University of Virginia Library

STREETS OF LONDON.

In few places are the “lights and shadows” of life
more strongly and vividly contrasted than in the
streets of a great metropolis; where bloated wealth
and hollow-eyed poverty trudge side by side, and
gay, fluttering vanity and squalid wretchedness
gaze strangely at each other. It is dramatic, but
unpleasant; at least until custom has produced
the callousness of heart requisite to enable a man
to look philosophically on all human sorrow, save
his own peculiar portion. Before he has arrived at
this state, however, a stroll through the streets of a
crowded city is apt to be uncommonly beneficial.
It generates a series of practical sermons, for which
every poor distressed object furnishes an eloquent
text, tending to inculcate gratitude for his own station,
charity for the miseries, and toleration for the
frailties of others. A back street in London shows
a man a few of the realities of life. To use a pugilistic

phrase, “it takes the conceit out of him.”
I am sometimes sorrier for my own disappointments
than for any person's; and occasionally pity and indulge
in the tenderest and most delicate sympathy
imaginable towards myself, on account of any trivial
inconvenience or privation to which I may
happen to be subjected; but I have never entered
a London by-lane in this frame of mind without
walking out “a wiser and a sadder man” at the
other end.” There is a vast deal of difference between
fanciful or poetical unhappiness and harsh
prose misery—plain, unvarnished, substantial misery,
arising from tangible wants and physical sufferings.
It is too much the fashion of the world
to exaggerate and swell into undue importance
half real and half imaginary mental woes, and to
sneer at and undervalue common bodily evils.
Your young poets and lady poetesses (heaven bless
them!) and indeed all persons of genteel sensibilities,
are continually plunging into the extreme
depths of desolation on what would appear to a
common-sense man rather insufficient grounds.
But going arithmetically to work, it will be a tolerably-sized
grief which produces as much pain as a
prolonged, stinging tooth-ache; and six-and-thirty
hours, or upwards, without victuals, must be almost
as bad to bear as slighted love, notwithstanding the
assertions of sensitive young ladies (who have
chicken at command) to the contrary. Indeed, it
has always struck me that going without a dinner
must be provocative of a vast deal of pathos; and
that it is rather unfair to make such an outcry
about “woes that rend the breast,” while the pangs
and twinges of the contiguous parts of the body, on
a descending scale, are never taken into consideration
by those who have never felt them. If this
view of things be correct—and it is correct—how
much intense suffering does the blessed sun look
down upon every day! Ah! who that has seen
the gaunt, shrivelled frame—the sharpened features—the
bloodless, compressed lips, and sunken
greedy eye which famine produces, but has felt sick
at heart, and inwardly prayed to be preserved,
above all things, from inanition. The omission
of even such commonplace things as victuals,
will, in an astonishingly short time, convince the
most wretchedly romantic youth that ever fell in
love, folded his arms, and turned his face moonwards,
of the excellent properties, moral and physical,
of a beef-steak.

The afflictions which poverty brings with it in
the country are as nothing to the infinity of evils
in which it enmeshes those who are cooped up in
cities. In the country, though the beds of the poor

be hard, and their food coarse, and their raiment
ragged, they have at least the free fresh air of heaven
to blow upon them, and they enjoy the changes
and delights which the ever-varying seasons bring
around, in common with the wealthiest. The odor
of the flower is as grateful to their sense—the warble
of the bird as pleasant to their ear—and the
velvet turf as soft and elastic to their tread as to
that of the man of many acres. With only the
cost of a little care, liberal nature clusters the briery
rose about their lowly windows, and twines the
graceful woodbine around their humble doors; and
not unfrequently in the prime of summer, the mean
clay walls of their cottages are completely buried
from the view beneath a mass of vegetative beauty
and fragrance. The village school gives their children
at least glimmerings of knowledge, and the
bell of each returning sabbath calls them (seldom
in vain) to their simple village church. They have
many, very many hardships and difficulties to wrestle
with, but they have at least a chance afforded
them of being hardy, healthy men and women;
and, in the calm of evening (despite of partial and
exaggerated statements to the contrary) there are
still hundreds of poor peasants that can stand at
their cottage doors and feel that content and happiness
are not merely empty sounds. But, alas! for
the “city's pale abortions;”—alas! for the child
born amid sin and gin in a confined, filthy London
court or alley, down which not even a straggling
breath of pure air, by any accident, ever found its
way. What a place for infancy—for the gleesome
sports of childhood! But such have no infancy—
they never are children (except in stature). The
springs of life are poisoned in the outset, and the
mind, as it gradually unfolds, is as gradually soiled
and tainted by all the urchin sees, and hears, and
learns. It never has the undoubting confidence
and frankness of a child, but becomes at once a
premature adult in head and heart; and is almost
as knowing, lynx-eyed, artful and suspicious as the
fully-developed sinners by whom it is surrounded.
Where is the wonder if a few more years fulfil its
destiny, and bring it to the convict ship or the gallows?
The greatest miracle is, that the lowest of
the low in London—surrounded as they hourly are
by debasing influences—retain so many human
sympathies and kindly feelings as they do, and as
they frequently evince towards each other.[1]

Poor wretches! Virtue should have lenity on
one hand and toleration on the other, when she
overlooks their accounts, and take especial note of
the few blossoms of good that spring up in such a
wilderness of evil. She ought to act upon the principle
I heard laid down by a bloated hackney
coachman, as I passed him one cold frosty morning.
“Now I likes a man as can make allowances,”
said he, to an ascetic-looking gentleman,
who had hired his vehicle, and was apparently endeavoring
to dissuade him from swallowing a glass
of gin which he had purchased to settle his nerves,
preparatory to starting. “It may all be true what
you says, sir, but it's uncommon hard on a poor fellow
like me.—Now I likes a man as can make
allowances!” and without further interlocution he
raised the cordial with trembling eagerness to his
lips. By the position of the glass he might have

half emptied it, when a miserable half-clad female,
shivering with cold, crawled by, and as she passed
looked wistfully in his face. The look was understood.
It touched a sympathetic chord in the gindrinker's
heart, and he made a full pause—“I say
ma'am, you're welcome to a drop this cold morning;
it will do you good;”—and with something
of natural politeness he handed her the glass. The
poor creature curtsied, sighed, thanked him, drank
it, and went on. There was delirium—there might
be poison in the draught, but it was given with the
kindliest feelings, and the offering, whether for good
or evil, was at least accompanied by the merit of a
self-sacrifice of no trifling magnitude. The man
was evidently a drunkard—he might be a blackguard—and,
I dare say, was altogether unfitted for
universal suffrage; but still he had “an eye for
pity,” and when, poor fellow! he has succeeded in
drinking himself into some obscure grave, I trust
he will then experience the benefit of his maxim of
“making allowances.”

Often when tired of walking the noble thorough-fares
of London, surrounded by wealth and affluence
in every direction, I have turned from them, and
taking some lofty church, or other prominent landmark,
for a guide, rambled carelessly towards it. I
will never forget the melancholy streets I have repeatedly

passed through in these heedless peregrinations.
Some solely set apart for the most abandoned,
inconceivable profligacy; others of good reputation,
but in which starving economy was evidently
engaged in an unceasing warfare with utter
want and destitution. This is the sort of streets
where the bankrupt tradesman, the unemployed
lawyer or physician, the rejected author, and the
slighted artist herd together. Alas! how many
“good men and true” have perished in these dreary
precincts, unnoticed and unknown? How many
of “nature's gentlemen,” with their fine, high spirits
and inborn love of pleasure, but lacking the
means of honorably gratifying their social propensities,
have sunk, step by step, into the mire of degradation
and debasement, until they became the companions
of sharpers, or the oracles of pot-houses?
How many a gifted spirit, whose strong integrity
poverty could not shake, has worn himself away,
“contending with low wants and lofty will”—has
sickened, perchance of the struggle, yet still borne
on for the sake of others, until some slight addition
has been forced upon the already intolerable burden,
and heart and hope have at once given way,
and he has dropped “unhonour'd and unsung,”
into the common place of repose “where bailiffs
cease from troubling, and debtors are at rest.”—
Such like blue-devilish reflections have ofttimes
forced themselves upon me while roaming amid
these dreary dwellings; and I have always felt
relieved when on unexpectedly emerging from their
dim confines, I have found myself in the vicinity
of the open parks, or other fashionable promenades,
where vinegar-visaged adversity dared not show
her face, and all was life, animation, and enjoyment,
and the brilliant butterflies of fashion (with
some admixture of loggerheads) were disporting in
the sunshine, pranked out in the newest vanities.
It was, to say the least, a pleasant dramatic contrast,
with a material improvement in the dresses
and decorations.

Among their other attractions, the streets of London
are rife with human curiosities; and an ardent
zoologist must find it very pleasant employment
going about comparing the various specimens of
the species, assembled from all parts of the globe.
The slim, swarthy-featured Lascar or Malay animals
(imported in the East India Company's ships),
with their malicious countenances and small rattlesnake
eyes, in vivid relief to the hippopotamus-looking
Bavarian or Dutch “broom girls;” with faces
strikingly similar in form and expression to those
of the well-fed cherubs to be met with on gravestones
or above altar-pieces; then there are the

juvenile countrymen of William Tell, who have
come all the way from the borders of “Geneva's
blue waters,” or alpine heights where the eagle
builds in safety, to the streets of London, to grind
away, with cruel perseverance, on a disorganized
barrel organ; or vainly endeavor, with unrelenting
assiduity, to extract music from the still more distressing
hurdy-gurdy. Wandering Savoyards too,
with their monkeys, and Scotch bagpipers with
their appropriate instruments of torture. Of all the
heterogeneous mass, however, the most pitiable are
the poor image boys—the offspring of old Rome!—
with their lank, sallow cheeks, and large lustrous
eyes, pleading, as they best may, in our harsh northern
tongue, for the custom of the descendants of
the barbarian subjects of their forefathers! I have
often been struck with the helpless, desolate look
of these poor fragile Italians, wanderers from their
own delicious land to a country where they stand
all day shivering in the very sunshine, and then
creep at night into holes where it were a pity for a
dog to lie down and die.

But of all the mendicant classes, which go vagabondizing
about, setting equally at defiance old,
impotent acts of parliament and the vigilant new
police, by far the sturdiest and most numerous are
those natives of the metropolis who have devoted

their time and talents to the study of music for the
public benefit. They have, as may be surmised,
no regular engagements or fixed salaries, but roam
about impregnating the air with strange noises in
every direction. Unlike the Provençal troubadours
of old, they are not distinguishable by any particular
costume, but rather affect a diversified style of dress.
Their capabilities are wonderful. They do not,
like Braham, Phillips, Sinclair, or other professionals,
confine themselves to any particular style,
but range at will through all the subtle varieties of
musical composition, from Mozart to Alexander Lee
inclusive. If they fall short of vocalists of greater
pretensions in some particulars, they have the advantage
of them in others. They are never taken
suddenly ill—no man sins his soul by making
apologies for them, and they sing equally with a
hoarseness as without it. In one thing they strikingly
resemble their brethren of the stage, namely,
in the infallible tact and nicety of judgment displayed
in introducing airs in appropriate situations;
and it is pleasant, amid the rattling of carriages,
the rumbling of carts, the heavy rolling of wagons,
and the multifarious cries of oysters, hot rolls, and
old clothes, to hear a fellow bawling—
or a waddling old woman, with a strictly feline organ,
squalling in the vicinity of Billingsgate,
At first this class might be confounded with an
inferior species in the provinces, commonly called
ballad-singers; but their habits are essentially different.
The primitive race that used to chronicle
the deeds of “Jack Monroe,” or narrate how “All
in the good ship Rover,” they had “sailed the
world around,” are now nearly extinct in the me
tropolis. The present “minstrelsy” of London, seem
to execute no other than the newest and most fashionable
pieces; and the contrast is, at times; both
laughable and melancholy, in returning from the
theatre where Vestris, or some of the other sirens
of the stage, have been floating before you in an
atmosphere of pleasure, and warbling their arch or
joyous ditties to delighted ears, to hear some poor
homeless wretch, trembling in the heavy dews of
midnight, howling the self-same strains to heedless
passengers as they hurry past him with a quickened
step to their comfortable beds. You scarcely
know which to be sorriest for—the air or the performer.
The contrast too, between the words of
the lively, pathetic or bacchanalian melodies which
they have ever in their mouths, and their own
mean and miserable appearance, is continually giving
rise to the most ludicrous associations. It
rather makes a man smile to hear a poor hatless,
coatless, shoeless wanderer, lugubriously laboring
away at “Oh there's nothing in life can sadden
us,” bleating out “The young May-moon is beaming,
love,” or dolefully asseverating

“Heaven tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.”
It must be so; or how these people, exposed to
nearly every ill that flesh is heir to, (unless indeed
they have become inured to starvation, or else have
got into a mechanical habit of living on from day
to day, and do not like to give it over,) continue to
keep up their hearts and still face existence, is more
than I can possibly conjecture.