Dicken's London II

30/08/2024

Child Bride (age 7) With Her Husband (age 14) , Bombay (Mumbai) – 1946.

Photographer: Margaret Bourke-White
Source: Life Archive

26/08/2024

“In the little world in which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice. It may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a big- b***d Irish hunter. Within myself, I had sustained, from my babyhood, a perpetual conflict with injustice.”

“Great Expectations” Charles Dickens - 1860

20/06/2024

“LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes - gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time - as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.”

“Bleak House” Charles Dickens - 1852

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06/06/2024

Clint Eastwood seen here in London while filming Where Eagles Dare 1968!🇬🇧

06/06/2024

“On the form at the end of the kitchen was one whose squalor and wretchedness produced a feeling approaching to awe. His eyes were sunk deep in his head, his cheeks were drawn in, and his nostrils pinched with evident want, while his dark stubbly beard gave a grim-ness to his appearance that was almost demoniac; and yet there was a patience in his look that was almost pitiable. His clothes were black and shiny at every fold with grease, and his coarse shirt was so brown with long wearing, that it was only with close inspection you could see that it had once been a checked one: on his feet he had a pair of lady’s side-laced boots, the toes of which had been cut off so that he might get them on. I never beheld so gaunt a picture of famine. To this day the figure of the man haunts me. […] The sanitary state of these houses is very bad. Not only do the lodgers generally swarm with vermin, but there is little or no ventilation to the sleeping-rooms, in which 60 persons, of the foulest habits, usually sleep every night. There are no proper washing utensils, neither towels nor basins, nor wooden bowls. There are one or two buckets, but these are not meant for the use of the lodgers, but for cleaning the rooms. The lodgers never think of washing themselves. The cleanliest among them will do so in the bucket, and then wipe themselves with their pocket-handkerchiefs, or the tails of their shirts.”

“London Labour and the London Poor” Henry Mayhew - 1840

Photo by Jack London

05/06/2024

The Entrance of The Oxford Arms, Warwick Lane, ca. 1875, looking from Warwick Lane.
From: A.& J. Bool

The "Oxford Arm" Inn, demolished in 1878, was an excellent example of the galleried Inns now becoming every year more scarce. As was said by a writer in the Athenaeum of May 20th 1876: "Despite the confusion, the dirt, and the decay. he who stands in the yard of this ancient Inn may get an excellent idea of what it was like in the days of its prosperity, when not only travellers in coach or saddle rode in and out of the yard, but poor players and mountebanks set up their stage for the entertainment of spectators, who hung over the galleries or looked on from their rooms - a name by which the boxes of a theatre were first known." The "Oxford Arms" was situate, as shown in No.3, at the end of a short lane leading out of the west side of Warwick Lane, Paternoster Row. The buildings were disposed on four sides of a large courtyard, being bonded on the west by the old City Wall.

But little is known of the history of the "Oxford Arms." That it existed before the Great Fire is proved by an advertisement in the London Gazette for March, 1672-3, quoted in Cunningham's Handbook of London:- "These are to give notice that Edward Bartlett, Oxford Carrier, hath removed his Inn in London from the Swan at Holborn Bridge to the Oxford Armes in Warwick Lane, where he did Inn before the Fire. His coaches and wagons going forth on their usual days, Mondays, Wednesdays and Frydays. He hath also a hearse, with all things convenient to carry a Corps to any part of England." The Inn was within the area of the Fire, in which it no doubt perished, being rebuilt, however, a few years later on the old plan. In Strype's Stowe we read that the "Oxford Arms" was much frequented by persons attending the Market, i.e., Newgate Market, close by.

Up to the time of its close, it still did a considerable carriers' business, carts daily leaving the Inn for Oxford and other places. An old servant of the Inn told the writer that, in the days before the railroads, he had frequently seen wagons drawn by nine horses leave the Inn, a portion of the goods being packed after the Inn yard had been cleared. It must have needed careful handling to get such a team and such a load safely round the corner of the narrow street. Mr Samuel Hill, who has kindly communicated much of the above, says the sumptuous furniture of the Inn was sold in 1868, since which time its many rooms were let out in tenements. The site is now occupied by the new buildings and gardens of the Minor Canons of St. Paul's.

Warwick Lane still contains vestiges of another old Inn, the "Bell", reduced now to a mere receiving office. Here, in 1684, died Archbishop Leighton, who thus obtained what he had often desired, frequently saying that if he was to choose a place to die in, it should be an Inn.

As to the name "Warwick Lane," two passages in Stow's Survey give pictures so curious to read in this nineteenth century, that it is impossible to resist the temptation to quote them. "Then is Eldenese Lane, which stretcheth north to the high street of Newgate Market; the same is now called Warwicke Lane, of an ancient house built there by an Earl of Warwicke, and was since called Warwicke Lane. It is in record called a messuage in Eldenese Lane, in the parish of St. Sepulchre, the 28th of Henry VI." (p.128) Warwick Square now stands on the site of this house. This also: "Nearer to our time, I read, in the 36th of Henry VI., that the greater estates of the realm being called up to London, ....Richard Nevill, Earl of Warwick," came "with six hundred men, all in red jackets, embroidered with ragged staves before and behind, and was lodged in Warwicke Lane; in whose house there were oftentimes six oxen eaten at a breakfast, and every tavern was full of his meat; for he that had any acquaintance in that house might have there so much of sodden and roast meat as he could pick and carry on a long dagger."

The above description, written by Alfred Marks in 1881, was taken from the letterpress which accompanies the photograph.

18/03/2024

“Courtly ideas of Covent Garden, as a place with famous coffee-houses, where gentlemen wearing gold- laced coats and swords had quarrelled and fought duels; costly ideas of Covent Garden, as a place where there were flowers in winter at guineas a-piece, pine-apples at guineas a pound, and peas at guineas a pint; picturesque ideas of Covent Garden, as a place where there was a mighty theatre, showing wonderful and beautiful sights to richly-dressed ladies and gentlemen, and which was for ever far beyond the reach of poor F***y or poor uncle; desolate ideas of Covent Garden, as having all those arches in it, where the miserable children in rags among whom she had just now passed, like young rats, slunk and hid, fed on offal, huddled together for warmth, and were hunted about (look to the rats young and old, all ye Barnacles, for before God they are eating away our foundations, and will bring the roofs on our heads!”

“Little Dorrit” Charles Dickens - 1855

18/03/2024

Albert Einstein at age 5 Munich 1884.

17/03/2024

🔸 This Is Margaret Ann Neve At Age 110 In 1902.⁣ ⁣ She Was Born In 1792 And Died In 1903, Making Her The First Proven Person In Recorded History To Have Lived In 3 Different Centuries.

03/03/2024

03/03/2024

“Filth everywhere - a gutter before the houses, and a drain behind - clothes drying, and slops emptying from the windows; … men and women, in every variety of scanty and dirty apparel, lounging, scolding, drinking, smoking, squabbling, fighting, and swearing.”

Taken from “Sketches by Boz. Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People” Charles Dickens - 1836