From 221B Baker Street to the Old Curiosity Shop

by Stephen Halliday

  Bow Street Magistrates’ Court also appears in Anthony Trollope’s Palliser series of novels when, in Phineas Redux, Phineas Finn, who is making his way up the Parliamentary ladder, survives the attempt by a jealous husband to shoot him, but is then accused of murdering the President of the Board of Trade, the unpleasant Mr Bonteen. Having been questioned at Bow Street he is sent to Newgate Prison prior to trial at the Old Bailey, but is saved when his admirer, the wealthy widow Madame Max Goesler, unmasks the true culprit, the wily preacher the Revd Joseph Emilius. Phineas later marries Madame Max.

  To the west of Bow Street, linking it to Covent Garden Market, is Russell Street, which was formerly the site of the burial ground of St Mary le Strand, the church itself being located in the Strand, opposite Somerset House. This constricted site was probably in the mind of Charles Dickens when he described a ‘hemmed-in churchyard, pestiferous and obscene’ in Bleak House as the burial place of the wretched Captain Hawdon and the run-down area as the home of Tom-all-Alone.

  On the opposite side of Covent Garden, leading west from the market itself, is Henrietta Street, long the home of publishers, including the firm of Chapman and Hall after their move from the Strand. Besides the works of Dickens they also published those of Evelyn Waugh, whose father, Arthur Waugh was for many years the firm’s managing director.

  In Vile Bodies, first published by Chapman and Hall in 1930, reference is made to a publisher (unnamed) in Henrietta Street with a young director called Benfleet, who attributes all his harshest decisions to his fellow-director ‘Old Rampole’, supposedly a ruthless and tyrannical martinet. Benfleet, alone in his office, reflects how fortunate it is that his authors never meet Old Rampole, ‘that benign old gentleman who once a week drove up to board meetings from the country, whose chief interest in the business was confined to the progress of a little book of his own about bee-keeping’. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this is an uncharacteristically kind reference to Waugh’s endlessly patient father who had financed Waugh’s dissolute progress through Oxford, was noted for his calm and benevolent nature (so different from that of his son) and by 1930 was semi-retired from the business.

  To the north of Henrietta Street, forming a link between Floral Street and Garrick Street, is the short stretch of Rose Street, which contains one of London’s most historic pubs, the Lamb and Flag. The present building dates from 1623, though an earlier tavern probably existed on the site, making it possibly London’s oldest pub. At one time the pub was known locally as the Bucket of Blood because of the bare-knuckle fights which took place in this rather disreputable area of London, and in 1679 the poet John Dryden was beaten up by thugs hired by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, whom the poet had offended. A Dryden bar, named in the poet’s honour, is on the first floor and the pub was also popular with Charles Dickens.

  Further to the west, still on the Covent Garden side of Charing Cross Road, is the Ambassadors theatre, which occupies a small place in our literary history, since for twenty-three years, 1952–75, it was the home of the play The Mousetrap by Agatha Christie. It transferred to the nearby St Martin’s theatre where it continues to attract audiences well into its second half century. Further down St Martin’s Lane is the Duke of York’s theatre, which staged the first productions of J.M. Barrie’s plays The Admirable Crichton (1902) and Peter Pan (1904), the latter running every Christmas until 1914.

  MARYLEBONE

  Baker Street, of course, is principally remembered as the home of the world’s most famous detective, at No. 221B, where Sherlock Holmes, over several pipes, would ponder the mysteries that were laid before him in the Strand Magazine. There also, cared for by the landlady Mrs Hudson, the faithful Dr Watson informed readers of The Musgrave Ritual that Holmes kept ‘his cigars in the coal scuttle, his tobacco in the toe end of a Persian slipper, and his unanswered correspondence transfixed by a jack knife into the very centre of his wooden mantelpiece’. Since the appearance of the first Holmes story in 1887, in A Study in Scarlet, readers have been addressing letters to 221B, undeterred by the fact that when the stories were first written the numbers did not run beyond 100 and that 221B has never existed as a postal address. Some have identified No. 61 as the model for the detective’s lodgings, an address that did exist when the stories were written. The Abbey National Building Society long occupied the site where the address would have been and shouldered the burden of answering the detective’s correspondence. In 1990 the Sherlock Holmes Museum, at 239 Baker Street, unveiled a plaque stating that it was ‘officially’ No. 221B. It is open every day except Christmas Day. Nearby is a shop advertising Hudson’s Soap, the implication being that it was used by Holmes’s famous landlady. A similar claim is made by the Sherlock Holmes pub in Northumberland Avenue, off Trafalgar Square. The pub changed its name after the 1951 Festival of Britain when Sherlock Holmes’s flat, installed on the South Bank site of the festival as a visitor attraction, was dismantled and installed in the former Northumberland Arms where, in The Hound of the Baskervilles, two of Sir Henry Baskerville’s boots mysteriously disappeared.

  The fictional 221B Baker Street is now home to the famous Sherlock Holmes Museum. (Mark Beynon)

  Conan Doyle became dismayed at the fact that his fictional detective, whom he considered to be a minor creation, became so popular that he put the author’s other works in the shade. Accordingly he decided to kill him off and duly did so when Sherlock Holmes apparently fell to his death in the Reichenbach Falls, Switzerland, carrying with him the criminal mastermind Professor Moriarty in The Adventure of the Final Problem, published in 1893. A plaque close to the falls records the event. Readers, however, were outraged and demanded the return of Holmes, who was duly revived and featured in Conan Doyle’s most famous story, The Hound of the Baskervilles, published in instalments in the Strand Magazine from August 1901.

  Baker Street has a further claim to literary fame since it was to lodgings in Baker Street that the unctuous and hypocritical clergyman Obadiah Slope retired after he failed in his machinations to become Dean of Barchester in Trollope’s Barchester Towers. Mrs Proudie, the wife of the Bishop of Barchester, triumphed, but Slope survived to marry a wealthy widow and become archdeacon of London with a parish church near the top of Baker Street.

  East of Baker Street, on the south side of Marylebone Road, is the parish church of Marylebone, St Mary’s, built in the classical style by Thomas Hardwick. At the time that he was conceiving Dombey and Son, Charles Dickens was living nearby at 1 Devonshire Terrace, and it appears that it was this church which Dickens had in mind, with its characteristic ‘steeple clock’ as the church where many of the novel’s more dismal events unfold.

  Dombey and Son was published in 1848 and is one of the saddest of Dickens’s works. The story opens with the birth of Paul Dombey, only son of the head of the shipping house of Dombey and Son, his mother dying following childbirth. Dombey senior is a rich, proud and insensitive man who invests all his hopes and feelings in his new son and neglects his affectionate daughter Florence. The boy, always delicate, sickens and die which drives the father further from feelings for his daughter. He exiles to the West Indies a young employee, Walter Gay, who loves Florence and Dombey’s second marriage is a disaster when his young wife leaves him. The Dombey business fails and Gay returns from the West Indies and marries Florence, who is reconciled to her father in his desolation. One of the colourful minor characters is Captain Cuttle, ‘a gentleman in a wide suit of blue, with a hook instead of a hand attached to his right wrist’.

  The events set at the church include the funeral of Paul Dombey’s wife and mother of his son, also Paul; young Paul’s gloomy baptism, briefly delayed by a short interval to allow a marriage of an ill-matched bride and groom; the funeral of young Paul; and the scene of Mr Dombey’s second, disastrous marriage. Bryanston Square, a short walk from the church, has been identified as the home of the Dombeys ‘on the shady side of a tall, dark, dreadfully genteel street … a house of dismal state with a
circular back to it.’

  A short distance to the west of the church is Baker Street station, the former headquarters of the Metropolitan Railway, surmounted by Chiltern Court, the highly fashionable residences erected above the station which opened in 1932 and whose tenants included Arnold Bennett and H.G. Wells. For the buffet at Baker Street John Betjeman composed a poem detailing a husband and wife meeting there, he after a day’s work, she after a day’s shopping:

  Early electric! Sit you down and see,

  ’Mid this fine woodwork and a smell of dinner,

  A stained-glass windmill and a pot of tea,

  And sepia views of leafy lanes in PINNER…

  Though he ends on a sad note:

  Cancer has killed him. Heart is killing her…

  Of all their loves and hopes on hurrying feet

  Thou art the worn memorial, Baker Street.

  A DANDY AND A DOCTOR

  To the east, at the top of Regent Street, the Langham Hotel lies in Portland Place, opposite the present home of the BBC at Broadcasting House. It was the scene of one of literature’s most productive meetings. It was built between 1863 and 1865 at the colossal cost of £300,000 and featured such luxuries as a hundred water closets and thirty-six bathrooms for its 380 rooms. Its original owners over-stretched themselves and had to sell it for little more than half the cost of its construction, but under new management it became profitable and began to attract such guests as Mark Twain, the Czech composer Antonin Dvorak and the Italian conductor Toscanini, who conducted concerts at the nearby Queen’s Hall, home of the early Promenade Concerts. But its claim to literary fame lies in a meeting arranged on 30 August 1889 by the American literary agent Joseph Marshall Stoddart, who had heard of two up and coming authors and wanted to commission works from them for his publication Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. The first was beginning to establish himself as a playwright, story-teller and raconteur and evidently arrived for the meeting like a ‘languorous dandy’. His name was Oscar Wilde. The second would-be author was a doctor whose attempts to develop his medical practice at 2 Devonshire Place were described by himself: ‘Every morning I walked from the lodgings at Montague Place, reached my consulting room at ten and sat there until three or four with never a ring to disturb my serenity.’ His idle time was spent writing detective stories and he was hoping that the meeting would enable him to lead a life as a full-time writer. His name was Arthur Conan Doyle and, despite wearing his best clothes, he was described as looking, at the meeting with Wilde and Stoddart, like ‘a walrus in Sunday clothes’. The contrast with the flamboyant Wilde must have been marked. Both writers received generous commissions from Stoddart. Wilde wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray which, though successful, was denounced by many critics as immoral and foreshadowed his later fall from grace. Conan Doyle wrote The Sign of Four, which marked a major advance in his public reputation and helped to make Sherlock Holmes the world’s most celebrated detective. Perhaps out of gratitude, he set some scenes from the story, and from A Scandal in Bohemia, in the hotel. The hotel, extensively refurbished, has been popular with such visitors as Winston Churchill, Noel Coward, Wallis Simpson and Charles de Gaulle, and since April 2009 has borne a green plaque at first-floor level on its eastern wall commemorating the meeting of Oscar Wilde and Conan Doyle at an important point in their respective careers.

  PADDINGTON

  Paddington is a more mixed area socially than are the grander parts of the City of Westminster, but its place in children’s literature is assured since it gave its name to Paddington Bear, who appeared at Paddington station in 1958, having arrived from ‘darkest Peru’ by some unspecified means of transport. His rather shabby appearance, with an old suitcase and a duffel coat, together with his taste for marmalade sandwiches, has helped to make him an object of affection to children throughout the world, who can read of his exploits in thirty languages. He is the creation of Michael Bond, who first conceived the idea when he saw a bear in a shop near Paddington station and bought it for his wife for Christmas 1956. The first story, A Bear Called Paddington, followed in 1958 and tells how the bear was discovered by the Brown family at Paddington station, with a note attached to his coat which read ‘Please look after this bear’. Bond recalled evacuee children at railway stations during the war with similar labels attached to their clothes. The Browns take him to their home in Windsor Gardens, Maida Vale and feed him marmalade sandwiches. Similar stories have followed over the subsequent half century. A bronze statue of him at Paddington station is located at the foot of the escalators leading up to the food court, where he was supposedly found.

  In 1953 Sir John Betjeman, himself a devotee of teddy bears, set out how the Paddington area had changed since the days when the impeccably middle class Whiteley’s, London’s first department store, set the tone for the area:

  Through those broad streets to Whiteley’s once

  The carriages would pass,

  When ever-weeping Paddington

  Was safely middle class.

  That silent land of stable smells,

  High walls and flowering trees,

  Is now rack-rented into flats

  For busy refugees.

  At the time John Betjeman wrote those lines, Paddington, and neighbouring Notting Hill, were being exploited to house West Indian immigrants in poor conditions by landlords like the late Peter Rachman, who gave the word ‘Rachmanism’ to the language to describe such practices. The areas have since been invaded by bankers, media folk and other plutocrats so that they have now become gentrified and unaffordable to most citizens.

  THE STRAND, CHARING CROSS AND WESTMINSTER

  South of the Strand are streets and buildings which remind us that in earlier centuries this was the site of grand aristocratic palaces whose gardens, before the construction of the Victoria Embankment, opened on to the Thames. The Savoy was the home of John of Gaunt. Northumberland House, the home of the Dukes of Northumberland, survived until the 1870s and was demolished by Sir Joseph Bazalgette to create a new thoroughfare from Trafalgar Square to the Embankment, now Northumberland Avenue. And Essex Street, the home of the Earl of Essex, earned its imprudent owner a place in history in 1601 when the young earl, Robert Devereux, organised a performance of Shakespeare’s Richard II, which features the deposition of the king. Essex then attempted to raise a rebellion against Queen Elizabeth I, of whom he had previously been a favourite. She kept her head and he lost his.

  Essex Street was also the place where Pip, in Great Expectations, found lodgings for Magwitch under the name Provis.

  Buckingham Street, formerly the home of the Dukes of Buckingham, now runs from the Strand to Victoria Embankment Gardens and was where Charles Dickens briefly lodged, at No. 15, and where he later lodged his alter ago, David Copperfield, with Mrs Crupp. The building has since been demolished and replaced by a new building overlooking the gardens. Dickens was not the only distinguished resident of No. 15 as it had been for a time the home of Tsar Peter the Great during his visit to London in 1698, and of Henry Fielding in 1735.

  Nearby, at No. 142 The Strand (now No. 2 Arundel Street), were the original offices of Dickens’s publishers Chapman and Hall who, following the success of The Pickwick Papers, received a visit from the author’s father, John Dickens, to ask for a loan! John Chapman also published the works of Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot and T.H. Huxley (‘Charles Darwin’s Bulldog’).

  Victoria Embankment Gardens was created by Sir Joseph Bazalgette in the 1870s when he built the Victoria Embankment. William Gladstone (1809–98), Prime Minister at the time, wanted to build offices on this rare green space (using the rents to abolish income tax!), but was prevented from doing so by a campaign led by W.H. Smith (1825–91) who, besides running the family business, was MP for Westminster. Apart from the fact that his station bookstalls encouraged many travellers to buy and read books, he occupies a place in our artistic heritage as the model for ‘Sir Joseph Porter the Ruler of the Queen’s Naveee’ in Gilbert and Sul
livan’s HMS Pinafore. Though lampooned, he was in fact a very effective First Lord of the Admiralty, shaking up many archaic practices and people.

  The Golden Cross Hotel at Charing Cross, which was demolished when Trafalgar square was created, accommodated Samuel Pickwick and his companions as they began their travels, and also David Copperfield, who encountered Daniel Peggotty in a state of distress on the steps of the nearby church of St Martin-in-the-Fields as Peggotty searched for Little Em’ly who had run away with the villainous Steerforth. David took Peggotty back to the hotel in an attempt to comfort him and eventually located Little Em’ly at a house off Golden Square, Soho.

  Charing Cross station occupies the former site of Hungerford fruit and vegetable market, which was demolished to make way for the station in 1862. Hungerford Stairs, nearby, was the home of Warren’s Blacking Warehouse, where Charles Dickens worked as a child while his parents were in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison for four months in 1824, a short period which left a lifelong scar of shame on the novelist. There the 12-year-old Dickens walked each day from his lodgings in Little College Street (now College Place), Camden Town, along the Hampstead Road, Tottenham Court Road and St Martin’s Lane to his place of work. Many years later the author’s son Henry remembered him playing a memory game in which Dickens’s clue was ‘Warren’s Blacking, 30 Strand’ where he covered pots of boot blacking ‘first with a piece of oil paper, and then with a piece of blue paper’. Hungerford Stairs was also the location at which Mr Micawber, in David Copperfield, took ship for a more prosperous life as a colonial magistrate in Australia, freed at last from his endless debts.