Part 4

If you would see the market at its best you must visit it at five in the morning, when the day’s work begins—the place is then already crowded; you will find bustle and noise enough over the sale of such an enormous mass of fish as will help you to understand something of hungry London. Hither come all the fishmongers to buy up their daily supplies. If you try to connect this vast mass of fish with the mouths for which it is destined you will feel the same kind of bewilderment that falls upon the brain when it tries to realize the meaning of millions.

Next to Billingsgate stands the custom house, with its noble terrace overlooking the river and its stately buildings. This is the fifth or sixth custom house; the first of which we have any record, that in which Chaucer was an officer, stood a little nearer the Tower. After keeping the King’s accounts and receiving the King’s customs all day, it was pleasant for him to sit in the chamber over the Gate of Ald, where he lived, and to meditate his verses, looking down upon the crowds below.

Next to the custom house you see the Tower and Tower Hill. I once knew an American who told me that he had been in London three years and had never once gone to see even the outside of the Tower of London. There are, you see, two varieties of man—perhaps they are the principal divisions of the species. To the first belongs the man who understands and realizes that he is actually and veritably compounded of all the generations which have gone before. He is consciously the child of the ages. In his frame and figure he feels himself the descendant of the naked savage who killed his prey with a club torn from a tree; in his manners, customs, laws, institutions, and religion, he enjoys, consciously, the achievements of his ancestors; he never forgets the past from which he has sprung; he never tires of tracing the gradual changes which made the present possible; like the genealogist, he never tires of establishing a connection. I am myself one of this school. I do not know any of my ancestors by sight, nor do I know whether to look for them among the knights or among the men at arms, but I know that they were fighting at Agincourt and at Hastings, beside Henry and beside Harold. If I consider the man of old, the average man, I look in the glass. When I sit upon a jury I am reminded of that old form of trial in which a prisoner’s neighbors became his compurgators and solemnly swore that a man with such an excellent character could not possibly have done such a thing. When I hear of a ward election I remember the Ward Mote of my ancestors. I think that I belong more to the past than to the present; I would not, if I could, escape from the past.

But, then, there is that other school, whose disciples care nothing about the past. They live in the present; they work for the present, regardless of either past or future; their faces are turned ever forward; they will not look back. They use the things of the past because they are ready to hand; they would improve them if they could; they would abolish them if they got in the way of advance. They are the practical men, the administrators, the inventors, the engineers. For such men the laws of their country, their liberties, the civic peace and order which allow them to work undisturbed, all are ready made; they found them here—they do not ask how they came. If they come across any old thing and think that it is in their way, they sweep it off the earth without the least remorse; they love a new building, a new fashion, a new invention; they are the men who only see the Tower of London by accident as they go up and down the river, and they think what a noble site for warehouses is wasted by that great stone place. This is a very large school; it embraces more than the half of civilized humanity.

Let me speak in this place of the Tower to the former school—the lesser half.

Three hundred years ago Stow wrote of the Tower of London in these words: “Now to conclude in summary. The Tower is a citadel to defend or command the city, a royal palace for assemblies or treaties, a prison of state for the most dangerous offenders, the only place of coinage for all England, the armory for warlike provision, the treasury of the ornaments and jewels of the Crown, the general conserves of the most ancient records of the king’s courts of justice at Westminster.”

The history of the Tower would cover many sheets of long and gloomy pages. There is no sadder history anywhere. Fortunately, we need not tell it here. When you think of it, remember that it is still, as it always has been, a fortress; it has been in addition a palace, a court, a mint, a prison; but it has always been a fortress, and it is a fortress still; at night the gates are shut; no one after dark is admitted without the password; to the lord mayor alone, as a compliment and a voluntary act of friendliness on the part of the Crown, the password is intrusted day by day. The Tower was surrounded by a small tract of ground called the Tower Liberties. Formerly the City had no jurisdiction over this district. Even now the boundaries of the Liberties are marked out again every three years by a procession including the mayor of the Tower, the chief officials, including the gaoler with his axe of office, and the school children carrying white wands. They march from post to post; at every place where the broad arrow marks the boundary the children beat it with their wands. In former times they caught the nearest bystander and beat him on the spot, in this way impressing upon his memory, in a way not likely to be forgotten, the boundaries of the Tower Liberties. In such fashion, “by reason of thwacks,” was the barber in the “Shaving of Shagpat” made to remember the injunctions which led him to great honor. In every London parish to this day they “beat the bounds” once a year with such a procession. I know not if the custom is still preserved outside London. But I remember such a beating of the bounds, long years ago, beside Clapham Common, when the boys of the procession caught other boys, and, after bumping them against the post, slashed at them with their wands. We were the other boys, and there was a fight, which, while it lasted, was brisk and enjoyable.

There are two places belonging to the Tower which should be specially interesting to the visitor. These are the chapel, called “St. Peter ad Vincula,” and the terrace along the river. The history, my American friend, which this chapel illustrates is your property and your inheritance, as much as our own. Your ancestors, as well as ours, looked on while the people buried in the chapel were done to death. Look at those letters “A. B.” They mark the grave of the hapless Anne Boleyn, a martyr, perhaps: a child of her own bad age, perhaps—who knows? Beside her lies her sister in misfortune,—no martyr, if all is true, yet surely hapless,—Katherine Howard. Here lies the sweetest and tenderest of victims, Lady Jane Gray; you cannot read her last words without breaking down; you cannot think of her fate without tears. Here lies Sir Walter Raleigh—is there anywhere in America a monument to the memory of this illustrious man? For the rest, come here and make your own catalogue; it will recall, as Macaulay wrote, “whatever is darkest in human nature and in human destiny, with the savage triumph of implacable enemies, with all the miseries of fallen greatness and of blighted fame.”

The other place, the terrace along the river, is fit for the musing of a summer afternoon. In front you have life—the life of the day; behind you have life, but it is the life of the past. Nowhere in England can you find such a contrast. Sit down upon this terrace, among the old, useless cannon, among the children at play, and the contrast will presently seize you and hold you rapt and charmed.

It is also the best place for seeing the gray old fabric itself, with its ancient walls and towers of stone, its barbican, its ditch, its gates, its keep, and the modern additions in brick and wood that have grown up among the mediæval work—incongruities which still do not disfigure. On the east of the Tower a new road has been constructed as an approach to the Tower Bridge. From this road another and quite a new view can now be obtained of the Tower, which from this point reveals the number and the grouping of its buildings. I have not seen represented anywhere this new side of the Tower.

I have said nothing all this time of London’s new gate. Yet you have been looking at it from London Bridge and from the terrace. It is the new Water Gate, the noblest and most stately gate possessed by any city: the gate called the Tower Bridge. It is, briefly, a bascule bridge—that is, a bridge which parts in the middle, each arm being lifted up to open the way, like many smaller bridges in Holland and elsewhere, for a ship to pass through. It was begun in 1884 and finished in 1894.

It consists of two lofty towers communicating with either shore by a suspension bridge. There is a permanent upper bridge across the space between the towers, access being gained from the lower level by lifts. The lower bridge, on the level of the two suspension bridges, is the bascule, which is raised up by weights acting within the two towers, so as to leave the space clear.

The width of the central span is 200 feet clear; the height of the permanent bridge is 140 feet above high-water mark, and the lower bridge is 29 feet when closed. The two great piers on which the towers are built are 185 feet long and 70 feet wide; the side spans are 270 feet in the clear.

The bascule may be described as a lever turning on a pivot; the shorter, and therefore the heavier, end is within the Tower. The weight at the end of the lever is a trifle, no more than 621 tons. That of the arm, which is 100 feet long, is 424 tons. If you make a little calculation you will find that the action of one side of the pivot very nearly balances that of the other, with a slight advantage given to the longer side. You are not perhaps interested in the construction of the bridge, but you must own that there is no more splendid gate to a port and a city to which thousands of ships resort than this noble structure. The bascule swings up about seventeen times a day, but the ships are more and more going into the docks below, so that the raising of the arms is becoming every day a rarer event. It is a pleasant sight to see the huge arms rising up as lightly as if they were two deal planks, which the great ship passes through; then the arms fall back gently and noiselessly, and the traffic goes on again, the whole interruption not lasting more than a few minutes—less time than a block in Cheapside or Broadway.

Beyond the Tower are the docks named after St. Katherine. They are so named to commemorate an ancient monument and a modern act of vandalism more disgraceful perhaps than any of those many acts by which things ancient and precious have been destroyed.

On the site of those docks there stood for seven hundred years one of the most picturesque and venerable of City foundations. Here was the House called that of St. Katherine by the Tower. Its first foundress was Matilda, queen of Stephen. She created the place and endowed it, in the spirit of the time, in grief for the loss of two children who died and were buried in the Church of the Holy Trinity Priory, Aldgate. Later on, Eleanor, Queen of Edward I, added certain manors to the little foundation, which had hitherto been but a cell to the Holy Trinity Priory. She appointed and endowed a master, three brethren, three sisters, the bedeswoman, and six poor clerks. Fifty years later, a third Queen, Philippa, wife of Edward III, increased the endowments. We should hardly expect this ancient foundation to survive to the present day, but it has done so. The house was spared at the Dissolution; it was considered peculiarly under the protection of the Queen consort, since three queens in succession had endowed it. Therefore, while all the other religious houses in the country were swept away this was spared; it received a Protestant form; it was called a college, a free chapel, a hospital for poor sisters. The warden, who received the greater part of the endowment, became a dignified person appointed by the Queen, the brethren and sisters remained, the bedeswoman remained, the endowment for the six poor clerks was given to make a school. The precinct became a Liberty, with its own officers, court, and prison; the buildings were retired and quiet, in appearance like a peaceful college at Cambridge; the warden’s house was commodious; the cloisters were a place for calm and meditation; there was a most beautiful church filled with monuments; there was a lovely garden, and there was a peaceful churchyard. Outside, the precinct was anything but a place of peace or quiet. It was a tangle of narrow lanes and mean streets; it was inhabited by sailors and sailor folk. Among them were the descendants of those Frenchmen who had fled across the Channel when Calais fell; one of the streets, called Hangman’s Gains, commemorated the fact in its disguise, being originally the Street of Hammes and Guisnes, two places within the English pale round Calais.

This strange place, mediæval in its appearance and its customs, continued untouched until some eighty years ago. Then—it is too terrible to think of—they actually swept the whole place away; the venerable church was destroyed; the picturesque cloister, with the old houses of sisters and of brethren, the school, the ancient court house, the churchyard, the gardens, the streets and cottages of the precinct, were all destroyed, and in their place was constructed a dock. No dock was wanted; there was plenty of room elsewhere; it was a needless, wanton act of barbarity. They built a new church, a poor thing to look at, beside Regent’s Park; they built six houses for the brethren and sisters, a large house for the warden; they founded a school, they called the new place St. Katherine’s. But it is not St. Katherine’s by the Tower, and East London has lost the one single foundation it possessed of antiquity; it has also lost the income, varying from £10,000 to £14,000 a year, which belonged to this, its only religious foundation.

In the modern chapel at Regent’s Park you may see the old monuments, the carved tombs, the stalls, the pulpit, taken from the ancient church; it is the putting of old wine into new bottles. Whenever I stand within those walls there falls upon me the memory of the last service held in the old church, when, amid the tears and lamentations of the people who loved the venerable place, the last hymn was sung, the last prayer offered, before the place was taken down.

Outside the docks begins the place they call Wapping. It used to be Wapping in the Ouze, or Wapping on the Wall. I have spoken of the embankment on the marsh. All along the river, all round the low coast of Essex stands “The Wall,” the earthwork by which the river is kept from overflowing these low grounds at high water. This wall, which was constantly getting broken down, and cost great sums of money to restore, was the cause of the first settlement of Wapping. It was in the reign of Queen Elizabeth that people were encouraged to settle here, in order that by building houses on and close to the wall this work would be strengthened and maintained.

Stow says that about the year 1560 there were no houses here at all, but that forty years later the place was occupied and thickly settled by “seafaring men and tradesmen dealing in commodities for the supply of shipping and shipmen.” If this had been all, there would have been no harm done, but the place was outside the jurisdiction of the city, and grave complaints were made that in all such suburbs a large trade was carried on in the making and selling of counterfeit goods. The arm of the law was apparently unable to act with the same vigor outside the boundaries of the lord mayor’s authority. Therefore the honest craftsman was encouraged by impunity to make counterfeit indigo, musk, saffron, cochineal, wax, nutmegs, steel and other things. “But,” says Strype, “they were bunglers in their business.” They took too many apprentices; they kept them for too short a time, and their wares were bad, even considered merely as counterfeits. The making of wooden nutmegs has been, it will be seen, unjustly attributed to New England; it was in vogue in East London so far back as the sixteenth century. The craftsmen of the City petitioned James I. on the subject; a royal commission was appointed who recommended that the City companies should receive an extension of their power and should have control of the various trades within a circle of five or six miles’ radius. Nothing, however, seems to have come of the recommendation.

Before this petition, and even in the lifetime of Queen Elizabeth, there was alarm about the growth of the suburbs; it was argued that there were too many people already; they were too crowded; there were not enough provisions for so many; if the plague came back there would be a terrible mortality, and so on. Therefore orders were issued that no new buildings should be erected within three miles of the City, and that not more than one family should live in one house. Nothing could be wiser than these ordinances. But nature is not always so wise as human legislators. It is therefore credible that children went on being born; that there continued to be marrying and giving in marriage; that the population went on increasing; and, since one cannot, even in order to obey a wise law, live in the open air, this beneficent law was set at defiance; new houses were built in all the suburbs, and if a family could not afford a house to itself it just did what it had always done—took part of a house. In the face of these difficulties East London began to create itself, and riverside London not only stretched out a long arm upon the river wall, but threw out lanes and streets to the north of the wall.

Not much of Wapping survives. The London docks cut out a huge cantle of the parish; the place has since been still further curtailed by the creation of a large recreation ground of the newest type. Some of the remaining streets retain in their name the memory of the gardens and fields of the early settlements; there is Wapping Wall, Green Bank, Rose Lane, Crabtree Lane, Old Gravel Lane, Hermitage Street, Love Lane,—no London suburb is complete without a Love Lane or a Lovers’ Walk,—Cinnamon Street: does this name recall the time of the wooden nutmegs?

Let me, at this point, introduce you to Raine’s Charity. Did you know that in our East London, as well as in the French village, we have our Rosière? The excellent Raine, who flourished during the last century, built and endowed a school for girls who were trained for domestic service; he also left money for giving, once a year, a purse containing a hundred golden sovereigns, upon her wedding day, to a girl coming from his own school who could show four years’ domestic service with unblemished character. On the occasion when I assisted at this function there was observed—I do not think that the custom has since been abolished—a quaint little ceremony. The wedding was held in the church of St. George’s-in-the-East. This church, a massive structure of stone, built a hundred and fifty years ago, stands a little off a certain famous street once called Ratcliffe Highway. They have changed its name, and shamed it into better ways. When the marriage was celebrated the church was crowded with all the girls, children, and women of the quarter. This spontaneous tribute to the domestic virtues, in a place of which so many cruel things have been alleged, caused a glow in the bosom of the stranger. Indeed, it was a curious spectacle, this intense interest in the reward of the Rosière. The women crowded the seats and filled the galleries; they thronged the great stone porch; they made a lane outside for the passage of the bridal party; they whispered eagerly, without the least sign of scoffing. When the bride, in her white dress, walked through them they gasped, they trembled, the tears came into their eyes. What did they mean—those tears?

After the service the clergyman, with the vestrymen, the bridal party, and the invited guests, marched in procession from the church through the broad churchyard at the back to the vestry hall. With the procession walked the church choir in their surplices. Arrived at the vestry hall, the choir sang an anthem composed in the last century especially for this occasion. The rector of St. George’s then delivered a short oration, congratulating the bride and exhorting the bridegroom; he then placed in the hands of the bridegroom an old-fashioned, long silk purse containing fifty sovereigns at each end. This done, cake and wine were passed round, and we drank to the health of the bride and her bridegroom. The bride, I remember, was a blushing, rosy maiden of two and twenty or so; it was a great day for her,—the one day of all her life,—but she carried herself with a becoming modesty; the bridegroom, a goodly youth, about the same age, was proposing, we understood, something creditable, something superior, in the profession of carter or carman. It is more than ten years ago. I hope that the gift of the incomparable Raine—the anthem said that he was incomparable—has brought good luck to this London Rosière and her bridegroom.

The church of St. George’s-in-the-East stands, as I have said, beside the once infamous street called the Ratcliffe Highway. It was formerly the home of Mercantile Jack when his ship was paid off. Here, where every other house was a drinking den, where there was not the slightest attempt to preserve even a show of deference to respectability, Jack and his friends drank and sang and danced and fought. Portugal Jack and Italy Jack and Lascar Jack have always been very handy with their knives, while no one interfered, and the police could only walk about in little companies of three and four. Within these houses, these windows, these doors, their fronts stained and discolored like a drunkard’s face, there lay men stark and dead after one of these affrays—the river would be their churchyard; there lay men sick unto death, with no one to look after them; and all the time, day and night, the noise of the revelry went on—for what matter a few more sick or dead? The fiddler kept it up, Jack footed it, one Jack after the other, heel and toe with folded arms, to the sailors’ hornpipe; there were girls who could dance him down, there was delectable singing, and the individual thirst was like unto the thirst of Gargantua.

The street, I say, is changed; it has now assumed a countenance of respectability, though it has not yet arrived at the full rigors, so to speak, of virtue. Still the fiddle may be heard from the frequent public house; still Mercantile Jack keeps it up, heel and toe, while his money lasts; still there are harmonic evenings and festive days, but there are changes; one may frequently, such is the degeneracy, walk down the street, now called St. George’s, without seeing a single fight, without being hustled or assaulted, without coming across a man too drunk to lift himself from the kerb. It is a lively, cheerful street, with points which an artist might find picturesque; it is growing in respectability, but it is not yet by any means so clean as it might be, and there are fragrances and perfumes lingering about its open doors and courts which other parts of London will not admit within their boundaries.