Dickens in Southwark and Bermondsey – and a Visit to the Dickens Museum
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Dickens in Southwark and Bermondsey – and a Visit to the Dickens Museum MICK HATTAWAY Assemble London Bridge Undergound. (Follow signs for Borough High Street and meet outside the exit that comes up on the west side of Southwark Street where it swings into Borough High Street.) Suggest you have a BR Travel Card or an Oyster Card as we shall take at least one tube ride.) 2 Charles Dickens Jr, Dictionary of London, (London, 1888). Sight-seeing, in the opinion of many experienced travellers, is best avoided altogether. It may well be, however, that this will be held to be a matter of opinion, and that sight–seeing will continue to flourish until the arrival of that traveller of Lord Macaulay’s, who has found his way into so many books and newspapers, but whose nationality shall not be hinted at here.1 One piece of advice to the intending sight-seer is at all events sound. Never go to see anything by yourself. If the show be a good one, you will enjoy yourself all the more in company; and the solitary contemplation of anything that is dull and tedious is one of the most depressing experiences of human life. Furthermore, an excellent principle – said to be of American origin – is never to enquire how far you may go, but to go straight on until you are told to stop. The enterprising sight-seeing who proceeds on this plan, and who understands the virtue of ‘palm-oil’ and a calm demeanour, is sure to see everything he cares to see. Nuisances. – A few of the désagrémens to which metropolitan flesh is heir, have been legally settled to be ‘nuisances’. (a) The following will be summarily suppressed on appeal to the nearest police-constable: Abusive language; Advertisements, carriage of (except in form approved.) Baiting animals; Betting in streets; Books, obscene, selling in streets Carpet-beating; Careless driving of cattle; Cock-fighting; Defacing buildings; Dogs, loose or mad; Exercising horses to annoyance of persons; Firearms, discharging; Fireworks, throwing in streets; Indecent ‘ exposure; Mat shaking after 8 am; Reins, persons driving without. (b) The following will require application to the police-courts: Cesspools, foul Cock-crowing; Dead body, infectious; Factory, unclean or overcrowded Houses, filthy or, injurious to health; Infected bedding or clothes, sale of; Lotteries; Manure, non removal of; 1 She [the Roman Catholic Church] may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s (On Ranke’s History of the Popes, 1840). 3 Powder magazine, keeping too large a quantity Want of reparation of highway. (pp.226 and 177) 1. The Old Operating Theatre (garret of St Thomas’ Church) http://www.thegarret.org.uk/find.htm ‘Well, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick, as that favoured servitor entered his bed- chamber, with his warm water, on the morning of Christmas Day, ‘still frosty?’ ‘Water in the wash-hand basin’s a mask o’ ice, Sir,’ responded Sam. ‘Severe weather, Sam,’ observed Mr. Pickwick. ‘Fine time for them as is well wropped up, as the Polar bear said to himself, ven he was practising his skating,’ replied Mr. Weller. ‘I shall be down in a quarter of an hour, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick, untying his nightcap. ‘Wery good, sir,’ replied Sam. ’There’s a couple o’ sawbones downstairs.’ ‘A couple of what!’ exclaimed Mr. Pickwick, sitting up in bed. ‘A couple o’ sawbones,’ said Sam. ‘What’s a sawbones?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick, not quite certain whether it was a live animal, or something to eat. ‘What! Don’t you know what a sawbones is, sir?’ inquired Mr. Weller. ’I thought everybody know’d as a sawbones was a surgeon.’ ‘Oh, a surgeon, eh?’ said Mr. Pickwick, with a smile. ‘Just that, sir,’ replied Sam. ’These here ones as is below, though, ain’t reg’lar thoroughbred sawbones; they’re only in trainin’.’ ‘In other words they’re medical students, I suppose?’ said Mr. Pickwick. Sam Weller nodded assent. ‘I am glad of it,’ said Mr. Pickwick, casting his nightcap energetically on the counterpane. ’They are fine fellows – very fine fellows; with judgments matured by observation and reflection; and tastes refined by reading and study. I am very glad of it.’ ‘They’re a-smokin’ cigars by the kitchen fire,’ said Sam. (The Pickwick Papers, Chap. 30) 4 2. The Niche from Old London Bridge at Guy’s Hospital I know that I was often up at six o’clock, and that my favourite lounging-place in the interval was old London Bridge, where I was wont to sit in one of the stone recesses, watching the people going by, or to look over the balustrades at the sun shining in the water, and lighting up the golden flame on the top of the Monument. The Orfling met me here sometimes, to be told some astonishing fictions respecting the wharves and the Tower; of which I can say no more than that I hope I believed them myself. In the evening I used to go back to the prison, and walk up and down the parade with Mr. Micawber; or play casino with Mrs. Micawber, and hear reminiscences of her papa and mama. Whether Mr. Murdstone knew where I was, I am unable to say. I never told them at Murdstone and Grinby’s. (David Copperfield, Chapter 11). 3. Bermondsey Riverside and Shad Thames Hoefnagel, Bermondsey, c. 1569 5 6 4. St Saviour’s Dock and Jacob’s Island Near to that part of the Thames on which the church at Rotherhithe abuts, where the buildings on the banks are dirtiest and the vessels on the river blackest with the dust of colliers and the smoke of close-built low-roofed houses, there exists the filthiest, the strangest, the most extraordinary of the many localities that are hidden in London, wholly unknown, even by name, to the great mass of its inhabitants. To reach this place, the visitor has to penetrate through a maze of close, narrow, and muddy streets, thronged by the roughest and poorest of waterside people, and devoted to the traffic they may be supposed to occasion. The cheapest and least delicate provisions are heaped in the shops; the coarsest and commonest articles of wearing apparel dangle at the salesman’s door, and stream from the house-parapet and windows. Jostling with unemployed labourers of the lowest class, ballast-heavers, coal- whippers, brazen women, ragged children, and the raff and refuse of the river, he makes his way with difficulty along, assailed by offensive sights and smells from the narrow alleys which branch off on the right and left, and deafened by the clash of ponderous waggons that bear great piles of merchandise from the stacks of warehouses that rise from every corner. Arriving, at length, in streets remoter and less-frequented than those through which he has passed, he walks beneath tottering house-fronts projecting over the pavement, dismantled walls that seem to totter as he passes, chimneys half crushed half hesitating to fall, windows guarded by rusty iron bars that time and dirt have almost eaten away, every imaginable sign of desolation and neglect. In such a neighborhood, beyond Dockhead in the Borough of Southwark, stands Jacob’s Island, surrounded by a muddy ditch, six or eight feet deep and fifteen or twenty wide when the tide is in, once called Mill Pond, but known in the days of this story as Folly Ditch. It is a creek or inlet from the Thames, and can always be filled at high water by opening the sluices at the Lead Mills from 7 which it took its old name. At such times, a stranger, looking from one of the wooden bridges thrown across it at Mill Lane, will see the inhabitants of the houses on either side lowering from their back doors and windows, buckets, pails, domestic utensils of all kinds, in which to haul the water up; and when his eye is turned from these operations to the houses themselves, his utmost astonishment will be excited by the scene before him. Crazy wooden galleries common to the backs of half a dozen houses, with holes from which to look upon the slime beneath; windows, broken and patched, with poles thrust out, on which to dry the linen that is never there; rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the air would seem too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they shelter; wooden chambers thrusting themselves out above the mud, and threatening to fall into it--as some have done; dirt-besmeared walls and decaying foundations; every repulsive lineament of poverty, every loathsome indication of filth, rot, and garbage; all these ornament the banks of Folly Ditch. In Jacob’s Island, the warehouses are roofless and empty; the walls are crumbling down; the windows are windows no more; the doors are falling into the streets; the chimneys are blackened, but they yield no smoke. Thirty or forty years ago, before losses and chancery suits came upon it, it was a thriving place; but now it is a desolate island indeed. The houses have no owners; they are broken open, and entered upon by those who have the courage; and there they live, and there they die. They must have powerful motives for a secret residence, or be reduced to a destitute condition indeed, who seek a refuge in Jacob’s Island. In an upper room of one of these houses--a detached house of fair size, ruinous in other respects, but strongly defended at door and window: of which house the back commanded the ditch in manner already described--there were assembled three men, who, regarding each other every now and then with looks expressive of perplexity and expectation, sat for some time in profound and 8 gloomy silence.