Literary London

“ WE walked in the evening in Greenwich Park. He asked me, I suppose by way of trying my disposition, ‘ Is not this very fine ? ’ Having no exquisite relish of the beauties of nature and being more delighted with the ‘ busy hum of men,’ I answered, ‘Yes, sir, but not equal to Fleet Street.’ JOHNSON. ‘ You are right, sir.’ ” Thus the light-minded Mr. Boswell ; and the no less truthful but finer Lamb writes to Wordsworth in answer to a pressing invitation to visit the poet at the Lakes:

“ I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead nature. The lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street, the innumerable trades, tradesmen and customers, coaches, wagons, play-houses ; all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden ; the watchmen, drunken scenes, rabbles ; life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night; the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street; the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon houses and pavements, the paintshops, the old bookstalls, persons cheapening books, coffee-houses, steams of soup from kitchens, the pantomimes, London itself a pantomime and masquerade, — all these things work themselves into my mind, and feed me without a power of satiating me.”

Margaret Fuller confessed that she never found herself at home until she reached Rome, but where there is one so adjusted to the antique and worldwide, there are twenty who touch the world of their imagination at most points when they take a walk down Fleet Street. The lines of Lamb which we have quoted are like pungent salts to any one who has ever abandoned himself to the fascination of that earthliest of cities. They revive his mind and send the recollection of days and nights stinging along his nerves. Yet it is through the most refined media that London comes to have this strong hold upon the human affection and imagination, for the city owes its fame not to historic deeds done there, but to historic men who have lived there, and most of all to the men of letters. Nor to these simply for what they have written of London, but often for the mere fact that they have written in London, and have consecrated its very mundane streets and houses by the presence of their spirits. We know the house, the room, in which Keats wrote his sonnet upon reading Chapman’s Homer. How slight a basis for an attachment to a locality ! Yet we stand there, like Poor Susan at the corner of Wood Street; “ we look and our heart is in heaven.”

It was every way fit that an American should furnish a directory ¹ to the London of literature, since it is his countrymen who walk London streets with the keenest sense of that spiritual population which inhabits the town. It is equally satisfactory to find that Mr. Hutton has understood perfectly what his countrymen want in such a directory, and has fulfilled his task with an eye single to its thoroughness. In alphabetical order he has entered the names of English-writing authors who have at any time lived or tarried in London; he has supplied the dates of birth and death under each name, and then has tracked the author not only to each place of residence in the city, but to his favorite haunts, indicating also those localities which the author by his art has made famous. In doing this he has confined himself to well-authenticated facts, and has patiently sifted the evidence in all obscure cases, so that the reader, noting the extreme care shown, comes to rely implicitly on Mr. Hutton’s results. As a slight indication of this accuracy of form, all statements as to existing monuments are dated by the year of Mr. Hutton’s record. He never says carelessly such a house is now standing, but he fixes his now by [1885]. By this means he at once protects himself and provides the traveler with the necessary clue. Any subsequent edition — and the book ought to be a standard one — will leave this undisturbed so far as it goes.

In preparing the volume, Mr. Hutton went to work in a most systematic fashion, verifying his facts by personal examination of localities. He says in his modest Introduction : “ Innumerable volumes upon London have been consulted, from Stow and Strype to the younger Dickens : early insurance surveys, containing the number and position of every house in London since houses were first numbered, in 1767, have been compared with similar surveys of the present, by means of tracings and by actual measurements of the streets themselves ; the first maps of London have been examined and compared in like manner with later and contemporary plans ; directories for the last century and a half have been studied carefully ; and it has been possible by these means to discover and note the exact sites of many interesting buildings, the position of which has hitherto been merely a matter of conjecture or entirely unknown.”

It is impossible that one should thus hunt for last year’s birds’ nests who did not have a positive affection for the birds, and it is very much to Mr. Hutton’s credit that he has denied himself the pleasure of lingering over the subjects which must so often have tempted him into comment. Instead, he has kept rigorously within the bounds of his work, and has given the sentimental traveler all the necessary facts without any sentiments of his own. He has restricted himself to men of the past altogether, wisely, since he would have infringed upon too much privacy if he had given to the curious any clues to the retreats or haunts of the living. He has furnished his book with admirable indexes, and altogether has made himself an invaluable valet de place to the lover of literary London.

The London of Mr. Hutton’s book is metropolitan, and perhaps it was necessary thus to limit the range, but it would have been possible to find a good many literary landmarks in the environs of the city, in what Mr. Walford appropriately terms, in his encyclopædic work, Greater London.² Mr. Hutton has indeed occasionally followed one of his heroes beyond the city limits, as in the case of Pope at Twickenham, and there are two slight references to Richmond; but for anything like fullness of statement one must go to Mr. Walford’s book. He must go to it, for he cannot carry it with him, since it is in two big volumes, adapted to the size of the subject, and is planned on a different scale and for a different purpose from Mr. Hutton’s book. It comprises a vast deal about other people than men of letters, and is plentifully supplied with coarse, sometimes very effective woodcuts.

One might profitably annotate the smaller book by means of the larger, and occasionally possibly correct it, or at least enlarge a statement into a less misleading one. Mr. Hutton, for instance, speaks of the grotto in Pope’s villa as still remaining, though he notes the fact that the villa itself is entirely different in character from the original one, and does not even stand on the same site. But Mr. Walford, at the close of his full and entertaining account of Twickenham, says : “ Suffice it to say that beyond his tomb in Twickenham church, the only memorials of the poet now visible here are the gardens and the famous grove, in which he took such great delight, and also the grotto — or rather, the tunnel, for it has been despoiled of most of its rare marbles, spars, and ores, and is now a mere damp subway.” To tell the truth, the ardent hunter of literary landmarks is too often obliged to content himself with the sad words “ Here might have been,” and he ought to think himself fairly well off if the grotto of his search has been arrested in its disappearance at the phase of a “ mere damp subway.”

We note a rather more distinct contradiction in the two books in the reference to Thomson’s sojourn at Rosedale House in Kew Foot Lane, Richmond. “ It has been greatly altered,” says Mr. Hutton, “ and was in 1885 a plain red brick mansion near the street, with a little bit of lawn in front. ‘ Rosedale House’ was painted on its gate-posts. The gardens and relics of the poet, which were for many years carefully preserved here, have gradually disappeared. He died in this house in 1748.” In Greater London, under the general subject of Richmond, we find a full account of Thomson’s home at Rosedale House, with the statement that the house had been transformed into a hospital, and that the Rosedale near at hand had nothing to do with Thomson. Still, though Mr. Hutton says nothing about the transformation, he may not have mistaken the two houses.

Under the title of Dickens, Mr. Hutton has given some interesting references not merely to Dickens’s own life, but to the scarcely less actual life of the men, women, and children whom he created. Greater London supplements all this in a very suggestive fashion, for it enables one to follow forlorn Oliver Twist on his tramp with Bill Sykes, and is especially minute and full in references to the scenes of Barnaby Rudge. Harrow School, from its associations with the boyhood of men of letters, becomes a marked literary landmark, and is described in a rambling fashion in the larger book. Enfield, also, besides its connection with Lamb, offers itself for admiration as the place, according to a diligent antiquary cited by Mr. Walford, where Sir Walter Raleigh made a foot bridge of his mantle for Queen Elizabeth. Some of Theodore Hook’s pranks were played outside of the city, and Dr. Johnson, sturdiest of Londoners, is represented by his wife’s grave in Bromley church.

Yet a comparison and collocation of the two books brings to light very distinctly the concentration of literary men upon London proper. They do not seem to have betaken themselves much to the suburbs, and no wonder, for all England is virtually a suburb of London ; if one is not in the heart of London he might almost as well, for convenience, be in Cumberland as at Staines, say, or Chigwell. The power of London to draw to itself men of letters is in its appeal to them to get near the throbbing of the great arteries. They recognize the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street, and the beauties of nature of Greenwich Park fade before the stunted rose-bushes of the Temple.