From 221B Baker Street to the Old Curiosity Shop

by Stephen Halliday

  Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,

  The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers;

  Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends

  Or other testimony of summer nights.

  The drainage works of Sir Joseph Bazalgette (1819–91) helped cleanse the river of sewage, but did little to protect it from the detritus of twentieth-century consumer society with its need for packaging and cigarettes. Bazalgette’s drainage works themselves became the centrepiece of a novel published in 2005. The Great Stink by Clare Clark (not to be confused with a work which bears the same title, by the present author, and is an account of Bazalgette’s life and work) tells the story of William May, a soldier of the Crimean War, who returns, traumatised by his experiences in that terrible conflict, and works with Bazalgette on the drainage systems which were being constructed in the 1850s and 1860s. William becomes a suspect when the body of a murdered man is discovered in the sewers and in the story the author incorporates a number of people and activities which were indeed involved in Bazalgette’s great project. Joseph Bazalgette himself (not yet Sir Joseph, which came in 1875) is asked what makes a good engineer and replies: ‘a pragmatist made conservative by the conspicuous failures of structures and machines hastily contrived.’ William is eventually exonerated and the book concludes with the execution, at Newgate, of the real culprit.

  A more tragic note was sounded by Andrew Motion, in his poem ‘Fresh Water’, written in memory of Ruth Haddon, a young woman who drowned with fifty others on 20 August 1989 following a collision near Cannon Street railway bridge between the dredger Bowbelle and the pleasure boat Marchioness, on which a party was being held:

  Afterwards we lean on the railings outside a café. It’s autumn.

  The water is speckled with leaves, and a complicated tangle of junk

  Bumps against the Embankment wall: a hank of bright grass,

  A rotten bulrush stem, a fragment of dark polished wood.

  One of the children asks if people drown in the river, and I think

  Of Ruth, who was on the Marchioness. After her death, I met

  someone who had survived.

  Finally, the contemporary poet Jeremy Hooker (born 1941) in ‘City Walking, 1’, visited St Mary’s Church, Battersea, where William Blake (1757–1827) was married and from which Turner had painted the river. He sees the river from which:

  Turner

  Sat to paint clouds

  And sunsets over the water –

  Where we can see tower blocks,

  Luxury flats, a marina,

  A power station,

  That drives the Underground

  The power station referred to was at Lots Road, Chelsea and was constructed from 1902–05, much to the indignation of the American-born artist James McNeil Whistler (1834–1903) who was offended by its monstrous size and would no doubt have been appalled to see his words applied to a Second World War poster entitled ‘The Proud City’. It depicted the distinctive outline of the power station against a background of searchlights and bore Whistler’s own words:

  The poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky and the tall chimneys become campanili and the warehouses are palaces in the night and the whole city hangs in the heavens.

  Lots Road ceased to provide power for the Underground in 2002 and the site is at present being redeveloped into shops, offices and luxury flats.

  3

  THE

  CITY OF LONDON

  Despite its role as a centre of commerce, the City of London has many literary associations, not least because it has been around for much longer than most of the rest of London. Indeed, some parts of it could accommodate a book of literary associations on their own. Given the number and variety of such connections, it is not easy to present them in a form which will suit all readers. Broadly, the chapter begins at the eastern end of the City and moves west towards Fleet Street, though with many diversions to accommodate the City’s rich history and to suit the whims of such personalities as Oliver Twist and Samuel Pickwick.

  The ‘Square Mile’ of the City itself owes its identity to the Roman wall built to surround their settlement of ‘Londinium’. Portions of the wall may still be seen, notably those close to the Tower of London and a substantial section found in the Barbican, near the church of St Giles, Cripplegate, in Fore Street.

  St Giles, Cripplegate is one of London’s most interesting churches, with strong literary connections. The poet John Milton is buried in this attractive little church, which was restored after being bombed during the Second World War. It also contains the tomb of John Foxe, author of Foxe’s Book or Martyrs, and it was the church where Oliver Cromwell was married and the children of Edmund Shakespeare were baptised. Edmund’s brother William is believed to have stood as their godfather, a tradition fortified by the discovery in 2007 that William was lodging nearby. The church also holds the tomb of Sir Thomas Lucy, lampooned in The Merry Wives of Windsor as Justice Shallow after the young William was involved in a poaching incident in Lucy’s deer park near Shakespeare’s Stratford home.

  GRUB STREET

  Running north from the Barbican towards Moorfields, in the vicinity of St Giles, is Milton Street, which until 1830 was called Grub Street, described by Samuel Johnson in his Dictionary as ‘much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries and temporary poems, whence any mean production is called grubstreet.’ Johnson himself worked there for a while and from 1730 to 1737 the Grub Street Journal, a satirical magazine, took its name from the street and targeted members of the literary establishment. During the eighteenth century, Grub Street was the home of several journals which were regarded as scurrilous by the authorities. Many of the publishers were prosecuted, including the publisher of John Wilkes’s journal the North Briton.

  John Wilkes (1725–97) was born in Clerkenwell, became MP for Aylesbury in 1757 and in 1762 launched a paper called the North Briton which attacked the government of George III, led by Lord Bute. Wilkes was prosecuted for seditious libel, but the charge was dismissed by the Lord Chief Justice on the grounds that Wilkes was an MP. When Parliament amended the relevant law, Wilkes fled to Paris and returned in 1768 to stand as MP for Middlesex. A farcical series of events led to Wilkes’s repeated election, expulsion from Parliament, arrest, imprisonment, fine and riots in Wilkes’s favour. He campaigned for freedom of the press, Parliamentary reform and supported the rebellious American colonies in their opposition to the government. In 1774 he became Lord Mayor of London. Informed by his former friend and one-time supporter, the Earl of Sandwich, that he would die on the gallows or of the pox, he replied: ‘That, my lord, will depend upon whether I embrace your principles or your mistress.’

  St Giles, Cripplegate has strong literary connections. (Ewan Munro)

  In 1728 Alexander Pope lampooned Grub Street in his satirical poem ‘The Dunciad’, which is a thinly-veiled attack on anyone, especially fellow writers, who had offended the thin-skinned poet. One of his targets was John Dryden, who was satirised along with other members of ‘the Grub Street race’ who wrote primarily for money. Dr Samuel Johnson, himself a Grub Street writer, would have been unmoved by Pope’s criticism since Johnson himself averred that ‘no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money’.

  The expression ‘Grub Street’ was soon taken to mean any low-quality hack writing, or the struggling writers who produced it, and this usage is reflected in George Gissing’s novel of 1891, New Grub Street. It features Edwin Rearden, a novelist of some talent and high ideals, who struggles to earn a living; and the cynical and calculating Jasper Milvain, who willingly undertakes hack writing for money while despising those who publish and read his work. Edwin dies and Jasper prospers.

  Aldersgate Street, nearby, and the gate from which it took its name, is recalled by Dickens in The Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, the site of the Chuzzlewits’s warehouse being Aldersgate Street. And it is close to Aldersgate, in Saxe-Coburg Square (a site north of Co
wcross Street, in fact Albion Place), that Sherlock Holmes takes Dr Watson in his search for the scene of a crime in The Red-headed League.

  The Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit was published in 1844. Martin is the grandson of old Martin, a wealthy gentleman who resents the demands made on him by his spendthrift family and has adopted Mary Graham, a young orphan, whom he treats as his daughter. Young Martin leaves his grandfather in the care of the dishonest architect Pecksniff, whose true character and desire to share the Chuzzlewit wealth gradually become evident. Young Martin, who has been disinherited by his grandfather for falling in love with Mary, goes to America with his friend Mark Tapley where they both fall ill with malaria, are swindled by American fraudsters in a land deal and lose their modest fortunes (an episode which caused considerable offence to Dickens’s many American readers). Wiser and less selfish, young Martin returns to England and uncovers Pecksniff’s treachery. His grandfather recognises that he is a reformed character and allows him to marry Mary. A separate plot concerns Jonas Chuzzlewit, nephew to old Martin and cousin to young Martin, a brutal husband and murderer and who later commits suicide, and the novel also includes one of Dickens’s most memorable minor characters, Mrs Gamp, the gin-swilling, umbrella-carrying midwife.

  LONDON’S GATES

  Cripplegate and Aldersgate are two of the Roman and medieval gates through which travellers were admitted to the city during hours of daylight and which enable us to trace the route of the Roman wall itself. From Moorgate, in the north, the gates run clockwise through Bishopsgate, Aldgate, Billingsgate, Dowgate, Ludgate, Newgate, St John’s Gate, Aldersgate and Cripplegate. Some of the gates themselves have literary connections. The twelfth-century St John’s Gate, for example, north of Smithfield, which was extensively refurbished in 2010, was for a time the home of the artist William Hogarth and of the Gentleman’s Magazine which employed Dr Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith and the actor David Garrick who all worked there. The gate now contains a small museum.

  St Botolph, Bishopsgate, is the scene of one of John Betjeman’s sadder poems, heavy with nostalgia as he thinks of his family. The poem, simply entitled ‘City’, tells how, amidst the odour of incense:

  I sit down

  In St Botolph Bishopsgate churchyard

  And wait for the spirit of my grandfather

  Toddling along from the Barbican

  The grandfather referred to had hoped that John would continue to run the family business, based in the Pentonville Road, making fine furniture, but the future poet had no interest, despite the pleas of his father in ‘Summoned by Bells’:

  Well now, my boy, I want your solemn word

  To carry on the firm when I am gone

  Fourth generation John, they look to you.

  I was a poet. That was why I failed.

  Bishopsgate is close to the site of another location with strong literary associations – Crosby Square, formerly Crosby Place. This was the original site of Crosby Hall, built in 1475 for a wealthy grocer, Sir John Crosby. In 1483 it became the home of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, later Richard III, who had the great misfortune to have his character blackened by William Shakespeare, ably assisted by Sir Laurence Olivier in the film of that name. When ordering his henchmen to execute his brother, the hapless Duke of Clarence, to clear his route to the throne, Richard instructs them:

  When you have done repair to Crosby Place,

  But sirs, be sudden in the execution,

  Withal obdurate, do not hear him plead;

  For Clarence is well-spoken and perhaps

  May move your hearts to pity if you mark him.

  Clarence is duly drowned in a barrel of Malmsey wine and Richard proceeds on his murderous way until final defeat at Bosworth at the hands of Henry VII.

  In 1532 Crosby Hall became the home of Sir Thomas More, author of Utopia, a fictional account of an ideal state. In 1908 the site was bought by a bank and Crosby Hall was moved lock, stock and barrel to Danvers Street, Chelsea, close to the Thames and to the site of Sir Thomas More’s Chelsea home, where it is now the home of a wealthy businessman (see Chapter 7).

  Crosby Square also appears in Conan Doyle’s story The Man with the Twisted Lip, first published in the Strand Magazine in 1891 and considered by the author to be one of his best Sherlock Holmes stories: a tale of opium dens and elaborate disguises. Neville St Clair, a Kentish gentleman, works in the City but has lodgings in ‘Upper Swandam Lane’, east of London Bridge, whence he issues as a cripple called Hugh Boone, a Threadneedle Street match-seller with a ‘shock of orange hair, a pale face disfigured by a horrible scar’. The story resembled the real life of Cecil Brown Smith from Norwood, who posed as a paralysed match-seller in Bishopsgate before being seen to exit Crosby Square as a fit young man. Smith was later sentenced to hard labour, having also posed as a clergyman and performed illegal marriage ceremonies.

  Aldgate, the gatehouse itself, was the home of Geoffrey Chaucer when he was employed as a collector of Customs in the reign of Richard II, and in 1381, from within its walls, Chaucer witnessed the arrival of the Essex insurgents of the Peasants’ Revolt, led by Jack Straw. He would have seen them pass through the gate on their way to their fatal encounter with Richard II at Smithfield, where their leader, Wat Tyler, was stabbed by the Lord Mayor of London and the rebellion was ended.

  Baroness Orczy (1865–1947), a Hungarian aristocrat more prosaically known as Mrs Montague Barstow, made Aldgate tube station a central feature of her detective story The Mysterious Death on the Underground Railway, in which a young woman is found dead in a carriage at Aldgate station. The story depends upon the fact that in the year of its publication, 1901, the Metropolitan Railway had lost passengers to the Central London Railway (now the Central Line) and that the empty carriages of the Metropolitan made it a suitable place to carry out a murder.

  Dickens also refers to coaching Inns near Aldgate. Samuel Pickwick sets out for Ipswich by coach from the Bull at Aldgate (now in Devonshire Row, Aldgate) and David Copperfield arrives at the nearby Blue Boar (formerly at No. 30 High Street, Aldgate) to enter Salem House School to which he has been sent by his cruel stepfather, Murdstone. He is miserable at Salem House under the tyrannical rule of its head, the flogger Creakle, his only consolation being his friendship with Steerforth, a ruthless charmer who goes on to wreck the lives of David’s friends the Peggottys. The Salem House connection also leads to David’s entry into Murdstone’s warehouse (mirroring Dickens’s spell in a blacking factory) and also his introduction to Wilkins Micawber, David’s generous but improvident landlord and one of Dickens’s most memorable characters. Micawber is an affectionate portrait of the novelist’s well-meaning but hopelessly improvident father, John Dickens, whose inability to manage money earned him a spell in the Marshalsea Prison for debtors. Micawber’s financial improvidence is such that he often has to move home, one of his many homes being in Windsor Terrace just north of the City Road. Windsor Terrace boasts a fine block of flats called Micawber Court, which would have been far beyond the means of their namesake. The City features in many other parts of Dickens’s novels, the home of Anthony and Jonas Chuzzlewit being at 5 Foster Lane, near St Paul’s and close to Wood Street, at whose Cross Keys Inn Pip, in Great Expectations, arrives by coach with Estella.

  David Copperfield was published in 1850 and Dickens declared ‘Of all my books I like this the best’. It has a strong autobiographical element. Brought up by his widowed mother and a cruel stepfather, David is sent, after his mother’s early death, to the hateful Salem House School where, despite the tyrannical headmaster, he makes two friends: the attractive but selfish Steerforth and the steadfast and honest Traddles. Sent into menial employment (like Dickens at the blacking factory), he meets Wilkins Micawber whose inability to manage money is a recurring theme of his life. Desperate to escape his wretched life, David walks to the home of his aunt, Betsey Trotwood, being robbed on the way. Kindly received by her, he is articled to a firm of solicitors, Spenlow and Jorkins, in Doct
ors’ Commons, falling in love with the pretty but brainless Dora, Spenlow’s daughter. Re-acquainted with Steerforth, David introduces him to the family of his old nurse Clara Peggotty, her husband a Yarmouth fisherman, and to a cousin of the family, Little Em’ly. Steerforth seduces Little Em’ly, runs away with her, but then abandons her, causing much distress and a long search by the Peggottys to recover her. Steerforth is drowned and David marries the empty-headed Dora Spenlow before becoming famous as an author. Dora, a cruel caricature of the author’s loving but neglected wife Catherine, dies and David marries again, his wife this time being the level-headed Agnes whom he has long known and come late to appreciate. Agnes’s father has become the victim of the machinations of a villainous clerk, Uriah Heep, who is finally exposed by Wilkins Micawber and Traddles. Uriah Heep is jailed and Micawber (for whom always ‘something will turn up’) emigrates to a new life in Australia.

  CORNHILL, LOMBARD STREET & CANNON STREET

  Many of the City’s streets bear ancient names. One of the earliest English poems, ‘Piers Plowman’ by William Langland (c. 1330–86), a poem written in about 1370, makes many references to London, such as ‘Thus he awaked, woet good, whan he wonede in Cornehull [Cornhill]’ and there are five references to Lombard Street, including ‘I lerned among Lumbardes a lesson and of Jewes’. This is a reference to the fact that, in the fourteenth century, usury (lending money for interest) was forbidden by the Church and the only groups who were able to lend money were Jews. However, the Lombards, from the area around Milan in northern Italy, had managed to evade this prohibition by a form of pawnbroking. A security would be given by a borrower in exchange for a loan and the security would be redeemed for more than the value of the original loan: a disguised interest payment. Lombard Street, in the heart of the City, remains at the heart of banking and is the home of many financial institutions. It is no surprise, therefore, that Dickens chose nearby Cornhill as the site of Scrooge’s counting house to which Bob Cratchit walked each day in A Christmas Carol.