Thames

by Peter Ackroyd

  What better place than this then could we find

  By this sweet stream that knows not of the sea

  That guesses not the city’s misery,

  This little stream whose hamlets scarce have names,

  This far-off lonely mother of the Thames?

  Wordsworth regarded the Thames with almost as much veneration as he gave to the Lake District or the Alps. The sonnet upon Westminster Bridge is sufficiently well known, but there are other intimations of the river’s imaginative potential. There is the poem, written upon the Thames near Richmond in 1790, in which he cites the “lovely visions” that are vouchsafed to him by the banks of the river:

  Till all our minds for ever flow

  As thy deep waters now are flowing.

  In this poem, and in the sonnet composed upon Westminster Bridge, he alludes to the calmness of the Thames. It possesses a “quiet soul” at once solemn and serene. In the mechanical and artificial chaos of the early-nineteenth-century city he saw in the river a site of vital communion with the natural world, perhaps the only vestige of natural life left in the capital.

  Yet there is for Wordsworth the intimation that the river encompasses both origin and ending, source and surcease, and can thus become an emblem of the eternal world. But that is perhaps too easy a formulation. In his Essay upon Epitaphs (1810) he remarks that

  origin and tendency are notions inseparably co-relative. Never did a Child stand by the side of a running Stream, pondering within himself what power was the feeder of the perpetual current, from what never-wearied sources the body of water was supplied, but he must have been inevitably propelled to follow this question by another: “Towards what abyss is it in progress? What receptacle can contain the mighty influx?”

  There is here the poet’s fascination with darkness and non-being. A poem upon the river Duddon, composed in 1820, alludes to the Thames as the larger and mightier river; yet both of them move ineluctably towards the “Deep” where they will lose both name and nature. What can be salvaged from the process of non-being, except the “Commerce freighted or triumphant War” which are maintained by the Thames? The historical process is then balanced by the natural process, achievement beside the “abyss” of loss, in a radically unstable equilibrium. It is one of the more unsettling visions of the river, doomed perpetually to lose itself while the wreckage of time lies beside its banks.

  Matthew Arnold observed all the aspects of the river’s life—“who knows them if not I?”—and his poem “Thyrsis” depicts the white and purple fritillaries that are the natural bounty of the water-meadows in the upper reaches of the Thames. He was pre-eminently the poet of the Upper Thames, and he alludes to Wychwood and to Cumner. There is also the place commemorated in “The Scholar Gypsy” (1853):

  Crossing the stripling Thames at Bablock Hythe

  Trailing in the cool stream thy fingers wet.

  Arnold was born, and eventually buried, at Laleham almost within the sound of the river. He lived by the river for the last fifteen years of his life. He was married by the river, too, so that the most sacred ceremonies of his life were conducted by the Thames. For him it was a token of permanence:

  And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames,

  Before this strange disease of modern life…

  It is in fact remarkable how many writers of the river do comment unfavourably on “modern life,” whether it be in eighteenth-, nineteenth-or twentieth-century versions; the riparian traveller of 1745 is just as likely to condemn “improvements” as the walker of 2007. The river induces a mood of nostalgia, perhaps, for that which never was and never could be. It imposes a sense of time, or a perspective, that would otherwise not occur to the wanderer. It is therefore an easy receptacle for false feeling and for ill-founded sentiment.

  The most curious of the Thames poets has been left to last. John Taylor, known in his lifetime as “The Water Poet,” was a Thames wherryman who had immortal longings. He was the self-appointed guardian and muse of the river, the Dante of the Thames. He was born in 1580, by the Severn, and attended the Gloucester grammar school there without noticeable success; he came to London, and became apprenticed to a waterman before being impressed into the navy. On his return from service, in the late 1590s, he resumed his Thames trade and began a long career ferrying between the two banks. The Thames haunted him. Like many of his poetical predecessors his first inspiration came when floating on its waters; one evening he was reclining in his boat and reciting some lines from Marlowe’s riverine poem, Hero and Leander, when he experienced his epiphany. The Muse of the Thames called him. From that time forward he became “the water poet.” His collected verses were eventually published in an edition of eight volumes but he also composed riverlogues, tavern reports, and political polemics. He even wrote a reference book, entitled The Carrier’s Cosmographie. Some two hundred works have been ascribed to him. Pope called him “swan of Thames,” albeit ironically. Taylor said of himself:

  Some through ignorance, and some through spite,

  Have said that I can neither read nor write.

  He organised river pageants, and royal battles upon the water; he collected the taxes on wine being transported upriver; he was asked to prepare plans for the cleaning and the dredging of the Thames. He became a celebrated London figure and, according to Robert Southey, “kings and queens condescended to notice him, nobles and archbishops admitted him to their table, and mayors and corporations received him with civic honours.” He represented what was then a flourishing popular culture around and about the river. He was the plebeian voice of the Thames, itself a potentially levelling and disruptive influence. He was bawdy and humorous in turn, a parodist of other poets, a quick-witted adventurer whose doggerel verse embodies the coarser virtues of the London riverside.

  He also arranged what would in the modern world be called a series of “publicity stunts.” He built a boat out of brown paper and with another boatman attempted a journey down the Thames from London to the Medway; the paper boat was supported by eight inflated pigs’ bladders and the oars were made out of stiffened stockfish:

  The water to the paper being got

  In one half hour began to rot.

  After an heroic thirty-six hours afloat, they staggered ashore with the remnants of their craft in their hands. In his later years he wrote an allegorical poem, entitled Thames-Isis, and began calling himself the “Acqua-Muse.” Thames-Isis is in part history, and in part travelogue; he used as his model Michael Drayton’s topographical poem, Polyolbion, and the Latin poem by John Leland entitled Cygnea Cantio. He was attempting to place his work in the long tradition of riverine epic, where he believed that he truly belonged. He retired to manage a public house in Phoenix Alley by Long Acre, but he was not so successful on dry land. He died in 1653, and there is one report that he starved to death. In Winstanley’s Lives of the Poets (1687) he was granted this epitaph:

  Here lies the Water-poet, honest John,

  Who rowed on the streams of Helicon;

  Where having many rocks and dangers past,

  He at the haven of heaven arriv’d at last.

  PART XIII

  Shadows and Depths

  Medmenham Abbey, where the members of the Hell Fire Club established their base

  CHAPTER 40

  River Dreams

  Lewis Carroll concluded Through the Looking Glass (1871), a narrative in part inspired by his journeys upon the Thames at Oxford, with the refrain:

  Ever drifting down the stream—

  Lingering in the golden gleam—

  Life, what is it but a dream?

  The Thames inspires dreams, or what we may also call reflections. Theodore Hook, at Thames Ditton in the early nineteenth century, wrote verses in celebration of “the placid waking dream” he experienced by the riverside. Gaston Bachelard, in L’Eau et Les Rêves (1993), wrote that “I cannot sit down beside a river without falling into a profound reverie, without looking back over my happiness.”

>   There is an anonymous poem, also, of the water “under wistful willows wending”:

  Why so swift to grasp the dream,

  Mad to learn the story’s ending?

  In The Earthly Paradise (1868–70) William Morris recounted his own dream by the river at Kelmscot:

  And dream of London, small, and white, and clean,

  The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green.

  So the river does not only create dreams; it appears within them. It is an ancient presence. In the Aboriginal art of Australia—in Walbiri circle line designs—the image of concentric circles is an emblem of water or of a water-hole, from which dreamings emerge or into which they enter. The water and the dream are of the same element. That is why, in Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, Sonning is an area of the Thames “in which to dream of bygone days, and vanished forms and faces, and things that might have been.” By the river Turner dreamed of classical and mythological pasts, and some of his sketches are a form of painterly day-dreaming with evanescent shapes of things that are and are not. Dido and Aeneas are to be found at Richmond, saying eternal farewell; Portia laments the departure of Brutus at Isleworth. There are triremes on the water, and elaborate palaces beside its banks. These are dreams of majesty.

  And who can tell dreams from visions? Wordsworth understood the power of the river very well, in some “Lines” (1790) written by Richmond-upon-Thames:

  Glide gently, thus for ever glide,

  O Thames! that other bards may see

  As lovely visions by thy side

  As now, fair river! come to me.

  The prospect of the river running down to the ocean has prompted many visionary conceptions; the light upon the water, the bridges across the river (the bridges of contentment), have been the agents of the imagination. The river obscures conscious thought and erases memory; the sound and movement of water lay to rest the powers of observation, like some watery narcotic. It may be the source of visions. That is why it has been commonly associated with the twentieth-century notion of the subconscious. It is water itself that dreams.

  Reflect upon the nature of reflections. They throw a curious light upon the boundary between shadow and substance. When the swan floats upon the water it seems as if it were to float double, swan and shadow of some other swan. At the still hour of the evening—often about half an hour before sunset—every riverside object may be perfectly reflected from the surface of the water, and the reflection or shadow is often seen more distinctly than the object to which it owes its existence. In that state reality seems to depart from the actual and impart its power to the unreal; in the process the most familiar objects become unfamiliar and novel. It is like observing some new world. Water does not in that sense become a mirror. It is gentler, more capacious, and more inviting, than a mirror. It naturalises, and idealises, the other within the depths of itself. It makes the reflected world profound—more profound, perhaps, than the actual world above the water. The reflection is in that sense more real than the reality. Yet this may induce bewilderment, and a form of vertigo; when you gaze at the inverted landscape, you may be half-afraid of becoming lost within it—of being swallowed up by the profound below.

  Thomas Traherne, the poet and mystic, was rector of St. Mary’s at Teddington and dwelled close to the river there. In a poem, “Shadows in the Water,” perhaps composed in the early 1670s, he meditates upon the nature of its reflections:

  By walking Men’s reversed Feet

  I chanc’d another World to meet;

  Tho it did not to View exceed

  A Phantom, ’tis a World indeed,

  Where Skies beneath us shine,

  And Earth by Art divine

  Another face presents below,

  Where People’s feet against Ours go.

  The river is filled with such strange reversals and pairings. The river encourages doubling. It can also represent the “world turned upside down,” that ancient phrase representing the libertarian and egalitarian power of misrule. We will discover that the river is the setting of liberty in all of its aspects.

  There is a significant feature of the ancient cursus at Lechlade. The smaller cursus site here is paralleled by a larger cursus complex on the other side of the river at Buscot Wick. There seems to have been some attempt at pairing, therefore, with the Thames acting as a natural boundary between the two monuments. This phenomenon is to be found elsewhere along the Thames, as, for example, at the adjacent cursus sites of Dorchester, and it acts as a curious harbinger for the emergence of “twin towns” linked by the river—Streatley and Goring, Pangbourne and Whitchurch, Reading and Caversham, Putney and Fulham. Is it possible that the pairing of towns has some prehistoric origin in the siting of monuments? Is it part of some atavistic impulse when humankind contemplates the river? There is some vision of doubleness, connected to the nature of reflecting water itself.

  There are more fanciful examples. The echo under the bridge arch as you walk along the tow-path at Maidenhead is well known for its strength. There used to be an inn-sign on the tow-path at Twickenham, for the Barmy Arms, showing the angry Duchess from Alice in Wonderland painted upside down. Since Alice in Wonderland is itself set in a reverse world inspired by Carroll’s sojourns on the river, the sign may be hailed as a true Thames vision. There have been many ghosts observed along the banks of the Thames, but perhaps they have the reality and the nature of reflections in the water. To the poem of Traherne we may add the poetry of Pope, from Windsor Forest, on the reflective Thames:

  Oft in her glass the musing shepherd spies

  The headlong mountains and the downward skies,

  The watry landskip of the pendant woods,

  And absent trees that tremble in the floods;

  In the clear azure gleam the flocks are seen,

  And floating forests paint the waves with green.

  CHAPTER 41

  Legends of the River

  There are local myths of the Thames. It used to be said that towns still existed beneath the river; an earlier Tilbury, for example, was believed to lie beneath the waters of the estuary. The area beside Dagenham was according to local belief the site of the original Deluge. There were stories of miraculously created stone trees beside the banks. One of them, at Godstow, was the token of a nun’s apotheosis; she used to point to a tree that, she said, would be turned into stone when she was with the saints in heaven. Pilgrims, as late as the early sixteenth century, venerated this tree. It is now of course realised that stone trees do exist by, or in, the Thames; but we have another explanation for their petrifaction. At Fairford, beside Inglesham, there was a sudden invasion of frogs and toads who made their way to the house of the local Justice; here, according to a pamphlet issued in 1660, “they divided themselves into two distinct bodies, and orderly made up to the House of the said Justice; some climbing the walls, and into the Windows and Chambers.” When the Justice made his peace with the Nonconformists of the town, the creatures “strangely and unexpectedly vanisht away.” There have been rumours of black magic at Cookham and at Burnham Beeches—and of course in connection with the “Hell Fire Club” located at Medmenham Abbey.

  There were deep holes by the Thames at Culham, one of them being known as “Gleddie’s” or “Glady’s” Hole. The people of the neighbourhood believed that a fisherman by the name of Gleddie fell within it and was drowned; it is said that the bubbles that rose from him to the surface of the water exploded as loud curses. There was an eyot beside Binsey known locally as “Black John’s Pit” from which, it was said, a goblin sprang who kept the heads of children under the water. The legend in these cases is clearly concerned with the fear of drowning but also, perhaps, of being lost in some strange underground world of chasms and caverns that is deemed to exist beneath the path of the river. It is the Otherworld of ancient reverence, revived in local stories that have never entirely been dissipated.

  There was an area on the southern bank of the river, between Westminster and Hungerf
ord, that in the seventeenth century was known as “Pedlar’s Acre.” The land was owned by a pedlar who, on his death, left it to the church of St. Mary at Lambeth. It is said that he was once granted shelter in the church, and bestowed the land upon it on condition that he and his dog should be commemorated in a stained-glass window. There is indeed stained glass in that church showing a pedlar and his dog, to which is attached a notice that “This window by tradition represents a benefactor who about the year 1500 left to this church a piece of land later known as Pedlar’s Acre on condition that his image be placed in the church and repaired from time to time. Mended in 1608; renewed 1703; transferred to this chapel 1884; destroyed 1941; renewed 1956.” There is nothing to dispute the legend. A marking stone, inscribed “Boundary of Pedlar’s Acre 1777,” was found when the area was being excavated. It was being prepared for the building of County Hall, which still stands on the ancient acre of ground.

  It is perhaps only to be expected that the river, so anciently a home of spiritual forces, should in later days be associated with the more conventional forms of the supernatural; the presence lingers, even in predictable or risible forms. Books have been written about the ghosts of the Thames. There are reported sightings at Windsor and at Slough, at Maidenhead and at Oxford. There are supposed ghosts at Henley. There was a grey lady of Ladye Place in Hurley; the ghost of Lady Hoby has been seen at Bisham Abbey. A “lady in white” is reported to haunt a room of the George Hotel in Dorchester-on-Thames, and a small lady flits around the fifteenth-century Cockpit bar at Eton. At Kempsford a ghost looks out of the window of the ruined abbey. There is a little grey lady who, at Dorney Court, sits in a bedroom and weeps. And it is perhaps predictable that monks have been glimpsed within the precincts of the ancient abbey at Dorchester. There are many such stories, perpetually restored in legend.