From 221B Baker Street to the Old Curiosity Shop

by Stephen Halliday

  GOSWELL ROAD, CASTLE COURT & CHANGE ALLEY

  Many of Samuel Pickwick’s misadventures occur within the City. He lodges with Mrs Bardell in Goswell Road (then called Goswell Street) and although his adventures take him to many places he is a Cockney at heart. In Pickwick’s own words: ‘As well might I be content to gaze on Goswell Street for ever without one effort to penetrate to the hidden counties which on every side surround it.’ His bachelor apartment is described in some detail:

  Mr Pickwick’s apartments in Goswell street, although on a limited scale, were not only of a very neat and comfortable description, but peculiarly adapted for the residence of a man of his genius and observation. His sitting-room was the first floor front, his bedroom the second floor front; and thus whether he were sitting at his desk in the parlour, or standing before the dressing-glass in his dormitory, he had an equal opportunity of contemplating human nature in all the phases it exhibits in that popular thoroughfare.

  Goswell Road is now the home of the Society of Genealogists, a learned society devoted to research which would surely have been a haunt of Samuel Pickwick had he had the opportunity.

  The Pickwick Papers or The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, published in instalments 1836–37, was Dickens’s first novel and is an account of the travels and adventures around England of Samuel Pickwick and his friends. It is not so much a story as a series of incidents: a Parliamentary election, an elopement, a breach of promise case brought against Pickwick himself, and other humorous incidents. Pickwick himself is a Cockney and his faithful servant, Sam Weller, is one of Dickens’s most memorable characters.

  Pickwick was much given to frequenting taverns in the City, one of his favourite haunts being the George and Vulture in Castle Court, off Lombard Street. It is mentioned many times and occupies a site which has accommodated an inn since the thirteenth century. Many proposals have been advanced to demolish it and develop its extremely valuable site, but on each occasion resolute campaigns have been launched to preserve it, most notably by Cedric Charles Dickens (1916–2006), the author’s great-grandson. It is now the home of the Dickens Pickwick Club, who dine on Pickwick Pie (better known as steak and kidney pudding) in a room where Dickens himself dined shortly before he began to write The Pickwick Papers. The rather shabby, tobacco-stained Dickens Room looks as if it has not been redecorated since the time of Dickens but, nevertheless, hosts the celebrations of City bankers for Christmas lunches and similar occasions.

  It is from Garraway’s Coffee House in Change Alley, off Lombard Street, that Pickwick writes to his landlady to tell her what he wants for dinner. Garraway’s, one of the oldest coffee houses in the City, was much frequented by Charles Dickens. It was demolished in 1874 but its former location is marked by a plaque in Change Alley which commemorates its predecessor, Jonathan’s Coffee House which, from 1680 to 1778, served as London’s Stock Exchange. Pickwick’s briefest letter, ‘Dear Mrs. B, chops and tomato sauce, Yours Pickwick’, is later produced as evidence of the fact that he broke a promise to marry her, the trial taking place at the Court of Common Pleas in the Guildhall. Pickwick’s conviction and his steadfast refusal to pay the £750 damages (then a substantial sum) to the disappointed lady leads to his confinement in the Fleet Prison for debtors, where he is soon joined by his faithful servant Sam Weller. Their release is secured when Pickwick agrees to pay Mrs Bardell’s costs, incurred by the rascally lawyers Dodson and Fogg. Their offices in Cornhill occupied the present site of the Royal Exchange. The Fleet Prison had been built in the twelfth century and was demolished in the 1840s to make way for the London, Chatham and Dover Railway, whose successors still use the Thameslink route which joins railways north and south of the Thames. The prison, London’s most notorious prison for debtors, is remembered in Old Fleet Lane, close to its former site. Samuel Pickwick’s view of the prison was unforgiving: ‘I have seen enough … My head aches with these scenes and my heart too.’

  FLEET STREET

  Until new printing technology and new management brought about changes in the 1980s, Fleet Street and its adjoining streets were synonymous with the national press. Fetter Lane, which runs north from Fleet Street towards Holborn Circus, was the home of the People’s Banner and its scheming and muck-raking editor Quintus Slide, who pursues Phineas Finn and others in Trollope’s Palliser novels. The origin of the street’s name is unclear but may well derive from an old French word faitor, meaning an idle and disreputable lawyer. The word was used by Chaucer to refer to beggars and imposters who haunted the street in the fourteenth century.

  The former Daily Express Building in Fleet Street, black glass without and art deco within, may with confidence be identified as the headquarters of the Daily Beast in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, which he subtitled ‘a novel about journalists’ and which ruthlessly and hilariously satirised the activities of popular newspapers. The building appeared many times in Private Eye as ‘The Black Lubyanka’, a reference to the infamous KGB headquarters in Moscow.

  The George and Vulture in Castle Court, off Lombard Street, was a favourite haunt of Samuel Pickwick. (Jim Linwood)

  Described at the time as ‘Britain’s most modern building for Britain’s most modern newspaper’, with the degree of modesty associated with its proprietor, Lord Beaverbrook, the Daily Express Building opened in 1932, shortly after Evelyn Waugh made a short and unsuccessful attempt to take up a career in journalism in its pages. The bullying proprietor of the Daily Beast, ‘Lord Copper’, combines confidence with sublime ignorance as he briefs the hapless William Boot on his forthcoming assignment in a remote African kingdom where war is confidently expected and eagerly anticipated by newspaper proprietors like Lord Copper. William is accustomed to writing a weekly column called ‘Lush Places’ on rural matters from the safety of Boot Magna Hall in an unidentified but remote part of the countryside where he feels at home. Through a case of mistaken identity he is summoned to the headquarters of the Daily Beast at Nos 700–853 Fleet Street (in reality Nos 121–128), where Lord Copper sits behind ‘massive double doors which by their weight, polish and depravity of design, proclaimed unmistakeably “Nothing but Us stands between you and Lord Copper” ’.

  Copper advises William to take with him a supply of cleft sticks for carrying messages through the jungle, so when William visits a store specialising in the supply of materials for exotic expeditions this is the first request he puts to General Cruttwell, departmental manager in what some observers have noticed bears a certain resemblance to the former Army and Navy Stores in Victoria. The Cruttwell character was a recurring one in Waugh’s novels. It was the name of his tutor at Oxford, C.R.M.F. Cruttwell, who had despaired at Waugh’s idle and drunken lifestyle and was rewarded with cameo appearances in several of his former student’s works, invariably in an absurd and unflattering light. In this case he got off quite lightly, General Cruttwell simply dismissing William Boot’s requests for cleft sticks as the work of a prankster and contenting himself with inspecting ‘a newly-arrived consignment of rhinoceros-hide whips in a menacing way’.

  In Vile Bodies the Daily Beast gives way to the Daily Excess, whose equally loathsome proprietor, Lord Monomark, congratulates Adam Symes for his gossip column which is based upon entirely fictitious events: ‘Now see here Symes, I like your page. It’s peppy, it’s got plenty of new names in it and it’s got that intimate touch.’ The Daily Express Building was abandoned by its original owner when Fleet Street’s newspapers emigrated to Wapping and elsewhere in the 1980s, but it remains in use, having become a London office of Goldman Sachs, an even more potent (and some would say menacing) organisation than the Daily Beast.

  Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, in Wine Office Court off Fleet Street, was popular with many writers including Conan Doyle, Dickens, G.K. Chesterton and John Galsworthy and the pub and its surroundings are mentioned in Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga and Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities.

  No. 1 Fleet Street now belongs to the Royal Bank of Scotland whose signs on t
he exterior lay claim to it, but the attractive Victorian interior leaves no visitor in doubt that it remains, at heart, Child’s bank with its own rich history. It has a claim to be the oldest bank in London and in A Tale of Two Cities it is presented as Tellson’s bank, the workplace of Jarvis Lorry, who brings Dr Manette to England after his long imprisonment in the Bastille.

  A Tale of Two Cities was published in 1859, the two cities being London and Paris at the time of the French Revolution. Dr Manette has been imprisoned for eighteen years in the Bastille to ensure that he remains silent about abuses committed by a French noble, the Marquis de St Evremonde. Charles Darnay, the marquis’ nephew, comes to England to escape the inheritance he despises and marries Lucie, Dr Manette’s daughter. Darnay returns to France and escapes execution as a former aristocrat when Sydney Carton, who has previously led a self-indulgent life, takes his place on the scaffold.

  NEWGATE AND THE OLD BAILEY

  Little now remains of Newgate Prison beyond the street to which it gave its name. It was demolished in 1902 to allow the expansion of its neighbour and partner in crime, the Old Bailey, Britain’s most famous courthouse. It has been the scene of many of the nation’s most notorious criminal trials and, of course, of the exploits of Horace Rumpole, John Mortimer’s garrulous and only moderately successful criminal barrister.

  Pommery’s Wine Bar, which figured so prominently in the career of the late Horace Rumpole, was based on El Vino’s at No. 47 Fleet Street. It was once a haunt of male journalists from the newspaper offices which abounded in the area, but protests by female journalists gained them admission, with the reluctant assent of the management in the 1970s. Since the departure of the press for Docklands and elsewhere, El Vino’s is now mostly patronised by curious visitors, financiers and lawyers, many of the latter claiming to be the model for Rumpole. There used to be several El Vino wine bars, the original one dating from 1879 when Alfred Bower opened as a wine merchant in the City. The Fleet Street bar is the only survivor.

  The diligent visitor can find a few remnants of the Newgate Prison in an old wall behind the Old Bailey, in a turning off Newgate Street. This wall is a relic of the fifth prison to be built on the site. The original Newgate Prison was the gatehouse of one of the entrances to the City through the Roman wall, though the gatehouse itself was built in about 1170 in the reign of Henry II and used as a prison for those awaiting trial. In the early fifteenth century this gatehouse was substantially reconstructed under the will of Richard Whittington (c.1359–1423), four times Lord Mayor of London, the prison being known as ‘The Whit’ after its benefactor.

  The Dick Whittington legend itself dates from 1605 and has earned its own place in literature. It remains one of Britain’s most popular pantomimes. Richard Whittington was born in the hamlet of Pauntley in Gloucestershire and was the younger son of a local knight and landowner and, as was common for younger sons at the time, was sent to London to earn his living. He became a very wealthy mercer (cloth merchant) and a member of the Mercers’ Company, London’s premier livery company with a magnificent hall on the corner of Iremonger Lane and Cheapside, where he is still celebrated. He paid for improvements to London’s sewerage and water supply as well as for the rebuilding of Newgate. The story of Whittington and his cat is one of the few ‘home-grown’ pantomime tales; most others (Aladdin, Cinderella etc.) are of foreign origin. It was first staged as a pantomime in 1814, based on a play dating from the seventeenth century.

  The famous Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese pub off Fleet Street played host to many writers, such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens and G.K. Chesterton. (Mark Beynon)

  Whittington’s building, which was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, incorporated a statue of Whittington in a niche on its exterior, the statue being accompanied by a cat. Its successor, the third Newgate, had fallen into disrepair by the 1770s and the fourth prison was in the process of being rebuilt when the almost completed building was destroyed by the Gordon rioters in 1780. Further reconstruction followed and the fifth and final Newgate, to the designs of the architect George Dance (who also designed the Mansion House), was completed in 1785. It was demolished in 1902 to allow the expansion of its neighbour the Old Bailey where, in A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Darnay, nephew of the notorious Marquis de St Evremonde, is acquitted of treason by reason of his resemblance to the dissolute lawyer (and later hero), Sydney Carton, who is present in court.

  Newgate’s notoriety as a prison and as a place from which convicted prisoners were taken to execution at Tyburn (Marble Arch) earned it a place in literature from the eighteenth century onwards, much of this being due to the compilation of the Newgate Calendar by the ‘Keepers’ (governors) of the prison. This document was originally simply a record of those entering the gaol, but keepers and others recognised that, with a little embellishment, it represented an excellent opportunity for money-making by publishing sensational accounts of the misdeeds of Newgate’s inmates. It may be regarded as an early, if not the first, example of muck-raking crime reporting. Examples of the titles which were published in this way include The Tyburn Calendar or Malefactors Bloody Register (1705); Most Notorious Highwaymen (1719); Plunders of the Most Noted Pirates (1734); and, in 1780, shortly before the gaol’s destruction by the Gordon rioters, Accounts of Executions, Dying Speeches and Other Curious Particulars Relating to the Most Notorious Violaters of the Laws of their Country who have Suffered Death. The titles may not have been catchy but the message was clear, so it is not surprising that writers of quality used the accounts as sources for their own works.

  THE BEGGAR’S OPERA

  The first major work to be based on Newgate was The Beggar’s Opera by John Gay (1685–1732), which was given fresh life by the German Marxist writer Bertold Brecht as The Threepenny Opera during the days of the Weimar Republic in 1928. Gay’s work, which appeared two centuries before Brecht’s in 1728, was based on the life of Jonathan Wild (1689–1725), a notorious criminal and thief who earned money in three ways: by organising crimes carried out by others; by taking rewards from victims of crime in return for ‘recovering’ their stolen goods; and, most lucratively, by ‘grassing’ to the authorities on those who had committed crimes on his behalf. Jonathan Wild was especially hated by the populace for his role in incriminating Jack Sheppard (1702–24), who escaped four times from Newgate and thereby became a popular hero. The principal character in The Beggar’s Opera, Peachum, is both a receiver of stolen goods and an informant, and is clearly based upon Jonathan Wild who had been executed amidst much public rejoicing three years earlier. Macheath, the highwayman (‘Mack the Knife’ in Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera) is a heroic figure who, unlike his forbear Jack Sheppard, escapes execution.

  THE NEWGATE NOVEL

  Such was the notoriety of Newgate in the English penal system that it spawned its own literary genre, the ‘Newgate novel’. These were often based upon material found in The Newgate Calendar, while others drew upon personal experience of the gaol.

  William Godwin (1756–1836) is remembered as the husband of Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1790), and as the father of Mary Shelley, wife of the poet and herself author of Frankenstein, but Godwin himself wrote Caleb Williams: Or Things as They Are, an early crime novel with many references to Newgate.

  Harrison Ainsworth (1805–82) wrote historical novels based on characters and episodes in the life of the prison. His novel Rookwood (1834) created the legend of Dick Turpin’s ride to York, while Jack Sheppard (1839) recounts, more or less accurately, the exploits of Jack Sheppard and Jonathan Wild, each of them ending on the gallows at Tyburn. In his account of Sheppard, Ainsworth incorporates Bedlam, the asylum which holds Sheppard’s insane mother. By the time that Ainsworth was writing, the Bethlehem Hospital, to give it the correct name, had been moved to Lambeth, the site now occupied by the Imperial War Museum, but Ainsworth describes it in all its horror as it would have been in Sheppard’s time at Moorfields, just beyond the Ci
ty boundary. Citizens were admitted to watch and listen to the unfortunate inmates, often shackled, as a form of entertainment.

  Ainsworth’s better-known contemporary was Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–73), best known for his historical novel The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), though in his lifetime he was better known for his Newgate novels Paul Clifford and Eugene Aram, both of them being based on events in Newgate and both breaking new ground at the time by portraying criminals not as pantomime villains but as people who engage the reader’s sympathies.

  William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–63) was repelled by the sympathetic light in which Lytton portrayed criminals and wrote a story called Catherine, which appeared in instalments in Fraser’s Magazine in 1839–40. It was an account of a woman called Catherine Hayes, who was taken from Newgate in 1726 to be burned at Tyburn ‘in very revolting circumstances’ for murdering her husband. It was supposed to be a moral tale, so to strengthen the anti-criminal sentiments of the work Thackeray drew in material from other crimes of the time, including the activities of two grave-robbers who, short of corpses to be sold for dissection, drowned a young boy in Nova Scotia gardens, Bethnal Green. They then removed the dead boy’s teeth with a bradawl for sale to dentists before delivering the corpse to the dissecting room of King’s College Hospital where they were arrested. A sensational trial and executions followed, but Thackleray’s inclusion of such notorious material in his Newgate novel did not have the desired effect and Catherine Hayes herself became an object of some sympathy.