MR. JESSE'S "LONDON."* IT seems easy enough to review a
book of this sort, especially if you have the courage to abstain from reading it. Some general remarks on the number of books that have been written about London, and on the variety of points of view from which the place may be treated, can be put together without much thought or study. The next thing is to pick out two or three chapters at random, and make a sort of condensation of their con- tents, slightly varying the author's language and his arrangement. If in the course of this you can discover a few trivial errors, a wrong date, or a wrong spelling, your reputation as a critic is made. Anyhow, whether you have read the book or not, whether you have said anything about it or not, you have written a review, and that is all you have to consider. Unfortunately, such a satisfactory mode of getting through one's work does not please everybody, and readers who want to know what there is in a book before they order it gain but little information from this process. Perhaps it may be said on behalf of the self-satisfied reviewer that a more artistic criticism of a book like Mr. Jesse's is a work of much difficulty. An analysis is out of the question. From a literary point of view, there is hardly anything to be said. The industry and research shown by Mr. Jesse would be poorly repaid if lie was to be called a bookmaker, but the absence of system, the heaping-up of undigested materials, the haphazard way in which curious facts and associations hang together by streets, go far to deprive him of higher honours. We do not say that it would have been possible to arrange much of this gossip otherwise than topographically, and it is so interesting that we should not wish to see it sacrificed to a more logical order. But at present, Mr. Jesse's book has too much the air of a guide-book. He takes us along Piccadilly, pointing out house after house, and telling us of the successive inmates. We turn up one of the side streets, and we are told that Pope's name is still to be found in the lease of a certain number, and that one of the subsequent tenants always kept alive the memory of the poet. Once started on such a course of reminiscence, Mr. Jesse is unable to stop. Not a street or square escapes him, not a house but has some worthy association. If it was possible to remember a tithe of the facts collected in these volumes, a walk in any part of London would have singular attractions.
• London : Its Celebrated Character: and Remarkable Places. By J. Heneage Jesse. 3 vols. London: Bentley. 1871.
When our cabman cuts off the corner of St. James's Street, we might be reminded that Arlington Street was called by Horace Walpole the Ministerial Street, a name it earned by being the residence of Pulteney, Walpole, Carteret, Pelham and the Duke of Grafton. Should we pass through Bow Street, we might wonder at it having once been among the most fashionable streets in London, but this feeling would yield to respect when we thought that Fielding wrote Tom Jones on the site of the present police office. Stranger still, Maiden Lane has the honour of being the street in which Voltaire lodged during his visit to England in 1727, and in which Andrew Marvell and J. M. W. Turner resided. Again we little think that the church of St. Paul in Covent 'Garden is second only to Westminster Abbey as the burial-place of men of genius and celebrity.
These instances are perhaps the most striking in Mr. Jesse's book, as they point the contrast between a state of present decay, neg- lect, or degradation, and a past of brilliance or glory. Of course if we go back far enough we come upon greater changes. The rapid encroachments which the capital has made on the country sound have been noticed in every age, and have at different times given rise to alternate admiration and remonstrance. In his essay on Holland House, Macaulay spoke of the growth of the great city, which would soon convert into rows of houses the park and gardens visited by so many illustrious men, and run its lines of brick through the rooms that had been the scene of such varied literary and political discussions. A century and a half before, Evelyn had inveighed against " the mad intemperance of the age," on account of buildings being erected close to what now is Berkeley Square, stating that the city had been enlarged nearly tenfold -during his time, and was far out of proportion to the nation. With our present experience, we can only wonder that such cen- sure was levelled at what was comparatively so harmless. Yet when we look back to the fourteenth century, it does not seem to us strange that the Clerk's Well, which gives a name to one of our lowest neighbourhoods, should have " bubbled in the midst of verdant meadows and shady lanes, the richly wooded uplands of Hampstead and Highgate rising behind them." We are too far separated from those days to appreciate the magnitude of the change. So the description of Ratcliffe Highway as " a little town wherein lived many sailors, And deriving its name from a red cliff which was formerly visible there," and the account of King Charles I. killing a stag in Nightingale Lane, Wapping, the street which now divides the London Docks from St. Katharine's Docks, produce a faint impres- sion on the minds of men who are acquainted with the modern aspect of those places. It may be more difficult to believe that the Fleet Ditch was once a tidal and navigable river, the tide flowing up it as far as Holborn Bridge, so that " ten or twelve ships' navies at once with merchandises were wont to come to the aforesaid bridge of Fleet " in the reign of Edward IL Comparing that picture with the modern one given by Mr. Jesse, we are re- minded of the scene in Gustav Freytag's "Soil and Haben " where Veitel Itzig looks from the back of the thieves' lodging- bouse upon the stream in which he is to drown his accomplice and is afterwards himself to perish : —
"One of the last glimpses to be caught of this nauseous stream we availed ourselves of many years ago, on the occasion of the destruction .of some old houses in West Street, at the south end of Saffron Hill, which had been the hiding-place and stronghold of thieves, and an asylum for the most depraved of both sexes, from the reign of Queen Anne to our own time. Here, according to tradition, the notorious Jonathan Wild carried on his crafty and nefarious traffic of plunder and human blood. We remember well how the black and disgusting-looking .stream flowed through a deep and narrow channel, encased on each side with brick, and overhung by miserable-looking dwelling-houses, the abode of poverty and crime. The stronghold of the thieves consisted of two separate habitations—one on each side of the ditch—ingeniously contrived with private means of communication and escape from one to the other. For instance, in the event of either being invaded by the myrmidons of the law, a plank might be readily thrown from one aper- ture to the other, and as readily withdrawn in the event of pursuit ; or, in the last extremity, the culprit could plunge into the ditch, and pursue his course down the murky stream, till either some familiar outlet, or the habitation of some friendly companion in crime, afforded him the means of escape. The principal building, known in the reign of George L as the Red Lion Tavern, was unquestionably of great antiquity. Its .dark closets, its trap-doors, its sliding panels, and its secret recesses and hiding-places, rendered it no less secure for purposes of robbery and murder, than as a refuge for those who were under the ban of the law. in this house, about thirty years ago, a sailor was robbed, and after- wards thrown naked, through one of the apertures which we have described, into the Fleet Ditch,—a crime for which two men and a woman were subsequently convicted and transported for fourteen years. About the same time, although the premises were surrounded by the police, a thief made his escape by means of its communications with the neigh- bouring houses, the inhabitants of which were almost universally either subsistent upon or friendly to pillage and crime."
Still, though the contrast here is most strongly marked, we are more alive to the changes of a single century. The modification of what actually remains strikes us more than the total demolition of one state of things and the construction of a wholly different system. This is the source of part of our interest in the residences of Voltaire and Fielding. It also leads us to note with pleasure that at the end of the seventeenth century the 'prentices of Lon- don used to play cricket and in the next century football under the porticos of Covent Garden. At a much later date the insecurity of the streets contrasted unfavourably with our modern outbreaks of garrotting. In 1749 Horace Walpole's carriage was stopped iu Hyde Park by a highwayman. The next year Lady Albemarle was robbed in Great Russell Street
by a band of nine men. Mr. Jesse says that some sixty years ago a hackney coach containing two friends of his was stopped by a party of three men just opposite St. James's Church in Piccadilly ; one of the men mounted the box to overawe the coachman, while the others presented themselves at the door with pistols. The road from Clerkenwell to Islington, which was solitary and bounded by fields, was so much infested by highwaymen at the end of the last century that travellers often stopped all night at the Angel. " Those whose business called them into the country at a late hour," says Mr. Jesse, " used to assemble at the upper end of St. John's Street, where was an avenue of trees called Wood's Close, and where they waited till they were reinforced by other travellers, when they were escorted by an armed patrol to Islington." Visitors to Sadler's Wells theatre had a similar guard, and it used to be announced in the play-bills whenever there was an extraordinary performance that a horse patrol would be stationed that night in the New Road, and that the thoroughfare leading to the City would also be thoroughly guarded. Mr. Jesse gives a curious account of the way in which a noted highwayman was captured. A man named Norton, who is described as a thief-catcher, hearing that the Devizes chaise had been robbed two or three times between Knightsbridge and Kensington, took his place as a passenger, and held himself in readiness. The highwayman came and demanded his money, on which, after giving up a five-shilling piece and snapping off a pistol, he jamped out of the chaise and ran the highwayman down. Having tied the highwayman's hands with his own neck-cloth, Norton wished his fellow-passengers good night, and carried his prize to London. Being asked at the trial by the prisoner what trade he followed, he replied, " I keep a shop in Wych Street, and sometimes I take a thief."
What is called in this story the half-way house between Knights- bridge and Kensington is certainly not the place that a robber of the present day would choose for his scene of action. Hyde Park might in those times be a " lonely neighbourhood," but as fashion has moved to the westward, all the old places of resort in the centre have been superseded. A modern Garrick would not dream of making his debut in Goodman's Fields, at the extreme east of London, or if he did, he would hardly attract thither " a dozen dukes of a night," to quote the sentence in Gray's letter. Gray himself did not at first appreciate Garrick, for in the same place he says, "I am stiff in the opposition ;" and Horace Walpole, too, writes, "All the run is now after Garrick, a wine merchant who is turned player at Goodman's Fields. He plays all parts, and is a very good mimic. His acting I have seen, and may say to you who will not say it again here, I see nothing wonderful in it ; but it is heresy to say so ; the Duke of Argyll says he is superior to Betterton." Gossip of this kind carries Mr. Jesse all round the London of past ages, and readers may do worse than dip into his book wherever it chances to open.
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