From 221B Baker Street to the Old Curiosity Shop

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From 221B Baker Street to the Old Curiosity Shop Page 3

by Stephen Halliday


  The Green Dragon at 3 Bull’s Head Passage, Leadenhall market, close to Cornhill, was where Pickwick’s faithful and memorable valet, Sam Weller, wrote a Valentine to Mary who eventually became his wife. Bull’s Head Passage is now well supplied with restaurants and wine bars for the City folk who work nearby, though the Green Dragon is no more.

  In Baroness Orczy’s (1865–1947) crime thriller Lady Molly of Scotland Yard the murder victim had his office in Lombard Street, while Wilkie Collins’s Moonstone was pledged to a banker there.

  A play of 1598 called The First and Second Parte of Edward the IV, whose author is unknown, gives an account of the rebellion of Jack Cade in 1450, making reference to many City streets whose names are still in use today as the rebels made their way along Leadenhall, Lombard Street and Cheapside in their quest for blood and plunder. However, Jack Cade, who claims Plantagenet descent and calls himself John Mortimer, first lays claim to London by striking the London Stone in Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part II.

  Now is Mortimer lord of this city. And here, sitting upon London-stone, I charge and command that, of the city’s cost, the pissing-conduit run nothing but claret wine this first year of our reign. And now henceforward it shall be treason for any that calls me other than Lord Mortimer.

  The London Stone, a strange relic of London’s ancient history, now lies embedded behind an iron grill in the wall of No. 111 Cannon Street, which until recently formed the premises of a Chinese bank. It will shortly be moved to a more dignified site at the Walbrook Building on the corner of Cannon Street and Walbrook. It is also known as the Brutus Stone, having supposedly been brought to London by a Trojan prince called Brutus following the fall of Troy. His followers, known as Brutons, gave their name to their new home (i.e. Britain) and founded New Troy which, during the reign of one of Brutus’s successors, King Lud, became known as Lud’s Town or London. By the time of the Norman Conquest the stone had given its name to the area surrounding it, where it was marked on maps as Londonstane, and the first Mayor of London, who took office in 1192, was called Henry Fitzailwyn de Londonstane. It is likely that it was used by the Romans as a point from which to measure distances to other Roman settlements and the poet William Blake identified it as an object where Druids carried out ritual sacrifices. It has also been advanced as a candidate for the stone from which King Arthur drew the sword Excalibur in Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. The stone was moved to its present position when Wren’s church of St Swithin’s, which previously accommodated it, was destroyed by bombing in 1941 and an ancient legend claims that ‘So long as the Stone of Brutus is safe, so long shall London flourish’.

  In about 1390 an anonymous Kentish poet wrote a scathing account of London in London Lickpenny, which presents the experience of an innocent countryman faced with the cynicism and corruption of traders, lawyers and other denizens of the metropolis. He, too, makes reference to the London Stone in Canywike (Cannon) Street with its population of drapers and candlemakers, after whom the street was originally named:

  Then went I forth by London Stone

  Throughout all Canywike Street,

  Drapers to me they called anon

  Great chepe of cloth they gan me hete [offer]

  But the verse, like all verses, ends ‘but for lack of money I might not spend’.

  William Blake, in his lengthy work ‘Jerusalem’, written between 1804 and 1820, penned and illustrated a vision of London which contrasts the heavenly and earthly cities, the latter including reference to supposed sacrifices by Druids. It begins with a flattering description of familiar parts of London:

  The fields from Islington to Marylebone

  To Primrose Hill and saint John’s Wood,

  Were builded over with pillars of gold,

  And there Jerusalem’s pillars stood.

  But it goes on to describe how ‘The Druids’ golden Knife’ revelled in human gore whose victims:

  Groaned aloud on London Stone

  They groaned aloud on Tyburn’s Brook,

  Albion gave his deadly groan,

  And all the Atlantic mountains shook.

  The stone itself, which is at present unnoticed by all but the most observant pedestrians in Cannon Street, is a Grade II listed monument.

  CHEAPSIDE

  In his Cook’s Tale Chaucer makes reference to the disorderly behaviour of Cheapside apprentices, one of whom is singled out:

  At every wedding he would sing and hop

  And he preferred the tavern to the shop.

  Whenever any pageant or procession

  Came down Cheapside, goodbye to his profession.

  He’d leap out of the shop to see the sight

  And join the dance and not come back that night!

  Wood Street, off Cheapside, was celebrated by William Wordsworth in his poem ‘The Reverie of Poor Susan’, in which the poet also makes reference to two other familiar City streets:

  At the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears,

  Hangs a Thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years:

  Poor Susan has pass’d by the spot, and has heard

  In the silence of morning the song of the bird.

  ’Tis a note of enchantment: what ails her? She sees

  A mountain ascending, a vision of trees;

  Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide,

  And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.

  The tree, a plane tree, survives in the churchyard of St Peter Westcheap, Wood Street. The tree, ancient and gnarled, and surrounded by a small shrubbery, is a rare sight in this part of the City and a notice reminds the passer-by that it was the subject of Wordsworth’s poem.

  Even before the time of Wordsworth the noise and energy of the City were making a strong impression on visitors. In his final and finest work The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, Tobias Smollett (1721–71) recorded the impressions of someone who was unfamiliar with the metropolis:

  I start every hour from my sleep, at the horrid noise of the watchmen bawling the hour through every street and thundering at every door. In the morning I start out of bed, in consequence of the still more dreadful alarm made by the country carts and noisy rustics bellowing ‘green peas’ under my window … All is tumult and hurry; one would imagine they were impelled by some disorder of the brain that will not suffer them to be at rest … possessed by a spirit more absurd and pernicious than anything we meet within the precincts of Bedlam [which at that time was located in Bishopsgate].

  QUEEN VICTORIA STREET

  Running parallel to Cheapside, Queen Victoria Street was constructed in the 1860s to link the Bank of England, at its east end, with the Victoria Embankment, which was opened in 1870 to provide a route from the heart of the City to Parliament. On the north side of Queen Victoria Street, on the Faraday Building, is a plaque which marks the fact that this was the last home of Doctors’ Commons, a college of law (in effect an Inn of Court) which at one time numbered Sir Thomas More amongst its members. Originally based in Paternoster Row near St Paul’s Cathedral, it moved to what is now Queen Victoria Street where Dickens rented an office for a time.

  By Dickens’s time, Doctors’ Commons was in terminal decline. In David Copperfield David became an articled clerk with Spenlow and Jorkins at Doctors’ Commons, which is described in the book as ‘a cosy, dosy, old fashioned, time-forgotten sleepy-headed little family party’. It was dissolved in 1865, its members moving to other Inns of Court, and its premises were demolished in 1867 to make way for Queen Victoria Street. While at Spenlow and Jorkins, David received from Francis Spenlow, his future father-in-law, some advice about ‘the best sort of professional business’ which reflected Dickens’s jaundiced view of the legal profession and which underpinned the legal obfuscations of Jarndyce and Jarndyce in Bleak House. Spenlow tells David that the best business is:

  … a good case of a disputed will where there was a neat little estate of thirty or forty thousand pounds was perhaps the best of all. In such a case
, he said, not only were there very pretty pickings in the way of arguments at every stage of the proceedings … but, the costs being pretty sure to come out of the proceeds of the estate at last, both sides went at it in a lively and spirited manner and expense was no consideration.

  LONDON BRIDGE

  T.S. Eliot worked in the Foreign and Colonial Department of Lloyd’s bank behind St Mary Woolnoth, near Bank station in the heart of the City. In ‘The Waste Land’ Eliot recorded his impressions as he made his way across London Bridge with other commuters on their way to what Eliot regarded as dull city jobs:

  Unreal city,

  Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

  A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

  I had not thought death had undone so many.

  Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

  And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

  Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,

  To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours

  With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

  Dickens, too, makes many references to London Bridge and placed a number of his more alarming episodes in its vicinity. David Copperfield, in flight from the cruelty of Creakle at Salem House, begins his long walk to Dover and to the safe arms of his aunt, Betsey Trotwood, from here. The steps on the Surrey bank of the Thames, leading down from London Bridge are also the scene of Nancy’s conversation with Rose Maylie which ultimately leads to her death in Oliver Twist.

  Oliver Twist, published in 1838, was Dickens’s second novel, and tells the story of Oliver, an orphan of unknown parentage brought up in harsh conditions in a workhouse from which he flees. In fact, Oliver is heir to a share in the estate of his late father, a fact of which he is unaware. Oliver’s half-brother, Monks, pays a gang of thieves led by Fagin and the violent Bill Sikes to lead Oliver into a life of crime which will thereby exclude him from his father’s inheritance, leaving it all to Monks. Oliver resists all attempts to turn him into a criminal and is taken under the wing of the benevolent Mr Brownlow, but the gang abduct him from Mr Brownlow’s care and he is sent on a burglary expedition with Bill Sikes, during which Oliver is injured and taken into the household of Rose and her guardian, the kind Mrs Maylie. Bill Sikes’s companion, Nancy, learns of the plot to corrupt Oliver and reveals it to Rose, but the conversation is overheard by a member of the gang, Noah Claypole, and Sikes, enraged, beats Nancy to death, after which he flees and dies, accidentally hanging himself near Jacob’s Island while escaping from an angry mob. Fagin is executed, Oliver learns of his fortune and is adopted by Mr Brownlow, and Rose turns out to be his mother’s lost sister, his aunt.

  The present London Bridge was built in the 1960s and the steps on which Nancy sat were removed, together with the bridge Dickens knew, to Lake Havasu City in Arizona.

  The north bank of the river Thames, close to the bridge, is chosen by Jonas Chuzzlewit as the place to which he commits bloodstained clothing after murdering Tigg. Just to the north of London Bridge is the Todgers’s boarding house in the same novel, The Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, in the labyrinth of streets that surround the Monument to the Great Fire of 1666. One of these, running east towards the Tower of London, is Eastcheap where, in Henry IV Part II, Shakespeare placed the Boar’s Head tavern, presided over by Mistress Quickly and a haunt of Falstaff and his friends. Rebuilt after the Great Fire it stood close to the present junction with Gracechurch Street and was finally demolished in 1831 to make way for King William IV Street.

  Lower Thames Street, on the north side of London Bridge, accommodates the wharf to which Pip in Great Expectations takes a boat as part of his plan to remove the fugitive Magwitch from England. The meeting of Pip and Magwitch takes place in the churchyard of St James, Cooling, on the Isle of Grain in the North Kent marshes where Pip is confronted by Magwitch, demanding food, while visiting the grave of his parents and brothers. Pip thereby earns the gratitude of Magwitch who becomes his benefactor.

  Great Expectations was published in 1861 and is often associated with the memorable film of the book made by David Lean in 1946. Pip, an orphan, who lives with his shrewish sister and her kindly blacksmith husband Joe Gargery, befriends a fleeing convict called Magwitch and is later introduced to Miss Havisham, a woman abandoned on her wedding day who remains in her wedding dress, surrounded by wedding paraphernalia, in a darkened room. In Berners Street, which runs north from Oxford Street, Dickens recorded that he encountered an eccentric woman clad all in white – the model for Miss Havisham. Miss Havisham has adopted a girl, Estella, whom she has groomed to be vain and contemptuous of men. During his visits to Miss Havisham Pip falls in love with the cold and moody Estella. Pip receives money from a mysterious benefactor (whom he assumes to be Miss Havisham) and goes to London to become a gentleman (and hence more worthy of Estella), meeting in the process Herbert Pocket, the lawyer Jaggers and his clerk Wemmick. Pip learns that his real benefactor is the convict Magwitch who, after being transported to Australia, made a fortune, but Pip, in his new life as a gentleman, distances himself from Magwitch and the kindly Joe Gargery who brought him up. Estella who, it turns out, is Magwitch’s long-lost daughter, marries a cruel husband, Bentley Drummle, and Magwitch, who has illegally returned from transportation, will be executed if he is caught. Pip tries to arrange Magwitch’s escape from England, but Magwitch is caught as the result of a former partner in crime called Compeyson, who drowns and is revealed as the man who deserted Miss Havisham on her wedding day. Magwitch escapes execution by dying of injuries and Pip marries Estella whose husband has died.

  In Nicholas Nickleby the mean-spirited Ralph Nickleby chooses ‘Spigwiffin’s Wharf’ as the site for the run-down home of his niece Kate and her mother. Dickens places it near London Bridge in Lower Thames Street, now populated by offices. He doesn’t make it sound very attractive:

  … a large old dingy house in Thames Street, the door and windows of which were so bespattered with mud that it would have appeared to be uninhabited for years…Old and gloomy and black in truth it was, and sullen and dark were the rooms once so bustling with life and enterprise…no life was stirring there. It was a picture of cold, silent decay.

  Nicholas Nickleby was published in instalments in 1838–39 and is the story of Nicholas, 19, whose father has died. He is sent by his hostile uncle Ralph Nickleby, a wealthy businessman, to work at Dotheboys Hall, a horrible school run by the sadistic Wackford Squeers, who is particularly cruel to Smike, a simple-minded lad he uses as a drudge. Nicholas’s mother and sister Kate are accommodated in dreary lodgings in a London slum owned by Ralph. Nicholas thrashes Squeers and flees with Smike and after many adventures, including a spell with some travelling players, Nicholas is offered employment by the benevolent and warm-hearted Cheeryble brothers, London merchants, whose generous attitude to the world contrasts with that of Ralph Nickleby. The Cheerybles also provide Nicholas’s family with a home. Ralph, frustrated by Nicholas’s success in creating a pleasant life for himself, attempts to remove Smike from Nicholas’s care. He fails, but Smike dies of consumption and Ralph, learning that Smike was in fact his son, hangs himself in despair. Nicholas marries Madeline Bray, whom Ralph had intended for another; Nicholas’s sister Kate marries the Cheerybles’s nephew Frank; and Wackford Squeers is sentenced to transportation.

  At that time, of course, (now Lower) Thames Street would have backed onto the old, decaying wharves of the Port of London (soon to be swept away for the Victoria Embankment). But Dickens did his best to give the City a happier face in the same novel by creating ‘City Square’ in the vicinity of the offices of the saintly Cheeryble brothers between Threadneedle Street and Bishopsgate:

  The City Square has no enclosure save the lamp post in the middle and no grass but the weeds which spring up round its base. It is a quiet, little-frequented retired spot favourable to melancholy and contemplation …It is so quiet you can almost hear the ticking of your own watch when you stop to cool in its
refreshing atmosphere.

  Dickens uses the quiet little square to emphasise the difference between the honest and friendly Cheeryble brothers and the mean and scheming Ralph Nickleby with his grand office in the West End. Dickens’s City Square was a product of the novelist’s imagination, but just such a setting exists close to the Guildhall Library in Aldermanbury: a small garden dedicated to the memory of John Heming and Henry Condell, friends of William Shakespeare who, in 1623, prepared an edition of thirty-six of his plays in the famous First Folio, which also contained a likeness of the playwright. Without their enterprise many of the plays would have been lost forever.

 

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