THE peculiar and somewhat old-world charm of Bloomsbury is, like that of Chelsea, only made known to her devotees. To the visitor to London, no less than to the fashionable dweller in the West-End, it is a grimy, sordid, squalid region, where slums abound, where "no nice people live," and where mere "going out to dinner" necessitates either the paying of a half-crown cab fare, or the sacrifice of an hour in the bone-shaking omnibus. Hence arises the custom of saying that "Bloomsbury is so far away." Of course, the distance or proximity of

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any part of London depends on what one chooses for the centre ; but, taking either Oxford Circus or Charing Cross-surely natural enough centres-as the diverging point, Bloomsbury is more central than any residential part of the metropolis.

But even at the play poor Bloomsbury is maligned; and this, too, notwithstanding the fact that it is the chosen abode of so many of the theatrical profession. "They call the place where I live, Bloomsbury," says Mr. Todman, the old secondhand bookseller of Liberty Hall, "though why Bloomsbury, I

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"A HOME FROM HOME"

CHAP.

don't know; for there ain't so much bloomin' as there is buryin'," (this, by the way, is a two-edged libel, for Bloomsbury being on high ground is notoriously healthy). And then the same gentleman goes on to remark, "they call my 'ouse a ramblin' one, though why it ain't rambled away to some nicer place, I can't think." We get, from the same play, a further impression that the Bloomsburians live mainly on a dish called "Smoked 'Addick." Perhaps the dramatist was led to this conclusion from the very pervading smell of fried fish that fills certain "unlovely streets" of cookshops or boardinghouses; where, however, in my experience the 'addick aroma has always yielded the palm to that of "sheeps'-trotters or "stewed eels." Be this as it may, the old solidly built squares and houses of Bloomsbury have a dignity of their own. Some of the streets have, it is true, "come down in the world; nevertheless, in their decay they retain a mournful look of having known better days,—a look that even their tenement rooms, ---- their broken windows, half-stuffed with paper, -their shock-headed dirty inmates,-cannot altogether abolish or destroy. Dickens, who always saw the human side of everything, has often noticed the peculiar pathos of some of these old, world-forgotten houses. In his inimitable Sketches by Boz he gives a graphic account of the gradual decay of a house "over the water." Here, the process is somewhat similar. First, it changes from a private dwelling-house to a "select boarding-house"; then, it becomes a friendly, social affair, a "Home from Home"; then, its area steps become dirtier, its cook sits on them, shelling peas, and exchanging jokes with the milkman; it blossoms out in gaudy paint, like a decorator's shop; cracked flowerpots, of odd shapes and sizes, adorn its windows; and it descends, by slow degrees, yet further in the scale of "gentility," till finally it becomes a mere tenement house, its juvenile population going in and out with jugs of beer, its area railings hung round with pewter milk-pots, and its door ornamented with a row of half-broken bell-chains for

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THE BEGINNINGS OF BLOOMSBURY

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the different occupants. And, if you should chance, too hurriedly, to ring one of these in search of a special inhabitant, ten to one a cross, dirty-faced female will appear, grumbling: "Can't yer see as this 'ere is Mrs. Smith's bell ?--Two pair back -ye've rung the wrong 'un!"

The Bloomsbury houses are pathetic, however, not so much from age, as because their glory has departed,--because they have had their day, and ceased to be; for, in the matter of actual age, few of them date back farther than the end of the eighteenth century. Queen Square, indeed, which is far prior to any of its neighbouring squares, was laid out in the reign of Queen Anne, in whose honour it was named, and whose statue still adorns it. It is a curiously shaped square, for, though enclosed, no houses were built at the northern end; this arrangement was made for the sake of the fine view of the hills of Highgate and Hampstead, that the square then commanded. Strange transformation! The Bloomsbury that we know was then all fields; the houses of Queen Square being, so to speak, the last sentinels of the London of that day! Rocques' map of 1746 gives no houses beyond the northern end of Southampton Row. Between Great Russell Street and the present Euston Road, was then open country,-called, first, the "Long Fields," -then "Southampton Fields," or "Lamb's Conduit Fields." Earlier, they were famous for their peaches and their snipes; but in about 1800 they were mainly waste ground, where brawling and disorderly sports took place, and where superstition asserted that, two brothers having fought there about a lady, the footsteps they made in their death-struggle would never again grow grass or herb! "The Brothers' Steps," the place was called, or, "The Field of the Forty Footsteps." The present Gordon Square is said to be built upon the exact spot. The place had, however, always been rife with superstition; for here, on Midsummer-Day, in the 17th century, young women would come looking for a plantain-leaf, to put under their pillows, so that they should dream of their

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242

OLD BEDFORD HOUSE

CHAP.

future husbands. far later, but two or three nobles' mansions, enclosed in their gardens,--such as "Bedford House," pulled down to build Bedford Square,-" Baltimore House," long since built into Russell Square,—and "Montague House," now rebuilt as the British Museum ;-with the old "Whitefield's Tabernacle" appearing through the trees towards the gardens of the ancient manor of "Toten Court," which gave its romantic name to the essentially unromantic Tottenham Court Road. (The ugly "Adam and Eve" public-house, at the junction of Euston Road and Tottenham Court Road, now occupies the place both of the old tavern of that name, and the older manor-house.)

From these fields could be seen, in 1746 and

The name "Bloomsbury" is, however, of more remote date; it is, like most London appellations, a "corruption," and comes from "Blemundsbury," the manor of the De Blemontes, or Blemunds, in the reign of Henry III. Later, the manor of Bloomsbury came, together with that of the neighbouring St. Giles, into the possession of the Earls of Southampton, till in 1668 it passed with Lady Rachel,--daughter of Thomas Wriothesley, last Earl, by her marriage with Lord William Russell,-into the family of the Dukes of Bedford, the present owners. Lord William Russell,-who was beheaded, without a fair trial, in Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1683, for supposed connection with the famous Rye House Plot,-lived in Bedford House (formerly Southampton House), on the northern side of Bloomsbury, originally Southampton, Square. (The house occupied the whole north side of the square until pulled down in 1802, after the illustrious Russells had lived there for more than 200 years.) This was the house admired by Evelyn, in an entry in his diary of February 9, 1665: "Dined at my Lord Treasurer's, the Earle of Southampton, in Blomesbury, where he was building a noble square or piazza, a little towne; some noble rooms, a pretty cedar chappell, a naked garden to the north, but good aire". It was at first intended that Lord William Russell should suffer in Bloomsbury Square, opposite his own