THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON BY THE SAME AUTHOR Modern Grub Street, and other Essays Famous Houses and Literary Shrines of London. Illustrated by Fredk. Adcock From a London Garden Admissions and Asides London Etchings Billicks In the Image of God Love in London The Shadow Show A Man with a Past Beyond Atonement The Consecration of Hetty Fleet East End Idylls etc. V1 ' j||gl$3$|P i ^ipTXT'^PJIifili PUP - " |J f i? -psloweR of London: f£m-=^- fre^Adcock.- " Stay yet, look back with me unto the Tower. Pity, ro^i ancient stones, those tender babes II horn any hath immured within your walls, Rough cradle for such litth pretty ones' Shakespeare's " Richard III.' Chapter o. THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON BY A. ST JOHN ADCOCK WITH TWENTY ILLUSTRATIONS BY FREDERICK ADCOCK METHUEN & CO. LTD. 36 ESSEX STREET W.C. LONDON First Published in ig/J PREFACE GOING up Cornhill a year or two ago, on a day when snow was falling, I happened to remember that somewhere about there was the court in which Scrooge, of Dickens's Christmas Carol, had his home and business premises, and that coming from his bleak tank of an office one cutting, wintry night Scrooge's clerk, Bob Cratchit, was so carried away by the joyous spirit of the season that he " went down a slide on Cornhill, at the end of a lane of boys, " twenty times in honour of its being Christmas Eve ; and somehow Bob Cratchit became as real to me in that moment as were any of the obvious people swarming on the pavement around me. As a matter of fact, he and his like are much more real than most of us ; for in a few years we shall have passed away like shadows, and our places will have forgotten us, but he will still be going down that slide on Cornhill, as he has been going down it already for exactly seventy years. If any so-called real person, walking audibly in undeniable boots, dared to indulge in a vi THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON similar pastime upon Cornhill nowadays, he would be promptly stopped by a policeman, and probably locked up ; but Bob Cratchit is so potent a reality that no transitory policeman born of woman has power to check his happy outlawry and take him off that slide. Surely here be truths sufficient to justify the making of this volume. Why should we differentiate between people who were once clay and are now dreams, and people who have never had to pass through that gross period of probation but have been dreams from the beginning ? Many books have been written about London's associations with men and women of the more solid kind, who had to pay rent for their houses ; I written two myself have ; there have been books about Dickens's London and Thackeray's London, but 1 do not think there has been any book on a large scale devoted to London's associations with the imaginary folk of the novelists and dramatists—with those familiar citizens who are literally free of the city and live where they will in it unfretted by landlords or tax-collectors, and who having once walked into one or another of its streets through certain books are walking in it always for whoever actually knows London. For you know very little of London if you do not know more than you can see of it. So I hope to be forgiven for making this humble and perhaps inadequate PREFACE vii contribution to a branch of history that has been rather neglected. I have not attempted anything in the way of research. As a fairly miscellaneous reader, my plan has been simply to select a route and to go along it gossiping of what memories I have of the imaginary men and women connected with the places we pass by the way. It was wrong of me to allow divers sometime real people haunting the same ground to intrude upon our visionary company, but I have done so partly for the sake of contrast, and partly because I am equally interested in them and could not resist the temptation to let them come in. If I have gone on any principle at all it has been one of including what appeals to me and leaving out what does not. The banks that stand in Lombard Street are so many dead and unattractive piles of stone so far as I am concerned, but if I knew which particular one Thackeray had in mind when he sent Becky Sharp in a coach to Lombard Street to cash the cheque Lord Steyne had given her I should take an interest in that bank. Even before I was aware that Shake- speare lodged for several years in a house that has been replaced by a tavern at the corner of Silver Street and Monkwell Street, I had a sort of sentimental regard for that spot, because Ben Jonson in his Staple of News puts Pennyboy, Senr., to live " in Silver Street, the region of money, a good seat for I viii THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON an usurer." I am not indifferent to the fact that Samuel Titmarsh was a clerk in an Insurance office in Cornhill ; that Mr Carker, showing all his teeth, used to ride up Cheapside ona" gleaming bay " on his road home of evenings from Mr. Dombey's ware- house, which lay in a byway towards Leadenhall Street ; that Dobbin and Joe Sedley stayed at Slaughter's Coffee House in St. Martin's Lane ; that Ferdinand Armine, of Henrietta Temple, and old Sedley, with little George Osborn, of Vanity Fair, were fond of roaming in Kensington Gardens ; that Clem Peckover and Bob Hewett, of Gissing's Nether World, loitered on the Embankment and leaned over the parapet between Waterloo Bridge and Temple Pier looking at the river, whilst Clem was subtly tempting Hewett to murder her husband, so that the two might go off together with his money— am not indifferent to those and scores of other such memories though I have said nothing about them in these pages. I could take you to Tower Hill and show you where Vincent Scattergood, of Albert Smith's Scattergood Family, gazed about him and ruminated, leaning up against the railings of Trinity Square ; and the last time I crossed Waterloo Bridge and noticed the shot tower, I remembered that, in the same story, Fogg, the dramatist, who lived in a blind court off Drury Lane, used to cross it too, on his way to the Surrey Theatre, in Blackfriars PREFACE ix Road, and invariably " became preoccupied with en- deavouring to render the shot tower available " in his next melodrama. But I wondered whether many were now intimate enough with Albert Smith and his world to take pleasure in such records. It is a long time since I read him myself, and I confess I I shall never read him again ; therefore you will find have said little about him. I have omitted other associations for the same reason. Indeed, it is probable that I have omitted a great deal ; some things knowingly, for lack of space ; some because I forgot them until too late ; and some, of course, from sheer ignorance. But for all my sins of omission I offer no excuse, except a frank acknowledgment that, even though I may know as much as anyone else, I do not know all about anything, certainly not about London, and let only him who does cast the first stone ! A. ST. J. A. CONTENTS PAGE I. Personal and General I " " II. The Saracen's Head and Newgate . 37 III. The Poetry of Cheapside .... 5 1 IV. Up and Down the City Road 75 V. Mr. Pickwick, Lizzie Hexam, and some Others 98 VI. To the Tower "5 VII. By the Thames, and up the Monument 160 VIII. South of the Thames . !75 IX. In the Shadow of St. Paul's 203 X. Fleet Street and the Temple 219 XL The Strand and Westminster 2 45 XII. Piccadilly and the Parks 269 XIII. Oxford Street, Holborn and Clerkenwell 282 Index ....... 3 J 3 ILLUSTRATIONS The Tower of London .... Frontispiece FACING PAGE Entrance to Bartholomew Close, West Smith- field ...... 16 Stepney Green ..... 32 London Stone, Cannon Street 48 Paradise Street, Lambeth 64 Walnut Tree Walk, Lambeth 80 High Street, Lambeth .... 96 St. Nicholas Church, Deptford 112 Bankside ...... 128 Holland Street, Blackfriars 144 Clifford's Inn ..... 160 Lincoln's Inn Gateway, Chancery Lane 176 Lamb Building, Middle Temple 192 Fountain Court, Temple 208 Walpole House, Chiswick Mall 224 The Spaniards, Hampstead 240 The Garden, Staple Inn 256 53 Hatton Garden .... 272 Clerkenwell Close .... 288 Wash-house Court, Charterhouse . 3°4 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON CHAPTER I PERSONAL AND GENERAL EVERY man finds his own charm in London, and unfortunately it too often blinds him to all the charms that other men have found in it. " I see that the Londoner is also, like me, a stranger in London," wrote Emerson in of his one Journals ; " I have a good deal to tell him of it." It is curious, how complacently the visitor or new resident assumes that the mystery, the wonder, the beauty, the fasci- nation of London that is new to him has never been discovered before, and that certainly the poor Cockney takes no interest in his native city and knows nothing about it. In the same spirit of surprise at his own discovery a writer (evidently one of these excited new-comers) noted in my newspaper the other morn- ing that "the average Londoner will not take the trouble to find out that on a very clear day if he looks straight down Bouverie Street he will have a view of the Crystal Palace over in Surrey." Well, I am a Cockney and an average Londoner, but I shall never go out of my way to obtain that dis- tracting vision, not because I am indifferent to the charm of London but simply because I do not want to see the Crystal Palace, and do not count any i l 2 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON prospect of it among the thousand and one reasons why I love my birthplace and keep an unfailing interest in it.