Thames

by Peter Ackroyd

  That is why the introduction of the Thames in his Itinerary is more than the product of incidental observation; after the Dissolution of the Monasteries he became Henry VIII’s court antiquarian, charged with the labour of preserving fragments and records of what had already become a ruined history. It was this, perhaps, that eventually drove him to madness. But his especial love and regard for the river, as an historical as well as a literary force, prompted him to invest great symbolic significance in the very fact and course of the Thames. For him it represented an historical landscape that still existed, flowing beside the ruined abbeys and the churches and maintaining the identity of the kingdom. The Thames became a witness to the past that was in danger of being altogether destroyed.

  This gives all the more power and poignancy to his prose descriptions of the Thames in the Itinerary:

  three miles above Maidenhead on the Berkshire bank of the Thames is Bisham Priory, and a further mile upstream is Hurley, a cell of Westminster Abbey. On the Buckinghamshire side there was a priory of nuns at Little Marlow, two miles above Maidenhead…One mile up the river above Bisham, on the Buckinghamshire side, is Medmenham, a cell of Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire.

  Bisham Abbey was “dissolved” the priory of Hurley was suppressed; the last prioress of the nunnery at Little Marlow, Margaret Vernon, had gone by the early 1540s; Woburn Abbey was granted to Sir John Russell in 1547. As Leland observed, and wrote about, the sacred edifices of the Thames they were being destroyed or converted or pillaged. Only the Thames offered continuity.

  Leland’s notes, unfinished by reason of his lunacy, were then taken up by John Camden and William Harrison. Harrison in the Description of the Islande of Britayne (1587), and Camden, in his Britannia (1586), continued Leland’s topographical work in a more voluminous and extensive manner. The eleventh chapter of the Description of the Islande of Britayne is entitled “The Description of the Thames, and such Riuers as Fall into the Same.” Of the Thames Harrison writes that “I must needs content my selfe with such obseruations as I haue either obtained by mine owne experience, or gathered from time to time out of other mens writings.” His is a notably more restrained account than that of Leland, eschewing mythic complexity for the pleasures of observation. He dismisses legends, and the work of armchair topographers such as Polydore Vergil. He relies to a large extent upon the poetry of fact. Harrison is the first, for example, to give an accurate account of the double tides upon the Thames. He also adds incidental detail which is all the more convincing for being apparently random—“after a great landfloud, you shall take haddocks with your hands beneath the [London] bridge, as they flote aloft vpon the water, whose eies are so blinded with the thicknesse of that element that they cannot see where to become.” He describes the “infinit number of swans daillie to be seene vpon this riuer,” and imparts the interesting information that there are two thousand wherries and small boats upon the Thames that maintain some three thousand poor watermen. He is the first accurate chronicler of the Thames.

  In his Britannia Camden moves between landscape and riverscape and history so that all of them cohere within his central vision of the Thames as the agent of unity. His narrative crackles with history and with historical reference; whereas Leland’s vision was one of barely suppressed dissolution and dismay, that of Camden is replete with references suggesting that the past is still enshrined within the contours of the present. So he will state that “crossing the river, and returning to the source of the Thames and the mouth of the Severn, shall visit the DOBUNI who formerly occupied the present Gloucester and Oxford shires.” He is identifying the river with the ancient past of England. The Thames becomes a principle of historical order no less than an aspect of English topography.

  It is impossible adequately to quote from a narrative so dense and specific, with the allusions moving rapidly from the ancient tribes of the regions to the reigns of Henry V or Edward III, from the derivation of the names of towns to the quality of the local pastureland. It is an encyclopaedia, a compendium and an anthology rather than a topography, but it has one clear theme—the Thames is the great unifying force which encompasses everything. It makes everything cohere.

  The river also acts as the line of narrative, so that Camden will follow its course from county to county in order to rehearse the events that happened along its shores. The Thames leads him forward, prompting him into speech and celebration. Like so many writers of the river Camden introduces verse within his prose narrative, and in one section composes a poem entitled De Connubio Tamae et Isis—“On the Marriage of the Thame and Isis.” In this poem Camden’s Muse travels from Reading to Windsor, from Richmond to Kent, and from Gloucester to Oxford. It is not topographically accurate but, in terms of Camden’s concern with natural progress and historical change, it is imaginatively precise. The fact that both Leland and Camden use a mixture of verse and prose to elucidate the meaning of the river is in itself interesting—it suggests that their work can accommodate the poetry of vision and the prose of history, and that somehow the river itself is full and vital enough to embrace both concepts. The river of vision and the river of history are thus the same river, running through their books.

  From his prison window in the Tower Sir Walter Raleigh could see as far as Blackfriars Stairs, and the stretch of the Thames from there to the place of his incarceration. He spent twelve years in close association with the river, having been sentenced in 1603, and in that long period of forced propinquity wrote his History of the World (1614) in which the river becomes a central part of his design. In the beginning of his study, the four rivers of Paradise are a metaphor for separation, and for decline from the source or Eden; yet the flowing water is also an emblem of historical destiny or what at a later date would be called historical necessity. The rushing water is an image of fate. In his historical account the progress of humankind is the progress of the river. Nimrod tells his followers “to resort and succour one another by the river.” The first cities of the world were built by rivers so that “Nineveh, Charran, Reseph, Canneh, Ur in Chaldea, and the other first peopled cities, were all founded upon these navigable rivers, or their branches.” In this profound intuition, he has subsequently been proved correct. Noah, surmounting the Flood, is the paradigm or archetype of later men who “lived safely upon the waters.” The river thus becomes the central fact of human history, and it might be observed that Noah in his Ark resembles Raleigh in his prison cell overlooking the waters of the Thames. In his eight volumes he had only reached 130 BC, but within those volumes he had charted the flow of history.

  His nickname, given to him by Elizabeth I, was “Water.” While living at Durham House, overlooking the Thames, he had dreamed of the rivers of the golden Americas. The Thames might have become for him the Orinoco. For Raleigh the sixteenth-century Thames was an image of human destiny and of modern life. Who came there but sovereigns, and travellers, and explorers, and merchants? So the image of the river as the highway of life deeply imprinted itself upon his imagination. There is one irony. The river affected Raleigh’s own history in a highly individual manner. After a period of house arrest, as a result of the failure of the expedition to find Orinoco gold, he attempted in 1618 to escape downriver from Tower Dock to the open sea. But he or his mariners had miscalculated the tide; they could not reach so far as Gravesend, returned to Greenwich and, floundering there, were taken. He had been thwarted by the Thames itself.

  There are many stray literary associations with the Thames. Samuel Richardson lived in a house by the river at Parson’s Green; Fielding wrote Tom Jones at Twickenham, by the river in Holly Road, while Francis Bacon lived in the original Twickenham Park in 1593. R. D. Blackmore wrote Lorna Doone while living at Teddington, and Gay wrote The Beggar’s Opera at Ham. Edward Gibbon was born by the river at Putney; he went to school there and at Kingston-upon-Thames.

  The characters of fiction—outcasts such as Magwitch and Dr. Fu-Manchu among them—also live and have their being beside the rive
r. Of Fu-Manchu, Sax Rohmer wrote, in The Book of Fu-Manchu (1929), that the Thames was “his highway, his line of communication along which he moved his mysterious forces…Always he made his headquarters upon the river.” It is not generally recalled that sections of Bram Stoker’s melodrama, Dracula (1897), are set in the estuarial regions of the Thames. Dracula crossed at this low stretch of the river, on his way to Bermondsey after being denied access to his house at Purfleet. He would have hastened down Purfleet Stairs and taken the ferry at low tide to the south bank at some time before one o’clock in the morning. It was of course said of the vampire that “he can only pass running water at the slack or the flood of the tide.” The Purfleet Stairs remained, near the Royal Hotel, until recent times.

  It is from the vantage of the estuary that Stoker described the setting for one of the undead, with “the wonderful smoky beauty of a sunset over London, with its lurid lights and inky shadows and all the marvellous tints that come on foul clouds even as on foul water.” Jonathan Harker had found for the count a house at Purfleet, on a by-road, surrounded by “a high wall, of ancient structure built of heavy stones” in its grounds were many trees as well as a “deep-dark-looking pond or small lake, evidently fed by some springs.” This is the landscape of the estuary.

  Some of the greatest writers of the Thames in fact belong to the nineteenth century. We may refrain from placing Pierce Egan in their company, although his Pilgrims of the Thames (1839) was exceedingly popular in the author’s lifetime; it is a mixture of prose and verse that, as we have seen, is the inevitable literary accompaniment to the Thames. And it is couched in Egan’s vivacious and picaresque style, perfectly suited to the taste of the early nineteenth century public for whom “the THAMES—Old Father Thames—and his next door neighbour, the Ocean, combine every thing that must please and attract the coldest spectator; but to a cockney, a man born in London, if you like the expression better, unutterable delight and satisfaction.”

  For the true music of the nineteenth century we must turn to the great symbolic novelist of that century, Charles Dickens. For Dickens the Thames was essentially a river of tears and of darkness. In his earliest journalistic essays, when he was in fact imitating the style of popular urban writers such as Pierce Egan, he described the “fun” of the Thames in accounts of steam excursions and other riverine escapades. But his experience of the river was deeper and darker than that of any willed optimism. He had lost his hope beside the Thames. At the age of twelve he was put to work in a blacking factory by the river, Warren’s Blacking of 30 Hungerford Stairs. It is not too much to say that this “crazy, tumbledown old house, abutting of course on the river,” as he described it later in a private memoir, haunted his imagination. It becomes the mouldering house in Nicholas Nickleby (1839) beside a Thames wharf; it becomes the summer-house overlooking the Thames in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), “sapped and undermined by the rats” in Oliver Twist (1838) it becomes Bill Sikes’s lair at Jacob’s Island by Bermondsey.

  The river runs through Dickens’s fiction just as it runs through the city itself. This is the river which in an essay, “Down with the Tide” (1853), he characterises as “lapping at piles and posts and iron rings, hiding strange things in its mud, running away with suicides and accidentally drowned bodies faster than midnight funeral should…this river looks so broad and vast, so murky and silent, seems such an image of death in the midst of the great city’s life.” No previous writer had so well captured the lachrymose and minatory aspects of the river. It was the river of secrets, the river of mist and fog, the river of night and thus the river of mystery. In Bleak House (1853) the Thames “had a fearful look, so overcast and secret, creeping away so fast between the low flat lines of shore: so heavy with indistinct and awful shapes, both of substance and shadow: so deathlike and mysterious.” It carries the weight of London somewhere within it, so vast and so dark and so wild, and in “Night Walks” (1860), an essayistic threnody of the city gloom, Dickens describes how “the very shadow of the immensity of London seemed to lie oppressively upon the river.”

  It is hard to think of a single novel by Dickens where the Thames is not present, carrying the weight of the novelist’s obsession; yet he understood its nature intimately, too, and you could always be sure he knew in which direction the tide was moving. It is an important element of Great Expectations (1861). He once wrote that he was concerned to present “the romantic side of familiar things” but his vision of the Thames goes beyond romance and melodrama. By instinct or indirection it is linked with the ancient history of the Thames as a grave and as a place of sacrifice.

  In this context the most powerful of his riverine novels is Our Mutual Friend (1865), with its opening on the Thames between Southwark Bridge and London Bridge. Gaffer Hexam and his daughter, Lizzie, are in a “boat of dirty and disreputable appearance”—the girl rowing while her father looks out for the corpses of the drowned. The surface of the river is covered with “slime and ooze,” and its waters are dark. Lizzie looks upon it with “dread or horror.” This is the primaeval river, alien to human life; Dickens might have been describing the Styx or Acheron. In another of his essays, “Wapping Workhouse” (1861), there is a description of a young man staring across the water at Wapping Old Stairs “with a puffed sallow face, and a figure all dirty and shiny and slimy, who may have been the youngest son of his filthy old father, Thames.” He seemed like an “apparition” to Dickens, and indeed there is more than a resemblance here to the figure of the drowned man taken from the depths. The “apparition” has become a guardian spirit, or votary, of the river. Our Mutual Friend, too, is a story of resurrection—particularly of resurrection from the waters of the river. Some are lost in its depths; some rise again. The significance of Dickens’s understanding of the river lies in his conflation of ancient myth and urban reality, so that the old powers of the Thames (perhaps perceived by Dickens when he was a small child) are given expressive reality in the context of the polluted and miasmal river of the nineteenth century.

  His only successor in the late nineteenth, and early twentieth, centuries was Joseph Conrad, who understood the darker aspects of the Thames. He had a working knowledge of the river, having been employed as a merchant seaman for many years, but for him the river was the guardian of older secrets. As Marlow said in The Heart of Darkness (1899), when looking at the waters of the Thames by Gravesend, “this, also, has been one of the dark places of the earth.” It is an abiding memory of the Thames. In a more recent novel, Downriver (1991), Iain Sinclair invokes the “wooden stumps in the mud. The ruin of a jetty. The tide was turning: a slime-caked causeway, plastered in filth and sediment, pointed at Gravesend. He often boasted, without much justification, that Magwitch faltered here, escaping from the hulks; and was brought to shore.” To the wary traveller, the stretch of water here is filled with ghost images, treacherous and hazardous, out of Conrad and Dickens and all those who have sensed the darkness of the Thames.

  Photo Insert Four

  Kew Gardens: Pagoda and Bridge. Richard Wilson’s canvases display an idealised river, an aesthetic version perhaps at odds with the reality.

  Westminster Bridge, with the Lord Mayor’s Procession. Canaletto brings to the river the light and life of his native city, Venice, and makes the Thames a symbol of majesty.

  Abingdon, painted by Turner in 1805, and Rain, Steam and Speed, Turner’s vivid impression of the Great Western Railway bridge at Maidenhead. Turner lived and died by the Thames, painting it in all its aspects. The river was an instrument of his vision and a source of his inspiration.

  Artists of every generation have been drawn to the Thames. It is the most painted river in the world.

  Turner’s Willows and Rossetti’s Water Willow, with the Thames at Kelmscott in the background.

  Whistler drew the maritime life of Wapping—“a world of mud, and planks, and bales”—but, later in his career, he celebrated the Thames with crepuscular images of night and twilight. Below: The Little Pool; ab
ove: Grey and Silver.

  William Blake painted this watercolour of Old Father Thames to adorn the text of Thomas Gray’s “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College.” Blake was always drawn to ancient deities.

  Baptism. Stanley Spencer’s true subject was always the river flowing beside the village of Cookham, where he was born and where he lived until his death. The Thames became for him a token of Eden, like the original rivers that flowed throughout the world.

  “As if she were part of the refuse it had cast out, and left to corruption and decay, the girl we had followed strayed down to the river’s brink, and stood in the midst of this night-picture, lonely and still, looking at the water…There was that in her wild manner which gave me no assurance but that she would sink before my eyes.” David Copperfield.

  Trading in the corpses of the drowned: “The girl rowed, pulling a pair of sculls very easily; the man kept an eagle look-out. He had no net, hook, or line, and he could not be a fisherman.” Our Mutual Friend.

  The Water Babies: Tom and the dragonflies; Alice in Wonderland: the pool of tears; The Wind in the Willows: Ratty and Mole; Three Men in a Boat: on the Thames.

  Dickens was familiar with the tides and the currents of the Thames. As a boy he had worked in a blacking factory beside it, and he knew that it was a river of darkness and suicide.