London, Volume 1
Knight, Charles
1841
Clean Your Honour's Shoes.
Clean Your Honour's Shoes.
In of the many courts on the north side of , might be seen, somewhere about the year , . would think that he deemed himself dedicated to his profession by Nature, for he was a Negro. At the earliest dawn he crept forth from his neighbouring lodging, and planted his tripod on the quiet pavement, where he patiently stood till noon was past, He was a short, large-headed, son of Africa, subject, as it would appear, to considerable variations of spirits, alternating between depression and excitement, as the gains of the day presented to him the chance of having a few pence to recreate himself beyond what he should carry home to his wife and children. For he had a wife and children, this last representative of a falling trade; and or little woolly-headed nestled around him when he was idle, or assisted in taking off the roughest of the dirt when he had more than client. He watched, with a melancholy eye, the gradual improvement of the streets; for during some or years he had beheld all the world combining to ruin him. He saw the foot-pavements widening; the large flag-stones carefully laid down; the loose and broken piece, which discharged a slushy shower on the unwary foot, instantly removed: he saw the kennels. diligently cleansed, and the drains widened: he saw experiment upon experiment made in the repair of the carriage-way, and the holes, which were to him as the which he loved, filled up with a haste that appeared quite unnecessary, if not insulting. solitary country shopkeeper, who had come to London once a year during a long life, clung to our sable friend; for he was the only of the fraternity that he could find remaining, in his walk from to . The summer's morning when that good man planted his foot on the -legged stool, and desired him carefully to turn back his brown gaiters, and asked | |
18 | him how trade went with him, and shook his head when he learned that it was very bad, and they both agreed that new-fangled ways were the ruin of the country--that was a joyful occasion to him, for he felt that he was not quite deserted. He did not continue long to struggle with the capricious world.
He retired into the workhouse; and his boys, having a keener eye than their father to the wants of the community, took up the trade which he most hated, and applied themselves to the diligent removal of the mud in an earlier stage of its accumulation--they swept crossings, instead of cleaning shoes. |
The last of the Shoe-blacks belongs to history. He was of the living monuments of London; he was a link between or generations. The stand which he in Bolt Court (in the wonderful resemblance of external appearance between all these courts, we cannot be sure that it was Court) had been handed down from successor to another, with as absolute a line of customers as Child's Banking-house. He belonged to a trade which has its literary memorials. In , the polite Chesterfield, and the witty Walpole, felt it no degradation to the work over which they presided that it should be jocose about his fraternity, and hold that his profession was more dignified than that of the author: | |
[n.18.1] | |
Gay makes --his mythological descent from the goddess of mud, and his importance in a muddy city--the subject of the longest episode in his amusing Trivia. The shoe-boy's mother thus addresses him: The cry is no more heard. The pavements of are more evenly laid than the ancient marble courts of , where Wolsey held his state, and Henry revelled; and they are far cleaner, even in the most inauspicious weather, | |
19 | than the old floor beneath the rushes. Broad as the footways are--as the broadest of the entire original streets--the mightiest of paving stones is not large enough for the comforts of the walker; and a pavement without a joint is sought for in the new concrete of asphaltum. Where the streets which run off from the great thoroughfares are narrow, the is widened at the expense of the carriage-road; and cart only can pass at a time, so that we walk fearless of wheels. If we would cross a road, there is a public servant, ever assiduous, because the measure of his usefulness is that of his reward, who removes every particle of dirt from before our steps. No filth encumbers the kennels; no spout discharges the shower in a torrent from the house-top. We pass quietly onwards from to the without being jostled off the curb-stone, though we have no protecting posts to sustain us; and we perceive why the last of the shoe-blacks vanished from our view about the time when we noticed his active brothers at every corner of Paris--a city then somewhat more filthy than the London of the days of Anne. |
He who would see London well must be a pedestrian. Gay, who has left us the most exact as well as the most lively picture of the external London of a years ago, is enthusiastic in his preference for walking: But what a walk has he described! He sets out, as what sensible man would not, with his feet protected with but if the shoe be too big, This, we see, is a London without ,. The middle of a paved street was generally occupied with the channel; and the sides of the carriage-way were full of absolute holes, where the ricketty coach was often stuck as in a quagmire. Some of the leading streets, even to the time of George II., were almost as impassable as the avenues of a new American town. The only road to the Houses of Parliament before was through and , [n.19.1] The present Saint Margaret's was formed out of a thoroughfare known as Saint Margaret's , which was so narrow that [n.19.2] The pales here preserved the passengers more effectually than the posts of other thoroughfares. These posts, in the principal avenues, constituted the only distinction between the foot-way and carriage-way; for the space within the posts was as uneven as the space without. This inner space was sometimes so narrow that only person could pass at a time; and hence those contests for the wall that filled the streets with the vociferations of anger, and the din of assaulting sticks, and sometimes the clash of | |
20 | naked steel. Dr. Johnson describes how those quarrels were common when he came to London; and. how at length things were better ordered. But the change must in great part be imputed to the gradual improvement of the streets. In Gay's time there was no safety but within the posts.
In wet and gusty weather the unhappy walker heard the crazy signs swinging over his head, as Gulliver describes the of Brentford. The spouts of every house were streaming at his feet, or drenching his laced hat and his powdered wig with unpitying torrents. At every step some bulk or shop-projection narrowed the narrow road, and drove him against the coach-wheels. The chairmen, if there was room to pass, occupied all the space between the wall and the posts. The came sometimes gingerly along, with pattens and umbrella (then exclusively used by women), and of courtesy he must the wall. The small-coal man, and the sweep, and the barber, the wall, in assertion of their clothes-soiling prerogative; and the bully thrust him, or was himself thrust, The great rule for the pedestrian was,-- The dignity of the wall, and its inconveniences, were as old as the time of James and Charles. Donne, in his Satire, describes the difficulties of who took the wall:--
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The streets, in the good old times, often presented obstructions to the pedestrian which appear to us like the wonders of some unknown region. In the more recent unhappy days of public executions the wayfarer passed up with an eye averted from the ; for there, as Monday morning came, duly hung some , and it may be , unhappy victims of a merciless code, judicially murdered according to our better notions. Then was the. rush to see the horrid sight, and the dense crowd pouring away from it; and the pickpocket active under the gallows; and the business of life interrupted for a quarter of an hour, with little emotion even amongst the steady walkers who heeded not the spectacle: it was a thing of course. And so was the pillory in earlier times. Gay says nothing of--the feelings of the passer-on; he had only to take care of his clothes: People used to talk of these things as coolly as Garrard wrote to Lord Strafford of them: [n.21.1] The cruelty is not mitigated by the subsequent account of Garrard, that Mr. Prynne [n.21.2] If the mob round the pillory was safely passed, there was another mob often to be encountered. Rushing along , or Covent Garden, or by the Maypole in , came the foot-ball players. It is scarcely conceivable, when London had settled into civilization, little more than a century ago,--when we had our famed Augustan age of Addisons and Popes,--when laced coats, and flowing wigs, and silver buckles, ventured into the streets, and the beau prided himself on that the great thoroughfares through which men now move, should be a field for foot-ball: [n.21.3] | |
This is no poetical fiction. It was the same immediately after the Restoration. | |
D'Avenant's Frenchman thus complains of the streets of London: | |
[n.22.1] | |
It was the same in the days of Elizabeth. To this game went the sturdy apprentices, with all the train of idlers in a motley population; and when their blood was up, as it generally was in this exercise, which Stubbes calls they had little heed to the passengers in the streets, whether there was passing by [n.22.2] or a gentle lady on her palfrey, wearing her [n.22.3] The courtier, described in Hall, had an awful chance to save his in such an encounter; when with his according to the of his time, he has to recover his from the that crosses the thoroughfare. | |
The days we are noticing were not those of pedestrians. The of the time of Anne were as little suited for walking, as the of Elizabeth, So Stubbes describes the of his day; and he adds, what seems very apparent, [n.22.4] These fine shoes belonged to the transition state between the horse and the coach; when men were becoming in the use of the new vehicles, which we have seen the Water-Poet denounced; and the highways of London were not quite suited to the walker. Shoes such as those are ridiculed by Stubbes as and he adds,
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In asking our readers to look back to the period when London was without no sound of wheels was heard but that of the , labouring through the rutty ways, with its load of fire-wood, or beer, or perhaps the king's pots and pans travelling from to Greenwich-we ask them to exercise a considerable power of imagination. Yet London had no coaches till late in the reign of Elizabeth; and they can scarcely be said to have come into general use till the accession of James. Those who were called by business or pleasure to travel long distances in London, which could not be easily reached by water-conveyance, rode on horses. For several centuries the rich citizens and the courtiers were equestrians. All the records of early pageantry tell us of the magnificence of horsemen. Froissart saw the coronation of Henry IV., and he thus describes the progress of the triumphant Bolingbroke through the city-- [n.23.1] The old English chroniclers revel in these descriptions. They paint for us, in the most vivid colours, the entry into London of the conqueror of Agincourt; they are most circumstantial in their relations of the welcome of his unhappy son, after the boy had been crowned at Paris, with the king riding amidst flowing conduits, and artificial trees and flowers, and virgins making and bishops ; and having made his oblations at the cathedral, [n.23.2] By the ancient it is prescribed that [n.23.3] The citizens were familiar with these splendid equestrian processions, from the earliest times to the era of coaches; and they hung their wooden houses with gay tapestry, and their wives and daughters sate in their most costly dresses in the balconies, and shouts rent the air, and they forgot for a short time that there was little security for life or property against the despot of the hour. They played at these pageants, as they still play, upon a smaller scale themselves; and the Lord Mayor's horse and henchmen were seen on all solemn occasions of | |
24 | marching-watches and Bartholomew fairs. The city-dignitaries seldom ride now; although each new sheriff has a horse-block presented to him at his inauguration, that he may climb into the saddle as beseems his gravity. The courtiers kept to their riding processions, down almost to the days of the great civil war; perhaps as a sort of faint shadow of the chivalry that was gone. Garrard tells us, in , how the Duke of Northumberland rode to his installation as a knight of the garter at Windsor, with earls, and marquises, and almost all the young nobility, and many barons, and a competent number of the gentry, near a horse in all.[n.24.1] The era of coaches and chairs was then arrived; but the Duke of Northumberland did not hold that they belonged to knighthood. years earlier coaches were shunned as Aubrey, in his short memoir of Sir Philip Sidney, describes the feeling about coaches in the days of Elizabeth: [n.24.2] Our friend the Water-Poet looks back upon that to him golden age with a similar feeling. |
Nor was the use of saddle-horses confined to men in the early days. Chaucer thus describes his -- When Katharine of Spain came over in to marry Prince Arthur, a horse was provided for her conveyance from, the Tower to Saint Paul's, upon which she was to ride but it was also ordered that [n.24.3] The great ladies long after this rode on horseback on ordinary occasions. Elizabeth commissioned Sir Thomas Gresham to purchase a horse at Antwerp; and the merchant-prince writes to Cecil in :-- [n.24.4] Of poor Mary of Scotland, the Earl of Shrewsbury, after conveying her to Buxton, writes to Cecil in :-- [n.24.5] The appears to have formed a connecting link between the saddle and the coach. When Margaret, daughter of Henry VII., set forward for Scotland, she rode on a but after her was [n.24.6] The litter was, as we here see, a vehicle of ceremony. Hall, | |
25 | the great chronicler of sights, thus describes the conveyance of Anne Bullen to her coronation :-- Up to the time of Charles I. the horse litter continued to be used on state occasions; but it gradually became exclusively employed by the rich and aged, at a period when coaches were still terribly rough vehicles. Evelyn, in his Diary, states that he travelled in with his sick father, in , from Bath to Wotton; and this, Markland says, is the latest mention of the conveyance which he can find. There is a later mention of it, in a bitter attack upon the old republicans, in : [n.25.1] Nothing can be more exact than. this description of a litter. |
Of the elder vehicles that preceded coaches, whether rejoicing in the name of chare, car, chariot, caroch, or whirlicote, we have little here to say. Their dignity was not much elevated above that of the waggon; and they were scarcely calculated to move about the streets of London, which are described in a Paving Act of as There appears little doubt that the coach appeared about ; although the question was subsequently raised [n.25.2] Stow thus describes the introduction of this novelty, which was to change the face of English society: | |
In little more than years a Bill was brought into Parliament
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of the most signal examples we can find of the growing importance of the middle classes is exhibited in their rapid appropriation to their own use of the new luxury which the highest in the land ventured at to indulge in, timidly, and with of the queen's displeasure. It was in vain that Parliament | |
26 | legislated against their it was equally in vain that the citizens and citizens' wives who aspired to ride in them, were ridiculed by the wits and hooted by the mob. As in the diffusion of every other convenience or luxury introduced by the rich, the distinction of riding in a coach soon ceased to be a distinction. The proud Duke of Buckingham seeing that coaches with horses were used by all, and that the nobility had only the exclusive honour of horses, set up a coach with horses; and then established with horses.[n.26.1] Massinger, in exhibits Anne Frugal demanding of her courtly admirer- The high-born and the wealthy soon found that those who had been long accustomed to trudge through the miry streets, or on rare occasions to bestride an ambling nag, would make a ready way with money to appropriate the new luxury to themselves. Coaches soon came to be hired. They were to be found in the suburban districts and in inns within the town. Taylor (he writes in ) says, He imputes this anxiety for the accommodation of a coach to the pride of the good people, and he was probably right. He gives us a ludicrous example of the extent of this passion in the case of who [n.26.2] The rich visitors who came to London from the country were great employers of coaches; and Taylor tells us that the somewhat It is easy to conceive that in those days of ill-paved and narrow streets the coaches must have been a great impediment to the goings--on of London business. Our Water-Poet is alive to all these inconveniences: and then he describes how the proud mistresses, sitting in their (Evelyn tells us this was the Londoner's name for a coach long after), ride grinning and deriding at the people D'Avenant, some or years later, notices the popular feeling: But the coaches flourished, in spite of the populace. The carman might drive up against them, and the coachman, might be compelled to |
27 | [n.27.1] They flourished, too, in spite of the roads. [n.27.2] It is affirmed in a pamphlet quoted by Markland, entitled that in the coaches
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It was years before the date of this calculation that the hackney-coach was established in London. Garrard thus describes it in a letter to Strafford: [n.27.3] | |
Writing months after, the same retailer of news says, In he writes, It is perfectly clear that the King might proclaim, and that his subjects would not hearken to him, as long as they found hackney-coaches essential to their business or pleasure. We have an amusing example of the inefficiency of such meddling, years after. Pepys, in his Diary of , writes, We think we hear his cunning chuckle as he hires the coach, and laughs at the law-makers. | |
When Prince Charles, afterwards Charles I., returned from his faithless wooing of the daughter of Philip IV., he brought with him sedan-chairs of curious workmanship. Such a mode of conveyance was unknown to the English. They had seen the fair and the feeble carried in a box, supported by a horse before and a horse behind; and they felt, therefore, something like what we have felt at the sight of an election rabble harnessed to the wheels of a popular candidate-they felt that men were degraded, when the favourite of James and Charles, Buckingham, moved into the streets of London, borne in his sedan on men's shoulders. had presented with of these luxuries of foreign growth. Wilson says, The very year of the expedition of Charles and Buckingham to Spain, , was Massinger's produced. Charles and the favourite returned to London early in October; the play was acted on the . It contains these lines: Gilchrist and Gifford think that this was an allusion to Buckingham. If so, and there can be little doubt of the matter, the vain favourite must have paraded with his new luxury, (as a writer of that day expresses himself,) upon the instant of his return. | |
But the popular clamour was as ineffectual against the chairs as against the coaches. In , Garrard, writing to Lord Strafford, says, The coachmen and the chairmen soon got up a pretty quarrel; and in we find published the amusing tract, entitled The title exhibits to us the form of the sedan, with its bearers for custom-and we have a description of the conveyance and its men, which, with the engraving which accompanies it, clearly enough shows that the chairmen no longer bore the on their shoulders, palanquin-fashion, | |
29 | but that they quickly adopted the mode of carrying which has lasted till our own day, however the form of the thing carried has changed. |
We have now the coach and the chair fairly launched into the streets of London, of which they held joint possession for more than a century and a half. We have no doubt that the chair was a most flourishing invention. The state of the pavement till the middle of the last century must have rendered carriage conveyance anything rather than safe and | |
pleasant. Dulaure tells us that before the time of Louis XIV. the streets of Paris were so narrow, particularly in the heart of the town, that carriages could not penetrate into them.[n.29.1] D'Avenant's picture of London, before the fire, is not much more satisfactory:
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The chair had a better chance than the coach in such a state of affairs. In the pictures of coaches of the time of Elizabeth, the driver sits on a bar, or narrow chair, very low behind the horses. In those of Charles I. he sometimes drives in this way, and sometimes rides as a postillion. | |
But the hackney-coachman after the Restoration is a personage with a short whip and spurs; he has been compelled to mount of his horses, that he may more effectually manage his progress through the narrow streets. His coach, too, is a small affair. D'Avenant describes the coaches as As the streets were widened, after the fire, the coachman was restored to the dignity of a seat on the carriage; for, in the times of William III. and Anne, we invariably find him sitting on a box. This was a thing for use and not for finery. Here, or in a leather pouch appended to it, the careful man carried a hammer, pincers, nails, ropes, and other appliances in case of need; and the was devised to conceal these necessary but unsightly remedies for broken wheels and shivered panels. The skill of this worthy artist in the way of reparation would not rust for want of use. Gay has left us vivid pictures of the common accidents of the days of Anne. The carman was the terror of coaches from the hour of their use; and whether he | |
30 | was the regular city carman, or bore the honour of the dustman, brewer's man, or coal-heaver, he was ever the same vociferous and reckless enemy of the more aristocratic coachman.
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The dangers of opened vaults, and of mighty holes in the paving, fenced round with no protecting rail, and illuminated only by a glimmering rushlight in a dark street, seem to belong altogether to some barbaric region which never could have been London:-- But long after Gay's time the carmen and the pavement made havoc with coaches. If we open Hogarth, the great painter of manners shows us the vehicular dangers of his age. Bonfires in the streets on rejoicing nights, with the that went miles an hour, overturned into the flames;[n.30.1] the lawyers getting out of a hackney-coach that has come in collision with a carman, while the brewer's man rides upon his shaft in somniferous majesty;[n.30.2] the dustman's bell, the little boy's drum, the knife-grinder's wheel, all in the middle of the street, to the terror of horses [n.30.3] : these representations exhibit the perils that assailed the man who ventured into a coach. The chair was no doubt safer, but it had its inconveniences. Swift describes the unhappy condition of a fop during a -- The chairmen were very absolute fellows. They crowded round the tavern-doors, waiting for shilling customers; but they did not hesitate to set down their box when a convenient occasion offered for the recreation of a foaming mug.[n.30.4] They were for the most part sturdy Milesians, revelling, if they belonged to the aristocracy, in all the finery of embroidered coats and epaulettes, and cocked hats and feathers. If they were hackney-chairmen they asserted their power of the strong arm, and were often daring enough as a body to influence the fate of | |
31 | and Middlesex elections, in the terror which they produced with fist and bludgeon. But they are gone. No Belinda now may be proud of
They glide not amongst the chariot-wheels at levee or drawing-room. The clubs want them not. They have retired to Bath and Oxford. We believe there is chair still lingering about May Fair; but the chairmen must be starving. The Society of Antiquaries ought to buy the relic. |
Walpole has somewhere a complaint of the increase of London, that it would be soon impossible for the chairmen to perform their functions. This sounds very like the notion that the noble and the rich could ride in nothing but chairs. These were the days when the private chair had its such as Jonathan Wild recovered for the Duchess of Marlborough, when of his rogues, in the disguise of chairmen, carried away her chair from Chapel, while the were drinking. The town has increased beyond Walpole's calculation, and that is, in some measure, the reason why the chairs are . The town did not stop in its increase to consider the chairs. But there is another reason. The rich and the high-born have wisely learned to be less exclusive than of old; and as they must now-a-days wear coats of the same fashion as humbler men, so must they ride in their own carriages, with no other perceptible difference between the carriage of the duke and his tailor than that of the blazonry. Pepys tells us of [n.31.1] This hints of the days when Ladies were learning to ride in glass-coaches, having just passed through the transition state of open coaches, and curtained coaches, and coaches with talc windows. How ashamed the wife of John Gilpin would have been not to have known better! And so when everybody rode in coaches the lords and ladies set up their chairs. The times are altered. We have seen a peer in an omnibus. | |
It is very difficult to conceive a London without an omnibus or a cabriolet. Yet who amongst us does not remember the hour when they appeared? For some years, those who rode in hired carriages had seen the hackney-coach passing through all its phases of dirt and discomfort; the springs growing weaker, the by which we ascended into its rickety capaciousness more steep and more fragile, the straw filthier, the cushions more redolent of dismal smells, the glasses less air-tight. But it is of little consequence. Nobody rides in them. The gentlemen at the tell us that licences are still granted to hackney-coaches. Alas, how are the horses fed? Are the drivers living men who eat beef and drink beer? We doubt if those huge capes ever descend to receive a fare. Are they not spectre-coaches-coachmen still doomed to sleep upon their boxes, as the wild huntsman was doomed to a demon chase--for propitiation? The same authority tells us that there are cabriolets to whom licences are granted. These we know are things of life. They rush about the streets as rapid as fire-flies. They lame few, they kill fewer. They sometimes overturn us:--but their serious damage is not much. We borrowed them from the French on a fine May morning in the year | |
32 | . It is remarkable how slow we are in the adoption of a new thing; and how we hold to it when it is once adopted. In there were and cabriolets upon the hackney-stands of Paris-- [n.32.1] and we had not . Now, we have of them. Our English -horse hackney-carriages have run through every variety of form; and have at length settled down into as comfortable vehicles as men can ride in. But we rejected them when they were proffered to us a generation or ago. We have before us the copy of a drawing in the splendidly illustrated Pennant in the , in which we see , with heads still blackening upon spikes over the arch, and beneath it a carriage of which that below is an exact representation. There is also a print without a date, giving the same delineation of the same vehicle; and this tells us that it is Like many other persons, Mr. Moore was before his age; and in another half-century his carriage, or something very like it, finds favour in our eyes as of
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We have ridden in of the omnibuses that run from Paddington to the Bank with an elderly gentleman who told us that in his day there was only stage from that then suburban neighbourhood to the commercial centre, and that was never filled. There are now above omnibuses and short stages--for the most part omnibuses--in the Metropolitan District--that is, licensed to run within miles of the General Post Office. They carry some people daily, and receive annually in fares about -quarters of a million sterling. The omnibus was tried about , with horses and wheels; but we refused to accept it in any shape till we imported the fashion from Paris in . | |
And now then, patient reader, seeing that you have borne this introductory gossip about London locomotion, we are in a condition to
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Footnotes: [n.18.1] The World, No. 57. [n.19.1] Smith's Westminster, p. 261, [n.19.2] Id. p. 26. [n.21.1] Strafford's Letters, vol. i.. p. 261, [n.21.2] Id. p. 266. [n.21.3] Trivia. [n.22.1] Entertainment at Rutland House. [n.22.2] Donne. [n.22.3] Stubbes. [n.22.4] Anatomy of Abuses. [n.23.1] Lord Bemers' Froissart. [n.23.2] Fabyan. [n.23.3] Liber Regalis, quoted by Strutt in his Manners, vol. iii. p. 422. [n.24.1] Strafford's Letters, vol. i., p. 427. [n.24.2] Lives, p. 551. [n.24.3] Harl. MS., quoted in Northumberland Household Book, p. 449. [n.24.4] Burgon's Life of Gresham, vol. i. p. 300. [n.24.5] Lodge's Illustrations, vol. ii. p. 239, [n.24.6] Leland's Collectanea, quoted in Markland's valuable paper on the early use of carriages, Archaeologia, vol. xx. p. 447. [n.25.1] Last Speech of Thomas Pride. Harl. Miscellany. [n.25.2] Taylor. [n.26.1] See Wilson's Memoirs. [n.26.2] World runs on Wheels, p. 239. [n.27.1] D'Avenant. [n.27.2] Taylor. [n.27.3] Strafford's Letters, vol. i. p. 227. [n.29.1] Histoire de Paris, tome ix., p. 482. [n.30.1] Night. [n.30.2] Second Stage of Cruelty. [n.30.3] Enraged Musician. [n.30.4] Hogarth's Beer Sheet. [n.31.1] Diary, 1667. [n.32.1] Dulaure. |
