The Uncommercial Traveller

by Dickens, Charles

  favourite retreats to decided advantage.

  Among these, City Churchyards hold a high place. Such strange

  churchyards hide in the City of London; churchyards sometimes so

  entirely detached from churches, always so pressed upon by houses;

  so small, so rank, so silent, so forgotten, except by the few

  people who ever look down into them from their smoky windows. As I

  stand peeping in through the iron gates and rails, I can peel the

  rusty metal off, like bark from an old tree. The illegible

  tombstones are all lop-sided, the grave-mounds lost their shape in

  the rains of a hundred years ago, the Lombardy Poplar or Plane-Tree

  that was once a drysalter's daughter and several common-councilmen,

  has withered like those worthies, and its departed leaves are dust

  beneath it. Contagion of slow ruin overhangs the place. The

  discoloured tiled roofs of the environing buildings stand so awry,

  that they can hardly be proof against any stress of weather. Old

  crazy stacks of chimneys seem to look down as they overhang,

  dubiously calculating how far they will have to fall. In an angle

  of the walls, what was once the tool-house of the grave-digger rots

  away, encrusted with toadstools. Pipes and spouts for carrying off

  the rain from the encompassing gables, broken or feloniously cut

  for old lead long ago, now let the rain drip and splash as it list,

  upon the weedy earth. Sometimes there is a rusty pump somewhere

  near, and, as I look in at the rails and meditate, I hear it

  working under an unknown hand with a creaking protest: as though

  the departed in the churchyard urged, 'Let us lie here in peace;

  don't suck us up and drink us!'

  One of my best beloved churchyards, I call the churchyard of Saint

  Ghastly Grim; touching what men in general call it, I have no

  information. It lies at the heart of the City, and the Blackwall

  Railway shrieks at it daily. It is a small small churchyard, with

  a ferocious, strong, spiked iron gate, like a jail. This gate is

  ornamented with skulls and cross-bones, larger than the life,

  wrought in stone; but it likewise came into the mind of Saint

  Ghastly Grim, that to stick iron spikes a-top of the stone skulls,

  as though they were impaled, would be a pleasant device. Therefore

  the skulls grin aloft horribly, thrust through and through with

  iron spears. Hence, there is attraction of repulsion for me in

  Saint Ghastly Grim, and, having often contemplated it in the

  daylight and the dark, I once felt drawn towards it in a

  thunderstorm at midnight. 'Why not?' I said, in self-excuse. 'I

  have been to see the Colosseum by the light of the moon; is it

  worse to go to see Saint Ghastly Grim by the light of the

  lightning?' I repaired to the Saint in a hackney cab, and found

  the skulls most effective, having the air of a public execution,

  and seeming, as the lightning flashed, to wink and grin with the

  pain of the spikes. Having no other person to whom to impart my

  satisfaction, I communicated it to the driver. So far from being

  responsive, he surveyed me - he was naturally a bottled-nosed, redfaced

  man - with a blanched countenance. And as he drove me back,

  he ever and again glanced in over his shoulder through the little

  front window of his carriage, as mistrusting that I was a fare

  originally from a grave in the churchyard of Saint Ghastly Grim,

  who might have flitted home again without paying.

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  Sometimes, the queer Hall of some queer Company gives upon a

  churchyard such as this, and, when the Livery dine, you may hear

  them (if you are looking in through the iron rails, which you never

  are when I am) toasting their own Worshipful prosperity.

  Sometimes, a wholesale house of business, requiring much room for

  stowage, will occupy one or two or even all three sides of the

  enclosing space, and the backs of bales of goods will lumber up the

  windows, as if they were holding some crowded trade-meeting of

  themselves within. Sometimes, the commanding windows are all

  blank, and show no more sign of life than the graves below - not so

  much, for THEY tell of what once upon a time was life undoubtedly.

  Such was the surrounding of one City churchyard that I saw last

  summer, on a Volunteering Saturday evening towards eight of the

  clock, when with astonishment I beheld an old old man and an old

  old woman in it, making hay. Yes, of all occupations in this

  world, making hay! It was a very confined patch of churchyard

  lying between Gracechurch-street and the Tower, capable of

  yielding, say an apronful of hay. By what means the old old man

  and woman had got into it, with an almost toothless hay-making

  rake, I could not fathom. No open window was within view; no

  window at all was within view, sufficiently near the ground to have

  enabled their old legs to descend from it; the rusty churchyardgate

  was locked, the mouldy church was locked. Gravely among the

  graves, they made hay, all alone by themselves. They looked like

  Time and his wife. There was but the one rake between them, and

  they both had hold of it in a pastorally-loving manner, and there

  was hay on the old woman's black bonnet, as if the old man had

  recently been playful. The old man was quite an obsolete old man,

  in knee-breeches and coarse grey stockings, and the old woman wore

  mittens like unto his stockings in texture and in colour. They

  took no heed of me as I looked on, unable to account for them. The

  old woman was much too bright for a pew-opener, the old man much

  too meek for a beadle. On an old tombstone in the foreground

  between me and them, were two cherubim; but for those celestial

  embellishments being represented as having no possible use for

  knee-breeches, stockings, or mittens, I should have compared them

  with the hay-makers, and sought a likeness. I coughed and awoke

  the echoes, but the hay-makers never looked at me. They used the

  rake with a measured action, drawing the scanty crop towards them;

  and so I was fain to leave them under three yards and a half of

  darkening sky, gravely making hay among the graves, all alone by

  themselves. Perhaps they were Spectres, and I wanted a Medium.

  In another City churchyard of similar cramped dimensions, I saw,

  that selfsame summer, two comfortable charity children. They were

  making love - tremendous proof of the vigour of that immortal

  article, for they were in the graceful uniform under which English

  Charity delights to hide herself - and they were overgrown, and

  their legs (his legs at least, for I am modestly incompetent to

  speak of hers) were as much in the wrong as mere passive weakness

  of character can render legs. O it was a leaden churchyard, but no

  doubt a golden ground to those young persons! I first saw them on

  a Saturday evening, and, perceiving from their occupation that

  Saturday evening was their trysting-time, I returned that evening

  se'nnight, and renewed the contemplation of them. They came there

  to shake the bits of matting whic
h were spread in the church

  aisles, and they afterwards rolled them up, he rolling his end, she

  rolling hers, until they met, and over the two once divided now

  united rolls - sweet emblem! - gave and received a chaste salute.

  It was so refreshing to find one of my faded churchyards blooming

  into flower thus, that I returned a second time, and a third, and

  ultimately this befell:- They had left the church door open, in

  their dusting and arranging. Walking in to look at the church, I

  became aware, by the dim light, of him in the pulpit, of her in the

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  reading-desk, of him looking down, of her looking up, exchanging

  tender discourse. Immediately both dived, and became as it were

  non-existent on this sphere. With an assumption of innocence I

  turned to leave the sacred edifice, when an obese form stood in the

  portal, puffily demanding Joseph, or in default of Joseph, Celia.

  Taking this monster by the sleeve, and luring him forth on pretence

  of showing him whom he sought, I gave time for the emergence of

  Joseph and Celia, who presently came towards us in the churchyard,

  bending under dusty matting, a picture of thriving and unconscious

  industry. It would be superfluous to hint that I have ever since

  deemed this the proudest passage in my life.

  But such instances, or any tokens of vitality, are rare indeed in

  my City churchyards. A few sparrows occasionally try to raise a

  lively chirrup in their solitary tree - perhaps, as taking a

  different view of worms from that entertained by humanity - but

  they are flat and hoarse of voice, like the clerk, the organ, the

  bell, the clergyman, and all the rest of the Church-works when they

  are wound up for Sunday. Caged larks, thrushes, or blackbirds,

  hanging in neighbouring courts, pour forth their strains

  passionately, as scenting the tree, trying to break out, and see

  leaves again before they die, but their song is Willow, Willow - of

  a churchyard cast. So little light lives inside the churches of my

  churchyards, when the two are co-existent, that it is often only by

  an accident and after long acquaintance that I discover their

  having stained glass in some odd window. The westering sun slants

  into the churchyard by some unwonted entry, a few prismatic tears

  drop on an old tombstone, and a window that I thought was only

  dirty, is for the moment all bejewelled. Then the light passes and

  the colours die. Though even then, if there be room enough for me

  to fall back so far as that I can gaze up to the top of the Church

  Tower, I see the rusty vane new burnished, and seeming to look out

  with a joyful flash over the sea of smoke at the distant shore of

  country.

  Blinking old men who are let out of workhouses by the hour, have a

  tendency to sit on bits of coping stone in these churchyards,

  leaning with both hands on their sticks and asthmatically gasping.

  The more depressed class of beggars too, bring hither broken meats,

  and munch. I am on nodding terms with a meditative turncock who

  lingers in one of them, and whom I suspect of a turn for poetry;

  the rather, as he looks out of temper when he gives the fire-plug a

  disparaging wrench with that large tuning-fork of his which would

  wear out the shoulder of his coat, but for a precautionary piece of

  inlaid leather. Fire-ladders, which I am satisfied nobody knows

  anything about, and the keys of which were lost in ancient times,

  moulder away in the larger churchyards, under eaves like wooden

  eyebrows; and so removed are those corners from the haunts of men

  and boys, that once on a fifth of November I found a 'Guy' trusted

  to take care of himself there, while his proprietors had gone to

  dinner. Of the expression of his face I cannot report, because it

  was turned to the wall; but his shrugged shoulders and his ten

  extended fingers, appeared to denote that he had moralised in his

  little straw chair on the mystery of mortality until he gave it up

  as a bad job.

  You do not come upon these churchyards violently; there are shapes

  of transition in the neighbourhood. An antiquated news shop, or

  barber's shop, apparently bereft of customers in the earlier days

  of George the Third, would warn me to look out for one, if any

  discoveries in this respect were left for me to make. A very quiet

  court, in combination with an unaccountable dyer's and scourer's,

  would prepare me for a churchyard. An exceedingly retiring publichouse,

  with a bagatelle-board shadily visible in a sawdusty parlour

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  shaped like an omnibus, and with a shelf of punch-bowls in the bar,

  would apprise me that I stood near consecrated ground. A 'Dairy,'

  exhibiting in its modest window one very little milk-can and three

  eggs, would suggest to me the certainty of finding the poultry hard

  by, pecking at my forefathers. I first inferred the vicinity of

  Saint Ghastly Grim, from a certain air of extra repose and gloom

  pervading a vast stack of warehouses.

  From the hush of these places, it is congenial to pass into the

  hushed resorts of business. Down the lanes I like to see the carts

  and waggons huddled together in repose, the cranes idle, and the

  warehouses shut. Pausing in the alleys behind the closed Banks of

  mighty Lombard-street, it gives one as good as a rich feeling to

  think of the broad counters with a rim along the edge, made for

  telling money out on, the scales for weighing precious metals, the

  ponderous ledgers, and, above all, the bright copper shovels for

  shovelling gold. When I draw money, it never seems so much money

  as when it is shovelled at me out of a bright copper shovel. I

  like to say, 'In gold,' and to see seven pounds musically pouring

  out of the shovel, like seventy; the Bank appearing to remark to me

  - I italicise APPEARING - 'if you want more of this yellow earth,

  we keep it in barrows at your service.' To think of the banker's

  clerk with his deft finger turning the crisp edges of the Hundred-

  Pound Notes he has taken in a fat roll out of a drawer, is again to

  hear the rustling of that delicious south-cash wind. 'How will you

  have it?' I once heard this usual question asked at a Bank Counter

  of an elderly female, habited in mourning and steeped in

  simplicity, who answered, open-eyed, crook-fingered, laughing with

  expectation, 'Anyhow!' Calling these things to mind as I stroll

  among the Banks, I wonder whether the other solitary Sunday man I

  pass, has designs upon the Banks. For the interest and mystery of

  the matter, I almost hope he may have, and that his confederate may

  be at this moment taking impressions of the keys of the iron

  closets in wax, and that a delightful robbery may be in course of

  transaction. About College-hill, Mark-lane, and so on towards the

  Tower, and Dockward, the deserted wine-merchants' cellars are fine

  subjects for consideration; but the deserted money-cellars of the

  Bankers, and their plate-cellars, and their
jewel-cellars, what

  subterranean regions of the Wonderful Lamp are these! And again:

  possibly some shoeless boy in rags, passed through this street

  yesterday, for whom it is reserved to be a Banker in the fulness of

  time, and to be surpassing rich. Such reverses have been, since

  the days of Whittington; and were, long before. I want to know

  whether the boy has any foreglittering of that glittering fortune

  now, when he treads these stones, hungry. Much as I also want to

  know whether the next man to be hanged at Newgate yonder, had any

  suspicion upon him that he was moving steadily towards that fate,

  when he talked so much about the last man who paid the same great

  debt at the same small Debtors' Door.

  Where are all the people who on busy working-days pervade these

  scenes? The locomotive banker's clerk, who carries a black

  portfolio chained to him by a chain of steel, where is he? Does he

  go to bed with his chain on - to church with his chain on - or does

  he lay it by? And if he lays it by, what becomes of his portfolio

  when he is unchained for a holiday? The wastepaper baskets of

  these closed counting-houses would let me into many hints of

  business matters if I had the exploration of them; and what secrets

  of the heart should I discover on the 'pads' of the young clerks -

  the sheets of cartridge-paper and blotting-paper interposed between

  their writing and their desks! Pads are taken into confidence on

  the tenderest occasions, and oftentimes when I have made a business

  visit, and have sent in my name from the outer office, have I had

  it forced on my discursive notice that the officiating young

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  gentleman has over and over again inscribed AMELIA, in ink of

  various dates, on corners of his pad. Indeed, the pad may be

  regarded as the legitimate modern successor of the old forest-tree:

  whereon these young knights (having no attainable forest nearer

  than Epping) engrave the names of their mistresses. After all, it

  is a more satisfactory process than carving, and can be oftener

  repeated. So these courts in their Sunday rest are courts of Love

  Omnipotent (I rejoice to bethink myself), dry as they look. And

  here is Garraway's, bolted and shuttered hard and fast! It is

  possible to imagine the man who cuts the sandwiches, on his back in