Later novelists have seen the river as a less sinister place. Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Grahame, for example, made it the setting for fantasy and fun. The work of Charles Kingsley and Jerome K. Jerome, too, is filled with the freedom and infantilism of the river world.
Sheerness in wartime: Barrage Balloons by Eric Ravilious.
Hadleigh Castle: the mouth of the Thames—morning after a stormy night, by John Constable. This is where the song of the river ends and it flows into the sea.
In Conrad’s novel Marlow and his companion looked at the river “not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and departs for ever, but in the august light of abiding memories.” The air above Gravesend was “dark, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom” the gloom lay above London, as an impression of that city, but still “the very mist on the Essex marshes was like a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded rises inland, and draping the low shores in diaphanous folds.”
In his volume of “memories and impressions,” The Mirror of the Sea (1906), Conrad devotes many pages to the experience of the Thames estuary. For him it evinced a “strange air of mysteriousness” which is associated with its historical presence; it was that part of the river first glimpsed by Roman galleys, and indeed by those first visitors from the newly estranged landmass of the European continent. On the banks of the estuary Conrad observed “slightly domed roofs…as if it were a village of Central African huts imitated in iron.” There is another intimation here of The Heart of Darkness, suggesting that the Thames still possessed a primitive or primeval aspect. So Marlow, in that novel, expands on the darkness.
He imagines a Roman citizen voyaging along the river for the first time. For him the Thames would have seemed “the very end of the world, a sea the colour of lead, a sky the colour of smoke…sand-banks, marshes, forests, savages.” In these terms he invokes the riverscape as one of horror “in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also the detestable.” And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. “The fascination of the abomination—you know, imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.” The alien nature of the river has never been more powerfully evoked. It might almost be the river before human memory.
Conrad believed that, of all the rivers of Britain, the Thames “is the only one I think open to romantic feeling” in his lifetime the banks downriver were largely deserted, provoking “the suggestion of mysterious vastness caused by the configuration of the shore.” It was a sensation all the more acute since, no more than 25 miles away, there stood the largest city on the face of the earth. It is a sensation that can still be enjoyed, in the early morning or evening light, if you sail down from Gravesend towards the open sea. In the vastness of the river by the estuary Conrad observed that the “traffic of the port,” the myriad craft on the water, “becomes insignificant” in more recent times, when that traffic has diminished beyond reckoning, the sense of emptiness is almost overwhelming. There are occasions, particularly late at night, when you may believe yourself to be aboard the only boat on the river.
The other chroniclers, or votaries, of the late Victorian and Edwardian river are imbued with a sense of mystery rather than a sense of savagery or of terror. This may be in part due to the new role which the Thames played in the consciousness of the age, as an avenue of recreation rather than of trade; but it must be in large measure because Kenneth Grahame, Lewis Carroll and Jerome K. Jerome had moved upriver from the estuary and the Pool of London with their attendant shadows.
Jerome was essentially a comic chronicler in the Punch mould, but one who all his life was affiliated with the Thames. He lived along stretches of the river at various times of his life. In the 1860s he lived in Narrow Street, Limehouse, for example, and then in later life moved to a new apartment block a few yards north of Battersea Bridge. In his memoirs he wrote that “most of my life, I have dwelt in the neighbourhood of the river,” and indeed he is another of those who need to remain close to the Thames. He asked that his ashes be buried in the churchyard at Ewelme, a small village not very far from the river in Oxfordshire.
His Three Men in a Boat (1889) was originally supposed to be a topographical and historical guide to the Thames, but by indirection or design it turned into a comic masterpiece. The three travellers embark at Kingston for the journey upriver. But although it is predominantly a voyage of farce and pantomime, there are elements of the dream fugue within it as Jerome meditates upon the historical past and upon the spirits of the river. The rain falling upon the water has “the sound as of a woman weeping low as in some dark chamber” while the woods alongside the river “stand like ghosts upon the margin…a spirit-haunted water through the land of vain regrets.” There are stretches of the river that for him are replete with “vanished forms and faces.” It is that note of regretfulness, of loose and sentimental nostalgia, that keeps on breaking through the overt gaiety of the narrative. That is why, throughout the book, the adults behave like children.
Childhood is often associated with the river. The water nymph, Leucothea, was also the patroness of childbirth. In Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies (1863), the Thames becomes a perpetual playground for children. Its refrain is “Play by me, bathe in me, mother and child.” In early photographs of the river, particularly in its London stretches, there seem always to be children upon the foreshore—playing, swimming or searching. In the 1937 panorama of the river, commissioned by the Port of London Authority, there are the figures of children to be seen at Gun Wharf and Eagle Wharf, Foundry Wharf and Snowdon’s Wharf; there seems to be a tiny mud-lark scrutinising the river at Wapping New Stairs. Wherever there was access to the river, the children gathered. There used to be a pleasure beach beside Tower Bridge, where the children also played. And at low tide, Gabriel’s Reach in Southwark still possesses a stretch of sand where children meet.
But of course there are dangers in the river. By the early twentieth century access to the river by means of the ancient watermen’s stairs had been largely denied, for fear of the children drowning in the sometimes treacherous waters. There is a notice still to be seen at the top of some stairs, “Children Must Not Play on These Steps.” There was a legend, at Eton, that a boy would be drowned in the Thames every third year. The bodies of children have often been dumped in the river. Innocence, and the death of innocence, are part of the story of the Thames.
Infancy is connected with the return of involuntary memories. That is why the river of remembrance is also the river of childhood. In Carroll and in Jerome and in Grahame it is the river of infantilism and of reversion to an earlier state of enchantment. If we may employ the language of the late nineteenth century, it is the gate into a far-off land. In the immediate vicinity of the river, adults may become children again. The Thames becomes the nurse, or the mother, in whose embrace the old can dream of bliss. So on the cool and rather wet afternoon of 4 July 1862, when Charles Lutwidge Dodgson took the three small daughters of Dean Liddell boating upon the Thames, upriver from Oxford to Godstow, he began to extemporise a story on the adventures of Alice underground. Instead of his customary clerical black he wore white flannel trousers, like T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock.
A companion on this trip, Robin Duckworth, who rowed stroke as Dodgson rowed bow, recalled that “the story was actually composed and spoken over my shoulder for the benefit of Alice Liddell.” “Is this an extempore romance of yours?” Duckworth asked. “Yes,” Dodgson replied, “I’m inventing it as we go along.” Dodgson and the children would sometimes picnic on Lock Wood Island, an eyot in the middle of the river, and sometimes in the bankside woods of Nuneham Park. Alice Liddell explained in later life that “most of Mr. Dodgson’s stories were told to us on river expeditions to Nuneham or Godstow.” There “we were told stories after luncheon that transported us into Fairyland.” If she had been acquainted with the mythology of the river, she would have known that she was there already.
And
so the narrative begins: “Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank…” The original version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a manuscript story entitled “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground” (1864), had made more specific reference to its origin. The pool of Alice’s tears, in the first chapter, becomes by some strange process of association a version of the Thames; it becomes a river “fringed with rushes and forget-me-nots,” just like the Thames at Godstow, so that we may speak of a river of tears.
At the conclusion of the original version, too, Alice has a vision of the Thames at Oxford. “She saw an ancient city, and a quiet river winding near it along the plain, and up the stream went slowly gliding a boat with a merry party of children on board—she could hear their voices and laughter like music over the water…” The kinship of the river and innocence, of the river and purity, could not be better expressed. But this vision of the river is touched by regret and nostalgia as “the boat wound slowly along, beneath the bright summer day, with its merry crew and its music of voices and laughter, till it passed round one of the many turnings of the stream, and she saw it no more.” The allusion to the “ancient city” prepares the reader for this river of time, time passed and time passing, so that within the enshrinement of childhood there are intimations of age and experience. The children pass out of sight.
Yet the Thames was also the cradle for books in which, as Virginia Woolf put it, we must become children. And on the river Dodgson himself could become a child again, as he often wished—his persistent stammer gone, his adult logic transcended. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871) are narratives of dream and vision and nonsense. One part of the enchantment of the river lies in the hope of escaping from time. The author once reminisced about “the cloudless blue above, the watery mirror below, the boat drifting idly on its way, the tinkle of the drops that fell from the oars….” This is the river as stasis, a paradisal moment prolonged within the eternity of inspiration. There is another connection with the Thames. William Morris once described the experience of boating on the river in terms of “the smallness of the scale of everything, the short reaches and the speedy change of the banks, [that] gives one a feeling of going somewhere, of coming to something strange, a feeling of adventure I have not felt in bigger waters.” Is this not an apt description of Alice’s own adventures? The river seems to encourage the foreshortened perspective and idiosyncratic detail of dream narratives:
And home we steer, a merry crew,
Beneath the setting sun.
The same spirit of nostalgia and of dream fills Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908), another book ostensibly for children that has become the reading of adults. The book was, for example, a favourite of Stanley Spencer. By curious coincidence Grahame was sent as a child to live with his grandmother in Cookham itself. At the age of six he explored the river-bank there, and observed the otters and other animals that lived beside it; his uncle, the curate of Cookham Dean’s church, took him boating upon the river to Bisham and other riverside haunts. Forty years later Grahame returned with his wife and son to Cookham, and inspired by this place he began telling the stories of Toad and Badger to his child. But, like the river, from small beginnings it grew and grew. After the suicide of his son he left Cookham, and retired some miles upriver to Pangbourne where he remained for the rest of his life. After his death, the local children decorated the parish church with willows gathered from the river-bank. On his grave were inscribed the words “To the beautiful memory of Kenneth Grahame, husband of Elspeth and father of Alastair, who passed the River on the 6th July, 1932.” He would have agreed with Rat’s encomium upon the river. “It’s my world, and I don’t want any other. What it hasn’t got is not worth having, and what it doesn’t know is not worth knowing. Lord! The times we’ve had together!’
In The Wind in the Willows there is no Alice, the “dream child,” but there are dream creatures of another kind. Yet Mole and Badger live in a recognisable riverscape. The old ice house in Bisham Woods is popularly supposed to have been the model of Toad’s dungeon, and the Edwardian boathouse on Bourne End Reach has similar claims to being Toad’s boathouse. Toad Hall is modelled upon the watermill by the river at Mapledurham, or perhaps upon Lullebrook Manor; the Wild Wood of the novel is certainly an image of Quarry Wood by the Thames near Bourne End. This was the wood that, in Grahame’s vision, was once the site of a great and powerful city that had been built to “last for ever.” But its inhabitants left, or were forced to leave, and the city itself was slowly levelled by “the strong winds and persistent rains.” We have noticed before that the river encourages, if it does not actually inspire, such meditations on vanished cities and civilisations. It is as if the cultures of the people who once lived beside its banks—with their cursus monuments and their stone barrows—have left their traces in the consciousness of humankind. As Grahame puts it in the first chapter of his novel, “the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea.” Grahame had heard the call of the sacred Thames.
CHAPTER 39
The Song of the River
There was a great celebration when, on 17 July 1717, a royal barge carried George I and some of his companions from Lambeth to Chelsea. He was accompanied by another barge filled with musicians, who played a piece of music especially commissioned from Handel. It was called Water Music, and is without doubt the most famous composition associated with the Thames. It has in a sense become the music of the river. The Daily Courant of 19 July reported that the king enjoyed the music so much that
he caus’d it to be plaid over three times in the going and returning. At Eleven his Majesty went a-shore at Chelsea where a Supper was prepar’d, and then there was another very fine Consort of Musick, which lasted till 2; after which his Majesty came again into his Barge and return’d the same Way, the Musick continuing to play till he landed.
It has often been claimed in retrospect that the music was played in order to drown out the vulgar abuse of the Thames watermen, their egalitarian sentiments hallowed by tradition on the river, but that was not in fact the reason for Water Music. It was an attempt to associate George from Hanover with one of the sources of English identity and English power. The combination of the Thames and the music was so powerful, in fact, that it was used to introduce Humphrey Jennings’s wartime film entitled Words for Battle (1941). The myth of the Thames runs deeply through the national psyche.
There is another music of the river. What is the song of the Thames? Its endless melody may be glimpsed in all the poetical legends and myths of the river. It is the place where many of the English stories of time and history have their origin—in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, in Drayton’s Polyolbion, in Pope and in Milton, in Marvell and in Shelley. In Spenser, the river came to represent the identity of the nation. The Thames conflated genres and forms to create a complete statement. It embodied harmony, and unity. It was an emblem of innocence, and benevolence, and prosperity. It became a metaphor for poetry itself. So there have always been the poets of the river. There has always been a poetry of the river. The name and nature of water have always been fluid, created with liquid consonants: water—aqua—apa—wasser—eau. Water is the mistress of flowing language, of language without interruption or surcease. The river has been said to sing as it makes its way towards the sea; it harbours what in The Revolt of Islam (1818) Shelley called a “sound like many voices sweet.”
The first poet of the Thames is arguably John Gower, of the fourteenth century, who is reputed to have financed the building of St. Mary Overie (presently Southwark Cathedral) on the south bank of the river where he lies buried. He is the earliest poet to mention the Thames, in lines from the prologue of Confessio Amantis (1386–90). He explains how he encountered Richard II upon the river:
As I came nighe
Out of my bote, when he me syghe<
br />
He bade me come into his barge.
But the true poet of the Thames, in that century, must remain Geoffrey Chaucer; he was born by the river, lived by the river, and earned his living from the river. His house lay in the street that ran parallel to the river in the ward of Vintry. He cannot be imagined without the background of the Thames. He would have seen, and heard, it every day of his life in London. He chose to live near or by the river until his death, retiring first to Greenwich or Deptford and then later to Westminster. He mentions the first two riverine settings in the prologue to “The Reeve’s Tale” of The Canterbury Tales (1392–1400):
Lo Depeford, and it is half-wey pryme!
Lo Grenewych, ther many a shrewe is inne!
It were al tyme thy tale to bigynne.
Chaucer was the supervisor of the custom tariffs at the Port of London, in which capacity he heard all the stories of the river and the sea. He was one of those poets who seem destined to be part of the river, which flowed through their being as powerfully as it flowed through the city itself.
There is indeed something stirring about the relationship of London poets, and London writers, to the Thames. We may think of Chaucer himself, of More, of Milton, of Pope, all haunting the same riverside streets—all living at various epochs within a hundred yards or so of each other, and all living in later life by the water. There is the artist, Turner, too, the great Londoner and observer of the river; we can trace Turner quoting Pope on the Thames, Pope quoting Milton, and Milton quoting Chaucer. There is a continuity, inspired and maintained by the river itself.
And in that hallowed London company we can also glimpse the form of William Blake, for whom the Thames was the river of eternity. He lived beside it at Lambeth, where at Hercules Buildings he could see over the marshes to the water. He crossed the newly built Waterloo Bridge every time he wanted to enter the city, and particularly marked the presence of the Albion Mills on that bridge’s approach. They became the “blackened mills” of his poetry. He died by the river, too, in Fountain Court off the Strand. Visitors to his lodging there remarked upon the river gleaming at the end of the alley. Blake himself described it as “like a bar of gold.” A twentieth-century poet, George Barker, was made aware of Blake’s presence on the river. In Calamiterror (1937) he records a vision of
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