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The Doughty Street house remains as he left it, but 1 Devonshire Terrace has been rather considerably altered. The new residence was such a much more imposing one than the other that absurd rumours got about that he was lapsing into extravagance and living beyond his income, and “I perfectly remember,” writes Sala, “when he moved from his modest residence in Doughty Street to a much grander but still not very palatial house in Devonshire Terrace, an old gentleman calling one day upon my mother and telling her, with a grave countenance, that Dickens had pawned his plate, and had been waited upon for the last fortnight by bailiffs in livery.” It was about this time, too, that the Quarterly made its famous prediction that in the case of work such as Dickens was doing “an ephemeral popularity will be followed by an early oblivion.” But there was no ground for any of these fears. His life was a triumphal procession; he went forward from victory to victory. At Devonshire Terrace he wrote most of Barnaby Rudge: and the prototype of Grip, Barnaby’s raven, the special playmate of Dickens’s children, died there; from here he went on his first visit to America, and on his return, with intervals of holiday at Broadstairs, in Cornwall, and in Italy, wrote the American Notes, Martin Chuzzlewit, The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, Pictures from Italy, Dombey and Son, and commenced the writing of David Copperfield. Whilst he was here, too, he was for a brief space the first editor of the Daily News, and in March 1850 opened his Wellington Street office and started Household Words. Incidentally, he was taking an active share in a dozen or more public movements; acting as chairman at meetings and dinners, managing and playing in private theatricals, writing miscellaneous articles for his new magazine, and attending closely to its business organisation. Never was a more strenuous literary worker, or one who brought more enthusiasm to whatever he undertook.
In the autumn of 1851, in the flowing and rising tide of his prosperity, he removed to the now vanished Tavistock House, in Tavistock Square, and in the next six years, before his removal to Gad’s Hill, wrote Bleak House, Hard Times, and Little Dorrit, to say nothing of the numerous short stories and articles he contributed to Household Words, and began to give those public readings from his books that were in his last decade to occupy so much of his time, add so enormously to his income and his personal popularity, and play so sinister a part in the breaking down of his health and the shortening of his career.
Writing immediately after Dickens’s death, Sala said that twenty years ago the face and form of Sir Robert Peel were familiar to almost everybody who passed him in the street, and “there were as few last week who would have been unable to point out the famous novelist, with his thought-lined face, his grizzled beard, his wondrous searching eyes, his bluff presence and swinging gait as, head aloft, he strode, now through crowded streets, looking seemingly neither to the right nor the left, but of a surety looking at and into everything – now at the myriad aspects of London life, the ever-changing raree-show, the endless roundabout, the infinite kaleidoscope of wealth and pauperism, of happiness and misery, of good and evil in this Babylon – now over the pleasant meads and breezy downs which stretched round his modest Kentish demesne hard by the hoary tower of Rochester… Who had not heard him read, and who had not seen his photographs in the shop windows? The omnibus conductors knew him, the street boys knew him; and perhaps the locality where his recognition would have been least frequent – for all that he was a member of the Athenæum Club – was Pall Mall. Elsewhere he would make his appearance in the oddest places, and in the most inclement weather: in Ratcliff Highway, on Haverstock Hill, on Camberwell Green, in Gray’s Inn Lane, in the Wandsworth Road, at Hammersmith Broadway, in Norton Folgate, and at Kensal New Town… His carriage was remarkably upright, his mien almost aggressive in its confidence – a bronzed, weatherworn, hardy man, with somewhat of a seaman’s air about him.” London folks would draw aside, he continues, “as the great writer – who seemed always to be walking a match against Thought – strode on, and, looking after him, say, ‘There goes Charles Dickens!’ The towering stature, the snowy locks, the glistening spectacles, the listless, slouching port, as that of a tired giant, of William Makepeace Thackeray were familiar enough likewise but, comparatively speaking, only to a select few. He belonged to Clubland, and was only to be seen sauntering there or in West End squares, or on his road to his beloved Kensington… Thackeray in Houndsditch, Thackeray in Bethnal Green or at Camden Town, would have appeared anomalous … but Charles Dickens, when in town, was ubiquitous.”
There are statues in London of many smaller men, of many who mean little or nothing in particular to London, but there is none to Dickens, and perhaps he needs none. Little critics may decry him, but it makes no difference, it takes nothing from his immortality. “It is fatuous,” as Trollope said of his work, “to condemn that as deficient in art which has been so full of art as to captivate all men.” And to the thousands of us who know the people and the world that he created he is still ubiquitous in London here, even though he has his place for ever, as Swinburne says, among the stars and suns that we behold not:
“Where stars and suns that we behold not burn,
Higher even than here, though highest was here thy place,
Love sees thy spirit laugh and speak and shine
With Shakespeare and the soft bright soul of Sterne,
And Fielding’s kindliest might and Goldsmith’s grace;
Scarce one more loved or worthier love than thine.”
CHAPTER XVI
CONCLUSION
When I was writing of what remains to us of the London of Shakespeare, I might have mentioned the four-century-old gateway of Lincoln’s Inn, in Chancery Lane, that Ben Jonson helped to build, and close by which, at 24 Old Buildings, Cromwell’s secretary, John Thurloe, lived in 1654; and although in my first chapter I gave a fairly lengthy list of famous authors and artists who were Cockneys by birth, I by no means made it so long as I could have done. Hablot K. Browne, otherwise “Phiz,” the chief of Dickens’s artists, was born in Kennington, and lived for eight years, towards the close of his career, at 99 Ladbroke Grove Road; Lord Lytton, whom Tennyson unkindly described as “the padded man that wears the stays,” and who was for a time a more popular novelist than either Dickens or Thackeray, was born at 31 Baker Street, and lived in after years at 12 Grosvenor Square, and at 36 Hertford Street; Gibbon was born at Putney, and lived for some years at 7 Bentinck Street, which he said was “the best house in the world”; John Leech was born over his father’s coffee-shop in Ludgate Hill, and lived when he had risen to fame at 32 Brunswick Square, and passed the last years of his life at 6 The Terrace, Kensington; and one who I confess interests me at least as much as any of these, Douglas Jerrold, was born in Greek Street, Soho, lived as a boy at Broad Court, in the same neighbourhood, and afterwards shifted about into half-a-dozen different parts of London, and died in 1857 at Kilburn Priory, on the skirts of St. John’s Wood. West Lodge, his house at Lower Putney Common, still stands much as it was when he occupied it, with his mulberry tree still growing in that garden round which, one memorable summer afternoon, he and Dickens, Forster, Maclise, and Macready gave each other “backs,” and played a joyously undignified game of leapfrog. I don’t know whether anybody reads Mrs. Caudle’s Curtain Lectures now, but everybody read them and laughed over them when they were new, and Jerrold’s best jokes and witticisms are much too well known to leave me an excuse for repeating any of them here. For all his bitter tongue, he was kind, generous, sensitive, afire with a fine scorn of wrong, injustice, and every variety of social humbug and snobbery. “A small delicately-formed, bent man,” is Edmund Yates’s recollection of him, “with long grey hair combed back from his forehead, with grey eyes deep-set under penthouse brows, and a way, just as the inspiration seized him, of dangling a double-eyeglass which hung round his neck by a broad black ribbon.”
Browning, who was born at Hanover Cottage, Southampton Street, Camberwell, in 1812, lived at De Vere Gardens, and at 19 Warwick Crescent. Removing from 74 Gloucester Place in 1842, Elizabeth Barrett and her autocratic father went to 50 Wimpole Street, and calling there with a friend in 1845, Robert Browning was introduced to her. It was from and to this house that so many of those wonderful love-letters of theirs were written, and little more than a year after their first meeting, her father stubbornly refusing his consent to their union, she stole out by this sedate and sombre door one autumn morning to join her waiting lover, and they were quietly and clandestinely married at the old church round the corner in Marylebone Road – the same church in which, in the same year, Dickens, then living at Devonshire House and within sight of it, married Mr. Dombey, with Captain Cuttle looking on at the ceremony from the gallery.
At 82 Wimpole Street Wilkie Collins died; and at 67, lived Henry Hallam, the historian, and his son Arthur, the friend of Tennyson, who often visited him there, and has enshrined his memory for ever in his In Memoriam; where, too, he pictures this house and this street:
“Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street,
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand.
A hand that can be clasped no more —
Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.
He is not here; but far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.”
Theodore Hook, another Cockney, was born in Charlotte Street, Bedford Square; Captain Marryat, another, in Great George Street, Westminster, and whilst he was writing the most famous of his books he lived at 8 Duke Street, St. James’s, and at Sussex Lodge, in the Fulham Road. Ruskin, who, like Browning, is included in my earlier list of Cockneys, was born at 54 Hunter Street, and made his home for many years at 163 Denmark Hill, both of which houses still survive him.
Benjamin Franklin lived at 7 Craven Street, Strand; before he rented a house in London after Johnson’s death, Boswell had lodgings, on his annual visits to town, in Half Moon Street, Piccadilly, in Conduit Street, Regent Street, and in Old Bond Street; where Sterne dwelt before him and Gibbon after him, and at 27A, Harrison Ainsworth, later than them all; but Ainsworth’s more notable residence, where he lived when he was in the full glory of his enormous popularity, is Kensal House, out in the no-longer-rural district of Kensal Green.
At 19 Albert Gate, Sloane Street, lived Charles Reade, who was nearly all his life quarrelling with his critics and fighting against legal injustices with an almost ungovernable fury, and yet David Christie Murray said he was one of the four men he had met who were “distinguished by that splendid urbanity of manner which was once thought to express the acme of high breeding… A beautiful, stately cordiality commonly marked his social manner, but he could be moved to a towering rage by an act of meanness, treachery, or oppression; and in his public correspondence he was sometimes downright vitriolic.” Anthony Trollope died at 34 Welbeck Street; and Lord Macaulay at Holly Lodge on Campden Hill. George Cruikshank lived in the queer, dull-looking little house that still remains at 263 Hampstead Road, and from that address put forth his groundless claims to being the originator of Ainsworth’s novels, Jack Sheppard and The Miser’s Daughter, and Dickens’s Oliver Twist. Ainsworth was still living, and strenuously denied his assertions; Dickens was dead, but there existed a letter of his about the illustrations to his book that sufficiently proved that the story was not written round Cruickshank’s drawings, as the aged artist seemed to have persuaded himself it was. A greater artist than Cruickshank (and another Cockney, by the way) was born in Cumberland Market, near Regent’s Park, and died in a sponging-house in Eyre Street Hill, Clerkenwell Road, in 1804. That was George Morland. Two years before his death he went with his wife and put up at the Bull Inn, at Highgate, which was kept by a former acquaintance of his. He is supposed to have utilised as a studio the large room with three bay windows that runs above the bar the full width of the building. He entertained Gainsborough and Romney and other contemporary artists there, but within a few months had had a fierce quarrel with the landlord and returned to lodge with his brother in Dean Street, Soho. He was by then showing the effects of his reckless dissipations, and looked “besotted and squalid and cadaverous; hanging cheeks and pinched nose, contracted nostrils, bleared and bloodshot eyes, swelled legs, a palsied hand, and tremulous voice bespeaking the ruin of what had once been the soundest of frames.” Drunk or sober, he worked rapidly and with unfailing mastery, but he was generally cheated by those around him of the due reward of his labours. Going on a short holiday to Brighton, he wrote giving his brother this list of what he had drunk in a single day: “Hollands gin, rum and milk – before breakfast. Coffee – for breakfast. Hollands, porter, shrub, ale, Hollands, port wine and ginger, bottled ale – these before dinner. Port wine at dinner. Porter, bottled porter, punch, porter, ale, opium and water. Port wine at supper. Gin, shrub, and rum on going to bed.” At the bottom of the list he sketched a tombstone bearing a skull and crossbones, and by way of epitaph: “Here lies a drunken dog.” And debts and duns and death in the sponging-house were the inevitable end of it.
Lady Blessington held her brilliant salon at 8 Seamore Place, Mayfair, before in 1836 she removed to the more noted Gore House, Kensington, and welcomed to her splendid drawing-rooms Byron, Lytton, Disraeli, Landor, Marryat, Dickens, Thackeray, Sydney Smith, Maclise, Hook, and all the greatest men of the day in literature, art, politics, and society, till in 1849 she was overwhelmed with financial embarrassments and fled to Paris, where she died the year after. Gore House has vanished from its place long since, and the Albert Hall more than covers the site of it. But Holland House, which was equally or more celebrated for its magnificent social gatherings in the first half of last century and earlier, still holds its ground. Addison lived there after his marriage to the Countess of Warwick in 1716, and from his bedroom there, in his last hours, sent for his dissipated stepson in order that he might see “how a Christian can die.”
Perhaps more interesting than either of these, from a literary standpoint, is the house of Samuel Rogers, 22 St. James’s Place, overlooking the Green Park. You can scarcely open the memoirs of any man of letters of his time, but you may read some account of a breakfast or a dinner at Rogers’s. “What a delightful house it is!” says Macaulay. “It looks out on the Green Park just at the most pleasant point. The furniture has been selected with a delicacy of taste quite unique… In the drawing-room the chimney-pieces are carved by Flaxman into the most beautiful Grecian forms. The bookcase is painted by Stothard, in his very best manner, with groups from Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Boccaccio. The pictures are not numerous, but every one is excellent. The most remarkable objects in the dining-room are, I think, a cast of Pope, taken after death by Roubiliac; a noble model in terra-cotta by Michael Angelo, from which he afterwards made one of his finest statues, that of Lorenzo de Medici; and, lastly, a mahogany table on which stands an antique vase. When Chantrey dined with Rogers some time ago he took particular notice of the vase and the table on which it stands, and asked Rogers who made the table. ‘A common carpenter,’ said Rogers. ‘Do you remember the making of it?’ said Chantrey. ‘Certainly,’ said Rogers, in some surprise; ‘I was in the room while it was finished with the chisel, and gave the workman directions about placing it.’ ‘Yes,’ said Chantrey, ‘I was the carpenter.’” Byron, who was a guest at Holland House and at Lady Blessington’s, was a frequent guest at Rogers’s table also. It was Rogers who introduced him to Miss Milbanke, the unfortunate lady who was to become his wife; and Byron seems by turns to have admired him, disliked him, and looked upon him with a sort of laughing contempt. “When Sheridan was on his deathbed,” he writes, “Rogers aided him with purse and person: this was particularly kind in Rogers, who always spoke ill of Sheridan (to me, at least); but indeed he does that of everybody. Rogers is the reverse of the line ‘The best good man with the worst-natured Muse,’ being ‘The worst good man with the best-natured Muse.’ His Muse being all sentiment and sago, while he himself is a venomous talker. I say ‘worst good man,’ because he is (perhaps) a good man – at least he does good now and then, as well he may, to purchase himself a shilling’s worth of Salvation for his Slanders. They are so little, too – small talk, and old womanny; and he is malignant too, and envious.”
Rogers had a fine head, a distinguished manner, a bland, silky way of saying the most cutting and cynical things. He was not so much a poet as a banker of a poetical temperament. His poetry will presently be forgotten, but his breakfasts and his dinners will be remembered because he lived to be well over ninety, was a very wealthy man of taste, and had the will and the means to play the generous host to some three generations of the wisest, wittiest, greatest men of his era, and several of them said brighter and better things in his dining and drawing-rooms than he ever wrote in his books. He covered such a long span of time that he could entertain Sheridan, who was born in 1751, and Dickens, who died in 1870. Many of the same glorious company had a meeting-place also until a more recent day at Bath House, Mayfair, where Lady Ashburton, the great friend of the Carlyles, held famous receptions, of which Carlyle himself and the Brookfields have left us reminiscences. And the invaluable Allingham has one or two notes about her in his Diary; one dated 5th November 1875, in which he says Carlyle passed his house “about four to-day. I overtook him in the Fulham Road, and walked with him to Lady Ashburton’s door at Knightsbridge. He said, ‘Browning in his young days wore a turn-down shirt collar with a ribbon for a necktie, and a green coat. I first met him one evening at Leigh Hunt’s, a modest youth, with a good strong face and a head of dark hair. He said little, but what he said was good.’” Possibly the talk fell upon him because Browning was among the guests he was to meet that day at Lady Ashburton’s.
William Morris and Burne Jones lived and worked together at 17 Red Lion Square; Steele used to live in Bloomsbury Square, where later Disraeli and his father lived, at No. 5. George Borrow lived at 23 Hereford Square, South Kensington. Berkeley Square has a peculiar attraction for me, less because Horace Walpole had his home at 42, than because Colley Cibber dwelt as a very old man at No. 20. In the same way I am not so much drawn to Gower Street by the fact that in a greatly altered house there Darwin used to live, as I am to that shabby Percy Street, Tottenham Court Road, where Albert Smith had a house at which Sala once visited him. Walpole and Darwin are, of course, incomparably greater men than Cibber and Albert Smith, but these last two have a curious fascination for me. I read Smith’s Christopher Tadpole and The Scattergood Family when I was a boy, and his figure flits elusively in the background of Dickens’s reputation, wrapped in a very characteristic mid-Victorian bohemianism, and, without precisely knowing why, I have taken a sort of liking to him. Sala says he was a kind, cheery little man, who when he was at work at home wore a blue blouse. “I recall him,” he says, “as a sturdy-looking, broad-shouldered, short-necked man, with grey eyes and flowing locks of light brown, and large side-whiskers; later in life he wore a beard. His voice was a high treble.” His study in Percy Street was littered always with French novels, dolls, pipes, cheap jewellery, cakes of soap made in the image of fruit, minature Swiss châlets, fancy costumes, and such a miscellany of odds and ends that it had the appearance of an old curiosity shop. As for Cibber, I began by feeling contempt for him, because of the scorn Pope pours on him in The Dunciad, and the character for dulness that was imposed upon him by that savage satirist and his host of imitators. But when I read some of Cibber’s comedies (such as The Careless Husband, and Love Makes a Man) I found them amusing and clever in their fashion, certainly not dull, and when I dropped one day into the National Portrait Gallery and saw that coloured bust of him under a glass case and leering through the glass eyes that have been fitted into his head – I succumbed, and acquired a sneaking regard for the gay old coxcomb that is not yet beginning to cool. You cannot read his plays and his delightful Apology for his Life without getting interested in him; and then if you go and look at that bust you will feel that you know the sly, witty, shrewd, ruddy-visaged, not over clean, furtive, leery old rascal as intimately as if you had been acquainted with him in the flesh.
But if one set out to write of the homes and haunts of these minor celebrities this book would be endless; moreover, many amongst them that have some peculiar attraction for me might have no interest for any one else; and many that for special reasons mean a great deal to you might mean nothing at all to me. So, as the wiser course, I have, in the main, limited my survey to the houses of men and women who are considerable enough to be known, more or less, by every one who has even a nodding acquaintance with literature, and to that extent my chronicle is at an end.
