by R S Surtees
FOOTMEN
are to be jobbed in London as well as coachmen; but with a handle inside the door, footmen are not useful and are certainly not ornamental. They generally try for 4s or 5s a day, though often very little better to look at than crossing - sweepers. But as the brougham is supposed to be jobbed for the ladies, why should not the gentleman ride beside the coachman? And here we may observe that
COUNTRY SERVANTS
are of no use in London. If you do not lose them in going up you are sure to do so when you get there; besides which they generally think they are brought for their own amusement and not for your service. Moreover, they learn no good in London lodgings. If you take a lady’s maid, stipulate beforehand that she is to wait at table.
HACK HORSES.
Riding is not an amusement to be recommended. A man is quite as respectable and much safer on the box of an omnibus. A hack horse is a hack horse whoever bestrides it, and even if their woebegone looks did not proclaim them, their wretched pulpy saddles and buckley bridles would: 14s a day, or 10s for a “Park ride” is an expensive way of risking one’s neck. For a man the
BOX OF AN OMNIBUS
is the best place from which to see London. He may see the outside of everything for a very few shillings.
RIVER STEAMERS
are also a great convenience to sight-seers; but avoid the crowded halfpenny and penny ones. The dearest are cheap enough.
A FISH DINNER
at Blackwall or Greenwich contrasts strangely with the expense of getting there. And eating leads us to say a few words about London
CHOP HOUSES.
These hints, though more especially intended for families, will be serviceable to the single of either sex as well. Gentlemen will most likely prefer dining out to the trouble of ordering dinner at home, and if so, here are a half a dozen houses selected at random, in different parts of the town, from Murray’s useful Handbook of Modern London. “Joe’s in Finch Lane, Cornhill, famous for chops and steaks. Simpson’s Cigar Divan in the Strand; joints from 5 to 7. Simpson’s, at the Albion, close to Drury Lane Theatre, said to be excellent. Blue Post in Cork Street, Bond Street. The Albany in Piccadilly, where, it is said, ladies may dine with comfort. Verrey’s in Regent Street, where there is French cookery.”
We are now about to enter upon the extreme delicacies of our subject.
SHOPPING
is the just prerogative of ladies. We will divide our hints into two heads, ladies’ shopping and gentlemen’s shopping; and first of LADIES’ SHOPPING.
The most marvellous sight in nature is a lady turning over half a shopful of things, and end by buying a pennorth of pins. The next most marvellous thing is how the shopkeepers stand it.
MILLINERS.
A first-rate London milliner and dressmaker is a difficult person to control. If she agrees to let you have a thing at an apparently reasonable price, she will often add something or another that will completely alter the reality. For instance, a lady will order a dress at, say, ten guineas. When the bill comes in at Christmas “a rich silk dress” is charged £10, 10s.; but there follows, perhaps, “A band and fine gold buckle £4, 14s. 6d.” — the band being a piece of ribbon, and the fine gold buckle a thing that a country silversmith will match for five and twenty or thirty shillings. The only way to meet this is to have the bill with the goods, whether you mean to pay the bill or not, as you can return a thing of this sort at the time, though you may not be able to do so six months after.
In dress, study the pretty and becoming, rather than what the milliners and dressmakers tell you is the fashion. If you observe the great ladies of life, they are never in extremes. Do not believe that the Queen wears all the queer things they attribute to her. No one has a more ladylike taste in dress than Her Majesty.
LACE.
There is said to be more roguery in lace than in anything else; what is sold in many shops as hand-made being only machinery-made with a little irregularity introduced in the pattern to give it an air of plausibility. Ladies like to be cheated. And certainly London is the true place to gratify the propensity, where swindling is a perfect science, and carried on in every guise, from the mock custom-house seizure sales, proclaimed with royal-arms-headed bills and advertisements, through the continually “selling off” and “tremendous sacrifice” shops, down to the prowling
DUFFERS
who hang about the streets, whispering into shop-window starers’ ears their enormous bargains in smuggled shawls, silks, laces, gloves or cigars. The parties who follow them to their low pothouse dens are lucky if they do not get robbed as well as cheated. Their pretended smuggled goods are all British manufacture. formerly held in such abhorrence, have come into favour, and save an infinity of trouble and persecution. You see at once the price of each article, and it is no longer open to the shopman to add ten or fifteen per cent, to accord with your arrival in a cab or a carriage. Besides “ticketing” prevents disappointment at finding that an article on which you have set your heart is greatly beyond your mark. Do not, however, suppose that ticketed shops are necessarily cheap, or that the figure on the ticket always denotes the price they mean to take. We once saw a lady buy for 14s an article that was ticketed 25s.
Strange shops should be entered with caution. There are handsomely set out shops — in the best streets too — where, if they get a lady in alone, they will try and bully her into buying, and cheat her most desperately into the bargain.
As a general rule, where the shopmen are extremely urgent and importunate, insisting upon showing things instead of answering your questions about price, make up your mind that they are cheats, and get out of the shop as quickly as you can.
As a general rule in shopping, when you do not take the things away with you, give your address, and name an horn-when you will be at home to receive and pay for them.
FOR TOYS
the Lowther Arcade, between St Martin’s Church and the Strand, is cheapest, if not best. At Soho Bazaar there is also good choice.
HAIRDRESSERS
are wonderful people for talking ladies into combs and cosmetics — each lauding his own and decrying his neighbour’s. Ladies may just as well take the master hairdresser in their neighbourhood as send for a fashionable one from a distance; the latter will most likely favour them with one of his genteel young men.
We wish we could tell our male readers where to get a comfortable clip without persecution, but we only know one shop, and that is so dirty we dare not recommend it.
MAN’S SHOPPING
is of man’s life a thing apart. We advise you to have nothing to do with cheap clothes, which are always dear in the end. True, the puffing tailors say that by dealing for ready money gentlemen only pay for themselves, and not for those who don’t; but we do not know that there is much to choose between paying for those who don’t, and paying for the bedizened palaces, poets and outrageous puffing of the slop shops. Besides, there is great danger of contagion from the unwholesome places in which most of the cheap clothes are made up.
We make it a rule never to change a tradesman who serves us well, therefore our own experience is necessarily limited. In these days of sack-like garments, however, there is no saying but a country tailor could make a baggy coat as well as a London man, and at much lower cost, especially if the material be found for him. It is not a bad plan to get London clothes and have them copied in the country.
The Post Office Directory gives the names of many thousand London tailors — an army of them in fact.
Hats may now be got as well in the country as in London. A guinea should get a good one in either.
CARRIAGE BUYING
is a very dangerous speculation in London; no one should attempt it on his own judgment.
Half the advertised bargains are swindles, and some apparently respectable coachmakers are as bad as any in the advertising way. If a great man dies they will immediately furbish up an old thing, add his coronet or crest, and perhaps get £150 for a vehicle not w
orth £10. Still, despite all the sneering self-sufficiency of country coach-makers, there is nothing like a London carriage.
COPERS, OR HORSE CHAUNTERS, are people who deal in fine-looking, but generally broken - winded or otherwise utterly worthless horses, by means of specious advertisements. They are generally very liberal in their offers of trials; but when the would-be buyer comes to mount, they request a deposit of — say half the value — £50 or £60, as he is a stranger. When the would-be buyer returns from his trial he finds the coper gone, and the smiles of the neighbourhood inform him he has been “done.” Horse-chaunting is a very common pursuit in London.
TATTERS ALL’S
is the best place either for buying or selling horses.
MOCK AUCTIONS
are places where the comedy of competition is amusingly performed by regular retainers whenever a stranger looks in. There is something about mock auctions that would go far to proclaim them, even if immortal ‘Punch’ had not taken them in hand.
REGULAR AUCTIONS
are bad enough; for unless you employ a broker to bid for you the fraternity will run you up to perhaps more than you would pay for the article in a shop; while, if you do employ a broker and ask his opinion of the value he will be sure to enhance it as he is paid a commission (generally five per cent) on the purchase-money. The only way is to appraise it yourself, and then tell a broker what you will give. By this means you may sometimes pick up bargains; but the bad ones will, we think, preponderate over the good.
MEDICAL ADVICE.
Having mentioned this at the outset we will close with a few words on the subject, though we hope your journey will be solely for pleasure.
There is no doubt that hundreds and thousands have died in the country who might have been saved if they had gone to London. The old, indefinite “internal complaint” that satisfies so many country incompetents, flies before the fight of London science. When, therefore, old Bolus does not make you any better, ask him who will be the best person in London to consult for your complaint, and if you fear the fatigue of the journey, order one of the invalid carriages which are to be had on most railways.
In all professional cases take one of the best men of the day; they cost no more than the worst, viz a guinea for a consultation, and another when there is an examination. A little delay in getting an interview is the only inconvenience, and this is often overcome by a tip to the servant.
The best plan, however, is to let them come to you, which costs no more. There are few more painful reminiscences than those connected with the crowded waiting-room of a London practitioner.
Remember, fair ladies, that time is money with professional men, and do not overpower them with questions. Think of Abernethy’s answer to the lady who, having exhausted his patience, at length asked if he thought she “might eat a few oysters.”
“Oh! d — mn it, Ma’am, yes! Shells and all!” exclaimed he rolling out of the room.
Supposing you go up well, one great aid in keeping so will be to exercise care in
WALKING THE STREETS.
To this end cross at a crossing and not at an angle. In crowded thoroughfares look well each way before you venture, and then cross coolly and collectedly, or you may meet some one else rushing from the contrary direction and upset each other. The right hand to it entitles you to the wall-side of the footway. As you will most likely have to go into the City for money before you leave town, let us advise you to go about mid-day, unless you are fond of waiting, which assuredly you will have to do if you postpone your call till the busy hours of banking.
If at any time you miss your way ask it of a policeman: but hoping that you will have no such misfortune, but on the contrary enjoy yourselves exceedingly and get away not only with a little money in your pockets, but without a wrangle either with your landlady, or the cab-driver who takes you to the station, or the luggage porter on the platform, prays Yours, &c., The Author.
Nimrod
CONTENTS
I. A VISIT TO NIMROD.
II. THE MAN AND HIS WRITINGS.
III. THE MAN AND HIS WRITINGS — CONTINUED.
IV. POMPONIUS EGO.
I. A VISIT TO NIMROD.
LOOKING BACK TO former years when the Continent was overrun with English visitors — when every third person we encountered was our countryman — it may appear like the repetition of an already oft-told tale to attempt a narrative of a trip to a place which has been explored by every traveller, from the lordly aristocrat who rolls along in his well-appointed calèche with avant-courier to the humble mechanic who has dared the waves in the tremulous steamer, which, starting from the Tower Stairs, promises to deposit its cargo at Calais or Boulogne, and return on the following day. But the rage for Continental travel has subsided; and though the influx of visitors in former times might lead one to suppose that no one had escaped the general mania, still there may be those who yet keep their visit in reserve, while others may like to know what changes have come over the land since last they retraced their steps from France.
It was on the last Saturday in June [1832] that we mounted the box of the Dover mail at 8 P.M., and were whisked out of London as fast as four horses could take us. The Dover road is one of the best in England for quick travelling. The business communication alone between this country and the Continent is amply sufficient to keep the posting department on a perpetual qui vive, and the crowds that flocked to the Continent in former years converted it into a regular thoroughfare. There is scarcely a stage that may not be travelled at the rate of ten miles an hour with a light carriage and a pair of horses. An Englishman is fond of going fast; and the man who has the most time to spare is generally the most niggardly of it when travelling. Of coaches there are, of course, both fast and slow; in fact, the most curious in paces is sure to be accommodated between the Royal Mail and the London van driven by that well-known gentleman ‘Tea-kettle Tom.’
Coaching, however, is but a sorry business on the Dover road just now. The unequal contest that the proprietors have to maintain with the steamboats tells sadly against them. From London to Heme Bay a passenger may be conveyed for half a crown, and for a less sum thence to Dover by land, whereas formerly it could not be accomplished much under a pound, going the cheapest way to work. We were ‘credibly informed’ at Dover, that a coach had made two journeys with only three passengers; and that, too, in the month of June, a time when many honest people begin to emigrate to the coast. Nor are the coach proprietors the only persons who have to deplore the change. The hotel-keepers on both sides the water declare that never during their recollection of that oft-quoted but invisible person, ‘the oldest inhabitant,’ were times so dull or so unpromising as at present. Their beds stand unaired, their cellars locked, their waiters unemployed, their commissionaires (those birds of rapine) in vain laud their masters’ houses to the skies in noisy clamour at the arrival of each steamer, and everything is dull, flat, and unprofitable.
We reached Dover about six o’clock on Sunday morning, and about noon stepped on board the steamboat which lay in the harbour. In former days we have seen these boats so crowded on a Sunday as scarcely to afford standing room beneath the awning; whereas about five-and-twenty passengers were all that mustered on this occasion, notwithstanding the day was one of the brightest that ever dawned on Dover heights.
“’Tis sweet on such a balmy morn
To hear the village church bells borne
Merrily swinging o’er mount and vale,”
and feel that mild and solemn stillness which so well bespeaks the Sabbath day in England. The shops were closed, the mechanic rested from his toils, the sailors appeared in their clean white trousers, and there were
“Lasses gaily drest
And ploughmen in coarse apparel, yet their best.”
The few passengers had mustered on deck, and made the usual preparations for a sea voyage, the majority with the apparently fixed determination of being sick. After a few minutes’ delay the bell rang, the rop
e was slipt, and away we steamed to sea. Who is there that having encountered a rough passage fails to retain some recollections of the accompanying pleasure? The long-protracted dives that denote the crossing of the bar, the creaking of the vessel as she gets among the waves, the flapping of the sails, the hallooing of the steersman, and the hovering of the sea-gulls as they wing their way towards the shore to escape the approaching storm. Then comes the nervous quivering of the paddles and the gradual approach to illness, confirmed by the green countenance and fixed eye of some less sailor-like person who lies extended on the deck. Then, perhaps, some hard-hearted sinner walks to and fro with folded arms in the pride of conscious superiority, or sits talking of the sumptuous dinner he means to provide on his landing, when the very thought of eating is enough to make a man throw himself overboard; and when somewhat recovered from the first effects, and while dozing away in hopes of beguiling the time, up comes the mate with, “Sorry to trouble you, sir, but we want this ere ballast-box shifted,” followed by another hero with a canvas bag and a book, to ask “if it would be convenient to settle for the passage”; when of all things in the world it is the least so; and when, after unbuttoning coats, the purse at length is found, it is handed over for him to help himself rather than undergo the least unnecessary trouble.
On the present occasion we are happy to say there was nothing to disturb the calm serenity which should reign over an editorial mind. The sea was almost as smooth as ice; what little wind there was blew in our favour, and shortly before three we stood off Calais. The long pier that runs out to sea exhibited the usual mixture of French Douanians and English Dowdies; the former with their dark green coats and white trousers, the latter with yellow bonnets, green ribbons, and such mixtures as none but Englishwomen would think of wearing. Indeed, save those of the higher class, our countrywomen have no idea of dressing; they spend five times as much money upon it as the French and do all in their power to imitate them; but like Mrs Oberflachlich (in Mathews’s Comic Annual) who studies to make her daughters look natural, it is of no avail — meet them on the borders of the Caspian Sea or the British Channel, there is no mistaking them.
