VI "LITTLE MOTHER" 133 only"the three R's," but also housewifery, house-cleaning, cooking, and other most necessary accomplishments: 66 Housewifery" (says Mr. Morley) "is the birthright of the children of the poor . . . . Every mite of a girl down in the East or South . . . . is a housewife by the time she is six . . . . Often enough when times are hard and funds very low-when father is out o' work, and mother's bad in bed" -does the poor little mother set forth with scrubbing-brush in hand, and clean the door-steps of the prosperous for twopence or threepence, according to the size and number of the steps. She probably lights the fire of a morning; it is her delight to go shopping to the remarkable establishment where most of the necessities of life are to be obtained by the farthing's-worth; and with the mysteries of marketing she is very well acquainted indeed. You should just see her in Bermondsey, the Walworth Road, the Dials, the New Cut, or Whitechapel on a Sunday morning, when these localities are alive with poor people buying their dinners. Road and footpath are blocked with stalls and barrows, and flesh, fish, fowl and vegetables are all jumbled together in confusion that is apparently inextricable. But little mother knows her way about, and whether it is red meat or white meat, beef, mutton or rabbit, trust her for getting a bargain, for keeping a sharp eye on weight and measure. A farden is a farden in districts where a penny is a substantial coin of the realm." The "Surrey Side" is noted for its hospitals, as well as its prisons and its slums; and of these "Guy's Hospital," on the left of the Borough High Street,-an eighteenth-century foundation, due to the wealth of a Lombard Street bookseller named Thomas Guy,-is one of the most important. This Guy was in his way a miser, and his savings were vastly increased by dealings in South Sea stock, showing that some good, at any rate, was wrought by the terrible "Bubble" that ruined so many thousands. Yet the hospital narrowly escaped losing the rich man's bequest. He was on the point of marrying his pretty maid, Sally, when, his bride offending him by officious interference, he broke off the marriage, and endowed the present hospital with his great wealth. A blackened brass statue of the founder stands in the courtyard of the edifice. If Chaucer, with his ever memorable Canterbury Pilgrims, did much to immortalise the Southwark of medieval times, 134 THE CHILD OF THE MARSHALSEA CHAP. Dickens, the child of a later era, has done at least as much for the Southwark of his day. In the Borough High Street, close to the site of the demolished Marshalsea Prison, stands St. George's Church, chiefly remarkable for the fact that Dickens has here placed the marriage of his heroine, "Little Dorrit," the Child of the Marshalsea. This was always a district of prisons; the natural sequence, one would think, of Southwark merry-making. Of the two Marshalsea prisons established here at different times, the earlier, nearer to London Bridge, was abolished in 1849; the later, so graphically described by Dickens, was not pulled down till 1887, after having been let for forty years as a lodging for tramps and vagabonds." Relics of it are now hard to find. Dickens, who knew it well as a boy, thus describes (in the preface to Little Dorrit) his search for it in later life: 6 .... "I found the outer front courtyard metamorphosed into a butter shop; and I then almost gave up every brick of the jail for lost. Wandering, however, down a certain adjacent Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey,' I came to Marshalsea Place, the houses in which I recognized, not only as the great block of the former prison, but as preserving the rooms that arose to my mind's eye when I became Little Dorrit's biographer Whoever goes into Marshalsea Place, turning out of Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey, will find his feet on the very paving-stones of the extinct Marshalsea jail; will see its narrow yard to the right and to the left, very little altered if at all, except that the walls were lowered when the place got free; will look upon the rooms in which the debtors lived; will stand among the crowding ghosts of many miserable years." Dickens's boyish recollections of the ancient debtors prison have, as was perhaps natural, sometimes more than a tinge of bitterness; here he passed to and fro during wretched childish years, between the daily drudgery of covering blacking pots at "Murdstone and Grinby's," down by Hungerford Stairs. More wretched, indeed, far, than any modern Borough waif, was this neglected and sensitive child of genius. The intense torture of his degradation (as he thought it) was never wholly forgotten. In this connection he tells (in Forster's Life) a pathetic VI DICKENS'S LONDON TYPES 135 little story. No boy at the blacking office, it seems, knew where or how he lived; and once, being taken ill there, and helped towards home by a kindly fellow-worker, the child Dickens said good-bye to his friend by Southwark Bridge: "I was too proud" (he says) "to let him know about the prison; and after making several efforts to get rid of him, to all of which Bob Fagin in his goodness was deaf, shook hands with him on the steps of a house near Southwark-bridge on the Surrey side, making believe that I lived there. As a finishing piece of reality in case of his looking back, I knocked at the door, I recollect, and asked, when the woman opened it, if that was Mr. Robert Fagin's house." While the boy suffered thus acutely, his father lived on in a Micawberish way at the Marshalsea, being merely of the amiable, shiftless, idle genus that drags its family down. For the rest, they did well enough at the Marshalsea: "The family," the son wrote, "lived more comfortably in prison than they had done. for a long time out of it. They were waited on still by the maid-of-all-work from Bayham Street, the orphan girl from Chatham workhouse, from whose sharp little worldly, yet also kindly, ways I took my first impressions of the "Marchioness" in The Old Curiosity Shop. Yet Destiny works in strange and devious ways, and all the while, if he had only known it, the Fates were conspiring for Charles Dickens's good. It was the father's misfortunes that really taught the boy all he needed to learn. Here, amid the unsavoury purlieus of the prison, he unconsciously studied all the types and localities of which he was to make such wonderful use in after-life. The Marshalsea and its ways; Lant Street and Bob Sawyer; "Tip," "of the prison prisonous, and of the streets streety"; Sam Weller at the "White Hart ; " Nancy at London Bridge Steps; Sikes and Folly Ditch; with a hundred others,―were, more or less, to be the outcome of that time. The glamour of a romantic past, the spirit of Chaucer and of Shakespeare, may still attach to Southwark; the playhouses and gaieties of Elizabeth's time may yet leave some faint record 136 THE CITY'S CHRONICLER CH. VÌ there; but it is, after all, by another of Fate's strange ironies, the Child of the Marshalsea, the boy brought up in wretchedness and squalor, who has glorified by his genius the place, the whole district, where he so suffered in early youth. Other and greater men have told London's history in the past; but Dickens, whose grave is still faithfully tended in Westminster Abbey while those of the mightier dead are long forgotten, Dickens, who cared everything for the lower, warmer phases of humanity; Dickens, to whom every grimy London stone was dear, and every dirty cockney child a creature of infinite possibilities; Dickens, whose name will be ever dear to the faithful Londoner; is the modern chronicler of the great city. CHAPTER VII THE INNS OF COURT "The perplexed and troublous valley of the shadow of the law."Dickens. "those bricky towers, The which on Thames' broad aged back doe ride, AMONG the by-ways that open suddenly out of the highways of London, are there any more attractive than the Inns of Court? which, in an almost startling manner, bring into the whirl of Holborn, and the din of Fleet Street, something of the charm of an older and more peaceful world. No parts of London are more delightful, and few call up more interesting historic associations. Picturesque and charming old enclosures, -full of that mysterious and intangible "romance of London" that appealed so strongly to writers such as Lamb, Dickens, and Nathaniel Hawthorne,--the Inns of Court have in their time sheltered many great men. How strange and how unexpected, in the very heart of busy London, are these quiet old-world quadrangles, of calm, collegiate aspect, of infinite peace; a peace that seems perhaps more intense in contrast with the outside, just as the London "close" of greenery seems all the greener for its being set amid the surrounding grime, shining "like a star in blackest night." Historic houses, indeed, in every sense, |