FAMOUS HOUSES
AND
LITERARY SHRINES OF LONDON
FAMOUS HOUSES
AND
LITERARY SHRINES
OF LONDON
BY
A. ST. JOHN ADCOCK
WITH SEVENTY-FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS
BY FREDERICK ADCOCK
AND 16 PORTRAITS
LONDON: J. M. DENT & SONS, LTD.
NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO. 1912
All rights reserved
Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson & Co.
At the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh
PREFATORY NOTE
Nothing could well be deader or emptier than an unoccupied house of whose former inhabitants we have no knowledge; and it is impossible to take a real interest in a house now occupied by strangers, even though it was aforetime the residence of some famous man, unless we are acquainted with that man’s personality, and know what he thought and did and said whilst he was living there. I have attempted to do little more than supply that information here as the complement of my brother’s drawings, and to this end have been less concerned to give my own descriptions and opinions than to bring together opinions and descriptions that were written by such famous residents themselves or by guests and visitors who saw and knew them. As far as possible I have quoted from contemporary Diaries and Memoirs, especially from letters that were written in or to these houses, or from Journals that their tenants kept whilst they dwelt there, supplementing all this with a narrative of incidents and events that might help to recreate the life and recapture the atmosphere that belonged to such places in the days that have made them memorable. Whenever I have adventured into any general biography, or expressed any personal opinion, it has been merely with the object of adding so much of history and character as would serve to fill in the outline of a man’s portrait, give it a sufficient fulness and colour of life, and throw into clear relief the space of time that he passed in some particular house that can still be seen in a London street.
I think I have throughout made due acknowledgment to the authors of various volumes of Recollections and Table Talk from which I have drawn anecdotes and pen-portraits, and I should like to mention at the outset that for biographical facts and much else I have been particularly indebted to such books as Elwin and Courthope’s edition of the Poems and Letters of Pope; Austin Dobson’s William Hogarth, and H. B. Wheatley’s Hogarth’s London; Boswell’s Johnson, of course, and Forster’s Lives of Goldsmith and of Dickens; Gilchrist’s Life of Blake; Leslie’s and Holmes’s Lives of Constable; Arthur B. Chamberlain’s George Romney; Lord Houghton’s Life and Letters of Keats, and Buxton Forman’s Complete Works of John Keats; Leigh Hunt’s Autobiography; De Quincey’s English Opium Eater; Hogg’s and Peacock’s Memoirs of Shelley; Carew Hazlitt’s Memoirs of Hazlitt; Blackman’s Life of Day; Byron’s Journals and Letters, and Lewis Bettany’s useful compilation from them, The Confessions of Lord Byron; Lockhart’s Life of Scott, and Scott’s Journal; Talfourd’s and Ainger’s Lives of Lamb, and Lamb’s Letters; Walter Jerrold’s Life of Thomas Hood; Cross’s Life of George Eliot; Sir William Armstrong’s Life of Turner, and Lewis Hind’s Turner’s Golden Visions; Joseph Knight’s Rossetti; Froude’s Thomas Carlyle, and W. H. Wylie’s Carlyle, The Man and His Books; Allingham’s Diary; E. R. and J. Pennell’s Life of Whistler; Trollope’s Thackeray, and Lady Thackeray Ritchie’s prefaces to the Centenary Edition of Thackeray’s works.
A. St. J. A.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE I. Some Celebrated Cockneys 1 II. Shakespeare in London 10 III. Where Pope stayed at Battersea 26 IV. Hogarth 36 V. Goldsmith, Reynolds, and some of their Circle 52 VI. Homes and Haunts of Johnson and Boswell 89 VII. Blake and Flaxman
PORTRAITS
Dr. Johnson Frontispiece From an engraving by T. Trotter after a drawing from life John Milton Facing p. 4 From a miniature by Faithorne William Shakespeare " 16 From an engraving by Scriven after the Chandos portrait Alexander Pope " 33 From an engraving by J. Posselwhite after the picture by Hudson Oliver Goldsmith " 81 After a drawing by Sir Joshua Reynolds Sir Joshua Reynolds " 96 From an engraving after his own portrait James Boswell " 102 From an engraving by W. Hall after a sketch by Lawrence John Keats " 144 From a drawing by W. Hilton Thomas de Quincey " 176 From an engraving by W. H. Moore Lord Byron " 193
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE St. Saviour’s, Southwark Cathedral xvi The Gateway, Middle Temple 6 Chaucer’s Tomb, Westminster Abbey 8 Jerusalem Chamber, Westminster Abbey 11 St. Olave’s Churchyard, Silver Street 17 Bartholomew Close, Smithfield 21 The Last Bulk Shop, Clare Market 25 Pope’s House, Battersea 29 Pope, Mawson’s Row, Chiswick 37 Sir James Thornhill, 75 Dean Street 42 Hogarth’s House, Chiswick 45 The Bay Window, Hogarth’s House 49 Sir Isaac Newton’s House, St. Martin’s Street, W.C. 53 Sir Joshua Reynolds’s House, Great Newport Street 57 The Staircase, 47 Leicester Square 59 Sir Benjamin West’s House, Newman Street 61 Gainsborough’s House, Pall Mall 65 Sheridan’s House, Savile Row 69 Pump Court, Temple 73 Richardson’s House, North End, Fulham 75 Goldsmith’s House, Canonbury 77 2 Brick Court, The Temple 83 Stairs up to Second Floor, 2 Brick Court 85 Goldsmith’s Grave
ST. SAVIOUR’S. SOUTHWARK CATHEDRAL.
FAMOUS LONDON HOUSES
CHAPTER I
SOME CELEBRATED COCKNEYS
You cannot stir the ground of London anywhere but straightway it flowers into romance. Read the inscriptions on the crumbling tombs of our early merchant princes and adventurers in some of the old City churches, and it glimmers upon you that if ever the history of London’s commercial rise and progress gets adequately written it will read like a series of stories out of the Arabian Nights. Think what dashing and magnificent figures, what tales of dark plottings, fierce warfare, and glorious heroisms must brighten and darken the pages of any political history of London; and even more glamorous, more intensely and humanly alive, would be a social history of London, beginning perhaps in those days of the fourteenth century when Langland was living in Cornhill and writing his Vision of Piers Plowman, or farther back still, in Richard the First’s time, when that fine spirit, the first of English demagogues, William Fitzosbert, was haranguing the folkmoot in St. Paul’s Churchyard, urging them to resist the tyrannic taxations of the Lord Mayor and his Court of wealthy Aldermen—a passion for justice that brought him into such danger that he and certain of his friends had to seek sanctuary, and barricaded themselves in Bow Church. The church was fired by order of a bishop who had no sympathy with reformers, and Fitzosbert and his friends, breaking out through the flames, were stabbed and struck down in Cheapside, hustled to the Tower, hastily tried and sentenced, dragged out by the heels through the streets, and hanged at Smithfield. I have always thought this would make a good, live starting-point, and had I but world enough and time I would sooner write that history than anything else.
No need to hunt after topics when you are writing about London; they come to you. The air is full of them. The very names of the streets are cabalistic words. Once you know London, myriads of great spirits may be called from the vasty deep by sight or sound of such names as Fleet Street, Strand, Whitehall, Drury Lane, The Temple, Newgate Street, Aldersgate, Lombard Street, Cloth Fair, Paternoster Row, Holborn, Bishopsgate, and a hundred others. You have only to walk into Whitefriars Street and see “Hanging-sword Alley” inscribed on the wall of a court at the top of a narrow flight of steps, and all Alsatia rises again around you, as Ilion rose like a mist to the music of Apollo’s playing. Loiter along Cornhill in the right mood and Thomas Archer’s house shall rebuild itself for you at the corner of Pope’s Head Alley, where he started the first English newspaper in 1603, and you will wonder why nobody writes a full history of London journalism.
As for literary London—every other street you traverse is haunted with memories of poets, novelists, and men of letters, and it is some of the obscurest of these associations that are the most curiously fascinating. I have a vivid, youthful remembrance of a tumble-down, red-tiled shop near the end of Leathersellers’ Buildings which I satisfied myself was the identical place in which Robert Bloomfield worked as a shoemaker’s assistant; Devereux Court still retains something of the Grecian Coffee-house that used to be frequented by Addison and Steele, but I knew the Court first, and am still drawn to it most, as the site of that vanished Tom’s Coffee-house where Akenside often spent his winter evenings; and if I had my choice of bringing visibly back out of nothingness one of the old Charing Cross houses, it would be the butcher’s shop that was kept by the uncle who adopted Prior in his boyhood.
Plenty of unpleasant things have been said about London, but never by her own children, or such children of her adoption as Johnson and Dickens. Says Hobbes, who was born at Malmesbury, “London has a great belly, but no
To begin with, the morning star of our literature, Geoffrey Chaucer, was born in Thames Street, not far from the wharf where, after he was married and had leased a home for himself in Aldgate, he held office as a Comptroller of Customs, and the pen that was presently to write the Canterbury Tales “moved over bills of lading.” The “poets’ poet,” Spenser, was born in East Smithfield, by the Tower, and in his Prothalamion speaks of his birthplace affectionately as—
“Merry London, my most kindly nurse,
That to me gave this life’s first native source,
Though from another place I take my name.”
Ben Jonson was born in Hartshorn Lane, Charing Cross; four of his contemporary dramatists, Fletcher, Webster, Shirley and Middleton, were also Londoners by birth; Sir Thomas Browne, author of the Religio Medici, was born in the parish of St. Michael-le-Quern, in the very heart of the city; and Bread Street, Cheapside, is hallowed by the fact that Milton had his birth there.
Dr. Donne, the son of a London merchant, was also born within a stone’s throw of Cheapside; and his disciple, Cowley, came into the world in Fleet Street, at the corner of Chancery Lane. But Cowley was a renegade; he acquired an unnatural preference for the country, and not only held that “God the first garden made, and the first city Cain,” but ended a poem in praise of nature and a quiet life with—
“Methinks I see
The monster London laugh at me;
I should at thee too, foolish city,
If it were fit to laugh at misery;
But thy estate I pity.
Let but thy wicked men from out thee go,
And all the fools that crowd thee so,
Even thou, who dost thy millions boast,
A village less than Islington wilt grow,
A solitude almost.”
JOHN MILTON
The daintiest of our lyrists, Herrick, was born over his father’s shop in Cheapside, and you may take it he was only playing with poetical fancies when, in some lines to his friend Endymion Porter, he praised the country with its “nut-brown mirth and russet wit,” and again when, in a set of verses on “The Country Life,” he assured his brother he was “thrice and above blest,” because he could—
“Leave the city, for exchange, to see
The country’s sweet simplicity.”
If you want to find him in earnest, turn to that enraptured outburst of his on “His Return to London”—
“Ravished in spirit I come, nay more I fly
To thee, blessed place of my nativity!...
O place! O people! manners framed to please
All nations, customs, kindreds, languages!
I am a free-born Roman; suffer then
That I amongst you live a citizen.
London my home is, though by hard fate sent
Into a long and irksome banishment;
Yet since called back, henceforward let me be,
O native country! repossessed by thee;
For rather than I’ll to the West return,
I’ll beg of thee first here to have mine urn.”
There speaks the true Cockney; he would sooner be dead in London than alive in the West of England. Even Lamb’s love of London was scarcely greater than that.
THE GATEWAY. MIDDLE TEMPLE.
It was fitting that Pope, essentially a town poet, should be born in Lombard Street. In the next thoroughfare, Cornhill, Gray was born; and, son of a butcher, Defoe began life in the parish of St. Giles’s, Cripplegate. Shakespeare was an alien, but Bacon was born at York House, in the Strand; which, to my thinking, is the strongest argument in favour of the theory that he wrote the plays. Churchill was born at Vine Street, Westminster; Keats in Moorfields; and, staunchest and one of the most incorrigible Londoners of them all, Charles Lamb in Crown Office Row, Temple. He refers, in one of his essays, to Hare Court, in the Temple, and says: “It was a gloomy, churchyard-like court, with three trees and a pump in it. I was born near it, and used to drink at that pump when I was a Rechabite of six years old.” The pump is no longer there, only one half of Hare Court remains as it was in Lamb’s day, and Crown Office Row has been rebuilt. His homes in Mitre Court Buildings and Inner Temple Lane have vanished also; but the Temple is still rich in reminiscences of him. Paper Buildings, King’s Bench Walk, Harcourt Buildings, the fountain near Garden Court, the old Elizabethan Hall, in which tradition says Shakespeare read one of his plays to Queen Elizabeth—these and the church, the gardens, the winding lanes and quaint byways of the Temple, made up, as he said, his earliest recollections. “I repeat to this day,” he writes, “no verses to myself more frequently, or with kindlier emotion, than those of Spenser, where he speaks of this spot—