From 221B Baker Street to the Old Curiosity Shop

by Stephen Halliday

  No. 24 Russell Square was for many years the office of the publisher Faber and Faber, where T.S. Eliot worked as an editor, often making use of the fire escape to exit when warned of the arrival of his wife Vivienne, who was later consigned to a mental hospital where she died. Virginia Woolf, herself no stranger to mental illness, described Vivienne as ‘a bag of ferrets’ which, she claimed, the poet wore around his neck.

  The busybody Lady Southdown in Vanity Fair has a home in Brunswick Square, close to the Foundling Hospital, as does Isabella, the sister of Emma in the novel of the same name, which many critics consider to be Jane Austen’s finest work. Isabella declares: ‘Our part of London is so very superior to most others … the neighbourhood of Brunswick Square is very different from all the rest. We are so very airy. Mr Wingfield thinks the vicinity of Brunswick Square decidedly the most favourable as to air.’ At the time this would have been more important than it seems now on account of the ‘miasmatic’ theory of disease causation. This held that epidemic diseases were transmitted in polluted air (rather than through water or direct contact) so that clean air would have been a major attraction to any prospective householder.

  Other more recent literary associations may be found in Gower Street. No. 12 was for many years the home of Lady Ottoline Morrell (1879–1938), whose generous patronage of writers ranging from Lytton Strachey and other members of the Bloomsbury Group to D.H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley did not spare her from ruthless caricature by those she had helped. In Women in Love D.H. Lawrence painted an unflattering portrait of her as Hermione Roddice, a demanding literary hostess and Aldous Huxley in Crome Yellow, caused as much offence to Ottoline as Lawrence did with his caricature of literary weekends at Crome, a pastiche of her country home at Garsington Manor in Oxfordshire.

  Also in Gower Street is University College, London, where David Lodge was educated, and he set one of his early novels, The British Museum is Falling Down, in the area. Further along Gower Street to the south is the University of London Senate House and Library. Opened in 1936 to an art deco design by Charles Holden (who also designed many of the London Underground’s listed stations) it was, at 209 feet, London’s first ‘skyscraper’ and the tallest secular building in the capital, a distinction which may have helped to earn it a sinister place in the world of literature. Graham Greene worked there briefly during the Second World War for the Intelligence Service and it is featured in his novel The Ministry of Fear, which was made into a film noir by Fritz Lang in 1944. It was also the model for the even more sinister ‘Ministry of Truth’, the workplace of Winston Smith in George Orwell’s 1984, where Smith concocts lies to conceal the truth from the inhabitants of Oceania. The Senate House was used as the Ministry of Truth in the film of 1984, made in that year, with John Hurt and Richard Burton.

  A short distance to the west is Tottenham Court Road which is, to this day, noted for its furniture shops, and it was in a shop in this street that furniture belonging to Traddles in David Copperfield was found after it had been seized from Micawber’s house by one of his numerous creditors.

  CANONBURY AND HOLLOWAY

  To the north, at No. 5 Canonbury Place, was the home of the brothers George and Weedon Grossmith, both comic actors, who wrote and illustrated the comic novel Diary of a Nobody, published in 1892 and greatly admired by Evelyn Waugh who himself lived nearby at No. 17a Canonbury Square. The Diary of a Nobody, despite its unassuming title, is one of the funniest books ever written, being supposedly the diary of Charles Pooter, a lower-middle-class city clerk who lives at The Laurels, Brickfield Terrace, Holloway, a little to the north of the Grossmiths’ home and an area which in the 1890s was expanding rapidly to accommodate families like the Pooters. Brickfield Terrace does not exist, but houses on Holloway Road are very similar to ‘The Laurels’ as described in The Diary: ‘Six-roomed residence plus basement … a flight of ten steps up to the front door.’ Pooter, having noted that the diaries of others are published, explains his decision to keep a diary:

  Why should I not publish my diary? I have often seen reminiscences of people I have never even heard of and I fail to see – because I do not happen to be a ‘Somebody’ – why my diary should not be interesting. My only regret is that I did not commence it when I was a youth.

  The diary is a hilarious account of Mr Pooter’s humiliations at the hands of a cast of miscellaneous characters, including his loving but critical wife Carrie, tradesmen, servants, casual acquaintances, readers of Bicycle News, conmen and, above all, his wayward son Lupin Pooter. Charles Pooter, whose meagre sense of humour is overshadowed by his sense of dignity and self-importance, is quite unaware of these humiliations and in the end he triumphs, informing the incorrigible Lupin: ‘My boy, as a result of 21 years’ industry and strict attention to the interests of my superiors in office, I have been rewarded with promotion and a rise in salary of £100.’

  Reginald Wilfer, in Dickens’s last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend (1865), has much in common with Mr Pooter as Wilfer, also a resident of Holloway, is, like Pooter, hen-pecked by his wife. But Holloway, by the time of Mr Pooter, has come a long way since it was the home of the Wilfers where it was: ‘A suburban Sahara, where tiles and bricks were burnt, bones were boiled, carpets were beat, rubbish was shot, dogs were fought, and dust was heaped by contractors.’

  Dickens placed Tommy Traddles from David Copperfield in Camden for a while, in a house very similar to the Dickens’s home in Camden’s Bayham Street, and the reader detects a sharp note of disapproval:

  I found that the street was not as desirable a one as I would have wished it to be, for the sake of Traddles. The inhabitants appeared to have a propensity to throw any trifles they were not in want of into the road which not only made it rank and sloppy but untidy too, on account of the cabbage leaves.

  Likewise the Toodle family live in ‘a little row of houses with little squalid patches of ground before them’ in Staggs Gardens, Camden Town, an imaginary street built by a speculative builder to take advantage of the desire of the lower middle classes to move out from the grimy centre of London to what were then suburbs accessible via the rapidly growing railway network.

  HAMPSTEAD & HIGHGATE

  Much of David Copperfield is set in Highgate where Dickens and his parents lived for a while in 1832 and in whose famous cemetery his parents, and his daughter Dora, are buried. In David Copperfield, the former home of the villainous Steerforth and the home of his mother has been identified as Church House in South Grove, and it is to a home in Highgate that David Copperfield brings his empty-headed bride Dora Spenlow:

  I went into a cottage that I saw was to let and examined it narrowly, for I felt it necessary to be practical. It would do for me and Dora admirably: with a little front garden for Jip [Dora’s spoilt dog] to run about and bark at the tradespeople through the railings.

  The Spaniards Inn in Hampstead played host to Van Helsing in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and was where Mrs Bardell plotted to trap Samuel Pickwick in Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers. (Ewan Munro)

  Eventually he decides to take a nearby house and here they are joined, in a nearby cottage, by his devoted aunt Betsey Trotwood. Such dwellings may still be seen.

  Highgate is also featured in Bleak House, since it is at the Archway Toll that Inspector Bucket, employed first by the rascally Tulkinghorn and later by Sir Leicester Dedlock, picks up the trail of Lady Dedlock on her fatal flight from what she conceives to be disgrace since she believes, wrongly, that her devoted husband Sir Leicester will disown her when he discovers that before she met him she gave birth to an illegitimate daughter.

  Highgate was also the childhood home of John Betjeman and he wrote of it with great warmth in ‘Summoned by Bells’:

  Safe, in a world of trains and buttered toast

  Where things inanimate could feel and think,

  Deeply I loved thee, 31 West Hill!

  At that hill’s foot did London then begin,

  With yellow horse-trams clopping past th
e planes

  To grey-brick nonconformist Chetwynd Road

  And on to Kentish town and barking dogs

  And costers’ carts and crowded grocers’ shops

  And Daniels’ store, the local Selfridge’s

  Neighbouring Hampstead has literary associations of its own. The Spaniards Inn in Hampstead Lane dates from the sixteenth century and was, according to Dickens, the place where Mrs Bardell and her accomplices plotted to enmesh Samuel Pickwick in the breach of promise case which resulted in his temporary incarceration in the Fleet Prison. The Spaniards can also boast an appearance in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, when Van Helsing and his gang retire to the inn after killing Lucy Westenra. The ponds on the neighbouring Heath are the subject of Samuel Pickwick’s paper, ‘Speculations on the Source of the Hampstead Ponds’. The inn also claims to be the place where John Keats, who lived nearby, composed ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. Keats lived in what is now Keats Grove for the last five years of his life and composed much of his finest poetry there as well as contracting the tuberculosis from which he died in Rome in 1821. Keats’s house, the poet’s home, was completely restored in the 1970s and is now a museum.

  A short walk to the west is Heath Street which was the home of the Upper Flask Tavern, used by Samuel Richardson (1689–1761) as a setting for some of the scenes in Clarissa (1748), one of the first novels ever written, whose formidable length (eight volumes) makes it more admired than read by modern readers. The tavern was also the home of the Kit Kat Club, which flourished from 1700–20 and included William Congreve and Joseph Addison amongst its members. The tavern itself no longer exists but its site is marked by Flask Walk, close to Hampstead station.

  Hampstead also features in a dramatic episode in Oliver Twist and it is still possible to follow much of the route of Bill Sikes as he flees from London after murdering Nancy:

  He went through Islington; strode up the hill to Highgate on which there stands the stone in honour of Whittington [which may still be seen]; turned down Highgate Hill, unsteady of purpose and uncertain where to go; struck off to the right again, almost as soon as he began to descend it; and taking the footpath across the fields, skirted Caen Wood and so came out on Hampstead Heath. Traversing the hollow by the Vale of Health he mounted the opposite bank, and crossing the road which joins the villages of Hampstead and Highgate, made along the remaining portion of the heath to the fields at North End, in one of which he laid himself down under a hedge and slept.

  Dickens himself lived for a short time in North End at Wylde’s Farm, close to the site of North End station (the only station on the Underground system which was never opened because campaigners led by Henrietta Barnett secured the Heath against development).

  John Betjeman spent much of his time in his youth on Hampstead Heath, contemplating his future as a poet rather than in the family cabinet-making business which his father had in mind (as recorded in Chapter 3). In his autobiographical work ‘Summoned by Bells’, Betjeman described his early struggles with his vocation:

  And so, at sunset, off to Hampstead Heath

  I went with pencil and with writing-pad

  And stood tip-toe upon a little hill,

  Awaiting inspiration from the sky.

  ‘Look! there’s a poet!’, people might exclaim

  On footpaths near. The muse inspired my pen:

  The sunset tipped with gold St. Michael’s church,

  Shouts of boys bathing came from Highgate Ponds,

  The elms that hid the houses of the great

  Rustled with mystery, and dirt-grey sheep

  Grazed in the foreground; but the lines of verse

  Came out like parodies of A & M.

  The gap between my feelings and my skill

  Was so immense, I wonder I went on.

  Hampstead is also the place where the narrator meets the Woman in White in Wilkie Collins’s novel of that name:

  I had now arrived at that particular point of my walk where four roads met – the road to Hampstead along which I had returned; the road to Finchley; the road to West End; and the road back to London. I had mechanically turned in this latter direction and was strolling along the lonely high road … when, in one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop by the touch of a hand laid lightly and suddenly on my shoulder from behind me. I turned on the instant, with my fingers tightening round the handle of my stick. There, in the middle of the broad, bright high-road – there, as if it had at that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven – stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments …

  No. 70 Queens’ Avenue, Finchley, bears a commemorative tablet recording the fact that Charles Dickens stayed there in 1843 while writing The Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit when the site was occupied by Cobley’s Farm. It was there that he conceived the character of the gin-swilling midwife Mrs Gamp, whose umbrella gave rise to the expression ‘a gamp’ for an ill-kept example of that useful artefact.

  Kensington Gardens, where J.M Barrie set one of his Peter Pan stories. (Mark Beynon)

  7

  HYDE PARK AND

  KENSINGTON & CHELSEA

  John Galsworthy, early in The Forsyte Saga, signals the domestic status of members of the Forsyte family by telling the reader in considerable detail where each of them lives. The Forsyte aversion to Soho is noted elsewhere but the rest of the family may be found near Hyde Park, some in Mayfair, others in what is now the royal borough of Kensington & Chelsea:

  There was Old Jolyon in Stanhope Place; the James in Park Lane; Swithin in the lonely glory of orange and blue chambers in Hyde Park mansions – he had never married, not he! – the Soameses in their nest in Knightsbridge, the Rogers in Princes Gardens.

  Soames’s sister Winifred lives in a rented house in Green Street, off Park Lane, while Soames and Irene, following their wedding, begin their doomed marriage at No. 62 Montpelier Square. The square is a short walk from Harrods but No. 62, sadly, does not exist except in the writer’s imagination.

  In the slightly less grand Gloucester Square, Bayswater, to the north of Hyde Park, is the town house of Lady Monk in Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her, the first of his Palliser novels. It is from here that Lady Glencora plans to elope with her wastrel lover Burgo Fitzgerald, a plot which is foiled by the timely arrival of Plantagenet Palliser with whom she is eventually to enjoy a happy marriage.

  J.M. Barrie set one of his Peter Pan stories, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, in the gardens where Barrie himself liked to walk and where the Peter Pan statue now stands.

  Matthew Arnold, in his ‘Lines Written in Kensington Gardens’ (1852) describes a place of tranquillity where he is screened from ‘the girdling city’s hum’:

  In this lone, open glade I lie,

  Screen’d by deep boughs on either hand;

  And at its end, to stay the eye,

  Those black-crown’d, red-boled pine-trees stand!

  Birds here make song, each bird has his,

  Across the girdling city’s hum.

  How green under the boughs it is!

  How thick the tremulous sheep-cries come!

  Sometimes a child will cross the glade

  To take his nurse his broken toy;

  Sometimes a thrush flit overhead

  Deep in her unknown day’s employ.

  Ezra Pound lived for a while in Kensington and in his poem ‘The Garden’ he wrote:

  Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall

  She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens

  And she is dying piecemeal

  Of a sort of emotional anaemia.

  A short distance to the west is Pitt Street, W8, which features as a crime scene in Sherlock Holmes’s The Adventure of the Six Napoleons. Conan Doyle often used fictional addresses (e.g. 221B Baker Street) in his works but Pitt Street, Kensington, remains as he described it: ‘a quiet little backwater just beside one of the briskest currents of London life.’

/>   BROMPTON ROAD

  To the south, on the corner of the Brompton Road and Boltons Place, is Bousfield Primary School, opened in 1956. It stands on the site of the childhood home of Beatrix Potter (1866–1943), where the young woman spent a lonely childhood with snobbish and zealously protective parents. She comforted herself by drawing pictures of plants (becoming a recognised authority on fungi) and animals, and it was the latter which inspired her to write her books, beginning with The Tale of Peter Rabbit, published by Warne in 1902 and soon followed by a series of titles which brought her greater sales than any other author of children’s books at that time. She became engaged to her publisher Norman Warne in 1905 (against the wishes of her parents who objected to the fact that he was ‘in trade’), but tragically he died shortly afterwards. Beatrix eventually moved to the Lake District where, with the proceeds of her books, she bought 4,000 acres of farmland to protect them from over-development and she married a local solicitor called William Heelis, her mother, of course, was disapproving. But it was here, in the prosperous London area called The Boltons, that Peter Rabbit, Squirrel Nutkin, Pigling Bland and her other characters were first conceived.