Old and New London, A Narrative of its History, its People and its Places. Illustrated with Numerous Engravings from the Most Authentic Sources. vol I
Thornbury, Walter
1872-78
Fleet Street Tributaries--South.
Fleet Street Tributaries--South.
Falcon Court, , took its name from an inn which bore the sign of the This passage formerly belonged to a gentleman named Fisher, who, out of gratitude to the. Cordwainers' Company, bequeathed it to them by will. His gratitude is commonly said to have arisen from the number of good dinners that the Company had given him. However this may be, the Cordwainers are the present owners of the estate, and are under the obligation of having a sermon preached annually at the neighbouring church of St. Dunstan, on the , when certain sums are given to the poor. Formerly it was the custom to drink sack in the church to the pious memory of Mr. Fisher, but this appears to have been discontinued for a considerable period. This Fisherwas a jolly fellow, if all the tales are true which are related of him, as, besides the sack drinking, he stipulated that the Cordwainers should give a grand feast on the same day yearly to all their tenants. What a quaint picture might be made of the churchwardens in the old church drinking to the memory of Mr. Fisher! Wynkyn de Worde, the father of printing in England, lived in , at his messuage or inn known by the sign of the Falcon. Whether it was the inn that stood on the site of Falcon Court is not known with certainty, but most probably it was. | |
Charles Lamb came to , Buildings in , after leaving , and remained in that quiet harbour out of till , when he removed to . | |
It was whilst Lamb was residing in Buildings that those Wednesday evenings of his were in their glory. In of Mr. Hazlitt's papers are graphic pictures of these delightful Wednesdays and the Wednesday men, and admirable notes of several choice conversations. There is a curious sketch in of a little tilt between Coleridge and Holcroft, which must not be omitted.
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It was at of these Wednesdays that Lamb started his famous question as to persons It was a suggestive topic, and proved a fruitful . Mr. Hazlitt, who was there, has left an account behind him of the kind of talk which arose out of this hint, so lightly thrown out by the author of and it is worth giving in his own words:--
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The present Hare Place was the once disreputable Ram Alley, the scene of a comedy of that name, written by Lodowick Barry and dramatised in the reign of James I.; the plot Killigrew afterwards used in his vulgar Barry, an Irishman, of whom nothing much is known, makes of his roystering characters say,--
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As a precinct of Whitefriars, Ram Alley enjoyed the mischievous privilege of sanctuary for murderers, thieves, and debtors-indeed, any class of rascals except traitors-till the century. After this it sheltered only debtors. Barry speaks of its cooks, salesmen, and laundresses; and classes it (Charles II.) with Pye Corner, as the resort of Lord Clarendon, in his autobiography, describes the Great Fire as burning on the Thames side as far as the striking next on some of the buildings which joined to Ram Alley, and sweeping all those into . In the reign of George I. Ram Alley was full of public-houses, and was a place of no reputation, having passages into the Temple and . adds Hatton, This useful Act swept out all the London sanctuaries, those vicious relics of monastic rights, including , (), the Savoy, Fulwood Rents (), (), the , Deadman's Place, (), the Clink, and the Mint in the same locality. The Savoy and the Mint, however, remained disreputable a generation or later | |
[extra_illustrations.1.137.1] , now deserted by the faithless serjeants, is supposed to have been given to the Dean and Chapter of York in (Henry IV.) It then consisted of shops, & c. In (Charles I.) the inn began its legal career by being leased for years to judges and serjeants. In this hall, in , the judges in full bench struck a sturdy blow at feudal privileges by agreeing that peers might be attached upon process for contempt out of Chancery. In (George I.) the inn was highly aristocratic, its inmates being the Lord Chief Justice, the Lord Chief Baron, justices, and serjeants. In , however, the fickle serjeants removed to , and Adam, the architect of the , designed the present houses and the present street frontage. On the site of the hall arose the [extra_illustrations.1.137.2] , which in transferred its business to the Economic, and the house is now the Norwich Union Office. The inn is a parish in itself, making its own assessment, and contributing to the City rates. Its pavement, which had been part of the stonework of Old , was not replaced till . The conservative old inn retained its old oil lamps long after the introduction of gas. | |
The arms of , worked into the iron gate opening on , are a dove and a serpent, the serpent twisted into a kind of true lover's knot. The lawyers of , no doubt, unite the wisdom of the serpent with the guilelessness of the dove. Singularly enough Dr. Dodd, the popular preacher, who was hanged, bore arms nearly similar. | |
Half way down , in the centre of old Whitefriars, is the [extra_illustrations.1.137.3] . The number of this popular and influential paper appeared on . The publishers, and part proprietors, were Messrs. Bradbury & Evans, the printers; the editor was Charles Dickens; the manager was Dickens's father, Mr. John Dickens; the , or assistant, editor, Douglas Jerrold; and among the other writers were Fonblanque and John Forster, both of the . (Mahoney) acted as Roman correspondent. The musical critic was the late Mr. George Hogarth, Dickens's fatherin-law; and the new journal had an in the person of Mr. R. H. Home, the poet. Miss Martineau wrote leading articles in the new paper for several years, and Mr. M'Cullagh Torrens was also a recognised contributor. The staff of Parliamentary reporters was said to be the best in London, several having been taken, at an advanced salary, off the | |
says Mr. Grant, in his
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The early numbers of the paper contained | |
138 | instalments of Dickens's
yet the new venture did not succeed. Charles Dickens and Douglas Jerrold took the night-work on alternate days; but Dickens, who never made politics a special study, very soon retired from the editorship altogether, and Jerrold was chief editor for a little while till he left to set up his
. Mr. Forster also had the editorship for a short period, and the paper then fell into the hands of the late Mr. Dilke, of the
, who excited some curiosityby extensively advertising these words : The of (which began No. I again), was a paper of pages, issued at , which, deducting the stamp, at that time affixed to every copy of every news- |
paper, was in effect halfpence. of the features of the new plan was that the sheet should vary in size, according to the requirements of the day--with an eye, nevertheless, at all times to selection and condensation. It was a bold attempt, carried out with great intelligence and spirit; but it was soon found necessary to put on another halfpenny, and in a year or the
was obliged to return to the usual price of at that time-fivepence. The chief editors of the paper, besides those already mentioned, have been Mr. Eyre Evans Crowe, Mr. Frederick Knight Hunt, Mr. Weir, and Mr. Thomas Walker, who retired in , on receiving the editorship of the . The journal came down to a penny in . | |
139 140 | |
The , at the beginning, inspired the with some dread of rivalry; and it is noteworthy that, for several years afterwards, the great journal was very unfriendly in its criticisms on Dickens's books. | |
There is no doubt that, over sanguine of success, the proprietors began by sinking too much money in the foundations. In , the ' reporters received on an average only guineas a week, while the gave ; but the pay was soon of necessity reduced. Mr. Grant computes the losses of the for the years at not much less than . The talent and enterprise of this paper, during the recent () German invasion of France, and the excellence of their correspondents in either camp, is said to have trebled its circulation, which Mr. Grant computes at a daily issue of . As an organ of the highest and most enlightened form of Liberalism and progress, the now stands pre-eminent. | |
Many actors, poets, and authors dwelt in in Charles II.'s time, and the great Betterton, Underhill, and Sandford affected this neighbourhood, to be near the theatres. Lady Davenant here presided over the Dorset Gardens Company; , nightly reeled home to the same precinct, unsteadily following the guidance of a will-o'the- wisp link-boy; and in the-square lived and died Sir John King, the Duke of York's solicitor-general. | |
If boasts of Richardson, the respectable citizen and admirable novelist, it must also plead guilty to having been the residence of that not very reputable personage, Mr. John Eyre, who, although worth, as it was said, some , was transported on (George III.) for systematic pilfering of paper from the alderman's chamber, in the justice room, . This man, led away by the thirst for money, had an uncle who made wills, leaving Eyre all his money, except a legacy of to a clergyman; another leaving the bulk to the clergyman, and only to his nephew. Eyre, not knowing of the will, destroyed the , in order to cancel the vexatious bequest.. When the real will was produced his disappointment and selfish remorse must have produced an expression of repressed rage worthy of Hogarth's pencil. | |
In Mr. Clarke's disagreeable confessions about the Duke of York were publicly burned, on the very spot (says Mr. Noble) where the zealous radical demagogue, Waithman, subsequently addressed the people from a temporary platform, not being able to obtain the use of Vestry. Nor must we forget to chronicle No. as the house of Tatum, a silversmith, to whom, in , that eminent man John Faraday acted as humble friend and assistant. How often does young genius act the herdsman, as Apollo did when he tended the kine of Admetus! | |
The Woodfalls, too, in their time, lent celebrity to . The Woodfall who became eminent was [extra_illustrations.1.140.1] Title Page, at the at . He commenced business under the auspices of Pope. His son Henry, who rose to be a Common Councilman and Master of the Stationers' Company, bought of Theophilus Cibber, in -, onethird of a share of the London , an organ which gradually grew into the , that daring paper in which the celebrated letters of Junius appeared. Those letters, scathing and full of Greek fire, brought down Lords and Commons, King's Bench and , on Woodfall, and he was fined and imprisoned. Whether Burke, Barre, Chatham, Horne Tooke, or Sir Philip Francis wrote them, will now probably never be known. The stern writer in the iron mask went down into the grave shrouded in his own mystery, and that grave no inquisitive eyes will ever find. he wrote, The Junius Woodfall died in . [extra_illustrations.1.141.1] , was born in , and educated at School. He was editor and printer of the , and in , had his office in , (Noble). Woodfall, as William was generally called, acquired fame by his extraordinary power of reporting from memory the speeches he heard in the . His practice during a debate (says his friend Mr. Taylor, of the ) was to close his eyes and lean with both hands upon his stick. He was so well acquainted with the tone and manner of the several speakers that he seldom changed his attitude but to catch the name of a new member. His memory was as accurate as it was capacious, and, what was almost miraculous, he could retain full recollection of any particular debate for a full fortnight, and after many long nights of speaking. Woodfall used to say he could put a speech away on a corner shelf of his mind for future reference. This is an instance of power of memory scarcely equalled by Fuller, who, it is said, could repeat the names of all the shops down (at a time every shop had a sign) in-regular and correct sequence; and it even surpasses Thompson, who used to boast he could remember every shop from | |
141 | to the end of . Yet, with all his sensitively retentive memory, Woodfall did not care for slight interruptions during his writing. Dr. Johnson used to write abridged reports of debates for the
from memory, but, then, reports at that time were short and trivial. Woodfall was also a most excellent dramatic criticslow to censure, yet never sparing just rebuke. At the theatre his extreme attention gave his countenance a look of gloom and severity. Mr. J. Taylor, of the , describes Kemble as watching Woodfall in of those serious moods, and saying to a friend,
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Finding himself hampered on the , Woodfall started a new daily paper, with the title of the , but eventually he was overpowered by his competitors and their large staff of reporters. His eldest son, who displayed great abilities, went mad. Mr. Woodfall's hospitable parties at his house at Kentish Town are sketched for us by Mr. J. Taylor. On particular occasion he mentions meeting Mr. Tickel, Richardson (a partner in ), John Kemble, Perry (of the ), Dr. Glover (a humorist of the day), and John Coust. Kemble and Perry fell out over their wine, and Pefry was rude to the stately tragedian. Kemble, eyeing him with the scorn of Coriolanus, exclaimed, in the words of Zanga,-- Perry very naturally effervesced at this, and war would have been instantly proclaimed between the belligerents had not Court and Richardson promptly interposed. The warlike powers were carefully sent home in separate vehicles. | |
Mr. Woodfall had a high sense of the importance of a Parliamentary reporter's duties, and once, during a heavy week, when his eldest son came to town to assist him, he said, Woodfall used to tell a characteristic story of Dr. Dodd. hen that miserable man was in Newgate waiting sentence of death he sent earnestly for the editor of the . Woodfall, a kind and unselfish man, instantly hurried off, expecting that Dodd wished his serious advice. In the midst of Woodfall's condolement he was stopped by the Doctor, who said he had wished to see him on quite a different subject. Knowing Woodfall's judgment in dramatic matters, he was anxious to have his opinion on a comedy which he had written, and to request his interest with a manager to bring it on the stage. Woodfall was the more surprised and shocked as on entefing Newgate he had been informed by Ackerman, the keeper of Newgate, that the order for Dr. Dodd's execution had just arrived. | |
Before parting with the Woodfall family, we may mention that it is quite certain that Henry Sampson Woodfall did not know who the author of was. Long after the letters appeared he used to say,--
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The grandson of William, Henry Dick Woodfall, died in Nice, , aged , carrying to the grave (says Mr. Noble) the last chance of discovering of the best kept secrets ever known. | |
The Whig of deserves-notice. The death of Queen Anne () roused the hopes of the Jacobites. The rebellion. of proved how bitterly they felt the peaceful accession of the Elector of Hanover. The northern revolt convinced them of their strength, but its failure taught them no lesson. They attributed its want of success to the rashness of the leaders and the absence of unanimity in their followers, to the outbreak not being simultaneous; to every cause, indeed, but the right . It was about this time that the Whig gentlemen of London, to unite their party and to organise places of gathering, established in various parts of the City. At these places, clubs were held, where Whig citizens could take their mug of ale, drink loyal toasts, sing loyal songs, and arrange party processions. These assemblies, not always very just or forbearing, soon led to violent retaliations on the part of the Tories, attacks were made on several of the mug-houses, and dangerous riots naturally ensued. From the papers of the time we learn that the Tories wore white roses, or rue, thyme, and rosemary in their hats, flourished oak branches and green ribbons, and shouted
The Whigs, on the other side, roared displayed orange cockades, with the motto,-- and; did their best on royal birthdays and other thanksgivings, by illuminations and blazing bonfires | |
142 | outside the mug-house doors, to irritate their adversaries and drive them to acts of illegal violence. The chief Whig mug-houses were in , , (Clerkenwell), , and . |
Mackey, a traveller, who wrote about this time, describes the mug-houses very lucidly:-- | |
he says,
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[extra_illustrations.1.142.1] , the in , , was followed by a still more stormy assault on the mughouse in July of the same year. The riot began on a Friday, but the Whigs kept a resolute face, and the mob dwindled away. On the Monday they renewed the attack, declaring that the Whigs were drinking and reviling the memory of Queen Anne; and they swore they would level the house and make a bonfire of the timber in the middle of . But the wily Whigs, barricading the door, slipped out a messenger at a back door, and sent to a mug-house in , Covent Garden, for reinforcements. Presently a band of Whig bludgeon-men arrived, and the Whigs of then snatched up pokers, tongs, pitchforks, and legs of stools, and sallied out on the Tory mob, who soon fled before them. For days the Tory mob seethed, fretted, and swore revenge. But the report of a squadron of horse being drawn up at ready to ride down on the City kept them gloomily quiet. On the day a Jacobite, named Vaughan, formerly a boy, led them on to revenge; and on Tuesday they stormed the place in earnest. says a Whig paper of the day, The contemporaneous account will most vividly describe the scene. | |
The (a Whig paper) of , says:
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says the same paper (),
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of the rioters were eventually hung at Tyburn Turnpike, in the presence of a vast crowd. According to Mr. J. T. Smith, in his a Whig mug-house existed as early as . It has been said the slang word owes its derivation to Lord Shaftesbury's which the beer cups were moulded to resemble. | |
In the of , , we find a doggerel old mug-house ballad, which is so characteristic of the violence of the times that it is worth preserving:--
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[extra_illustrations.1.143.1] printing office was at the north: west corner of , communicating with the court, No. , . Here the thoughtful old citizen wrote and here, in , Oliver Goldsmith acted as his Richardson seems to have been an amiable and benevolent man, kind to his compositors and servants and beloved by children. All the anecdotes relating to his private life are pleasant. He used to encourage early rising among his workmen by hiding half crowns among the disordered type, so> that the earliest comer might find his virtue rewarded; and he would frequently bring up fruit from the country to give to those of his servants. who had been zealous and good-tempered. | |
Samuel Richardson, the author of and was the son of a Derbyshire joiner. He was born in , and diedi n . Apprenticed | |
144 | to a London printer, he rose by steady industry and prudence to be the manager of a large business, printer of the Journals of the , Master of the Stationers' Company, and part-printer to the king. In , at the age of , publishers urging the thriving citizen to write them a book of moral letters, Richardson produced a novel which ran through editions the year, and became the rage of the town. Ladies carried the precious volumes to Ranelagh, and held them up in smiling triumph to each other. Pope praised the novel as more useful than volumes of sermons, and Dr. Sherlock gravely recommended it from the pulpit. In Richardson wrote his most perfect work, and in his somewhat tedious ( vols.) In he drew a servant, whom her master attempts to seduce and. eventually marries, but in the heroine, after harrowing misfortunes, dies unrewarded. Richardson had always a moral end in view. He hated vice and honoured virtue, but he is too often prolix and wearisome. He wished to write novels that should wean the young |
from the foolish romances of his day. In
he rewarded struggling virtue; in he painted the cruel selfishness of vice; in he tried to represent the perfect Christian gentleman. Coleridge said that to read Fielding after Richardson was like emerging from a sick room, heated by stoves. into an open lawn on a breezy May morning. Richardson, indeed, wrote more for women than men. Fielding was coarser, but more manly; he had humour, but no moral purpose at all. The natural result was that Fielding and his set looked on Richardson as a grave, dull, respectable old prig; Richardson on Fielding as a low rake, who wrote like a man who had been an ostler born in a stable, or a runner in a sponginghouse. the vain old printer used to say to his feminine clique,
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Dr. Johnson, who had been befriended by Richardson, was never tired of depreciating Fielding and crying up the author of he used to thunder out, He called Fielding a
Some present here mildly suggested that Richardson was very tedious. replied Johnson, After all, it must be considered that, old-fashioned as Richardson's novels have now become, the old printer dissected the human heart with profound knowledge and exquisite care, and that in the back shop in , amid the jar of printing-presses, the quiet old citizen drew his ideal beings with far subtler lines and touches than any previous novelist had done. | |
On occasion at least Hogarth and Johnson met at Richardson's house. | |
says Nichols,
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Boswell tells a good story of a rebuke that Richardson's amiable but inordinate egotism on occasion received, much to Johnson's secret delight, which is certainly worth quoting before we dismiss the old printer altogether. says, Boswell
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At corner of (says Mr. Timbs) are the premises of Peacock, Bampton, & Mansfield, the famous pocket-book makers, whose for is Its picturesque engravings have never been surpassed, and their morocco and russia bindings scarcely equalled. In our time Queen Adelaide and her several maids of honour used the [extra_illustrations.1.146.1] . was provided by the firm with a -guinea housewife (an antique-looking pocket-book, with goldmounted scissors, tweezers, & c.); and Mr. Mansfield relates that on occasion the king took his housewife from his pocket and handed it round the table to his guests, and next day the firm received orders for ,
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In [extra_illustrations.1.146.2] , westward (says Mr. Timbs), was a large dining-house, where, some years ago, Colton, the author, used to dine, and publicly boast that he wrote the whole of his Lacon; or, upon a small rickety deal table, with pen. Another frequenter of this place was Webb, who seems to have been so well up in the topics of the day, that he was a sort of walking newspaper, who was much with the King and Queen of the Sandwich Islands when they visited England in . | |
This Caleb Colton, mentioned by Mr. Timbs, was that most degraded being, a disreputable clergyman, with all the vices but little of the genius of Churchill, and had been, in his flourishing time, vicar of Kew and Petersham. He was educated at Eton, and eventually became Fellow of , Cambridge. He wrote Remarks on the Tendencies of a poem on Napoleon, and a satire entitled His best known work, however, was published in . These aphorisms want the terse brevity of Rochefoucauld, and are in many instances vapid and trivial. A passion for gaming at last swallowed up Colton's other vices, and becoming involved, he cut the Gordian knot of debt in by absconding; his living was then seized and given to another. He fled to America, and from there returned to that syren city, Paris, where he is said in years to have won no less than . The miserable man died by his own hand at Fontainebleau, in . In the is the subjoined passage, that seems almost prophetic of the miserable author's miserable fate : | |
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And here is a fine sentiment, worthy of Dr. odd himself:-- | |
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Footnotes: [extra_illustrations.1.137.1] Serjeants' Inn, Fleet Street [extra_illustrations.1.137.2] Amicable Assurance Society [extra_illustrations.1.137.3] office of the Daily News [extra_illustrations.1.140.1] Henry Woodfall [extra_illustrations.1.141.1] William Woodfall, the younger brother [extra_illustrations.1.142.1] An attack on a Whig mug-house [extra_illustrations.1.143.1] Richardson's [extra_illustrations.1.146.1] George IV [extra_illustrations.1.146.2] St. Bride's Passage |
