Part 3

At this date we were through the instrumentality of Mrs. Paul, widow of Mr. James Paul--formerly in the service of Catnach, introduced to Mrs. Elizabeth Benton, the last surviving daughter of John and Mary Catnach. Mr. Benton was assistant treasurer, and box-book keeper to Mr. Alfred Bunn, of Covent Garden and Drury Lane Theatres, Mrs. Benton, at the time being wardrobe-mistress and _costumier_. At one period Mr. and Mrs. Benton lived with Mr. Bunn in St James' Place, St. James' Street, Mrs. Benton acting in the capacity of housekeeper. During several seasons Mr. Benton was also treasurer for the proprietors of Vauxhall Gardens, afterwards he filled the same office for E. T. Smith--_Dazzle Smith!_ at Cremorne Gardens. He died abroad in 1856. The interview we had with Mrs. Benton led up to receiving the two letters that follow:--

5, Sonderburg Road, Seven Sisters' Road, Holloway. London. _November, 13th, 1876._

Dear Sir,

In reply to your letter, in which you ask if I know where my Father and mother were married, I regret to say I do not know for certain if it was in Edinburgh or Berwick-on-Tweed, but I am certain it was not in Alnwick.

* * * * *

I shall feel obliged for the [Alnwick] Journal, and also for the Register of Baptisms.

I always understood that my father was a descendant of Catnach, King of the Picts.

[Signature: I remain yours & E Benton]

P.S.--The paper has not arrived--shall be glad to hear from you by return of Post.

Charles Hindley, Esq., 76, Rose Hill Terrace, Brighton.

5, Sonderburg Road, Seven Sisters' Road, Holloway, London. _November 18, 1876._

Dear Sir,

I am sorry I have not answered your letter before, but I have been very ill.

I am sorry I can give you no more information than I have already given you, but about Mrs. Ryle and Mr. ---- I cannot exactly say, and as my niece Mrs. Harding was but a girl when her uncle died I should not like to apply to her as it would be painful.

My father was dead when the Battle of Waterloo was fought, but was in Alnwick at the Battle of Trafalgar, and for some time after. My Father had 3 residences in London. 1. (only a shop) in Wardour Street, Soho Square, and ditto also Gerrard Street, and also in Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square (apartments).

My Father had a severe illness, also a fever of which he died. I should feel very much obliged if you could find me a copy of the Hermit of Warkworth, and I will willingly pay for it, and also Blair's Grave.

I am very much obliged for the Registers, and if I can supply you with further information I will do so with pleasure. I have not heard from Mr. [Mark] Smith.

[Signature: I remain Yours &c. E Benton]

P.S.--I received the Paper [Alnwick Journal] with thanks.

C. Hindley, Esq., 76, Rose Hill Terrace, Brighton.

It was at this particular date of our history--1876--that we had the good fortune to get acquainted with Mr. George Skelly, of Alnwick--who, like ourselves, is possessed of the _cacoethes scribendi_, and was at the time supplying, _con amore_, an article to the _Alnwick Journal_, entitled "John and James Catnach," which we found to contain certain information relative to the elder Catnach, and also of the earlier portion of the life of James, of which we had no previous knowledge. At our solicitation to be allowed to make a selection from the same, we received a most courteous and gentlemanly letter, which, in addition to containing several pieces of information and answers to many queries we had put to Mr. Skelly, he wound up by saying:--"You have full liberty to make use of anything that I have written, and it will afford me much pleasure if I can further your intentions in any way."

From that date, Mr. George Skelly continued to correspond with us on the subject of the "Two Catnachs," nearly up to the last moment of our going to press with our own "Life and Times of James Catnach," and to him we are greatly indebted for much of the information therein contained. And it was at his suggestion that we wrote the following letter to the _Alnwick Journal_--Mr. Skelly at the same time furnishing the local paragraph.

Letter to the Editor.

_To the Editor of the Alnwick Journal._

76, Rose Hill Terrace, Brighton, June 16th, 1876.

SIR,--Your townsman, Mr. George Skelly, in the concluding chapter of his excellent article of "John and James Catnach," makes mention of my name as being engaged in preparing for publication "The Life and Times of James Catnach, formerly of Seven Dials, printer of ballads, &c." Such being the fact, I shall therefore be glad if you would allow me sufficient space in the _Alnwick Journal_, to ask your readers and correspondents who possess any additional facts, sayings, doings, or letters of the two Catnachs--John and James--to supply me with the same, when I shall have much pleasure in assigning to any such contributions a proper chronological place in my work, and of acknowledging the source of the same, while all documents or books will be faithfully returned by yours, &c., &c.,

CHARLES HINDLEY.

* * * * *

JOHN AND JAMES CATNACH.--It will be seen by a correspondence in another page that Mr. Charles Hindley, of Brighton, is preparing for publication the "Life and Times of James Catnach," and he respectfully solicits from our readers any facts and scraps they may be possessed of, also the loan of any letters or books suitable for the extention of the life of the celebrated and withal eccentric printer, who, although a native of Alnwick, settled in London, and occupied a peculiar position for upwards of a quarter of a century in the Seven Dials district. We trust that our correspondent may be enabled to add to his all ready large stock of material in hand a few more items, by the publication of his letter in our columns. Mr. Hindley's work, will, it is expected, be published by Messrs. Reeves and Turner, of the Strand, London, during the coming autumn.

The above letter to the _Alnwick Journal_ was the means of obtaining another valuable correspondent--Mr. George H. Thompson, also of Alnwick, who volunteered his services to aid and assist, to the best of his time and ability, in supplying all the information he possessed or could glean from his friends and acquaintances in the good old borough of Alnwick, or the county at large. And _inter alia_ copied out _verbatim_ from the Parish Register of Baptisms in St. Michael's Church all the entries in connection with the family of John and Mary Catnach and which will be found _in extenso_ at pages 2-3 of this work.

Mr. George Skelly and Mr. G. H. Thompson are fortunate by their residence in Alnwick in having had the acquaintance and friendship of the late Mr. Mark Smith--James Catnach's fellow apprentice, Mr. Thomas Robertson, Mr. Tate, the local historian, and several other _Alnwick-folk_. And they have made the best possible use of the circumstance to supply us with information on the subject of our enquiry.

Recently Mr. Geo. Skelly has forwarded to us an original trade invoice of John Catnach of which we here append a _fac-simile_ copy:--

We have now brought up the history of our pursuit of knowledge to the eve of the publication of the Life and Times of James Catnach--late of Seven Dials, Ballad-monger--which was first announced in 1878 in the manner following.

YE LIFE OF JEMMY CATNACH.

Now, my friends, you have here just printed and pub--lish--ed, the Full, True, and Particular account of the Life, Trial, Character, Confession, Condemnation, and Behaviour, together with an authentic copy of the last Will and Testament: or DYING SPEECH, of that eccentric individual "Old Jemmy Catnach," late of the _Seven Dials_, printer, publisher, toy-book manufacturer, dying-speech merchant, and ballad-monger. Here, you may read how he was bred and born the son of a printer, in the ancient Borough of Alnwick, which is in Northumberlandshire. How he came to London to seek his fortune. How he obtained it by printing and publishing children's books, the chronicling of doubtful scandals, fabulous duels between ladies of fashion, "cooked" assassinations, and sudden deaths of eminent individuals, apocryphal elopements, real or catch-penny accounts of murders, impossible robberies, delusive suicides, dark deeds and public executions, to which was usually attached the all-important and necessary "Sorrowful Lamentations," or, "Copy of Affectionate Verses," which, according to the established custom, the criminal composed, in the condemned cell, the night before his execution.

Yes, my customers, in this book you'll read how Jemmy Catnach made his fortune in Monmouth Court, which is to this day in the Seven Dials, which is in London. Not only will you read how he did make his fortune, but also what he did and what he didn't do with it after he had made it. You will also read how "Old Jemmy" set himself up as a fine gentleman:--JAMES CATNACH ES--QUIRE.

And how he didn't like it when he had done it. And how he went back again to dear old Monmouth Court, which is in the Seven Dials aforesaid. And how he languished, and languishing, did die--leaving all his old mouldy coppers behind him--and how being dead, he was buried in Highgate Cemetery.

Furthermore, my ready-money customers, you are informed that there are only 750 copies of the work print-ed and pub-lish-ed, viz., namely that is to say;--500 copies on crown 8vo, at 12/6 each.

250 copies on demy 8vo., at 25/- each.

LONDON: REEVES AND TURNER, 196, STRAND, W.C. 1878.

The Seven Dials!--Jemmy Catnach and Street Literature are, as it were, so inseparably bound together that we now propose to give a short history of the former to enable us to connect our own history with the later:--

The Seven Dials were built for wealthy tenants, and Evelyn, in his _Diary_, 1694, notes: "I went to see the building near St. Giles's, where Seven Dials make a star from a Doric pillar placed in the middle of a circular area, in imitation of Venice." The attempt was not altogether in vain. This part of the parish has ever since "worn its _dirt_ with a difference." There is an air of shabby gentility about it. The air of the footman or waiting-maid can be recognised through the tatters, which are worn with more assumption than those of their unsophisticated neighbours.

"You may break, you may shatter the vase if you will; But the scent of the roses will hang round it still."

The Seven Dials are thus described in Gay's Trivia:--

"Where famed St. Giles's ancient limits spread, An in-railed column rears its lofty head; Here to seven streets, seven dials count their day, And from each other catch the circling ray; Here oft the peasant, with inquiring face, Bewildered, trudges on from place to place; He dwells on every sign with stupid gaze-- Enters the narrow alley's doubtful maze-- Tries every winding court and street in vain, And doubles o'er his weary steps again."

This column was removed in July, 1773, on the supposition that a considerable sum of money was lodged at the base; but the search was ineffectual.

Charles Knight, in his "London," writes thus of Seven Dials:--

"It is here that the literature of St. Giles's has fixed its abode; and a literature the parish has of its own, and that, as times go, of a very respectable standing in point of antiquity. In a letter from Letitia Pilkington, to the demure author of 'Sir Charles Grandison,' and published by the no less exemplary and irreproachable Mrs. Barbauld, the lady informs her correspondent that she has taken apartments in Great White Lion Street, and stuck up a bill intimating that all who have not found 'reading and writing come by nature,' and who had had no teacher to make up the defect by art, might have 'letters written here.' With the progress of education, printing presses have found their way into St. Giles's, and what with literature and a taste for flowers and birds, there is much of the 'sweet south' about the Seven Dials harmonising with the out-of-door habits of its occupants. It was here--in Monmouth Court, a thoroughfare connecting Monmouth Street with Little Earl Street--that the late eminent Mr. Catnach developed the resources of his genius and trade. It was he who first availed himself of greater mechanical skill and a larger capital than had previously been employed in the department of THE TRADE, to substitute--for the excrable tea-paper, blotched with lamp-black and oil, which characterised the old broadside and ballad printing--tolerably white paper and real printer's ink. But more than that, it was he who first conceived and carried into effect, the idea of publishing collections of songs by the yard, and giving to purchasers, for the small sum of one penny (in former days the cost of a single ballad), strings of poetry, resembling in shape and length the list of Don Juan's mistresses, which Leporello unrolls on the stage before Donna Anna. He was no ordinary man, Catnach; he patronised original talents in many a bard of St Giles's and is understood to have accumulated the largest store of broadsides, last dying speeches, ballads and other stock-in-trade of the flying stationer's upon record."

Douglas Jerrold in his article on the Ballad Singer, published in "Heads of the People; or Portraits of the English"--1841, writes thus of Seven Dials and its surroundings:--

"The public ear has become dainty, fastidious, hypercritical; hence the Ballad-Singer languishes and dies. Only now and then, his pipings are to be heard * * * With the fall of Napoleon, declined the English Ballad-Singer. During the war, it was his peculiar province to vend halfpenny historical abridgments to his country's glory; recommending the short poetic chronicle by some familiar household air, that fixed it in the memory of the purchaser, who thus easily got hatred of the French by heart, with a new assurance of his own invulnerability. No battle was fought, no vessel taken or sunken, that the triumph was not published, proclaimed in the national gazette of our Ballad-Singer. If he were not the clear silver trump of Fame, he was at least her tin horn. It was he who bellowed music into news, which, made to jingle, was thus, even to the weakest understanding, rendered portable. It was his narrow strips of history that adorned the garrets of the poor; it was he who made them yearn towards their country, albiet to them so rough and niggard a mother.

Napoleon lost Waterloo, and the English Ballad-Singer not only lost his greatest prerogative, but was almost immediately assailed by foreign rivals, who had well-nigh played him dumb. Little thought the Ballad-Singer, when he crowed forth the crowning triumphs of the war, and in his sweetest possible modulations breathed the promised blessings of a golden peace, that he was then, swan-like, singing his own knell; that he did but herald the advent of his own provençal destroyers.

Oh muse! descend and say, did no omen tell the coming of the fall? Did no friendly god give warning to the native son of song? Burned the stars clearly, tranquilly in heaven,--or shot they madly across Primrose-hill, the Middlesex Parnassus?

* * * * *

Evening had gathered o'er Saint Giles's, and Seven Dials. So tranquil was the season, even publishers were touched. Catnach and Pitts sat silent in their shops; placing their hands in breeches-poke, with that serenity which pockets best convey, they looked around their walls--walls more richly decked than if hung with triumphs of Sidonian looms, arrayed with Bayeux stitchings; walls, where ten thousand thousand ballads--strips harmonious, yet silent as Apollo's unbraced strings,--hung pendulous, or crisply curling, like John Braham's hair. Catnach and Pitts, the tuneful masters of the gutter-choir, serenely looked, yet with such comprehensive glance, that look did take their stock. Suddenly, more suddenly than e'er the leaves in Hornsey wood were stirred by instant blast, the thousand thousand ballads swung and rustled on the walls; yet wind there was not, not the lightest breath. Still like pendants fluttering in a northern breeze, the ballads streamed towards Catnach, and towards Pitts! Amazing truth--yet more; each ballad found a voice! 'Old Towler' faintly growled; 'Nancy Dawson' sobbed and sighed; and, 'Bright Chanticleer' crowed weakly, dolorously, as yet in chickenhood, and smitten with the pip. At the same instant, the fiddle, the antique viol of Roger Scratch, fell from its garret-peg, and lay shivered, even as glass.

A cloud fell upon Seven Dials; dread and terror chilled her many minstrels: and why--and wherefore?

At that dread moment, a ministrel from the sunny south, with barrel-organ, leapt on Dover beach! Seven Dials felt the shock: her troubadours, poor native birds, were to be out-carrolled and out-quavered, by Italian opera retailed by penn'orths to them, from the barrel-organs: and prompt to follow their masters, they let the English ballad singer sing unheard.

The Ballad-Singer has lost his occupation; yet should he not pass away unthanked, unrecompensed. We have seen him a useful minister in rude society; we have heard him a loud-mouthed advocate of party zeal, and we have seen him almost ground into silence by the southern troubadour. Yet was he the first music-seller in the land. Ye well-stocked, flourishing vendors of fashionable scores, deign to cast a look through plate glass at your poor, yet great original, bare-footed and in rags, singing, unabashed, amidst London wagon-wheels: behold the true decendant of the primative music-seller."

Charles Dickens, as Boz, long since "sketched" the Seven Dials, and at the same time and place given us his--"Meditations in Monmouth Street":--

"Seven Dials! the region of song and poetry--first effusions, and last dying speechees: hallowed by the names of Catnach and Pitts--names that will entwine themselves with costermongers, and barrel-organs, when penny magazines shall have superseded penny yards of song, and capital punishment be unknown."

Several years ago Mr. Albert Smith, who lived at Chertsey, discovered in his neighbourhood part of the Seven Dials--the column doing duty as a monument to a Royal Duchess--when he described the circumstance in a pleasant paper, entitled "Some News of a famous Old Fellow," in his "Town and Country Magazine." The communication is as follows:--

"Let us now quit the noisome mazes of St. Giles's and go out and away into the pure leafy country. Seventeen or eighteen miles from town, in the county of Surrey, is the little village of Weybridge.

One of the lions to be seen at Weybridge is Oatlands, with its large artificial grotto and bath-room, which is said--but we cannot comprehend the statement--to have cost the Duke of Newcastle, who had it built, £40,000. The late Duchess of York died at Oatlands, and lies in a small vault under Weybridge Church, wherein there is a monument, by Chantrey, to her memory. She was an excellent lady, well-loved by all the country people about her, and when she died they were anxious to put up some sort of a tribute to her memory. But the village was not able to offer a large some of money for this purpose. The good folks did their best, but the amount was still very humble, so they were obligated to dispense with the service of any eminent architect, and build up only such a monument as their means could compass. Someone told them that there was a column to be sold cheap in a stonemason's yard, which might answer their purpose. It was accordingly purchased; a coronet was placed upon its summit; and the memorial was set up on Weybridge Green, in front of the Ship Inn, at the junction of the roads leading to Oatlands, to Shepperton Lock, and to Chertsey. This column turned out to be the original one from Seven Dials.

The stone on which the dials were engraved or fixed, was sold with it. The poet Gay, however, was wrong when he spoke of its seven faces. It is hexagonal in its shape; this is accounted for by the fact that two of the streets opened into one angle. It was not wanted to assist in forming the monument, but was turned into a stepping stone, near the adjoining inn, to assist the infirm in mounting their horses, and there it now lies, having sunk by degrees into the earth; but its original form can still be easily surmised. It may be about three feet in diameter.

The column itself is about thirty feet high and two feet in diameter, displaying no great architectural taste. It is surmounted by a coronet, and the base is enclosed by a light iron railing. An appropriate inscription on one side of the base indicates its erection in the year 1822, on the others are some lines to the memory of the Duchess.

Relics undergo strange transpositions. The obelisk from the mystic solitudes of the Nile to the centre of the Place de la Concorde, in bustling Paris--the monuments of Nineveh to the regions of Great Russell Street--the frescoes from the long, dark, and silent Pompeii to the bright and noisy Naples--all these are odd changes. But in proportion to their importance, not much behind them is that old column from the crowded dismal regions of St. Giles to the sunny tranquil Green of Weybridge."

We are now approaching--"The beginning of the end"--of our history. We were not taken by surprise as we know that "coming events cast their shadows before," and that:--

Often do the spirits Of great events stride on before the events, And in to-day already walks to-morrow.

Therefore we were well prepared to read in the newspapers of October, 1883, the following paragraph:--

The old-established printing and publishing house formerly occupied by James Catnach, 2, Monmouth-court, Seven Dials, will soon be amongst the lost landmarks of London. The Metropolitan Board of Works have purchased the house, and it is to be pulled down to make the new street from Leicester-square to New Oxford-street. The business of the literature of the street was founded by James Catnach in 1813, who retired in 1840. The ballads and broadsides he printed, many of them illustrated with cuts by Bewick, helped to furnish the people with news and political and social ballads for generations.

All that is fortold in the above has since taken place, Monmouth-court and the house and shop wherein old Jemmy Catnach established the "Catnach Press" in the year 1813 has disappeared to make way for the "New Thoroughfare" from Leicester-square to New Oxford street, and:--

THE CATNACH PRESS

removed by Mr. W. S. Fortey--Catnach's successor--to Great St. Andrew-street, Bloomsbury, W.C.

_O tempora! O mores!_