Part 2

Charterhouse is the centre of a neighbourhood which Dickens chose for many of his scenes, as the reader of this knows. “Only a wall,” says Thackeray, in _Mr. and Mrs. Frank Berry_, “separates the playground, or ‘green,’ as it was called in his time, from Wilderness Row and Goswell street. Many a time have I seen Mr. Pickwick look out of his window in that street, though we did not know him then.” Not only of Mr. Pickwick, but of many other characters, do we find reminiscences in Smithfield. The Sarah Son’s Head, as John Browdy called it, Snow Hill, Saffron Hill, Fleet Lane, and Kingsgate street are not far away. The buildings with the ancient fronts, the idlers at the corners, and the confusing little alleys, which lead where no one would expect them to lead, all belong to Dickens’s London. The miserable associations of his early life, his interest in the poor, and his relish for the grotesque, drew him into the shady and disreputable quarters of the city; and the student of his works can track him with greater ease and ampler results in neighbourhoods like Smithfield than in the West End. With Thackeray, the reverse is the case; and, excepting Charter-house, the reader who desires to identify his localities finds little to reward him in a search east of Pall Mall, or south of Oxford street.

IV.

On the site of the Imperial Club in Cursitor street, Chancery Lane, stood a notorious “sponging house,” to which Rawdon Crawley was taken when arrested for debt, immediately after leaving the brilliant entertainment given by the Marquis of Steyne, and from which he wrote an ill-spelled letter to his wife (who had appeared triumphantly in some charades at that entertainment), begging her to send some money for his release. The reader remembers how the faithless little woman answered,—assuring him of her grief and anxiety, and telling him that she had not the money, but would get it; though, as poor, blundering, soft-hearted Rawdon discovered afterward, she had a very large sum at the moment she wrote to him, and did not send him any of it because she wished to keep him in jail that she might intrigue with the licentious old marquis; and the reader will remember that Rawdon was released at the instance of his cousin’s wife, and went to the little house in Curzon street, where he surprised his deceitful spouse, and nearly murdered her companion, the same old Marquis of Steyne, knight of the garter, lord of the powder-box, trustee of the British Museum, etc.

When we come to the end of that passage, we put the book on our lap and lean back in the chair, and, while we are still glowing with the excitement of the scene, we are filled with admiration of the genius which produced it. How did Thackeray achieve his effects? Becky Sharp is a unique and permanent figure in literature, a subtle embodiment of duplicity, ambition, and selfishness. She is avaricious, hypocritical, specious, and crafty. Though not malignant nor to a certainty criminal, she is a conscienceless little malefactor, whose ill deeds are only limited by the ignoble dimensions of her passions. She lies with amazing glibness, is utterly faithless to her hulking husband, and utterly indifferent to her child. Her mendacity is superlative, and double-dealing enters into all her transactions. But she is so shrewd, so vivacious, so artful, so immensely clever and good-humoured, she has so much prettiness of manner and person, that, while we despise her, and have not the least pity for her when retribution falls heavily upon her, our indignation against her is not so great as we feel that it ought to be, principally because her sins have a certain feminine archness and irresponsibility in them, which keeps them well down to the level of comedy. When we close the book we know her through and through, and thoroughly understand all the complex workings of her strategic mind. How do we know her so well? Thackeray is not exegetical, and does not depend on elaborate analysis for his effects. The actions of the characters are themselves fully expository, and do not call for any outside comments or enlargement on the part of the author. This is the case to such an extent that, when we examine the completeness with which the characters are revealed to us, we are inclined to believe that Thackeray’s art is of the very highest kind, and that, though in form it is undramatic, intrinsically it is powerfully dramatic.

But we are straying from our purpose, which is simply to look for ourselves at the places which he has described. Across the way from the bottom of Chancery Lane is the Temple, to the interest of which he has added many associations. He was fond of its dark alleys, archways, courts, and back stairs.

In 1834 he was called to the bar, and for some time he occupied chambers in the venerable buildings with the late Tom Taylor. His rooms, which were at number 10 Crown Office Row, have disappeared before “improvements” that present a modern front to the gardens and the river. Philip had chambers in the Temple, and there, also, in classic Lamb’s Court, Pendennis and Warrington were located.

Warrington smoking his cutty pipe, and writing his articles—the fine-hearted fellow, the unfortunate gentleman, the unpedantic scholar, who took Pendennis by the hand and introduced him to Grub street when that young unfortunate came to the end of his means. George Warrington teaches us a new lesson in manhood, in patience, in self-abnegation. His lot is full of sorrow, his cherished ambitions are impossible, through no fault of his own, but it is not in him to surrender to “the dull gray life and apathetic end,”—his contentment is the repose of a generous nature, his cheeriness with his pipe and his work springs out of a calmly philosophic mind, a satisfied conscience, a profound faith, and when we pass through Lamb’s court, not least in our affections is the shadow of him.

“The man of letters cannot but love the place which has been inhabited by so many of his brethren, and peopled by their creations as real to us at this day, as the authors whose children they were,” and says Thackeray. “Sir Roger de Coverley walking in the Temple garden, and discoursing with Mr. Spectator about the beauties in hoops and patches who are sauntering over the grass, is just as lively a figure to me, as old Samuel Johnson rolling through the fog with the Scotch gentleman at his heels, on their way to Mr. Goldsmith’s chambers in Brick court, or Harry Fielding, with inked ruffles and a wet towel round his head, dashing off articles at midnight for the _Covent Garden Journal_, while the printer’s boy is asleep in the passage.”

Leaving the Temple, we once more enter Smithfield, to look for the site of the old Fleet prison, the scene of many episodes in the stories of Dickens. It was in this strange place, that the brilliant, but thriftless Captain Shandon lived, “one of the wisest, wittiest, and most incorrigible of Irishmen;” here Pendennis found him sitting on a bed, in a torn dressing gown, with a desk on his knees: here a prisoner for debt, he indited the prospectus of the _Pall Mall Gazette_, which was so called, he said, because its editor was born in Dublin, and the sub-editor (excellent Jack Finucane) at Cork; because the proprietor lived in Paternoster Row, and the paper was published in Catherine Street, Strand. This imaginary title of Thackeray’s was not the only one afterwards adopted by a real newspaper. He writes of the _Whitehall Review_ as an opposing print, and that is now the name of a successful London journal.

The Fleet is a thing of the past, and the attributes of Captain Shandon have no inheritors in the press of to-day. A knight armed cap-à-pie in Cheapside, would not be a more antiquated figure, than the boozy scholar editing a reputable journal in the cell of a prison. Journalism has taken off its soft hat and shabby clothes; it has mended its erring and improvident ways, and put on the manners of polite society. Not in a tap-room, with jorums of hot whiskey, Welsh rabbits, and devilled chops does the modern scribe regale himself. He has a club somewhere in Adelphi, or St. James’, where he presents himself in sedate evening dress, he turns pale at the very mention of supper, and, instead of singing old English songs, sadly compares notes with his fellow-dyspeptics. A vulgar public-house, or low music hall stands on the site of the Haunt and the Back Kitchen. When Warrington, Pendennis, Tom Sarjeant, Clive Newcome, and Fred. Bayham frequented the Haunt, and joined in the diversions of the literary democracy, there was a superstition among them, that the place vanished at the approach of daybreak, that when Betsy turned the gas off at the door lamp, as the company went away, the whole thing faded into mist—the door, the house, the bar, Betsy, the beer-boy, Mrs. Nokes, and all. Whether this was so or not, it has now vanished, not for a day, but for ever, like Captain Shandon, and the wild Bohemianism of his time. {42}

V.

It is only a minutes’ walk from the corner of Fleet Lane, to the street of booksellers, Paternoster Row, in which the rival publishers, Bungay and Bacon lived—Bacon in an ancient low-browed building, with a few of his books displayed in the windows under a bust of my Lord Verulam; and Bungay in the house opposite, which was newly painted, and elaborately decorated in the style of the seventeenth century, “so that you might have fancied stately Mr. Evelyn passing over the threshold, or curious Mr. Pepys examining the books in the windows.” _The_ Row, so called—as financiers arrogantly call Wall Street, _the_ Street—is not wider than an alley way, and in this respect it is exactly as it was when Warrington introduced Pendennis to the editor of the _Parlor Table Annual_, wherein his verses were published. But though its breadth has not been increased, the old buildings on both sides of it have given place in many instances to towering new ones, five and six stories high, which shut out the light, and keep the editors, compilers, printers, engravers, and book-binders, who are the principal laborers of the Row, in an all-day gloom. Both Bungay and Bacon had their domestic establishments over their shops, and their wives, who were sisters, thus had an opportunity to insult one another by looks and mute signs from their opposite windows. Bungay and Bacon, and their belligerent spouses are now out of the trade, and the annual _Souvenirs_ and _Keepsakes_ which made a part of their business, belong to an extinct form of literature. The Row is full of Grub Street curiosities; but Lady Fanny Fantail, Miss Bunion, and the Honorable Percy Popinjay are seen within its precincts no more, and if they still exist, they probably find a new field for their distinguished services in the society papers.

Let anyone strike out which way he will from Fleet Street, he is sure to find himself in the presence of something which reminds him of Dickens, near some object which his humor has made famous, or which answers to one of his luminous descriptions.

The slums between the Strand and Soho, and between Smithfield and Clerkenwell, were fertile to him, and not a _gamin_ there knew the winding alleys, and crisscross streets better than the gentleman with the high complexion, the sparkling eye, the iron-gray beard, the well-cut dress, and the brisk step, who might have been seen speeding through them at all sorts of unusual hours. One day, he was heard of in Ratcliff Highway, or among the riverside shanties of Poplar, and the next, among the bird shops of Seven Dials, or in the courts of Lambeth. When we contrast the little we have found of Thackeray in the neighbourhood through which we have just been, with the variety and suggestiveness of the reminiscences of Dickens in the same region, our search seems disappointing.

As we have said Thackeray was not a novelist of low life. “Perhaps,” he says in the preface to _Pendennis_: “the lovers of excitement may care to know that this book began with a very precise plan, which was entirely put aside. Ladies and Gentlemen, you were to have been treated, and the writer’s and publisher’s pocket benefited by the recital of the most active horrors. What more exciting than a ruffian (with many admirable virtues) in St. Giles, visited constantly by a young lady from Belgravia? What more stirring than the contrasts of society? The mixture of slang and fashionable language? The escapes, the battles, the murders? . . . . The exciting plan was laid aside (with a very honorable forbearance on part of the publishers) because on attempting it, I found that I failed from want of experience of my subject; and never having been intimate with any convict in my life, and the manners of ruffians and gaol-birds being quite unfamiliar to me, the idea of entering into competition with M. Eugene Sue was abandoned.”

VI.

Though in the east end of the town and in the south, Thackeray has left few footsteps, for us to follow, in ancient and comfortable Bloomsbury, and the region to the west of it and north of Oxford street (called De Quincey’s step-mother), we find much to remind us of him. It was in Russell Square that the Sedleys lived in the time of their prosperity, and thence, on the evening after the arrival of gentle Amelia from the boarding school at Chiswick, a messenger was sent for George Osborne, whose house was No. 96. Russell Square is the largest and handsomest of the chain of squares which extend, almost without a break, from Oxford street to the New Road—Bloomsbury Square, Woburn Square, Gordon Square, Tavistock Square, and Euston Square. The neighbourhood has seen many strange shifts of fortune, and some of the finest of its mansions are debased to the uses of common boarding-houses and private hotels. There are streets and streets of houses with white cards in the windows announcing “Lodgings to let.” Sombre old houses they are, built of brick, with flat, uninteresting fronts, the sooty darkness of which is sometimes relieved by a yellowish portico, freshly painted, or a plaster shell of a drab colour reaching from the basement to the second story. The cheeriness of the spreading trees in the little parks, the flowering shrubs, the shining fountains, and the grass, are only a partial alleviation. Russell Square has deteriorated less than some of the other places in the neighbourhood, however, and the houses around it would not be beneath the inclinations of a prosperous merchant such as old Sedley was. We look in vain for 96; the numbers do not go as high as that; but we have no difficulty in singling out the respectable dwelling on the western side in which poor Amelia sighed for her selfish lover, and Becky Sharp set her cap at the corpulent Mr. Jos.

How sad the story of the Sedleys is!—the unrequited love of Amelia—the untimely death of George at Waterloo—the failure of old Sedley, and the cold-heartedness of the elder Osborne! The decayed merchant musing over all sorts of fatuous schemes by which he hopes to recover his position, and sitting in the dark corner of a coffee-house with his letters spread out before him—letters relating to a make-believe and visionary business—which he is anxious to read to every friend, is the most touching picture, after the death of Colonel Newcome, which Thackeray has drawn.

“What guest at Dives’s table can pass the familiar house without a sigh?—the house of which the lights used to shine so cheerfully at seven o’clock—of which the hall doors opened so readily—of which the obsequious servants, as you passed up the comfortable stairs, sounded your name from landing to landing, until it reached the apartment where jolly old Dives welcomed his friends! What a number of them he had! What a noble way of entertaining them! . . . How changed is the house, though! The front is patched over with bills, setting forth the particulars of the furniture in staring capitals. They have hung a shred of carpet out of the upstairs window—a half dozen of porters are lounging on the dirty steps—the hall swarms with dingy guests of oriental countenance, who thrust printed cards into your hands, and offer to bid. Old women and amateurs have invaded the upper apartments, pinching the bed curtains, poking the feathers, shampooing the mattresses, and clapping the wardrobe drawers to and fro. . . . O Dives, who would have thought, as we sat round the broad table sparkling with plate and spotless linen, to have such a dish at the head of it as that roaring auctioneer?”

Among the bidders was a six-foot, shy-looking military gentleman, who bought a piano, and sent it without any message to the little house—St. Adelaide Villa, Anna Maria Road, West—to which the Sedleys had retired after their downfall, and there, as the reader no doubt remembers, Amelia received it with great gladness, believing that it came from her well-beloved George.

It was years before she discovered that it was not her faithless lover, but simple, brave, tender-hearted Captain Dobbin, to whom she should have been grateful. It was in Hart street, two blocks nearer Oxford street than Russell Square, that little George Osborne went to school at the house of the Rev. Laurence Veal, domestic chaplain to the Earl of Bareacres, who prepared young noblemen and gentlemen for the universities, the senate, and the learned professions, whose system did not embrace the degrading corporal severities still practiced at the ancient places of education, and in whose family the pupils found the elegancies of refined society, and the confidence and affection of a home. Thither came poor Amelia, walking all the way from Brompton to catch a glimpse of her darling boy, who had been taken away from her by his obdurate grandfather.

Great Russell street is next to Hart street, and on it fronts the classic portico of the British Museum, in the splendid reading-room of which Thackeray was often seen. It was in Great Coram street, adjoining the celebrated foundling hospital, that he lived, when, one evening, he called on a young man who had chambers in Furnival’s Inn, and offered to illustrate the works which were beginning to make “Boz” famous; and we can see him coming back to his lodgings in low spirits over the rejection of his proposal, for at that time Thackeray was poor, and neither literature nor art, which he loved the better, would support him.

About half a mile farther north, across Tottenham Court Road, is Fitzroy Square; and when we look for 120, we find that 40 is the highest number which the Square includes. Though the little circular garden which it incloses is prettily laid out, and is one of the leafiest of the oases between Euston and Bloomsbury, Fitzroy has degenerated more than some of the other squares in the neighborhood. It was not very fashionable when Colonel Newcome took No. 120 with James Binnie, and it is not fashionable at all now. One side is badly out of repair. There are two or three doctors’ houses in it, several houses with announcements of apartments to let, and a private hotel. The particular house occupied by the Colonel and his old Indian friend cannot be easily identified by Thackeray’s description. “The house is vast, but, it must be owned, melancholy. Not long since, it was a ladies’ school in an unprosperous condition. The scar left by Madame Latour’s brass plate may still be seen on the tall black door, cheerfully ornamented in the style of the end of the last century, with a funereal urn in the centre of the entry and garlands, and the skulls of rams at each corner.” We fancy that it was on the south side of the square, near the middle of a row of heavy sepulchral houses built of stone, which, first blackened by the London smoke, have since been unevenly calcined by the atmosphere, so that, as in many other buildings, they look as if a quantity of dirty whitewash had been allowed to trickle down them. Some of the ornaments have been removed, but the urn is still over the door.

The days spent here were the happiest in the lives of the good old Colonel and his son. The Colonel had just returned from India full of honors and riches, and with his old chum, James Binnie, he kept house with lavish hospitality, and much originality. “The Colonel was great at making hot-pot, curry, and pillau,” Pendennis tells us. “What cozy pipes did we not smoke in the dining-room, in the drawing-room, or where we would! What pleasant evenings did we not have with Mr. Binnie’s books and Schiedam! Then there were solemn state dinners, at most of which the writer of this biography had a corner.” The guests at these entertainments were not selected for their social position or their worldly prosperity, and it mattered not whether they were rich or poor, well dressed or shabby, if they were friends. Old Indian Officers were among them, and young artists with unkempt ways from Newman street and Berners street; the genial F. B. waltzed with elderly houris and paid them compliments; Professor Gandish talked about art with many misplaced h’s, and the Rev. Charles Honeyman sighed and posed and meekly received the adulation of the women.

Despite the failure of the Bundlecomb Bank, the later part of the history of the Newcomes would have been less sad but for that accident to Mr. Binnie, in which he fell from his horse and was so much injured that Mrs. Mackenzie—the “awful” campaigner—was called in to nurse him with the aid of poor little Rosey. Fitzroy Square is so old that its gloomy houses must have known much sorrow; but we doubt if any of them has seen anything more pitiable than the humiliation of Colonel Newcome, or anything crueller than the remorseless tyranny of the “campaigner” and her fierce temper—the “campaigner,” who was all smiles, coquetry, and amiability, until prosperity fled from those who had been her benefactors, when she suddenly revealed all the pettiness and harshness of her termagant soul.

Three streets away from the Square is Howland street, to which Clive removed with his weak little wife and his spiteful mother-in-law when disaster fell upon him; and every reader of Thackeray will remember how Pendennis, Clive, and Boy went out to meet the broken-hearted old man as he came along Guilford street and Russell Square, from the Charterhouse to eat his last Christmas dinner.

When we close the history of Colonel Newcome we ask ourselves if any man who moves our hearts as Thackeray does, could be a cynic? Cynicism is a withering of the heart, the exhaustion of a shallow moral nature, the self-consciousness of an ignoble mind. But what pathos is so spontaneous, so genuine, so lasting as Thackeray’s—so free from the literary trickery which may produce tears in youth, but only provokes a smile when age has dulled the feelings and opened the eyes to artifice. Among all English authors the writer of this little book, at least, does not recognize one who is more unaffectedly tender than this great Social preacher, who speaks with unflinching candour of evil, but glorifies all good, and reads with unfeigned pity the lessons of life.

VII.

Before Thackeray died, he had become as familiar a figure in the West End of London as Dr. Johnson was in Fleet street and its tributary courts and lanes. Any one who did not know him might have supposed him to be an indolent man about town; and those who could identify him generally knew where to find him, if they wished to show the great author to a friend from the country. He was usually present in the Park at the fashionable hour; and if the Pall Mall of his day is ever painted, his face and form will be as inseparable from a truthful picture as the mammoth bulk of the testy lexicographer is from the contemporaneous prints of old Temple Bar.