From 221B Baker Street to the Old Curiosity Shop

by Stephen Halliday

  All freaks of nature, all Promethean thoughts

  Of man; his dulness, madness, and their feats

  All jumbled up together to make up

  This Parliament of Monsters.

  By the mid-nineteenth century the fair and the cattle market had become notorious for disorderly behaviour, the phrase ‘bull in a china shop’ deriving from the practice of goading animals to fury by the huge crowds which gathered there during the fair. In 1855 the fair was suppressed for that reason and the market became one for slaughtered meat only, as it is today.

  Dickens would have been familiar with its reputation for misbehaviour and it is perhaps for this reason that he often uses it as a setting for disorder. In Oliver Twist, Oliver is led by Nancy and Sikes through Smithfield, which is full of ‘crowding, pushing, driving, beating, unwashed, unshaven dirty figures’, while Pip, in Great Expectations, declares that ‘the shameful place, being all asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam, seemed to stick to me’. But it is also in Great Expectations that Pip sees the lawyer Jaggers, who informs Pip of his ‘Great Expectations’ at his office in Little Britain behind St Bartholomew’s Hospital.

  Just to the south of Smithfield is Snow Hill, the London headquarters of Wackford Squeers, the brutal and sadistic headmaster of Dotheboys Hall in Nicholas Nickleby. It is now the site of a police station of the City of London Police, Snow Hill being one of three police stations of this, Britain’s smallest police service.

  CLOTH FAIR

  Just to the south of Little Britain, 43 Cloth Fair was for many years the home of the poet John Betjeman who celebrated London in many of his poems. Despite his residence within the City he was often critical of those who earned their living there. In his poem ‘The City’ he wrote of:

  Businessmen with awkward hips

  And dirty jokes upon their lips

  And large behinds and jingling chains

  And riddled teeth and riddling brains…

  And:

  Young men who wear on office stools

  The ties of minor public schools…

  It is hardly an affectionate portrait!

  A sadder note is struck on his ‘Monody’ on the death of Aldersgate Street station, which was written when the old station, close to his home in Cloth Fair, was redeveloped and incorporated into the new Barbican scheme, whose multi-storey dwellings replaced the devastation caused by bombing in the Second World War. A ‘Monody’ is simply a poem of lamentation written to mark a death and here John Betjeman applies it to the old station, now known as ‘Barbican’:

  Snow falls in the buffet of Aldersgate station,

  Soot hangs in the tunnel in clouds of steam.

  City of London! before the next desecration

  Let your steepled forest of churches be my theme.

  This, the first verse, looks back to the time when the Metropolitan Railway, a Victorian invention, was powered by steam trains and thus celebrates three of the poet’s greatest loves: the Victorians, steam railways and the Metropolitan Railway which, in ‘Summoned by Bells’, he celebrated at length in verse:

  Great was our joy, Ronald Hughes Wright’s and mine

  To travel by the Underground all day

  Between the rush hours, so that very soon

  There was no station, north to Finsbury Park,

  To Barking eastwards, Clapham Common south,

  No temporary platform in the west

  Among the Actons and the Ealings where

  We had not once alighted. Metroland

  Beckoned us out to lanes in Beechy Bucks.

  4

  THE

  INNS OF COURT

  Inns of Court enjoy the exclusive privilege to admit students as barristers, with the accompanying right to appear as advocates in the senior courts of England and Wales. Lincoln’s Inn, the oldest, is recorded from 1422, Middle Temple from 1501, Inner Temple from 1505 and Gray’s Inn from 1569, though it is likely that they all date from the fourteenth century. They are called ‘Inns’ because they originally provided accommodation for students, but their function is now educational, preparing students for work at the bar (hence the term ‘barristers’) through lectures and strange rituals which require students to eat a certain number of dinners in the magnificent and historic halls of the Inns. They frequently feature in novels, especially during the Victorian period, not least because writers like Dickens often learned their trade as court reporters and worked in one or other of the Inns. A separate category embraced the Inns of Chancery, which were numerous but began to disappear during the nineteenth century as the Law Society took over the training of solicitors.

  LINCOLN’S INN

  Just to the south of High Holborn we find Lincoln’s Inn Fields where, in The Warden, Trollope places the chambers of the Attorney-General, Sir Abraham Haphazard. At Lincoln’s Inn the great man is visited by the Reverend Septimus Harding, the principal character of The Warden, who has decided that he should give up the wardenship of Hiram’s Hospital, which he enjoys and which provides him with a comfortable living, although the law would support his right to retain the office. With great difficulty he persuades the lawyer that his conscience is more important to him than any legal niceties while knowing that, although his daughter Eleanor will support his decision, he must now explain it to his very unsympathetic son-in-law Archdeacon Grantly:

  Mr Harding was sufficiently satisfied with the interview to feel a glow of comfort as he descended into the small old square of Lincoln’s Inn. It was a calm, bright, beautiful night, and by the light of the moon, even the chapel of Lincoln’s Inn, and the sombre row of chambers, which surround the quadrangle, looked well. He stood still a moment to collect his thoughts, and reflect on what he had done, and was about to do. He knew that the attorney-general regarded him as little better than a fool, but that he did not mind; he and the attorney-general had not much in common between them; he knew also that others, whom he did care about, would think so too; but Eleanor, he was sure, would exult in what he had done, and the bishop, he trusted, would sympathise with him.

  In the meantime he had to meet the archdeacon, and so he walked slowly down Chancery Lane and along Fleet Street, feeling sure that his work for the night was not yet over. When he reached the hotel he rang the bell quietly, and with a palpitating heart; he almost longed to escape round the corner, and delay the coming storm by a further walk round St Paul’s Churchyard, but he heard the slow creaking shoes of the old waiter approaching, and he stood his ground manfully.

  There are many Dickens associations in the area, much of the action in Bleak House being set in Lincoln’s Inn. The premises of the sinister and blackmailing lawyer Tulkinghorn are at 58 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, described as ‘a large house, formerly a house of state let off in sets of chambers now and in those shrunken fragments of greatness lawyers lie like maggots in nuts’. It was in reality well known to Dickens as the home of his friend and biographer John Forster. In the same novel, Guppy, the admirer of Esther Summerson, works in an office at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in the practice of the long-winded ‘Conversation’ Kenge and his partner Carboy. Moreover, the Court of Chancery, in which the endless case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce is hopelessly mired, is based at Lincoln’s Inn in Dickens’s Bleak House. Across Chancery Lane from Lincoln’s Inn, off Cursitor Street, is Took’s Court, represented in the same novel as Cook’s Court where Mr Snagsby has his Law Stationery shop.

  GRAY’S INN

  Dickens worked for a while in a firm of attorneys in Gray’s Inn to the north, in ‘a poor old set of chambers in three rooms’ in South Square, where he later placed Tommy Traddles’s chambers in David Copperfield. His office later moved to 6 Raymond Buildings. In his essay ‘The Uncommercial Traveller’ he described Gray’s Inn in harsh terms:

  I look upon Gray’s Inn generally as one of the most depressing institutions in bricks and mortar known to the children of men. Can anything be more dreary than its arid Square, Sahara Desert of the law, with the ugly old ti
led-topped tenements, the dirty windows, the bills To Let, the door-posts inscribed like gravestones, the crazy gateway giving upon the filthy Lane, the scowling iron-barred prison-like passage into Verulam buildings.

  Some of these features may still be seen, though most visitors find Gray’s Inn a tranquil and attractive quarter of London. To the east, south of Holborn Circus, is Thavies Inn, no longer an Inn of Chancery, where the chaotic Jellyby family lived and where they provided a night’s rest for Esther, Ada and Richard in Bleak House. Dickens himself lived for a time in rooms at Furnival’s Inn, another Inn of Chancery, which was on the present site of Holborn Bars (still often referred to as the ‘Prudential Building’) and was joined there by his wife Catherine shortly after their marriage.

  Samuel Pickwick’s legal adviser, Perker, has chambers at Gray’s Inn from where he conducts the defence which results in Pickwick losing his breach of promise case in Bardell vs Pickwick. David Copperfield also stays in Gray’s Inn for a while.

  Gray’s Inn itself has an important place in literature since Shakespeare’s early play A Comedy of Errors was first performed in its Hall at Christmas.

  A little further to the south is Portugal Street, in which is to be found ‘The George’, public house, successor to ‘The Magpie and Stump’ which was one of the haunts of Samuel Pickwick in The Pickwick Papers.

  Another resident of Portugal Street was John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647–80), a poet noted for his scurrilous and salacious verses and who was the subject of ‘Lord Rochester’s Monkey’ by Graham Greene (1904–91).

  Nearby is ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’, home of Little Nell in Dickens’s novel of that name. The shop is in Portsmouth Street, close to Clare Market, which was well known to Dickens since he had dealings with a bookbinder there. It was also the home of Johnson’s Alamode Beef House, where Dickens lunched during his blacking warehouse days and where David Copperfield later did the same. The model for Dickens’s shop was some distance away in Orange Street, behind the National Gallery, but the nineteenth-century owner of the shop in Portsmouth Street, a former dairy dating from the sixteenth century, changed the name of his antiques and bric-a-brac shop to ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’ to take advantage of the popularity of Dickens’s novel and the author’s association with the area. Dickens asserted in his novel that ‘the old house had long ago been pulled down’, but the house in Portsmouth Street continues to attract curious visitors.

  The Old Curiosity Shop, immortalised by the Charles Dickens novel. (Mark Beynon)

  The Old Curiosity Shop, published in 1841, tells the story of Little Nell Trent, who devotedly cares for her grandfather who barely scrapes a living from his Old Curiosity Shop, a task made harder by spendthrift relatives and by the machinations of one of Dickens’s most sinister characters, the moneylending dwarf Daniel Quilp, who eventually seizes the shop. Grandfather and Nell flee and find refuge in a country cottage, where they are discovered by the grandfather’s brother, too late for Little Nell who has died. Kit Nubbles, Little Nell’s devoted admirer employed at the Old Curiosity Shop, attracts the hostility of the evil Quilp, who tries to frame him as a thief, but his deceit comes to light and Quilp dies whilst fleeing his pursuers. Like many of Dickens’s novels, The Old Curiosity Shop was published in weekly episodes (in Dickens’s magazine Master Humphrey’s Clock) and it is recorded that crowds gathered by the quayside in New York to obtain the latest instalments as they arrived from England. The passage describing the death of Little Nell attracted unprecedented attention, though it was later criticised for excess of pathos. Oscar Wilde declared that: ‘One would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without dissolving into tears … of laughter.’

  THE MIDDLE AND INNER TEMPLE

  The Temple, which lies between Fleet Street and the river, is an area rich in history, including that of literature. It lies on the western border of the City of London where it meets the City of Westminster. It was here that, according to Shakespeare, in Henry VI Part I, the two factions contending the Wars of the Roses gathered and declared their allegiance to one side or the other by plucking a white rose, to represent the house of York, or a red rose to represent the claims of Lancaster. The two factions are represented by Richard Plantagenet, later Duke of York, and John Beaufort, later Duke of Somerset:

  Plantagenet:

  Let him that is a true-born gentleman

  And stands upon the honour of his birth,

  If he suppose that I have pleaded truth

  From off this brier pluck a white rose

  with me.

  Beaufort:

  Let him that is no coward nor no flatterer,

  But dare maintain the party of the truth,

  Pluck a red rose from off this thorn with me.

  There is no evidence that this event ever occurred, in the garden of the Temple church or elsewhere, but it was taken up by Sir Walter Scott in his now forgotten historical novel Anne of Geierstein, or The Maiden of the Mist (1829), in which the expression ‘Wars of the Roses’ was first used and from there it made its way into history books and legends.

  In Dickens’s Great Expectations, Pip and his friend Herbert Pocket take chambers in the Temple, in Garden Court, where he is visited by Magwitch who tells him of his fortune. Pip’s final meeting with Magwitch occurs there on a stormy night when ‘a vast heavy veil had been driving over London from the East, and it drove still, as if in the East there were an Eternity of cloud and wind’, weather which presages Magwitch’s fate. At Temple Stairs Pip also keeps the boat with which he later hopes to effect Magwitch’s escape.

  Nearby Fountain Court remains an attractive feature of this part of London and appears in better weather and happier circumstances in The Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit as a place where Ruth Pinch and John Westlock meet:

  Brilliantly the Temple Fountain sparkled in the sun and laughingly its liquid music played, and merrily the idle drops of water danced and danced, and peeping out in sport among the trees, plunged lightly down to hide themselves, as little Ruth and her companion came towards it.

  John Galsworthy had chambers at 3 Paper Buildings, Inner Temple in the 1890s and, although he barely practised as a barrister, his legal training is reflected in The Forsyte Saga, much of which is concerned with legal actions. Paper Buildings also held the chambers of Sir John Chester in Barnaby Rudge and Mr Stryver in A Tale of Two Cities.

  Temple Underground station also claims to be the place where Baroness Orczy, while queuing for a ticket, conceived the idea of The Scarlet Pimpernel, her best-known work, though it should be added that Tower Hill station has a rival claim to that honour.

  The Temple is also the London residence of Tom Towers, editor of The Jupiter (a thinly disguised caricature of The Times) who, in Trollope’s The Warden, supports the campaign to reform the charity Hiram’s Hospital, of which the Revd Septimus Harding is the warden of the title. The cause is taken up by other journalists, notably the self-righteous Dr Pessimist Anticant, and Mr Popular Sentiment, caricatures of Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens respectively. It is in the Temple that Septimus Harding visits Tom Towers, who is disconcerted by the quiet clergyman’s wild hand gestures, a habit he had formed when nervous of playing his much-loved, but on this occasion imaginary, cello.

  5

  THE

  CITY OF WESTMINSTER

  COVENT GARDEN

  Covent Garden, formerly the site of London’s principal fruit and vegetable market, has many literary associations, both fictional and real. Eliza Doolittle, the heroine of Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion and of its musical adaptation My Fair Lady, was a Covent Garden flower seller, while Bow Street, Covent Garden, was the home of the magistrates’ court from which the novelist Henry Fielding (1707–54) and his brother John dispensed justice untainted by bribery. This was a new phenomenon in eighteenth-century London, employing Britain’s first effective police force, the Bow Street Runners. Two of the Runners appear in Oliver Twist and Great Expectations as B
lathers and Duff. In Oliver Twist, Dickens sends the pickpocket the Artful Dodger before the magistrates in Bow Street for one of his many court appearances. The most famous magistrates’ court in the world closed its doors for the last time on 14 July 2006, its work being transferred to Westminster Magistrates’ Court in Horseferry Road. The adjoining Bow Street police station, with its unique white lamp, closed at the same time. (Queen Victoria had commanded a white lamp be used instead of a blue one, as the blue reminded her of the room in which Albert died.)

  The Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, first opened in 1732, the proprietor being John Rich, who paid for it from the proceeds of The Beggar’s Opera (see reference on page 49). It was the most luxurious theatre ever built in London and saw the first production of many of Handel’s works and of She Stoops to Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith in 1773. The author was so worried about the reception of his work that for the first night he persuaded many of his friends to attend and applaud, and he could not himself bear to watch the production until the final act. It was a great success and made Goldsmith’s name. In 1775 The Rivals by Richard Sheridan was first produced there. In 1808 the theatre burned down and when it reopened the following year prices were put up to pay for the rebuilding, setting off the Old Price Riots which continued for sixty-one nights before the management gave way. It staged the first performances in English of Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1817) and The Marriage of Figaro (1819) before being burned down again in 1856. The third theatre reopened in 1858 and was extended and refurbished in the 1980s. It is now devoted to the production of opera and ballet, and has witnessed the premieres of many twentieth century works by composers like Benjamin Britten, Sir Arthur Bliss, Ralph Vaughan Williams and William Walton.