THE WORLD OF LONDON. WHILE on others devolves the task to record the physical changes time has wrought in the mighty Babylon, to point attention to the monuments of this most renowned city, to chronicle the progressive improvements of ages, be it ours to regard rather the moral features of the metropolis; to study the manners of the great family whose home London is; and to draw from the depths of the vast and illimitable mine lying beneath our observation, the sterling ore of experience and wisdom. Our task is never to be complete : the horizon of the vast world of London, like the horizon of the earth, the further we advance extends the more, "And, like the circle joining earth and skies, Allures pursuit, but, as we follow, flies." Nor will the observation of one man, however close, nor the experience of one man, however great, nor the social intercourse of one man, however extensive, be able to do more than to break the ground or sink the first shaft; and this is all we propose to ourselves for our share of this great undertaking. There is certainly some credit due to us on the score of originality, since we are not aware that any general moral prospect of the World of London has been yet any where presented to the public eye, although the magnificence and grandeur of this prospect is perhaps less wonderful than its extreme novelty. Some of the prevalent errors of country folks respecting this mighty city, we have already been at the pains to confute. We have one other common mistake yet to rectify, that, namely, of the idea of the universal splendour and luxury of London. We recollect, in the days of our boyhood, our belief in the golden pavements of London streets was implicit ; and any one who questioned that the conduits ran wine, and the houses were tiled with pancakes, we regarded as a heretic, with whom no faith was to be kept. In short, our early impressions of London were of that gorgeousness of golden glitter and blaze of precious stones pervading the Arabian Tales; nor could we then dream that hunger, houselessness, or toil, had place in our imagined terrestrial paradise. On our first crossing Finchley Common, and gaining the summit of that abrupt declivity upon which Highgate archway now stands, whence the first obscure and smokedimmed prospect of the mighty Babylon is obtained by those journeying from the north, we well remember the straining of the eyes, and craning of the neck, and mounting among the luggage upon the roof to catch the murky volume of the endless town extended wide below. Nor do we forget the laugh raised at the expense of our simplicity, by the waggish guard demanding a sovereigntoll for our first appearance within sight of London, assuring us that his prerogative entitled him to that sum from every new comer, and which, in our then verdant condition, we were green enough to believe! But it is not only the stranger who is full of imaginings of the universal splendour and luxury of London: speculation is confined to the great many unobserving residents, whose arteries of communication between one end of town and another, or the realms of fashion at the West End, which they do not see, they cannot are of the same opinion, that poverty, believe exists; and as the contemplation of distress is not at any time very pleasing, few will be at the trouble to make expeditions for the discovery of the abiding-places of human misery. The truth is, poverty and wretchedness in London are more bashful than elsewhere-hiding themselves from they nestle in nooks and cornersthe sight of prosperous abundance, "Where no contiguous palace rears its head, To mock the meanness of their humble shed." And as the world of wealth and fashion boast their neighbourhoods, so do the worlds of misery congegrate in theirs. If there is a court end, there is also a beggar's end of the town; there is wretchedness genteel and ungenteel, paupers fashionable and unfashionable. Nothing of this do you meet with in the leading arteries of the metropolis. You may walk from the Bank to Hyde Park Corner, with money in your hand, and not encounter a solitary object of charity; all exhibits the pride of successful industry, and the ostentation of superfluous wealth. In such a city, you would hardly believe that human beings should be compelled to pick from dunghills the refuse vegetables of the markets, to wash and offer them for sale; and yet the obscure court wherein we reside, resounds from morning till night with the cries of those who have obtained their baskets of vegetables in this way at second hand; nay, we have ourselves seen the poor creatures culling their vegetables in this fashion! It would scarcely be credited that, in splendid London, women are subjected to various kinds of severe and repulsive toil, that if such things were related of Turks or Hottentots, we should set them down as so many proofs of inherent barbarism among the people where such usages had place. For example, the porterage of meat at the wholesale markets, as Newgate and Leadenhall, is performed by women, many of them old. You will see these wretched creatures stagger under the weight of a side of beef, or, having an entire sheep upon their heads, conveying their burdens to the butchers' carts, drawn up in the vicinity of the market. Surely this is man's work; and surely, if women are driven by hard necessity to such masculine toil, it must argue something rotten in the state of that society where such extreme necessity is suffered to exist. Another melancholy and revolting spectacle is, that of women and children of all ages, up to the middle in the vast laystalls, wherein are collected the removed filth of the metropolis, riddling and sifting the materials of which these mountains of dust, as it is technically called, are composed, begrimed with irremovable skins of dirt, and looking more like damned souls toiling in some infernal prison-house, than creatures who are heirs to an eternal heritage of heaven! It is truly wonderful to see how life is sustained by a great amount of our overcrowded population. Go to Strutton Ground in Westminster, to Tottenham Court Road, or along Whitechapel, places where a prescriptive right seems to exist of exposing, in the open air, the wares of humble traffickers, on a Saturday night in winter when the snow is on the ground, or falling about your ears, and see the crowds of shivering creatures standing by their little stock in trade, to be converted, if they are fortunate, into the means of staving off starvation for the morrow. There, for example, stands a poor woman, her tray of oranges and apples supported against her limbs by a strap of leather passing over her shoulders; a rushlight flickers in the midst of her fruity store; at either side, sucking their little fingers to beguile the cold, are two half-clad children, bending eager eyes on the passing crowd, as if imploring them to buy; the aspect of mother and children is that of creatures habituated to hunger, hardship, and grief. Near to these stands a blind old man, a framework_hung before his breast, whence depend staylaces, braces, pencil-cases, and such trifling articles; his sightless orbs, as they roll to and fro in their sockets, are his advocates; he trusts implicitly to the honour and good feeling of his customers in his little transactions, for who would rob the blind? Further on, is a poor widow, whose means of livelihood is an inverted umbrella filled with penny prints; one glance will tell you she has seen better days, and her little merchandize, tastefully assorted, indicates no vulgar mind. On the step of a door sits a poor woman crying, a baby at her breast; when you enquire her grief, she extends in her hand a few boxes of lucifer matches, and informs you she has been striving all day, and has sold nothing. The sallow-faced manufacturer from the country, who came up to London in the vain attempt to procure work, with his wife and children, are drawn up in the kennel, silently imploring alms; a ragged soldier of the late Spanish legion, with a wooden leg, and pewter crosses of San Fernando, offers forty songs for a halfpenny; a little boy, hardly able to crawl, screams fifty radishes a penny; here are stalls covered with pieces of stale flat fish; there, murdered grimalkins are offered for sale, under the savoury incognito of mutton-pies; in another place, the skin of the animal, stripped from its back while yet alive, and made into a cap, is hawked about by the wife or daughter of the pieman. Meat, fish, flesh, and fowl, condemned by the proper authorities of the several markets, are here exposed in every state of putridity, and, what is more extraordinary, find abundance of consumers. Truly, if the spectator of these, the obverse sides of life, does not feel a lively sense of thankfulness to the Great Being who has vouchsafed to him abundance, we earnestly recommend him to turn Turk in default of a better religion! Can any one, with a heart the size of a nutmeg, contemplate without pain the pitiable condition of those poor wretches who make out life from hand to mouth, exposed to the inclemencies of the weather, and perpetually baited by the myrmidons of the law, whose recreation seems to lie in hunting these children of misfortune from humble industry to crime. Of positive and decided impressions, the first and strongest the stranger wandering through London feels, is the idea of illimitability. It is to him not only a world, but it is a world without an end, spreading its gigantic arms on every side. It seizes upon surrounding villages, expels the rural deities from their ancient seats, and aims at an universal empire of bricks and mortar. It is an eternity of town, without beginning and without endan ocean filling the mind of the bewildered wanderer with the idea of amplitude infinitesimally extended. Let the adventurous traveller take his station in the heart of the city, and thence set out on a voyage of discovery to the end, if there is such a thing, of this great American sea-serpent of a town. Miles upon miles of narrow dingy streets, crammed to repletion with waggons, threatening to crush him between their ponderous wheels and the contiguous wall, indicate the city, whose enormous wealth and splendour are to the ignorant eye but poorly evidenced by dingy warehouses, dark alleys, and retired count. ing-houses, where the office lamp for ever burns an eternal fire before the shrine of Mammon. Yet here is the heart's core of the vast mass-here is neither time nor inclination, space nor opportunity, for exhibition or show of wealth-here, as in the breast of the royal Dane, is "that within that passeth show ;" and the wayfarer would, without a guide, puzzle himself in vain to discover the dusky den whence a Rothschild stretches forth a saving hand to tottering monarchs, or reassures the extinguished credit of bankrupt governments. It is truly astounding to us of the vulgar, who are in the habit of associating great business with great bustle, to contemplate the whereabouts of the city firms, whose credit and whose influences affect, one way or another, the commercial interests of the universal world. Here, indeed, may you behold commerce in all the immensity and glory, without any of the tinsel or gingerbread of empire: here confidence and credit sit upon thrones of adamantine rock, smiling upon trickster statesmen and penniless Chancellors of Exchequers: here, as from a fountain, the stream of enterprize inundates all lands, fertilizing as it flows, and returning only to flow forth to fertilize again." Mighty city! thy warehouses groan beneath the weight of the accumulated products of the ends of earth; thy mercantile navy, numberless as the birds of ocean, flies on errands of peace from pole to pole; thy capitalists weild at will the destinies of distant nations; and thy merchant princes grasp with the right hand and the left the extremities of either Ind. There is no place for trumpery ostentation, or the vain display of dissipated wealth. The governor of the Bank of England and a junior clerk carry with them a chop to an humble tavern, and partake of the mid-day meal with equal humility; a director of the East India House and a draper's assistant eat their biscuit and take their glass of sherry at the bar; the owner of a hundred ships and the mate of a trader exchange the news of the day over the table of a dingy coffeehouse in a dusky alley off Corn hill. Taking his way down one of the main arteries of the metropolis, the great aorta, for example, that pours the full tide of human existence through Fleet Street and the Strand, the splendour, less real than that he has left behind, but more apparent, breaks upon his astonished view. The shops of the goldsmith, piled from floor to roof with the richest treasures of their art; the shawl-shops, through whose crystal fronts you catch the gorgeousness of the commodities within; the emporiums of works of art and vertu, where lessons of taste may be had for looking; the vast repositories of learning, appealing eloquently to the eye of the mind; these, and a thousand other evidences of diffusive wealth, oppress for a while and bewilder the mind by their immensity, and almost lead us to the belief that all the wealth and splendour of the world must be gathered here for show. How much more would our astonishment increase, if we knew the history of any one of those shops disputing our attention. The fortunes that have been amassed within for a succession of generations -the fortunes that are being amassed in them now by some, and the handsome competence they afford to all the taxes they pay to the municipality and to the revenue, the incomes they afford in ground-rents, profit-rents, beneficial interests, and partnerships to numbers-the livelihoods derived from them by tradesmen, clerks, assistants, down to the porters who take off the shutters, and the man who sweeps the crossing-not to speak of the myriads who, all over the world, earn their bread and support their families by manufacturing the thousandand-one works of art and industry that are there, within the limits of an hour's walk, exhibited to every passing stranger-who can, or who cannot buy. Truly we are not to blame in speaking of this city as a world, when we consider that those shops, spitted together in rows like so many larks, and edging each other off the pavement, are estates each to its owner, and may be compared, for the purposes of illustration, with a vast extent of territory giving subsistence and employment to numbers of our fellow-creatures. We are at Charing- Cross: we have left behind the regions of the great merchants, and of the shopocrats; and we now timidly adventure upon the courtly regions of the consumers and customers. What a change! Here, pride seems to reign triumphant: coroneted carriages abound: the butterflies of fashion are abroad: ostentatious wealth, and non-productive industry, rule the destinies of this extremity of our world. Anon, in the heart of a mighty thoroughfare, where every foot of ground is worth its weight in gold, we skirt a dead wall, a penitentiary doubtless, or a prison. No; the massive gate falls back upon its ponderous hinges, and, while a gorgeous equipage rolls forth, reveals for an instant a spacious court-yard, ornamented with statues and vases, a sumptuous palace occupying the background. We would look at the revealed splendours for a moment, but the portly Cerberus forbids: darting an indignant glance at the inquisitive stranger, he hastens to close the massive portal in our teeth. Talk of the Grand Turk, forsooth, and his seraglio! talk of the seclusion of a convent, or the impenetrability of the Faubourg St Germain ! an assault upon the privacy of any one of them, is child's play compared with the forlorn hope of penetrating the exclusive seclusion of the magnates of London fashionable life. The space occupied by some of the town palaces of our great nobility would, if let as building ground, afford more than the revenue of a German potentate; a slip of wharfage, cut off from the foot of the garden of one of these, produces at this moment upwards of eight thousand pounds a-year, and the garden alone would let for sixteen or eighteen thousand more. Perhaps nothing can convey a better idea of the illimitable revenues of some of the great aristocracy, than the fact that they can afford, at this immense sacrifice, the indulgence of city parks around their city palaces. The traveller is now leaving the neighbourhoods of commerce: as he goes on for a little while, the rivalry of shops and private dwellings continues; but soon the former give up the unequal contest, and our stranger finds himself in what is conventionally understood as a genteel neighbourhood. A mile or two further on, grass plots and holly bushes, growing from tubs, come into fashion; bow pots, well stored with mignionette, musk, stone-crop, geraniums, and polyanthuses, decorate the windows, and the self-deluded voyageur fondly believes that he must now, at least, approximate to the end of the town. under the attractive title of “fresh air." Alas! the end of his journey is farther than the journey he has already made; the vast wilderness of London out of town is before him; and as the shades of evening fall, and the suburban butchers "let on" their gas, he finds himself somewhere about the end of Kensington and the beginning of Turnham Green, where, foot-sore and weary, he gives it up as a bad job, and returns to the city, satisfied that this vast metropolis is really and truly a world without end! The vastness of suburban London distinguishes that city eminently from the continental cities. A mile beyond Paris you are in a wilderness of sand hills, gypsum quarries, sterile rocks, and windmills; beyond the walls of Rome there is literally an immense expanse of desert; whereas London, if we may borrow a bull, surrounds itself, suburb clinging to suburb, like onions, fifty on a rope. The suburbs, which George Colman described emphatically as "regions of preparatory schools," have a character peculiarly their own; once seen, they cannot be mistaken. They are marvellously. attached to gardening, and rejoice above all things in a tree in a tub. They delight in a uniformity of ugliness, staring you out of countenance with five windows in front, and a little green hall-door at one side, giving to each house the appearance of having had a paralytic stroke; they stand upon their dignity at a distance from the road, and are carefully defended from intrusion by a bodyguard of spikes bristling on a low wall. They delight in outlandish and ridiculous names: a lot of tenements looking out upon a dead wall in front, and a madhouse in the rear, club together, and introduce themselves to your notice as OPTIC TERRACE: another regiment is baptized by the christian and surnames of PARADISE PROSPECT; while a third lot, standing together two and two, after the manner of the Siamese Twins, are called MOGG'S VILLAS, BUGSBY'S COTTAGES, or GEMINI PLACE. The natives of these outlandish regions are less wealthy than genteel; like Beau Tibbs, they live here for the benefit of their health-and fortune. When you visit them, they are eloquent upon the merits of an atmosphere surcharged with dust, which they earnestly recommend for your inhalation, All shopkeepers, tradesmen, and others in these regions, are insufferably bad and dear; every body is supplied with the staple of their consumables from town, and it is only on an emergency that the suburban dealers are applied to. Knowing that their articles are not required for the regular consumption, they take good care to make those pay well whose necessities compel them occasionally to have dealings with them. We find by experience that meat rises in price, as we travel westward, at the rate of a penny per pound per mile, and every thing else (except taxes) in the like ratio. We must, however, leave the suburbs for the present. "Peace to each swain who rural rapture Has doled his houses forth in two by two, And rear'd a row upon the plan, no doubt, Of old men's jaws, with every third tooth out." Not less strong upon the mind of the reflective stranger in London, is his impression of its endless variety, its inexhaustibility, not merely of streets and squares, lanes and alleys, courts and passages, but of human character, occupation, and condition. Other places have usually a distinctive character, peculiarly their own: towns are maritime, as Liverpool and Bristol: manufacturing, as Leeds and Manchester; or both, as Glasgow: literary and educational, as Edinburgh, Cambridge, and Oxford: military, as Chatham and Woolwich: naval, as Portsmouth, Plymouth, and the like: health and pleasure seeking, as Cheltenham, Leamington, Brighton, ⚫Harrowgate, Bath. London, on the contrary, is at once one and all—a mercantile, manufacturing, literary, military, pleasure-seeking, busy, idle place; and hence the endless diversity of character that abounds along its overcrowded streets. The duke and the dustman, the private soldier and the prince, the seaman and the sovercign, all look upon London as |