Part 1

“_Familiar in their Mouths as HOUSEHOLD WORDS._”—SHAKESPEARE.

HOUSEHOLD WORDS. A WEEKLY JOURNAL.

CONDUCTED BY CHARLES DICKENS.

N^{o.} 15.] SATURDAY, JULY 6, 1850. [PRICE 2_d._

THE OLD LADY IN THREADNEEDLE STREET.

Perhaps there is no Old Lady who has attained to such great distinction in the world, as this highly respectable female. Even the Old Lady who lived on a hill, and who, if she’s not gone, lives there still; or that other Old Lady who lived in a shoe, and had so many children she didn’t know what to do—are unknown to fame, compared with the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street. In all parts of the civilised earth the imaginations of men, women, and children figure this tremendous Old Lady of Threadneedle Street in some rich shape or other. Throughout the length and breadth of England, old ladies dote upon her; young ladies smile upon her; old gentlemen make much of her, young gentlemen woo her; everybody courts the smiles, and dreads the coldness, of the powerful Old Lady in Threadneedle Street. Even prelates have been said to be fond of her; and Ministers of State to have been unable to resist her attractions. She is next to omnipotent in the three great events of human life. In spite of the old saw, far fewer marriages are made in Heaven, than with an eye to Threadneedle Street. To be born in the good graces of the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, is to be born to fortune: to die in her good books, is to leave a far better inheritance, as the world goes, than “the grinning honour that Sir Walter hath,” in Westminster Abbey. And there she is, for ever in Threadneedle Street, another name for wealth and thrift, threading her golden-eyed needle all the year round.

This Old Lady, when she first set up, carried on business in Grocers’ Hall, Poultry; but in 1732 she quarrelled with her landlords about a renewal of her lease, and built a mansion of her own in Threadneedle Street. She reared her new abode on the site of the house and garden of a former director of her affairs, Sir John Houblon. This was a modest structure, somewhat dignified by having a statue of William the Third placed before it; but not the more imposing from being at the end of an arched court, densely surrounded with habitations, and abutting on the churchyard of St. Christopher le Stocks.

But now, behold her, a prosperous gentlewoman in the hundred and fifty-seventh year of her age; “the oldest inhabitant” of Threadneedle Street! There never was such an insatiable Old Lady for business. She has gradually enlarged her premises, until she has spread them over four acres; confiscating to her own use not only the parish church of St. Christopher, but the greater part of the parish itself.

We count it among the great events of our young existence, that we had, some days since, the honour of visiting the Old Lady. It was not without an emotion of awe that we passed her Porter’s Lodge. The porter himself, blazoned in royal scarlet, and massively embellished with gold lace, is an adumbration of her dignity and wealth. His cocked hat advertises her stable antiquity as plainly as if she had written up, in imitation of some of her lesser neighbours, “established in 1694.” This foreshadowing became reality when we passed through the Hall—the tellers’ hall. A sensation of unbounded riches permeated every sense, except, alas! that of touch. The music of golden thousands clattered in the ear, as they jingled on counters until its last echoes were strangled in the puckers of tightened money-bags, or died under the clasps of purses. Wherever the eye turned, it rested on money; money of every possible variety; money in all shapes; money of all colours. There was yellow money, white money, brown money; gold money, silver money, copper money; paper money, pen and ink money. Money was wheeled about in trucks; money was carried about in bags; money was scavengered about with shovels. Thousands of sovereigns were jerked hither and thither from hand to hand—grave games of pitch and toss were played with staid solemnity; piles of bank notes—competent to buy whole German dukedoms and Italian principalities—hustled to and fro with as much indifference as if they were (as they had been) old rags.

This Hall of the Old Lady’s overpowered us with a sense of wealth; oppressed us with a golden dream of Riches. From this vision an instinctive appeal to our own pockets, and a few miserable shillings, awakened us to Reality. When thus aroused we were in one of the Old Lady’s snug, elegant, waiting-rooms, which is luxuriously Turkey-carpeted and adorned with two excellent portraits of two ancient cashiers; regarding one of whom the public were warned:—

“Sham Abraham you may, I’ve often heard say: But you mustn’t sham ‘Abraham Newland.’”

There are several conference-rooms for gentlemen who require a little private conversation with the Old Lady—perhaps on the subject of discounts.

It is no light thing to send in one’s card to the Foster-Mother of British commerce; the Soul of the State; “the Sun,” according to Sir Francis Baring, around which the agriculture, trade, and finance of this country revolves; the mighty heart of active capital, through whose arteries and veins flows the entire circulating medium of this great country. It was not, therefore, without agitation that we were ushered from the waiting-room, into that celebrated private apartment of the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street—the Parlour—the Bank Parlour, the inmost mystery—the _cella_ of the great Temple of Riches.

The ordinary associations called up by the notion of an old lady’s comfortable parlour, were not fulfilled by this visit. There is no domestic snugness, no easy chair, no cat, no parrot, no japanned bellows, no portrait of the Princess Charlotte and Prince Leopold in the Royal Box at Drury Lane Theatre; no kettle-holder, no worsted rug for the urn, no brass footman for the buttered toast, in the parlour in Threadneedle Street. On the contrary, the room is extensive—supported by pillars; is of grand and true proportions; and embellished with architectural ornaments in the best taste. It has a long table for the confidential managers of the Old Lady’s affairs (she calls these gentlemen her Directors) to sit at; and usually, a side table fittingly supplied with a ready-laid lunch.

The Old Lady’s “Drawing” Room is as unlike—but then she is such a peculiar Old Lady!—any ordinary Drawing-room as need be. It has hardly any furniture, but desks, stools, and books. It is of immense proportions, and has no carpet. The vast amount of visitors the Old Lady receives between nine and four every day, would make lattice-work in one forenoon of the stoutest carpet ever manufactured. Everybody who comes into the Old Lady’s Drawing-room delivers his credentials to her gentlemen-ushers, who are quick in examining the same, and exact in the observance of all points of form. So highly-prized, however, is a presentation (on any grand scale) to the Old Lady’s Drawing-room, notwithstanding its plainness, that there is no instance of a Drawing-room at Court being more sought after. Indeed, it has become a kind of proverb that the way to Court often lies through the Old Lady’s apartments, and some suppose that the Court Sticks are of gold and silver in compliment to her.

As to the individual appearance of the Old Lady herself, we are authorised to state that the portrait of a Lady (accompanied by eleven balls on a sprig, and a beehive) which appears in the upper left-hand corner of all the Bank of England Notes, is NOT the portrait of _the_ Lady. She invariably wears a cap of silver paper, with her yellow hair gathered carefully underneath. When she carries any defensive or offensive weapon, it is not a lance, but a pen; and her modesty would on no account permit her to appear in such loose drapery as is worn by the party in question—who we understand is depicted as a warning to the youthful merchants of this country to avoid the fate of George Barnwell.

In truth, like the Delphian mystery, SHE of Threadneedle Street is invisible, and delivers her oracles through her high priests: and, as Herodotus got his information from the priests in Egypt, so did we learn all we know about the Bank from the great officers of the Myth of Threadneedle Street. All of them are remarkable for great intelligence and good humour, particularly one MR. MATTHEW MARSHALL; for whom the Old Lady is supposed to have a sneaking kindness, as she is continually promising to pay him the most stupendous amounts of money. From what these gentlemen told us, we are prepared unhesitatingly to affirm in the teeth of the assertions of Plutarch, and Pliny, and Justin, that although Crœsus might have been well enough to do in the world in his day, he was but a pettifogger compared with the Great Lady of St. Christopher le Stocks. The Lydian king never employed nine hundred clerks, or accommodated eight hundred of them under one roof; and if he could have done either, he would have been utterly unable to muster one hundred and thirty thousand pounds a year to pay them. He never had bullion in his cellars, at any one time, to the value of sixteen millions and a half sterling, as our Old Lady has lately averaged; nor “other securities”—much more marketable than the precious stones Crœsus showed to Solon—to the amount of thirty millions. Besides, _all_ his capital was “dead weight;” that in Threadneedle Street is active, and is represented by an average paper currency of twenty millions per annum.

After this statement of facts, we trust that modern poets when they want a hyperbole for wealth will cease to cite Crœsus, and draw their future inspirations from the shrine and cellars of the Temple opposite the Auction Mart; or, as the late Mr. George Robins designated it when professionally occupied, “The Great House over the way.”

When we withdrew from the inmost fane of this Temple, we were ushered by the priest, who superintends the manufacture of the mysterious Deity’s oracles, into those recesses of her Temple in which these are made. Here we perceived, that, besides carrying on the ordinary operations of banking, the Old Lady is an extensive printer, engraver, bookbinder, and publisher. She maintains a steam-engine to drive letter-press and copper-plate printing machines, besides the other machinery which is employed in various operations, from making thousand pound notes to weighing single sovereigns. It is not until you see three steam-printing machines—such as we use for this publication—and hear that they are constantly revolving, to produce, at so many thousand sheets per hour, the printed forms necessary for the accurate account-keeping of this great Central Establishment and its twelve provincial branches, that you are fully impressed with the magnitude of the Old Lady’s transactions. In this one department no fewer than three hundred account-books are printed, ruled, bound, and used every week. During that short time they are filled with MS. by the eight hundred subordinates and their chiefs. By way of contrast we saw the single ledger which sufficed to post up the daily transactions of the Old Lady on her first establishment in business. It is no bigger than that of a small tradesman’s, and served to contain a record of the year’s accounts. Until within the last few years, visitors to the Bullion Office were shown the old box into which the books of the Bank were put every night for safety during the Old Lady’s early career. This receptacle is no bigger than a seaman’s chest. A spacious fire-proof room is now nightly filled with each day’s accounts, and they descend to it by means of a great hydraulic trap in the Drawing Office; the mountain of calculation when collected being too huge to be moved by human agency.

These works are, of course, only produced for private reference; but the Old Lady’s publishing business is as extensive as it is profitable and peculiar. Although her works are the reverse of heavy or erudite—being “flimsy” to a proverb—yet the eagerness with which they are sought by the public, surpasses that displayed for the productions of the greatest geniuses who ever enlightened the world: she is, therefore, called upon to print enormous numbers of each edition,—generally one hundred thousand copies; and reprints of equally large impressions are demanded, six or seven times a year. She is protected by a stringent copyright; in virtue of which, piracy is felony, and was, until 1831, punished with death. The very paper is copyright, and to imitate even that entails transportation. Indeed its merits entitle it to every protection, for it is a very superior article. It is so thin that each sheet, before it is sized, weighs only eighteen grains; and so strong, that, when sized and doubled, a single sheet is capable of suspending a weight of fifty-six pounds.

The literature of these popular prints is concise to terseness. A certain individual, duly accredited by the Old Lady, whose autograph appears in one corner, promises to pay to the before-mentioned Mr. Matthew Marshall, or bearer on demand, a certain sum, for the Governor and Company of the Bank of England. There is a date and a number; for the Old Lady’s sheets are published in Numbers; but, unlike other periodicals, no two copies of hers are alike. Each has a set of numerals, shown on no other.—It must not be supposed from the utter absence of rhetoric in this Great Woman’s literature, that it is devoid of ornament. On the contrary, it is illustrated by eminent artists: the illustrations consisting of the waves of a watermark made in the paper; a large black blot, with the statement in white letters of the sum which is promised to be paid; and the portrait referred to in a former part of this account of the Wonderful Old Lady.

She makes it a practice to print thirty thousand copies of these works daily. Everything possible is done by machinery,—engraving, printing, numbering; but we refrain from entering into further details of this portion of the Old Lady’s Household here, as we are preparing a review of her valuable works, which shall shortly appear, in the form of a History of a Bank note. The publication department is so admirably conducted, that a record of each individual piece of paper launched on the ocean of public favour is kept, and its history traced till its return; for another peculiarity of the Old Lady’s establishment is, that every impression put forth comes back—with few exceptions—in process of time to her shelves; where it is kept for ten years, and then burnt. This great house is, therefore, a huge circulating library. The daily average number of notes brought back into the Old Lady’s lap—examined to detect forgeries; defaced; entered upon the record made when they were issued; and so stored away that they can be reproduced at any given half-hour for ten years to come,—is twenty-five thousands. On the day of our visit, there came in twenty-eight thousand and seventy-four of her picturesque pieces of paper, representing one million, one thousand, two hundred and seventy pounds sterling, to be dealt with as above, preparatory to their decennial slumber on her library shelves.

The apartment in which the notes are kept _previous_ to issue, is the Old Lady’s Store-room. There is no jam, there are no pickles, no preserves, no gallipots, no stoneware jars, no spices, no anything of that sort, in the Store-room of the Wonderful Old Lady. You might die of hunger in it. Your sweet tooth would decay and tumble out, before it could find the least gratification in the Old Lady’s Store-room. There was a mouse found there once, but it was dead, and nothing but skin and bone. It is a grim room, fitted up all round with great iron-safes. They look as if they might be the Old Lady’s ovens, never heated. But they are very warm in the City sense; for when the Old Lady’s two store-keepers have, each with his own key, unlocked his own one of the double locks attached to each, and opened the door, Mr. Matthew Marshall gives you to hold a little bundle of paper, value two millions sterling; and, clutching it with a strange tingling, you feel disposed to knock Mr. Matthew Marshall down, and, like a patriotic Frenchman, to descend into the streets.

No tyro need be told that these notes are representatives of weightier value, and were invented partly to supersede the necessity of carrying about ponderous parcels of precious metal. Hence—to treat of it soberly—four paper parcels taken out, and placed in our hands—consisting of four reams of Bank notes ready for issue, and not much more bulky than a thick octavo volume—though they represent gold of the weight of _two tons_, and of the value of two millions of pounds sterling, yet weigh not quite one pound avoirdupois each, or nearly four pounds together. The value in gold of what we could convey away in a couple of side pockets (if simply permitted by the dear Old Lady in Threadneedle Street, without proceeding to extremities upon the person of the Chief Cashier) would have required, but for her admirable publications, two of Barclay and Perkins’s strongest horses to draw.[1]

Footnote 1:

One thousand sovereigns weigh twenty-one pounds, and five hundred and twelve Bank-notes weigh exactly one pound.

We have already made mention of the Old Lady’s Lodge, Hall, Parlour, Store-room, and Drawing-room. Her Cellars are not less curious. In these she keeps neither wine, nor beer, nor wood, nor coal. They are devoted solely to the reception of the precious metals. They are like the caves of Treasures in the Arabian Nights; the common Lamp that shows them becomes a Wonderful Lamp in Mr. Marshall’s hands, and Mr. Marshall becomes a Genie. Yet only by the power of association; for they are very respectable arched cellars that would make dry skittle-grounds, and have nothing rare about them but their glittering contents. One vault is full of what might be barrels of oysters—if it were not the Russian Loan. Another is rich here and there with piles of gold bars, set cross-wise, like sandwiches at supper, or rich biscuits in a confectioner’s shop. Another has a moonlight air from the presence of so much silver. Dusky avenues branch off, where gold and silver amicably bide their time in cool retreats, not looking at all mischievous here, or anxious to play the Devil with our souls. Oh for such cellars at home! “Look out for your young master half a dozen bars of the ten bin.” “Let me have a wedge of the old crusted.” “Another Million before we part—only one Million more, to finish with!” The Temperance Cause would make but slow way, as to such cellars, we have a shrewd suspicion!

Beauty of colour is here associated with worth. One of these brilliant bars of gold weighs sixteen pounds troy, and its value is eight hundred pounds sterling. A pile of these, lying in a dark corner—like neglected cheese, or bars of yellow soap—and which might be contained in an ordinary tea-chest, is worth two hundred and ten thousand pounds. Fortune herself transmuted into metal seems to repose at our feet. Yet this is only an _eightieth_ part of the wealth contained in the Old Lady’s cellars.

The future history of this metal is explained in three sentences; it is coined at the Mint, distributed to the public, worn by friction (or “sweated” by Jews) till it becomes light. What happens to it then we shall see.

By a seldom failing law of monetary attraction nearly every species of cash, “hard” or soft, metallic or paper, finds its way some time or other back to the extraordinary Old Lady of Threadneedle Street. All the sovereigns returned from the banking-houses are consigned to a secluded cellar; and, when you enter it, you will possibly fancy yourself on the premises of a clock-maker who works by steam. Your attention is speedily concentrated to a small brass box not larger than an eight-day pendule, the works of which are impelled by steam. This is a self-acting weighing machine, which with unerring precision tells which sovereigns are of standard weight, and which are light, and of its own accord separates the one from the other. Imagine a long trough or spout—half a tube that has been split into two sections—of such a semi-circumference as holds sovereigns edgeways, and of sufficient length to allow of two hundred of them to rest in that position one against another. This trough thus charged is fixed slopingly upon the machine over a little table as big as that of an ordinary sovereigns-balance. The coin nearest to the Lilliputian platform drops upon it, being pushed forward by the weight of those behind. Its own weight presses the table down; but how far down? Upon that hangs the whole merit and discriminating power of the machine. At the back, and on each side of this small table, two little hammers move by steam backwards and forwards at different elevations. If the sovereign be full weight, down sinks the table too low for the higher hammer to hit it; but the lower one strikes the edge, and off the sovereign tumbles into a receiver to the left. The table pops up again, receives, perhaps, a light sovereign, and the higher hammer having always first strike, knocks it into a receiver to the right, time enough to escape its colleague, which, when it comes forward, has nothing to hit, and returns to allow the table to be elevated again. In this way the reputation of thirty-three sovereigns is established or destroyed every minute. The light weights are taken to a clipping machine, slit at the rate of two hundred a minute, weighed in a lump, the balance of deficiency charged to the banker from whom they were received, and sent to the Mint to be re-coined. Those which have passed muster are re-issued to the public. The inventor of this beautiful little detector was Mr. Cotton, a former governor. The comparatively few sovereigns brought in by the general public are weighed in ordinary scales by the tellers. The average loss upon each light coin, on an average of thirty-five thousands taken in 1843, was twopence three farthings.

The business of the “Great House” is divided into two branches; the issue and the banking department. The latter has increased so rapidly of late years, that the last addition the Old Lady was constrained to make to her house was the immense Drawing-room aforesaid, for her customers and their payees to draw cash on checks and to make deposits. Under this noble apartment is the Strong Room, containing private property, supposed to be of enormous value. It is placed there for safety by the constituents of the Bank, and is concealed in tin boxes, on which the owners’ names are legibly painted. The descent into this stronghold—by means of the hydraulic trap we have spoken of—is so eminently theatrical, that we believe the Head of the Department, on going down with the books, is invariably required to strike an attitude, and to laugh in three sepulchral syllables; while the various clerks above express surprise and consternation.