: =£* aammiiwuimiiminmi i i i „ Ml MmIff > F YESTERDAY I III Bill iiiil iiilllilliilil hbl, stx Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2010 with funding from Boston Library Consortium Member Libraries http://www.archive.org/details/londonlifeofyest1909comp THE LONDON LIFE OF YESTERDAY THE LONDON LIFE OF YESTERDAY BY ARTHUR COMPTON-RICKETT M.A., LL.D. AOTHOR OF ' THE VAGABOND IN LITERATURE,' ETC. NEW YORK E. P. DUTTON & CO. 1909 TO MY BEST FRIEND WILLIAM ARTHUR JONES PREFACE In the following pages I have endeavoured to produce a series of clearly defined pictures of certain notable epochs into which London History may be divided. No attempt has been made to trace consecutively or to discuss in detail the political, the social, or the religious life of the various periods dealt with. For such a treatment of the subject the reader may be referred to the scholarly writings of Mr. Loftie and Dr. Sharpe, or to the pleasant pages of Sir Walter Besant's leisurely volumes. What I have tried to essay in this small volume is rather such a presentment of particular epochs as may serve for a background, which the reader can fill in at his leisure from works of a more ambitious and specialized character. A glance at the selection of books dealing with London life given in the Appendix will indicate how rich a literature we possess on the subject, and my obligations to the many who have specialized on certain epochs of its history are necessarily considerable. I have thought it better not to burden the volume with references, save in a few special instances. vii viii LONDON LIFE OF YESTERDAY My cordial thanks are due to Mr. Ernest H. Short for the material assistance he has rendered me through- out the preparation of this volume for the press, and to Mr. Henry C. Barker, LL.B., and to Mr. Arthur Bassett, who are responsible for the Index. Mr. Henry C. Barker also kindly helped with the proof reading. ARTHUR COMPTON-RICKETT. 1 6 Dryburgh Road, Putney, S.W. May 1909. CONTENTS Preface . vii Introduction ...... i CHAPTER I .- London in the Making . .14 CHAPTER II The London of Alfred and Canute . .28 CHAPTER III The London of Fitz-Stephen . • 5P CHAPTER IV The London of Langland and Chaucer . .69 CHAPTER V The London of Whittington and Crosby . .100 CHAPTER VI London and the Renascence . .128 ix x LONDON LIFE OF YESTERDAY CHAPTER VII London and the Reformation . .154 CHAPTER VIII The London of Shakespeare . .180 CHAPTER IX The London of Milton and Cromwell . .212 CHAPTER X The London of Pepys and Wren .... 248 CHAPTER XI The London of Addison and Pope . 286 CHAPTER XII The London of Johnson and Hogarth . .315 CHAPTER XIII The London of Francis Place and Dickens . 343 APPENDIX 387 INDEX . • . • -395 — INTRODUCTION London ... a new land Which foreigners can never understand. Byron. I have seen the greatest wonder which the world can show to the astonished spirit . and still there remains fixed in my memory the stone forest of houses, and amid them the rushing stream of faces of living men with all their motley passions, all their terrible impulses of love, of anger, and of hatred—I mean London. Heine. London : that great sea whose ebb and flow At once is deaf and loud, and on the shore Vomits its wreck and still howls on for more. There is more than a measure or truth in Shelley's picture. Certain it is that none who know London would deny that its treasures must be sought in the depths. From one point of view there is something terrible about London. The friendless immensity, the chill impassivity of the metropolis that jarred on the sensitive imaginations of Shelley and De Quincey, suggest a point of view which strikes many of us painfully in certain moods. None the less it is hard for any Englishman to escape the fascination of " that " great sea —despite its insistent minor. " And yet, on reflection, why " despite ? Does not the magic of London depend largely upon its appeal to the springs of pity and terror within us ? Where there is no mystery there is no magic. Obvious people are the least interesting : and a city which embodied the B — 2 LONDON LIFE OF YESTERDAY spirit of Mark Tapley would not claim our allegiance for long. The songs which pluck at our heart-strings are all of them minor melodies. The primal utterances of the race, the ancient folk-songs, are big with tears. And so it is that the clamorous loneliness, the inscrut- able cruelty of the Great City repels and attracts at one and the same moment. The appeal which London makes is potent also by reason of its complexity. To realise it acutely one must be returning to her as a wanderer from other lands. Then, to us erstwhile aliens, she seems charged with historical associations, personal memories, sorrows, joys, desperations, aspirations, inspirations an electric tide of emotion which tingles through us, as eagerly we gaze at her familiar grey buildings, the sprawling multiplicity of her life. Friendly is she ? Perhaps not. Yet what does it matter ! For tarry and listen we must, like the wedding guest in the ballad, to her never-ending story. Of course we rail at her, scold her, preach at her—and when the earth is carpeted with green and gold and the west wind laden with sweetness, then we leave her vowing maybe never to return. But how many of us who sing bravely of the country life, extolling its spaciousness, tranquillity, simplicity, are content with exile from London when " the woods decay, the woods decay and fall "—and we look at Nature in the stark severity of winter ? When we review the past, the share which our City has played in shaping the artistic life of her great men is realised readily. William Langland was no lover of " London : he is always sighing in his Vision of Piers the Plowman" for the pleasant pastures of Malvern. But none of his pictures are so vivid, so instinct with actuality as those dealing with London haunts, the INTRODUCTION 3 streets of the City, the mixed company of the tavern. In Chaucer's greatest work, The Canterbury Tales, the mediaeval City starts into life—the Church, the Hostel, the Mart, the Law Courts. I have no doubt that he cursed his ill fortune when recalled from the rare charm of the Italy of Petrarch and Giotto, to take up the dull routine of a government officialship at it neither from France nor Italy, Aldgate ; yet was dearly as he loved them, that he was to receive his finest inspiration—but from London and from the manners and mannerisms of his own fellow citizens. Passing by men of lesser stature, the Gowers and Lydgates, and looking at the wonderful flowering of imaginative life in Tudor London, we see again how profound a debt the singers and jesters owe to the City. In the pages of conservative-minded Stow, of the genial, moralising Harrison, of the austere Philip Stubbes, we may find a valuable commentary on the life of the City. But most valuable in its rich vitality is the picture of Tudor London mirrored in the plays of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson ; nor could we afford to dispense with the illuminating sidelights on the life of the day supplied by Dekker, Robert Greene, or Thomas Nash. In the seventeenth century, no chronicler of the Court, no learned historian of the times, can vie with the cynical wit of Dryden, of Congreve and Wycherley, or the naive garrulity of Mr. Pepys, in impressing upon the modern reader the corruption, the artificiality, the picturesque folly of Charles the Second's time ; although it is not to the dramatist but to the poet that we must turn for the deeper springs of contemporary thought. Whatever opinion may be held as to the value of the Puritan ideal in civic and national life, no one will challenge the rare stimulus which Puritanism gave to our 4 LONDON LIFE OF YESTERDAY literature : how it stirred the heart of Milton and fired the muse of Andrew Marvell. Even if we cannot claim Bunyan as a Londoner, yet unquestionably he used the conventions of the City as pigments wherewith to paint his great allegory. Pepys and Evelyn live for us to-day not as Englishmen so much as typical London citizens. Passing to the eighteenth century, the literature inspired by London grows bewildering in its splendid opulence. To that superb journalist Defoe, the Londoner—his ways, his fashions, his ideals— is a source ' ; conflict between the lingering of infinite copy ' the feudalism and the austere puritanism finds perfect expression in the prose of Addison and Steele ; while for other sides of contemporary life, Pope and Gay are invaluable as commentators. Eliminate London from the pages of Richardson and Fielding, and you deprive them of a large measure of their interest. The humour and squalor of Grub Street are epitomized in one man if the —Samuel Johnson ; and, the swirl and fury of human tide of London find imperishable expression in Hogarth, something of the leisured tranquillity of the backwaters is reflected on the gracious canvasses of Sir Joshua Reynolds. But in the nineteenth century, beyond other ages, one may trace the profound and varied inspiration of London Town. A casual reader might imagine that a greater magic lay in the old, ill-lit, quaint-gabled, rough, and barbarous City : that here indeed was stuff for the imagination of artist and poet, while in the London of scientific improvements mystery and fantasy would find it increasingly hard to find an abiding place.