buried at Drayton. The late Queen Dowager left a pattern to every rank in these touching and admirable words. ‘I die in all humility, knowing well that we are all alike before the Throne of God; and I request, therefore, that my mortal remains be conveyed to the grave without any pomp or state. They are to be removed to St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, where I request to have as private and quiet a funeral as possible. I particularly desire not to be laid out in state. I die in peace and wish to be carried to the tomb in peace, and free from the vanities and pomp of this world. I request not to be dissected or embalmed, and desire to give as little trouble as possible.’
With such precedents and such facts fresh in the general knowledge, and at this transition-time in so serious a chapter of our social history, the obsolete custom of a State Funeral has been revived, in miscalled ‘honor’ of the late Duke of Wellington. To whose glorious memory be all true honor while England lasts!
We earnestly submit to our readers that there is, and that there can be, no kind of honor in such a revival; that the more truly great the man, the more truly little the ceremony; and that it has been, from first to last, a pernicious instance and encouragement of the demoralising practice of trading in Death.
It is within the knowledge of the whole public, of all diversities of political opinion, whether or no any of the Powers that be, have traded in this Death - have saved it up, and petted it, and made the most of it, and reluctantly let it go. On that aspect of the question we offer no further remark.
But, of the general trading spirit which, in its inherent emptiness and want of consistency and reality, the longdeferred State Funeral has appropriately awakened, we will proceed to furnish a few instances all faithfully copied from the advertising columns of The Times.
First, of seats and refreshments. Passing over that desirable first-floor where a party could be accommodated with ‘the use of a piano’; and merely glancing at the decorous daily announcement of ‘The Duke of Wellington Funeral Wine,’ which was in such high demand that immediate orders were necessary; and also ‘The Duke of Wellington Funeral Cake,’ which ‘delicious article’ could only be had of such a baker; and likewise ‘The Funeral Life Preserver,’ which could only be had of such a tailor; and further ‘the celebrated lemon biscuits,’ at one and fourpence per pound, which were considered by the manufacturer as the only infallible assuagers of the national grief; let us pass in review some dozen of the more eligible opportunities the public had of profiting by the occasion.
LUDGATE HILL. - The fittings and arrangements for viewing this grand and solemnly imposing procession are now completed at this establishment, and those who are desirous of obtaining a fine and extensive view, combined with every personal convenience and comfort, will do well to make immediate inspection of the SEATS now remaining on hand.
FUNERAL, including Beds the night previous. - To be LET, a SECOND FLOOR, of three rooms, two windows, having a good view of the procession. Terms, including refreshment, 10 guineas. Single places, including bed and breakfast, from 15s.
THE DUKE’S FUNERAL. - A first-rate VIEW for 15 persons, also good clean beds and a sitting-room on reasonable terms.
SEATS and WINDOWS to be LET, in the best part of the Strand, a few doors from Coutts’s banking-house. First floor windows, £8 each; second floor, £5 10s. each; third floor, £3 10s. each; two plate-glass shop windows, £7 each.
SEATS to VIEW the DUKE of WELLINGTON’S FUNERAL. Best position of all the route, no obstruction to the view. Apply Old Bailey. N.B. From the above position you can nearly see to St. Paul’s and to Temple-bar.
FUNERAL of the late Duke of WELLINGTON. - To be LET, a SECOND FLOOR, two windows, firing and every convenience. Terms moderate for a party. Also a few seats in front, one guinea each. Commanding a view from Piccadilly to Pall-mall.
FUNERAL of the DUKE of WELLINGTON. - The FIRST and SECOND FLOORS to be LET, either by the room or window, suited to gentlemen’s families, for whom every comfort and accommodation will be provided, and commanding the very best view of this imposing spectacle. The ground floor is also fitted up with commodious seats, ranging in price from one guinea. Apply on the premises.
THE DUKE’S FUNERAL. - Terms very moderate. - TWO FIRST FLOOR ROOMS, with balcony and private entrance out of the Strand. The larger room capable of holding 15 persons. The small room to be let for eight guineas.
THE DUKE’S FUNERAL. - To be LET, a SHOP WINDOW, with seats erected for about 30, for 25 guineas. Also a Furnished First Floor, with two large windows. One of the best views in the whole range from Temple-bar to St. Paul’s. Price 35 guineas. A few single seats one guinea each.
THE FUNERAL PROCESSION of the DUKE of WELLINGTON. - Cockspur-street, Charing-cross, decidedly the best position in the whole route, a few SEATS still DISENGAGED, which will be offered at reasonable prices. An early application is requisite, as they are fast filling up. Also a few places on the roof. A most excellent view.
FUNERAL of the Late DUKE of WELLINGTON. - To be LET, in the best part of the Strand, a SECOND FLOOR, for £10; a Third Floor, £7 10s. , containing two windows in each; front seats in shop, at one guinea.
THE DUKE’S FUNERAL. - To be LET, for 25 guineas to a genteel family, in one of the most commanding situations in the line of route, a FIRST FLOOR, with safe balcony, and ante-room. Will accommodate 20 persons, with an uninterrupted and extensive view for all. For a family of less number a reduction will be made. Every accommodation will be afforded.
But above all let us not forget the
NOTICE TO CLERGYMEN. - T.C. Fleet-street, has reserved for clergymen exclusively, upon condition only that they appear in their surplices, FOUR FRONT SEATS, at £1 each; four second tier, at 15s. each; four third tier, at 12s. 6d. ; four fourth tier, at 10s. ; four fifth tier, at 7s. 6d. ; and four sixth tier, at 5s. All the other seats are respectively 40s. , 30s. , 20s. , 15s. , 10s.
The anxiety of this enterprising tradesman to get up a reverend tableau in his shop-window of four-and-twenty clergymen all on six rows, is particularly commendable, and appears to us to shed a remarkable grace on the solemnity.
These few specimens are collected at random from scores upon scores of such advertisements, mingled with descriptions of non-existent ranges of view, and with invitations to a few agreeable gentlemen who are wanted to complete a little assembly of kindred souls, who have laid in abundance of ‘refreshments, wines, spirits, provisions, fruit, plate, glass, china,’ and other light matters too numerous to mention, and who keep ‘good fires.’ On looking over them we are constantly startled by the words in large capitals, ‘WOULD TO GOD NIGHT OR BLUCHER WERE COME !’ which, referring to a work of art, are relieved by a legend setting forth how the lamented hero observed of it, ‘in his characteristic manner, “Very good; very good indeed.”’ O Art! You too trading in Death!
Then, autographs fall into their place in the State Funeral train. The sanctity of a seal, or the confidence of a letter, is a meaningless phrase that has no place in the vocabulary of the Traders in Death. Stop, trumpets, in the Dead March, and blow to the world how characteristic we autographs are!
WELLINGTON AUTOGRAPHS. - TWO consecutive LETTERS of the DUKE’S (1843) highly characteristic and authentic, with the Correspondence, &c. that elicited them, the whole forming quite a literary curiosity, for £15.
WELLINGTON AUTOGRAPHS. - To be DISPOSED OF, TWO AUTOGRAPH LETTERS of the DUKE of WELLINGTON, one dated Walmer Castle, 9th October, 1834, the other London, 17th May, 1843, with their post-marks and seals.
WELLINGTON. - THREE original NOTES, averaging 2¼ pages each, (not lithographs,) seal, and envelopes, to be SOLD. Supposed to be the most characteristic of his Grace yet published. The highest sum above £30 for the two, or £20 for the one, which is distinct, will be accepted.
TO BE DISPOSED OF, by a retired officer, FIVE LETTERS and NOTES of the late HERO - three when Sir A. Wellesley. Also a large Envelope. All with seals. Apply personally, or by letter.
THE DUKE’S LETTERS. - TWO highly interesting LETTERS, authentic, and relating to a most amusing and characteristic circumstance, to be SOLD.
THE DUKE of WELLINGTON. - AUTOGRAPH LETTER to a lady, with seal and envelope. This is quite in the Duke’s peculiar style, and will be parted with for the highest offer. Apply — where the letter can be seen.
F.M. the DUKE of WELLINGTON. - To be SOLD, by a member of the family, to whom it was written, an ORIGINAL AUTOGRAPH LETTER of the late Duke of Wellington, on military affairs, six pages long, in the best preservation. Price £30.
FIELD-MARSHAL the DUKE of WELLINGTON’S AUTOGRAPH. - A highly characteristic LETTER of the DUKE’S for DISPOSAL, wherein he alludes to his living 100 years, date 1847, with envelope. Seal, with crest perfect. £10 will be taken.
DUKE of WELLINGTON. - An AUTOGRAPH LETTER of the DUKE, written immediately after the death of the Duchess in 1831, is for SALE; also Two Autograph Envelopes franked and sealed.
DUKE of WELLINGTON. - AUTOGRAPH BUSINESS LETTER, envelope, seal, post-mark, &c. complete. Style courteous and highly characteristic. Will be shown by the party and at the place addressed. Price £15.
FIELD-MARSHAL the DUKE of WELLINGTON. - TWO AUTOGRAPH LETTERS of His Grace, one written in his 61st, the other in his 72d year, both firstrate specimens of his characteristic graphic style, and on an important subject, to be SOLD. Their genuineness can be fully proved.
THE DUKE of WELLINGTON. - A very curious DOCUMENT, partly printed, and the rest written by His Grace to a lady. This is well worthy of a place in the cabinet of the curious. There is nothing like it. Highest offer will be taken.
TO be SOLD, SIX AUTOGRAPH LETTERS from F. M. the Duke of WELLINGTON, with envelopes and seals, which have been most generously given to aid a lady in distressed circumstances.
THE DUKE of WELLINGTON. - A lady has in her possession a LETTER, written by his Grace on the 18th of June, in the present year, and will be happy to DISPOSE OF the same. The letter is rendered more valuable by its being written on the last anniversary which his Grace was spared to celebrate. The letter bears date from Apsley House, with perfect envelope and seal.
A CLERGYMAN has TWO LETTERS, with Envelopes, addressed to him by the late DUKE, and bearing striking testimony to the extent of his Grace’s private charities, to be DISPOSED OF at the highest offer (for one or both) received by the 18th instant. The offers may be contingent on further particulars being satisfactory.
THE DUKE of WELLINGTON. - A widow, in deep distress, has in her possession an AUTOGRAPH LETTER of his Grace the Duke of WELLINGTON, written in 1830, enclosed and directed in an envelope, and sealed with his ducal coronet, which she would be happy to PART WITH for a trifle.
VALUABLE AUTOGRAPH NOTE of the late Duke of WELLINGTON, dated March 27, 1850, to be SOLD, for £20, by the gentleman to whom it was addressed, together with envelope, perfect impression of Ducal seal, and Knightsbridge post-mark distinct. The whole in excellent preservation. A better specimen of the noble Duke’s handwriting and highly characteristic style cannot be seen.
ONE of the last LETTERS of the DUKE of WELLINGTON for DISPOSAL, dated from Walmer Castle within a day or two of his death, highly characteristic, with seal and post-marks distinct. This being probably the last letter written by the late Duke its interest as a relic must be greatly enhanced. The highest offer accepted. May be seen on application.
THE GREAT DUKE. - A LETTER of the GREAT HERO, dated March 27, 1851, to be SOLD. Also a beautiful Letter from Jenny Lind, dated June 20, 1852. The highest offer will be accepted. Address with offers of price.
Miss Lind’s autograph would appear to have lingered in the shade until the Funeral Train came by, when it modestly stepped into the procession and took a conspicuous place. We are in doubt which to admire most; the ingenuity of this little stroke of business; or the affecting delicacy that sells ‘probably the last letter written by the late Duke’ before the aged hand that wrote it under some manly sense of duty, is yet withered in its grave; or the piety of that excellent clergyman - did he appear in his surplice in the front row of T. C.’s shop-window? - who is so anxious to sell ‘striking testimony to the extent of His Grace’s private charities;’ or the generosity of that Good Samaritan who poured ‘six letters with envelopes and seals’ into the wounds of the lady in distressed circumstances.
Lastly come the relics - precious remembrances worn next to the bereaved heart, like Hardy’s miniature of Nelson, and never to be wrested from the advertisers but with ready money.
MEMENTO of the late DUKE of WELLINGTON. - To be DISPOSED OF, a LOCK of the late illustrious DUKE’S HAIR. Can be guaranteed. The highest offer will be accepted. Apply by letter prepaid.
THE DUKE of WELLINGTON. - A LOCK of HAIR of the late Duke of WELLINGTON to be DISPOSED OF, now in the possession of a widow lady. Cut off the morning the Queen was crowned. Apply by letter post paid.
VALUABLE RELIC of the late DUKE of WELLINGTON. - A lady, having in her possession a quantity of the late illustrious DUKE’S HAIR, cut in 1841, is willing to PART WITH a portion of the same for £25. Satisfactory proof will be given of its identity, and of how it came into the owner’s possession, on application by letter, pre-paid.
RELIC of the DUKE of WELLINGTON for SALE. - The son of the late well-known haircutter to his Grace the late Duke of Wellington, at Strathfieldsaye, has a small quantity of HAIR, that his father cut from the Duke’s head, which he is willing to DISPOSE OF. Any one desirous of possessing such a relic of England’s hero are requested to make their offer for the same, by letter.
RELICS of the late DUKE of WELLINGTON. - For SALE, a WAISTCOAT, in good preservation, worn by his Grace some years back, which can be well authenticated as such.
Next, a very choice article - quite unique - the value of which may be presumed to be considerably enhanced by the conclusive impossibility of its being doubted in the least degree by the most suspicious mind.
A MEMENTO of the DUKE of WELLINGTON. - La Mort de Napoleon. Ode d’Alexandre Manzoni, avec la Traduction en Français, par Edmond Angelini, de Venise. - A book, of which the above is the title, was torn up by the Duke and thrown by him from the carriage, in which he was riding, as he was passing through Kent: the pieces of the book were collected and put together by a person who saw the Duke tear it and throw the same away. Any person desirous of obtaining the above memento will be communicated with.
Finally, a literary production of astonishing brilliancy and spirit; without which, we are authorised to state, no nobleman’s or gentleman’s library can be considered complete.
DUKE of WELLINGTON and SIR R. PEEL. - A talented, interesting, and valuable WORK, on Political Economy and Free Trade, was published in 1830, and immediately bought up by the above statesmen, except one copy, which is now for DISPOSAL. Apply by letter only.
Here, for the reader’s sake, we terminate our quotations. They might easily have been extended through the whole of the present number of this Journal.
We believe that a State Funeral at this time of day - apart from the mischievously confusing effect it has on the general mind, as to the necessary union of funeral expense and pomp with funeral respect, and the consequent injury it may do to the cause of a great reform most necessary for the benefit of all classes of society - is, in itself, so plainly a pretence of being what it is not: is so unreal, such a substitution of the form for the substance: is so cut and dried, and stale: is such a palpably got up theatrical trick: that it puts the dread solemnity of death to flight, and encourages these shameless traders in their dealings on the very coffin-lid of departed greatness. That private letters and other memorials of the great Duke of Wellington would still have been advertised and sold, though he had been laid in his grave amid the silent respect of the whole country with the simple honors of a military commander, we do not doubt; but that, in that case, the traders would have been discouraged from holding anything like this Public Fair and Great Undertakers’ Jubilee over his remains, we doubt as little. It is idle to attempt to connect the frippery of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office and the Herald’s College, with the awful passing away of that vain shadow in which man walketh and disquieteth himself in vain. There is a great gulf set between the two which is set there by no mortal hands, and cannot by mortal hands be bridged across. Does any one believe that, otherwise, ‘the Senate’ would have been ‘mourning its hero’ (in the likeness of a French Field-Marshal) on Tuesday evening, and that the same Senate would have been in fits of laughter with Mr. Hume on Wednesday afternoon when the same hero was still in question and unburied?
The mechanical exigencies of this journal render it necessary for these remarks to be written on the evening of the State Funeral. We have already indicated in these pages that we consider the State Funeral a mistake, and we hope temperately to leave the question here for temperate consideration. It is easy to imagine how it may have done much harm, and it is hard to imagine how it can have done any good. It is only harder to suppose that it can have afforded a grain of satisfaction to the immediate descendants of the great Duke of Wellington, or that it can reflect the faintest ray of lustre on so bright a name. If it were assumed that such a ceremonial was the general desire of the English people, we would reply that that assumption was founded on a misconception of the popular character, and on a low estimate of the general sense; and that the sooner both were better appreciated in high places, the better it could not fail to be for us all. Taking for granted at this writing, what we hope may be assumed without any violence to the truth; namely, that the ceremonial was in all respects well conducted, and that the English people sustained throughout, the high character they have nobly earned, to the shame of their silly detractors among their own countrymen; we must yet express our hope that State Funerals in this land went down to their tomb, most fitly, in the tasteless and tawdry Car that nodded and shook through the streets of London on the eighteenth of November, eighteen hundred and fifty-two. And sure we are, with large consideration for opposite opinions, that when History shall rescue that very ugly machine - worthy to pass under decorated Temple Bar, as decorated Temple Bar was worthy to receive it - from the merciful shadows of obscurity, she will reflect with amazement - remembering his true, manly, modest, self-contained, and genuine character - that the man who, in making it the last monster of its race, rendered his last enduring service to the country he had loved and served so faithfully, was Arthur Duke of Wellington.
总目录
目录
Contents
Introduction to the Chinese Editions of Great Ideas
Despots of the Fourteenth Century
Despots of the Fifteenth Century
The Republics: Venice and Florence
企鹅口袋书系列·伟大的思想
论作为艺术品的国家
(英汉双语)
[瑞士]雅各布·布克哈特 著
孙平华 于艳芳 汉译
中国出版传媒股份有限公司
中国对外翻译出版有限公司
图书在版编目(CIP)数据
论作为艺术品的国家:英汉双语/(瑞士)布克哈特著;孙平华,于艳芳译.—北京:中国对外翻译出版有限公司,2014.1
(企鹅口袋书系列·伟大的思想)
ISBN 978-7-5001-3880-8
Ⅰ.①论… Ⅱ.①布… ②孙… ③于… Ⅲ.①英语-汉语-对照读物 ②文艺复兴-研究-意大利 Ⅳ.①H319.4:K
中国版本图书馆CIP数据核字(2014)第000782号
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England
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Taken from The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy,
Published by Penguin Classics 1990
This selection published in Penguin Books 2010
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中国对外翻译出版有限公司与企鹅图书有限公司联合出版
《伟大的思想》中文版序
企鹅《伟大的思想》丛书2004年开始出版。在英国,已付印80种,尚有20种计划出版。美国出版的丛书规模略小,德国的同类丛书规模更小一些。丛书销量已远远超过200万册,在全球很多人中间,尤其是学生当中,普及了哲学和政治学。中文版《伟大的思想》丛书的推出,迈出了新的一步,令人欢欣鼓舞。
推出这套丛书的目的是让读者再次与一些伟大的非小说类经典著作面对面地交流。太长时间以来,确定版本依据这样一个假设——读者在教室里学习这些著作,因此需要导读、详尽的注释、参考书目等。此类版本无疑非常有用,但我想,如果能够重建托马斯·潘恩《常识》或约翰·罗斯金《艺术与人生》初版时的环境,重新营造更具亲和力的氛围,那也是一件有意思的事。当时,读者除了原作者及其自身的理性思考外没有其他参照。
这样做有一定的缺点:每个作者的话难免有难解或不可解之处,一些重要的背景知识会缺失。例如,读者对亨利·梭罗创作时的情况毫无头绪,也不了解该书的接受情况及影响。不过,这样做的优点也很明显。最突出的优点是,作者的初衷又一次变得重要起来——托马斯·潘恩的愤怒、查尔斯·达尔文的灵光、塞内加的隐逸。这些作家在那么多国家影响了那么多人的生活,其影响不可估量,有的长达几个世纪,读他们书的乐趣罕有匹敌。没有亚当·斯密或阿图尔·叔本华,难以想象我们今天的世界。这些小书的创作年代已很久远,但其中的话已彻底改变了我们的政治学、经济学、智力生活、社会规划和宗教信仰。
《伟大的思想》丛书一直求新求变。地区不同,收录的作家也不同。在中国或美国,一些作家更受欢迎。英国《伟大的思想》收录的一些作家在其他地方则默默无闻。称其为“伟大的思想”,我们亦慎之又慎。思想之伟大,在于其影响之深远,而不意味着这些思想是“好”的,实际上一些书可列入“坏”思想之列。丛书中很多作家受到同一丛书其他作家的很大影响,例如,马塞尔·普鲁斯特承认受约翰·罗斯金影响很大,米歇尔·德·蒙田也承认深受塞内加影响,但其他作家彼此憎恨,如果发现他们被收入同一丛书,一定会气愤难平。不过,读者可自行决定这些思想是否合理。我们衷心希望,您能在阅读这些杰作中得到乐趣。
《伟大的思想》出版者
西蒙·温德尔
Introduction to the Chinese Editions of Great Ideas
Penguin's Great Ideas series began publication in 2004. In the UK we now have 80 copies in print with plans to publish a further 20. A somewhat smaller list is published in the USA and a related, even smaller series in Germany. The books have sold now well over two million copies and have popularized philosophy and politics for many people around the world — particularly students. The launch of a Chinese Great Ideas series is an extremely exciting new development.
The intention behind the series was to allow readers to be once more face to face with some of the great nonfiction classics. For too long the editions of these books were created on the assumption that you were studying them in the classroom and that the student needed an introduction, extensive notes, a bibliography and so on. While this sort of edition is of course extremely useful, I thought it would be interesting to recreate a more intimate feeling — to recreate the atmosphere in which, for example, Thomas Paine's Common Sense or John Ruskin's On Art and Life was first published — where the reader has no other guide than the original author and his or her own common sense.
This method has its severe disadvantages — there will inevitably be statements made by each author which are either hard or impossible to understand, some important context might be missing. For example the reader has no clue as to the conditions under which Henry Thoreau was writing his book and the reader cannot be aware of the book's reception or influence. The advantages however are very clear — most importantly the original intentions of the author become once more important. The sense of anger in Thomas Paine, of intellectual excitement in Charles Darwin, of resignation in Seneca — few things can be more thrilling than to read writers who have had such immeasurable influence on so many lives, sometimes for centuries, in many different countries. Our world would not make sense without Adam Smith or Arthur Schopenhauer — our politics, economics, intellectual lives, social planning, religious beliefs have all been fundamentally changed by the words in these little books, first written down long ago.
The Great Ideas series continues to change and evolve. In different parts of the world different writers would be included. In China or in the United States there are some writers who are liked much more than others. In the UK there are writers in the Great Ideas series who are ignored elsewhere. We have also been very careful to call the series Great Ideas — these ideas are great because they have been so enormously influential, but this does not mean that they are Good Ideas — indeed some of the books would probably qualify as Bad Ideas. Many of the writers in the series have been massively influenced by others in the series — for example Marcel Proust owned so much to John Ruskin, Michel de Montaigne to Seneca. But others hated each other and would be distressed to find themselves together in the same series! But readers can decide the validity of these ideas for themselves. We very much hope that you enjoy these remarkable books.
Simon Winder
Publisher
Great Ideas
译者导读
雅各布·布克哈特(Jacob Burckhardt, 1818—1897),19世纪杰出的文化历史学家,出生于瑞士巴塞尔一个古老的名门望族家庭。1839年至1843年留学德国,获哲学博士学位。回国后,在巴塞尔大学执教,长期担任历史学与艺术史教席教授。1897年8月8日,在巴塞尔的寓所去世。布克哈特终生未婚,并一直定居巴塞尔。重点研究欧洲艺术史以及人文主义。
布克哈特最重要的著作有《君士坦丁大帝时代》(Die Zeit Konstantin des Großen)(1853年)、《向导:意大利艺术品鉴赏导论》(Der Cicerone. Eine Anleitung zum Genuß der Kunstwerke Italiens)(1855年)、《意大利文艺复兴时期的文化》(Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien)(1860年),还有作者去世后由他人整理和出版的两部重要作品《世界历史沉思录》(Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen)和三卷本的《希腊文化史》(Griechische Kulturgeschichte)。其中最具代表性的是《意大利文艺复兴时期的文化》一书。文艺复兴是欧洲历史上具有重大意义的新文化运动。恩格斯评价为,“这是一次人类从未经历过的最伟大的、进步的变革”。 【1】
布克哈特最突出的贡献是关于意大利文艺复兴运动的研究。欧洲的传统历史学家,一直到十九世纪,都认为历史学的研究范围在于政治和军事;而文艺复兴属于思想、文学和艺术领域,在传统的历史学中没有地位。布克哈特在古典主义学派温克尔曼(Johann Joachim Winckelmanns)和歌德(Johann Wolfgang Goethe)等人的影响下,形成了以美学、人类学作为观察人类历史和思想的出发点的研究方式,这与前人过分重视政治和军事不同。德国埃森文化科学研究所所长、当代著名历史理论家耶尔恩·吕森在为《世界历史沉思录》中译本撰写的一篇长篇序言中,如此评价布克哈特:“他尝试把人类学当作历史思维的基础,并以此来代替历史哲学,从而发展了考察历史的新方法。” 【2】
布克哈特的代表作《意大利文艺复兴时期的文化》是自伏尔泰以来,欧洲学术界第一部关于文艺复兴运动综合研究的专著,它奠定了近代西方历史学在此领域的正统理论,具有划时代意义。英国著名历史学家阿克顿勋爵评价此书是“现有著作中关于文化史的一部最深刻、最精确的研究著作”。
《意大利文艺复兴时期的文化》全书共有六篇,记述了从十三世纪下半叶到十六世纪中叶这三百年间意大利文化的发展情况,依次阐述了政治、思想、学术、社交生活和道德宗教等方面的内容。本书《论作为艺术品的国家》是《意大利文艺复兴时期的文化》的第一篇也是最长的一篇,约占全书四分之一左右,下分十章,从不同侧面叙述了文艺复兴时期意大利的政治制度和政治形势。书中,布克哈特重视的不是具体的政治事件,而是影响社会变化的政治背景。这种以论述政治形势开始,接着介绍文化状况的撰史方法,为欧洲后来的文化史著述树立了一个范例。
《意大利文艺复兴时期的文化》自出版以来,各种译本风行不衰,以其经典的地位一直吸引着每一代读者。
注释
【1】 中共中央马克思恩格斯列宁斯大林著作编译局编,《马克思恩格斯选集》(第三卷),北京:人民出版社1995年版,第445页。
【2】 耶尔恩·吕森,雅各布·布克哈特的生平和著作,载于雅各布·布克哈特著,《世界历史沉思录》,北京:北京大学出版社2007年版,第1页。
引 言
本书的题目从最严谨的字面意义来说是一篇论文的题目。作者比任何人都清楚他自己是以何等有限的方法和力量来进行如此艰巨的工作的。即使他能更自信地看待自己的研究,对于能否得到有识者的赞同,也几乎不能因此而感到有更大的把握。也许任何一种文化在每个人的眼中会呈现出不同的画面;在探讨一种像我们自己的母亲般的、现在仍然在影响着我们的文化时,必然会随时显示出作者和读者个人的判断和感觉。我们在一望无际的大海上冒险航行,可能有许多道路和方向,对于本书研究所使用的同样的材料,在别人手中,很有可能不仅处理和应用的方式迥异,而且会得出截然不同的结论。的确,本课题非常重要,仍需进一步的探索,也许从不同的视角研究起来更具优势。而且,如有人耐心倾听,并把本书的整体加以评价,我们会感到满足。撰写文化史的最大困难在于,为了各方面易于理解,一个伟大的智识进程必须被分成一个个阶段,并且常常近乎武断地予以分门别类。我们原打算写一本专门论文艺复兴时期艺术的著作来弥补一些本书未及论述的内容——然而,此想法只得到部分的实现。教皇们与霍亨斯陶芬王朝之间的斗争使意大利处于一种与西方其他国家完全不同的政治环境中。在法国、西班牙和英格兰,封建制度组织极其严密,以至于当它解体时很自然地成为统一的君主制国家。在德国,封建制度至少有助于维持帝国表面上的统一;而意大利几乎已完全摆脱了封建制度。十四世纪的历代皇帝,即使在最顺利的情况下,也不再是作为封建领主而是作为已存各势力可能的领袖和支柱,受到人们的承认和尊敬。而罗马教皇政权及其傀儡和同盟,有力量阻止未来的国家统一,本身却无力完成统一。在皇帝和教皇政权之间,有许多政治组织——共和国和专制君主国——一些历史较久,一些刚刚兴起,这些政治组织只是依靠维持自己生存的实力才得以存在。从它们身上,我们第一次觉察到欧洲的现代政治精神,即随心所欲以及经常呈现出的极端自私的最恶劣特征,侵害每一种权利,扼杀健康文化的每一个萌芽。但是无论在什么地方,只要阻止了或以任何方式补偿了这种邪恶的趋势,历史上就会出现一个新的事实——经过深思和谋算所产生的国家,作为一种艺术品的国家。这种新生活以千百种形式,在共和国家和专制国家中表现出来,也决定了他们的内部政治制度,还有国家的外交政策。我们的探讨范围仅限于由专制国家所表现出来的这种更完整、更明确的国家类型。
南意大利和西西里的诺曼帝国,在弗里德里克二世改革之后,为暴君统治下的国家的内部情况提供了一个令人难忘的近似写照。弗里德里克,这位首位登上王位宝座的现代型的统治者,由于成长于邻邦撒拉森人的叛乱和危险中,因此很早就习惯于非常客观地处理各种事务。他对撒拉森国家的内部局势和管理情况的熟悉以及与教皇的殊死斗争,迫使他及其对手倾尽全力应付此事。弗里德里克所采取的措施(尤其是在1231年之后),目的是完全摧毁封建政体,把人民变成无意志、无反抗手段却最能为国库带来收入的广大群众。他用一种在此之前整个西方国家无人知晓的方式,把整个司法权和行政权集于一身。任何职位的任用都不需要人民的选举,如有提出异议的地区,则摧毁其城池,把其居民变为奴隶,以示惩罚。各种赋税,根据综合评估以及伊斯兰教国家的做法,以残酷而严苛的方式来征收。的确,如果不以此方式,要想从东方人那儿收到钱是不可能的。简言之,在这里,我们看到的不是人民,而仅仅是一群唯命是从的臣民。比如,不经特别许可,不准与外国人结婚并且绝不允许在国外求学。那不勒斯大学,是我们所知道的第一所限制学习自由的大学,而东方各国,在这些方面不管怎样是不限制他们的年轻人的。弗里德里克按照伊斯兰教国家统治者的做法,为了自己个人的利益,在地中海各地进行贸易,把许多商品垄断在自己手中,并以各种方式限制臣民的商业活动。法蒂玛王朝的哈里发们尽管不信仰秘教,但至少在初期,他们容忍人民的各种宗教信仰。而弗里德里克却通过设立审判异端的宗教法庭来建立他的政府体制。当我们记起他以异教徒之名迫害自治城市的自由民代表时,这种宗教法庭似乎更应予以谴责。最后,国内警察,还有对外作战的军队的核心,是由从西西里带到诺切拉和卢切拉的撒拉森人组成的——这些人对人民痛苦的呼声置若罔闻,并且也不在乎教堂的禁令。后期,人民因为久已不习武备,只好坐视曼弗雷的灭亡和安茹的查理攫取政权,后者发现这一体制行之有效,便继续使用。
这个实行中央集权政治的皇帝身边还出现了一个最令人感到奇怪的篡位者,即他的代理主教及女婿埃兹利诺·达·罗曼诺。他不是任何政府或组织的代表,因为他所有的活动都浪费在了北意大利东部地区的最高权力的争夺上。但是作为一种政治典型人物,他对于未来的重要性并不亚于他的保护人弗里德里克皇帝。在此之前发生在中世纪的征服和篡权,不是以真正或虚假的继承权为理由,就是以反对不信教者和开除教籍的人为借口。在这里,第一次公开通过大屠杀和无休止的暴行努力建立政权,总之,采用一切手段,只为达到最终目的。埃兹利诺的后继者们,甚至凯撒·波几亚,也比不上埃兹利诺所犯下的滔天大罪。但是先行者的榜样是不会被人忘记的,他的灭亡在各国并没带来正义的回归,也没有起到对后来篡位者的警示作用。
在这样一个时期,生为弗雷德里克臣民的圣托马斯·阿奎那徒劳地创立了君主立宪的理论,提出君主应得到由自己命名的上议院的支持,并且君主是由人民选举产生的代表。这些理论在讲堂外得不到任何反响,并且弗雷德里克和埃兹利诺过去是、现在仍然是意大利十三世纪伟大的政治形象。他们已成为半传奇色彩的人物性格成为《古代故事百篇》中最重要的主题,这本书无疑是在本世纪 【1】 创作的。在讲述埃兹利诺的故事中,由于他给人以威力无边的印象而让人心生敬畏。从亲历者的编年史到后来诗人们半神话式的悲剧作品,埃兹利诺的形象已成为整个文学的中心。
注释
【1】 指作者所处的十九世纪。——译者注
第一章 十四世纪的暴君
十四世纪大大小小施行暴政的国家证明像这样的事例一直在持续。他们的恶行昭著,并且历史学家在其著作中不断详细描述。作为只能依靠自己而生存,并为此目的科学构建内部组织的国家,它们比历史故事更能引起我们的兴趣。
由于有目的地采用了当时意大利之外的君主未想到的手段,并把此手段与国内实行的几乎绝对的权力相结合,所以在暴君中产生了奇怪的人和奇怪的生活方式。一个精明的统治者治理国家的要诀是:尽可能在他所发现的或者在他起初安排的项目上征税。主要的收入来源包括:根据估定价值所征收的土地税、有明确数额的消费品税、进出口货物关税,还有统治家族的私有财产。税收增加的唯一可能性在于商业的发展和国家整体上的更加昌盛。像我们在自由城市里所见到的贷款,在这里是没有的。只要公信力不动摇,经过周密计划实行的没收所获得的钱财被认为是一种可取的筹款方式——例如,由迫使财政官下台并抢夺其财产这一真正东方人的方式来达到的一种目的。
从此收入中支出小朝廷、卫兵、雇佣军和公共建筑的费用,以及服侍君主个人的滑稽演员和其他有特长人员的费用。暴君统治的不合法使他陷于孤立,并不断被危险包围。他所结成的最值得尊敬的联盟就是有知识的人,而不管其出身。十三世纪北方君主只限于对骑士和歌功颂德的贵族豪爽大方,而意大利的暴君做法不同。他渴望声名,热衷不朽的作品,因此他所需要的是才能,而不是出身。与诗人、学者为伍,他感觉自己处于一个新的位置,确实,他觉得自己几乎拥有了新的合法性。
在这方面,没有其他君主比维罗纳的统治者坎·格兰德·戴拉·斯卡拉更出名,此人在宫廷中招待著名的流亡者,在整个意大利的代表中是数一数二的。文人并非不感激,皮特拉克,因拜谒这些人的宫廷一直受到的指责,描述了一幅十四世纪君主的理想图画。他虽然向他的保护人帕多瓦君主提出很高的要求,却是以一种表明他认为君主有能力实现的方式提出的。
您一定不要做臣民的主人,而要做他们的父亲,像爱您自己的孩子、爱您自己的身体一样爱他们。武器、卫兵和军队,您可用来抵御敌人;而对于您的臣民,善意足矣。提到人民,当然,我指的是那些热爱现存秩序的人;至于那些每天渴望变革的人,他们是谋反者和叛徒,对他们要通过严苛的法律加以惩治。
接着,文章对国家的无限权力进行了详细、完全现代式的描述。君主应该掌管一切事务,维护和修建教堂和公共建筑,维持城市秩序,排净沼泽的水,监督酒类和粮食的供应;摊派捐税时,使人民认识到税收的必要性;他还要帮助病人和无助者,并保护和招待优秀学者,这些人影响到他后世声名的流传。
但是,这种制度不管有什么光明的方面和个别统治者的优点,十四世纪的人们仍然多多少少明显意识到这种大多数君主国家的短暂性和不确定性。由于像这样的政治组织机构的安全与其疆域的大小成正比,这样就驱使着较大的王国不断吞并较小的国家。当时,上百个小君主牺牲在了维斯康提这一个家族手中。这种外部的危险直接导致内部无休止的骚乱。这种局势对统治者的性格一般造成了最坏的影响。握有绝对的权力、沉溺于奢华、放纵自私,还有敌人及谋反者所带来的危险,所有这些不可避免地使他变成最坏的暴君。要是他能信任最近的亲戚就好了!但是在一切都不合法的情况下,无论是王位的继承,还是统治者财产的分配,都不可能有规范的继承法;因此,如果继承者无能或未成年,为了家族本身的利益,他就可能被更果敢坚定的叔伯或堂兄弟所取代。对私生子的承认或排除是争斗的根源,因此这些家庭大多数都被一群心存不满和伺机报复的族人所困扰。这种情况引起一次次叛乱和家族杀戮的可怕场面。有时,觊觎王位者流亡在国外,像维斯康提家族,当时在加达湖上捕鱼为生,却冷漠而又耐心地关注着国内的局势。当对手的使者问其中一位,他考虑什么时候、以什么方式回米兰时,他回答道:“和当年驱逐我的那些人一样的方式,但要等到他的罪恶超过我当年罪恶的时候。”有时,暴君十分恶劣地违背了公众的道德,基于拯救家族的考虑,他被其亲属所杀,以平息他所引起的公愤。有几个这样的情况,政府掌握在整个家族手中或至少统治者必须要听从他们的意见,在这里,对财产和权势的分配也常常引起激烈的争夺。
这整个制度激起了当时佛罗伦萨的作家们深切而持久的仇恨。即使暴君用以给民众留下印象而不是满足自己虚荣心所举办的庆典排场,也引起了作家们最辛辣的嘲讽。有人胆敢冒险,如果落入作家手中,那就倒霉了。像比萨的崛起者阿盖罗总督(1364),常常手持金杖,骑马出行,有时出现在王宫的窗口,让民众观看。“像遗物被展览”,他斜倚在绣花织物和软垫上,被跪着的侍从像服侍教皇或皇帝一样服侍着。然而,佛罗伦萨的老作家们常常以一种高傲的严肃语气来谈论这个话题。但丁看出并清楚地表明新君主野心的粗俗和平庸这一特征。他们的喇叭和钟铃,他们的号角和长笛,有何意义?不过是警示“刽子手来了,抢劫者来了”。暴君的城堡像大家所想象的,是一座高耸孤零的建筑,里面布满了地牢和偷听管道,是残忍和痛苦之源。对于所有那些为暴君服务的人,已经预先被告知要遭到不幸,即使暴君自己也最终变成了让人可怜的对象,他们必然成为所有善良正直的人们的敌人,他不可能相信任何人,并且从他臣民的脸上能够读出期待他下台的信息。随着暴君专制国家的崛起、发展和巩固,在其中也暗暗滋长着注定使它们瓦解和灭亡的因素。但是还没谈到这种憎恨的最深层根源,佛罗伦萨当时是人类个性得到最丰富发展的地方,而对于暴君们,除了他们自己的以及最亲近依附者的个性外,不容忍其他人个性的存在和发展。严格实施对个人的控制,甚至建立了护照的制度。
许多暴君迷信占星术、不信仰宗教,在同时代人心中,这种被上帝舍弃的可怕的存在给涂上了一层怪异的色彩。当卡拉拉家族的最后一位君主不能再保卫遭受瘟疫袭击的帕多瓦的城墙和城门,四面又被威尼斯人所包围时(1405),卫兵听到他对魔鬼喊道“杀死我吧”。
从乔万尼大主教去世后(1354),在米兰的维斯康提家族中无疑能发现十四世纪最完整的、最具启示性的暴君专制的类型。在贝尔那博和罗马最坏的皇帝之间清楚地显示出家族的相像。当时人们生活的重中之重就是君主的野猪狩猎活动,不管是谁,只要妨碍狩猎,就施以极刑处死。满心恐惧的人们被迫喂养五千头猎犬,并要严格保证它们的健康和安全。君主想尽一切办法强征各种捐税;他的七个女儿每人得到一笔十万金弗罗林的嫁妆;他还搜刮了大量的金银珠宝。他妻子去世时(1384),他向臣民发布一个告示,要他们分担他的哀伤(就像他们曾经分享他的快乐一样),并且要穿丧服一年。他的侄子吉安加利佐使他就范于自己权力之下的“突袭事件”(1385)——至今仍使后世的历史学家惊心动魄的著名阴谋之一——清楚显示出吉安加利佐的特征。
在吉安加利佐身上最大程度地表现出大部分暴君所具有的对修建巨大工程的狂热。他以三十万金弗罗林为代价,承担了巨大堤坝的建造工程。必要时,把明乔河水从曼图亚改道,把布莱塔河水从帕多瓦改道,结果,致使这两个城市全无防御能力。事实上,他很可能考虑要排干威尼斯的湖水。他在帕维亚修建了女修道院中最好的切尔托莎修道院;并修建了雄伟壮丽超越基督教界所有教堂的米兰大教堂。帕维亚王宫由其父加利佐初建,他在位时竣工,很可能是欧洲王宫中最宏伟的。他把他著名的图书室和他所收集的大批圣贤遗物(对此他有一种奇怪的信仰)转移至此处。要是这种性格的君主对政治没有最高野心的话,那真让人感到奇怪。温切斯劳斯国王封他为大公(1395),当他病逝时(1402),他所渴望的只是意大利王国或帝国的王冠。据说,单单一年,他整个领地付给他除了一百二十万金弗罗林的常规贡赋外,还有不少于八十万金弗罗林的特别补贴。在他死后,他用各种武力统一起来的领地四分五裂了;并有一段时期,他的继任者连维持原来的核心王国都有困难。他的儿子乔万尼·马利亚(死于1412年)和菲利波·马利亚(死于1417年),若是生活在不同国家,或身处其他传统中,不好说会变成什么样的人;但是,作为这个家族的后嗣,他们继承了一代代积累的残忍和怯懦的可怕资产。
乔万尼·马利亚也以他的狗著称,然而这些狗不再用来打猎,而是专为撕扯人肉。它们的名字像皇帝瓦伦廷尼安的熊一样一一流传下来。1409年5月,当战事正酣,饥饿的人们在街上向他喊着“和平!和平!”时,他派雇佣军扑向他们,二百个人被夺取了生命;他禁止人们说“和平”和“战争”这两个词语,违者处以绞刑,加以严惩,并且命令牧师说“赐给我们安宁”来取代“赐给我们和平”。最后,一群谋反者利用这个丧心病狂的统治者的雇佣兵大队长法西诺·凯内在帕维亚生病的时机,在米兰的圣哥达多教堂杀死了乔万尼·马利亚。同一天,奄奄一息的法西诺让其部下宣誓效忠继任者菲利波·马利亚,他自己要求他的妻子在他死后嫁给菲利波·马利亚,他妻子比阿特丽丝·第·丹达听从了他的劝告。在文章的后面我们要讲到菲利波·马利亚。
在这样的时期,柯拉·第·利恩奇梦想在腐朽的罗马居民摇摇晃晃的热情上建设一个即将危及整个意大利的新国家。他和我们已描述过的那些统治者相比,好像不过是个可怜的自欺欺人的傻瓜而已。
第二章 十五世纪的暴君专制
十五世纪的暴君专制国家的特点已有所改变。许多不太重要的暴君和一些较大的暴君,像斯卡拉和卡拉拉,都已灭亡;而靠征服别国变得更加强大的暴君们已使他们的制度得到各具特色的发展。例如,那不勒斯从新的阿拉戈纳王朝获得了一种新的更强大的推动力。这一新时代的显著特征是许多雇佣兵队长企图建立他们自己的独立王朝。人们不再考虑传统的评价,而只注重事实和事情之间的真实关系;才能和冒险是人人追求的目标。小国的暴君们,为了得到可信赖的靠山,开始服务于较大的国家,他们自己成了雇佣兵队长,作为效劳的回报,他们从这些大国领取金钱并且如果他们有不端行为,只要不是扩张本国领土,可以免受惩罚。所有暴君,无论大小,必须更加努力,其行为必须更加谨慎和深思,必须学会抑制住实施大规模暴行的冲动;舆论只容许为了实现大家期待的目标而必然会犯的错误,公正的旁观者当然不挑剔这种错误。在这里,看不到任何支持西方合法君主的那种半宗教式的忠诚的痕迹;我们所能发现的最接近这种忠诚的,是个人的受欢迎。才能和算计是前进道路上唯一的手段。像大胆查理那样,在狂热追求不切实际的目标中耗尽心力的性格,意大利人难于理解。“瑞士人只是些农民,如果全部被杀死,对有可能阵亡的勃艮第贵族们也不能补偿。如果勃艮第大公不战而拥有整个瑞士,他的收入也不会多加五千金币。查理性格中的中世纪特点、他身上所具有的骑士精神的抱负和理想,长期以来让意大利人难以理解。当南方的外交官们看到他殴打军官后,却还让他们继续服役;当他因军队打败仗而施以惩罚,以此虐待他们,而又在这些军人面前责备他的顾问官时,他们认为这个人已无任何希望。而路易十一,尽管其政策胜过意大利各君主按自己的方式所制定的政策,并且公开宣称自己是弗兰切斯科·斯福查的崇拜者,但在文化和优雅诸方面,人们认为他与这些统治者还相差甚远。
十五世纪的意大利诸国中,美德与邪恶令人奇怪地并存。统治者的个性发展很充分,其个性往往又具有非常深刻的意义,并且极具那一时代社会状况和需求的特点,因此要对它作一恰当的道德判断并不是一件容易的事情。
这种暴君专制制度的基础过去是,现在也仍然是不合法的,并且没有什么能消除它身上的魔咒。皇帝的批准或者授权对此并无任何改变,因为暴君从国外某处或从过境的陌生人手中购买羊皮纸授权书这件事,人民对此并不以为然。要是皇帝对于任何事情都处理得当的话——依毫无判断力的常识的逻辑这样推论——他就根本不会让暴君兴起。自查理四世的罗马远征起,皇帝们在意大利除了批准那些不依靠他们帮助而兴起的暴君政权外,没有做任何事情;他们给予暴君专制的实际权威,除来自皇帝诏书之外,无其他任何方式。查理在意大利的整个行为是一场充满丑闻的政治喜剧。马提奥·维兰尼讲到维斯康提家族怎样陪查理游览他们的领地并且最后护送他出境,途中查理怎样为了得到钱,像小贩一样叫卖他的货物(特权等等);他在罗马的形象是多么庸俗小气,以及怎样在最后,甚至剑都没出鞘,就带着金银宝箱越过阿尔卑斯山满载而归。西吉斯蒙多来了,至少在第一次(1414年),怀着劝说教皇约翰二十三世参加他的议会的美好愿望。就在旅途中,当教皇和皇帝从克雷莫纳的高塔上眺望伦巴第的景色时,他们的东道主,暴君加比诺·丰多洛满心想的是把两人推下高塔。第二次,西吉斯蒙多只是作为一个冒险家来到意大利,半年多的时间里,他都像不敢出门的欠债者一样在锡耶纳闭门不出;克服重重困难,后来才在罗马成功加冕。那么想一想弗雷德里克三世,又是什么情况呢?正是那些想让他确认其特权或者为了满足其招待过皇帝的虚荣心的那些人,使他的意大利之行充满了假期旅行或短途游乐的气氛。后者就像那不勒斯的阿尔方索,他为了皇帝访问的光荣而付出十五万弗罗林。在费拉拉,当弗雷德里克第二次从罗马归来时(1469年),一整天没离开他的房间,颁发了不少于八十个头衔,他授封了骑士、伯爵、博士、公证人——伯爵,实际上分有不同等级,例如,有宫廷伯爵,还有有权授封至多五个博士的伯爵,以及有权予以私生子合法地位和任命公证人的伯爵,等等。作为回报,这位颁发头衔的人期望从这些封赠中得到获取报酬的特权,而这在费拉拉被认为是过多了。当博尔索的皇室庇护人给所有小朝廷颁发头衔和委任状时,他也被册封为摩德纳和勒佐公爵;作为回报,他每年需缴纳四千金弗罗林,博尔索对此事的想法,并未提及。人文主义者,也就是那个时代的主要发言人,根据个人的利益,对于此事的看法有所分歧,而其中几人以罗马皇室的诗人们常用的歌颂向皇帝表示致敬。波吉奥坦称,他不再知道加冕典礼有什么意义;在古时候,只有凯旋的大将军才被加冕,那时他被用桂冠加冕。
马克西米利安一世即位后,不仅开始了外国的普遍干涉,而且开始实施针对意大利的新的帝国政策。第一步——授封洛多维科·摩罗为米兰大公和除掉他的不幸的侄子——就不是一个有好结果的措施。按照现代的干涉理论,当两方正在争斗瓜分一个国家时,就可能有第三方插手进来并获取自己的那份利益。罗马帝国就是按照这个原则来采取行动的,但人们却不再诉诸公理和正义。当人们期待路易十二到热那亚时(1502年),帝国之鹰从公爵宫殿的大殿上被除掉而代之以彩绘的百合花。历史学家纳雷加问及侥幸逃过那么多变乱而留下来的鹰究竟有什么意义、帝国对于热那亚提出什么要求时,除了“热那亚是帝国的账房”这句老生常谈外,没人有更多的了解。最后,当查理五世把西班牙和帝国合并起来时,他能够凭借西班牙的军事力量提出帝国的要求,但臭名昭著的是他由此所得并非给帝国,而是给西班牙君主国带来了利益。
与十五世纪各个朝代政治上的非婚生身份有密切关系的是民众对于合法婚生身份的不在乎态度,这一点对于外国人——例如,科米斯——似乎非常奇怪。这二者自然并行不悖。在北方国家,像在勃艮第,私生子的后代依靠独特的附属封地为生,如主教管区之类;在葡萄牙,非婚生世系只能通过不断的努力在王位上延续下去;在意大利,情况相反,已没有即使在直系后代中也不容许私生子存在的王室家族。那不勒斯的阿拉戈纳世系的君主们属于非婚生世系,阿拉戈纳王国本身传给了阿尔方索一世的兄弟。也许乌尔比诺的伟大的弗雷德里克根本就不是蒙特费尔特罗家族的后裔。当教皇庇护二世在去曼图亚会议(1459年)的路上时,伊斯特王室家族的八个私生子在费拉拉骑马去迎接他,其中有在位的博尔索大公本人和他的非婚生兄弟、前任大公利奥纳洛的两个私生子。利奥纳洛也曾经有一个妻子,是那不勒斯的阿尔方索一世和一个非洲女人的私生女。当婚生子女年幼而同时国内局势处于生死存亡之际,私生子往往被允许继承王位;年长者的统治开始被承认,而不再考虑其出身的纯正与否。个人的健康、价值和能力比在西方其他地方盛行的所有法律和惯例都更重要。确实,那正是教皇的儿子们正在建立王朝的时代。十六世纪,由于国外的思想和当时开始的反宗教改革运动的影响,整个问题才得以更严格地判断。瓦尔奇发现:婚生子对于王位的继承是“理智所赋予的,并且是上帝的旨意”。红衣主教伊波利托·得·美第奇基于他也许是一个合法婚姻所生的后代,并且无论如何是一个淑女的儿子,而不像阿利桑德罗大公是一个女佣的儿子这个事实,提出佛罗伦萨君主权要求。这时开始了在十五世纪,无论在政治的或道德的基础上都是毫无意义的上层社会男子与下层社会女子的恋爱婚姻。
但是十五世纪最高的和最受人仰慕的非婚生形式由雇佣兵队长体现出来,他无论是什么出身,自己已升到了独立的统治者的地位。说到底,诺曼人在十一世纪占领南意大利就属于这一性质。那时这种企图开始使这个半岛处于不断的动荡中。
一个雇佣兵队长在他的雇主由于缺乏金钱或者军队而以此方式为他提供生计时,即使不经过夺权,也有可能获得一个地方的君主身份。雇佣兵队长,无论在何种情况下,即使暂时解散了他的大部分军队,也需要一个能够建立冬营并储藏军需物品的安全地方,第一个获得这样的君主身份的队长是约翰·霍克伍德,他被教皇格雷戈里十一封为巴尼亚那卡瓦洛和科蒂尼约拉地方的君主。当意大利的军队和统治者们与阿伯利哥·达·巴比亚诺的共同势力开始强大时,就有了更多建立一个公国或者扩张一个已建立公国的机会。第一次血腥的重大军事暴乱发生在吉安加利佐死后(1402年)的米兰公国。他的两个儿子所施行政策的目的,主要是消灭雇佣兵队长们所建立的新暴君专制政权;从这些雇佣兵队长中最大的法西诺那里,维斯康提家族继承了很多城市和四十万金弗罗林,以及法西诺的寡妇,不用说还有比阿特丽斯·第·丹达所带来的除她之外的她前夫的士兵。从那时起,十五世纪所特有的、政府和它们的雇佣兵队长之间的完全不道德的关系变得越来越普遍。一个虚虚实实、影影绰绰的老故事对此有如下描述:某城市(好像指的是锡耶纳)的人们曾有一个为他们服务的军官,这名军官曾从外国的侵略中解放了他们,每天这些人都在商议怎样回报他,商议的结果是,他们的力量太微弱,即使选他做那个城市的君主,也不足以酬报他的恩德。最后,其中一人站起来说:“让我们杀了他,然后把他当作我们的庇护圣徒来崇拜吧!”然后他们这样做了,仿照罗马元老院处置罗慕路斯的先例。事实上,雇佣兵队长们有理由最畏惧他们的主人。如果他们打了胜仗,他们就成了危险人物,就像罗伯托·马拉泰斯达,为教皇西克塔斯四世打了胜仗后就被处死(1482年);如果他们打了败仗,威尼斯人对卡马尼约拉的报复给他们显示了他们会有什么样的危险(1432年)。这种处境道德上的特点是,雇佣兵队长常常不得不把他们的妻子儿女当人质,尽管如此,他们不仅自己不放心,别人对他们也不放心。他们必须一直是克制私欲的英雄,本性像贝利撒留将军那样,不为仇恨和怨毒所腐蚀;只有最完美的优秀品质才能拯救他们免于罪大恶极。那么我们如果发现他们对一切神圣的事物充满蔑视,对他们的同胞——那些不关心自己是否会死于教会禁令的人——残忍而奸诈,就不会感到奇怪了。与此同时,迫于这种形势,他们中许多人的天才和能力获得了能想象到的最高度发展,并为他们赢得了部下的景仰和献身。他们的军队是现代历史上第一支以统帅的人格魅力为唯一动力的军队。弗兰切斯科·斯福查的一生就是一个光辉的典范;对他出身的任何偏见都不能阻止他必要时从他所打交道的每一个人那里赢得无限忠诚并加以利用;不止一次,他的敌人一看到他,就放下了武器,恭敬地脱帽向他致意,每人都尊敬他为“所有军人共同的父亲”。斯福查家族有这种特别的,从它家族历史一开始,我们似乎就能追溯到的努力追求王冠的兴趣。这个家族的幸运基于家庭中惊人的人丁兴旺。弗兰切斯科的父亲亚科波本人就是一个名人,他有二十个兄弟姊妹,都在法恩扎附近的科蒂尼约拉没经过多少管教地被抚养长大,在他们成长过程中,一直处于自己家族和帕索利尼家族之间在罗马尼约尔的无尽的族间仇杀的危险之中。全家人的住处只不过是一个军火库和堡垒,母亲和女儿们都像家中男子一样地尚武好战。亚科波十三岁时,离家逃到班尼加尔的教皇雇佣兵队长博尔德利诺那里——此人甚至死后还在继续领导他的军队,命令从停放着涂有香膏的遗体的营帐中发出,直至最后找到了合适的统帅来接替他。当亚科波在为不同的雇佣兵队长服务中最终使自己变得实力强大时,他派人把他的亲属找到一起,并从他们那里获得了如同一个君主从人口众多的王国那里所得到的同样的好处。当他被俘在那不勒斯的乌奥沃城堡里做阶下囚时,是他的亲属保住了军队免于解散。他妹妹亲手拘捕王室使者,并把他们关进监狱,以这种报复手段拯救了他的生命。亚科波在金钱问题上绝对值得信赖这件事,表明他做事深谋远虑;甚至在他打了败仗的时候,他都能从银行家那里得到钱。他经常保护农民免遭军队的骚扰,并且情非得已才摧毁或破坏一个被占领的城市。他为了免除与王室姻亲联盟关系的束缚,让他众所周知的情妇,即弗兰切斯科的母亲露西亚嫁给了别人。即使他亲属的婚姻也都是按照一定的计划来安排的。他远离同时代人的邪恶放纵的生活,并抚养儿子弗兰切斯科,遵从三条诫律:“不要染指别人的妻子;不要殴打你的追随者,或者如果你打了他,就把受伤的人发配远方;不要骑难咬马嚼子的马或脱落了蹄铁的马。”但他的影响力主要源自他即使不是一个伟大的将军,至少也是一个伟大的军人所具有的品质。他的体格孔武有力,并且通过各种锻炼得到增强;他那一张农民的面孔和坦率直白的性格赢得大众的欢迎;他的记忆力惊人,经过多年之后仍能记起部下的姓名、他们马匹的数目和他们薪俸的数目。他所受的教育纯粹是意大利式的:他利用闲暇时间研读历史,并命人翻译了许多希腊语和拉丁语作品以供参考。弗兰切斯科,他那比他还著名的儿子,从一开始就决心建立一个强大的国家,并且通过其卓越的统率才能和对任何事都毫不犹豫的奸诈作风,拥有了米兰这座伟大的城市(1447—1450年)。
他的榜样具有感染力量。伊尼亚斯·希尔维优斯对于这一时期曾写道:“在我们这热爱变革的意大利,在这个没有任何事情是一成不变的地方,在这个古代的王朝已不存在的地方,一个佣人轻易地就能变成国王。”有一个特别的标榜自己是“幸运之人”的人,让全国人们充满了想象:他是尼科洛的儿子亚科波·皮奇尼诺。他是否也能成功建立一个王室,这是一个当时激起激烈争论的问题。较大的国家明显要阻止它,甚至弗兰切斯科·斯福查也认为那张自我封君的名单最好不要再扩大了。但是在当时,例如,亚科波·皮奇尼诺想要做锡耶纳的君主时,那些被派去攻打他的兵士和队长们却意识到拥护他对他们自己有利:“要是他完蛋了,我们就不得不回家去种地。”甚至把他围困在奥贝泰罗期间,他们还给他给养;并且他体面地脱离了困境。但是最终命运突袭了他。在他(1465年)访问了米兰的斯福查去那不勒斯的费兰特国王那里的时候,全意大利都在就他此行的结果打赌。尽管他得到过保证,尽管他和权贵有联系,他还是在乌奥沃城堡里被人谋杀了。连通过继承而获得领地的雇佣兵队长也从来没有感到他们自己是安全的。当罗伯托·马拉泰斯达和乌尔比诺的菲德利哥,一个在罗马,另一个在波洛尼亚,在同一天去世的时候(1482年),人们发现他们曾建议把自己的国家交给对方来治理。为反对胆大妄为之人所做的任何事都被认为是允许的。弗兰切斯科·斯福查年轻时娶了一个富有的卡拉布里亚女继承人波丽森娜·露莎,即蒙达多女伯爵,生下一个女儿;而她的姑母却毒死了母女二人,从而攫取了继承权。
自皮奇尼诺死后,由雇佣兵队长建立新国家的所作所为成了一件令人不能容忍的丑事。四个伟大的政权,那不勒斯、米兰、教皇政权和威尼斯,在它们之间形成了一种不容许有任何扰乱的政治均衡。在教皇的属邦里,蜂拥着许多小暴君。其中部分是,或者曾经是雇佣兵队长,自教皇西克塔斯四世的时代以来,历任教皇的侄子们独占了所有这些暴君所承担事务的权利。但是一有政治危机的苗头,这些做过雇佣兵队长的军人们就又出现在现场。在教皇英诺森八世的邪恶治理下,有一个从前曾在勃艮第军队中服役的叫博卡利诺的人,几乎要把自己及其统治下的奥西莫镇献给了土耳其军队;幸运的是,由于庄严之人洛伦佐的干涉,他愿意拿到一笔钱后离去。在1495年,当查理八世的战争把意大利搞得天翻地覆时,布雷西亚的雇佣兵队长维多韦罗试了试自己的实力:他已经夺取了切泽纳市镇并屠杀了很多贵族和自由民;但却没攻下城堡而被迫撤退。然后他率领着另外一个恶棍——已经谈到过的罗伯托的儿子、威尼斯的雇佣兵队长、里米尼的潘多福·马拉泰斯达——借给他的一队人马,从拉文纳的大主教那里强夺了乌奥沃城堡。威尼斯人,恐怕情况变得更糟糕,也是受教皇的催促,命令潘多福,“怀有最善良的意愿”利用一个机会逮捕了他的好朋友维多韦罗:尽管逮捕是“怀着深深的遗憾”进行的,但接着传来了把他送到绞刑架上的命令。潘多福体贴地在监狱里先勒死了他,然后把尸体给人们看。这种篡位者的最后一个引人注目的例子是著名的慕索的卡斯特兰,他在帕维亚之战(1525年)后的米兰领地的混乱中,在科莫湖畔临时拥有了统治权。