According to my lights online

BOOGIHIT FROM
Laemmle Donation





G. E. Stechert & Co.

Alfred Hafner

New York



ACCORDING TO MY LIGHTS



I > > ,



, , I



ACCORDING TO MY
LIGHTS



BY

JOHN HOLLINGSHEAD




WITH A PORTRAIT



LONDON
CHATTO & WINDU S

1900



TO

MY GOOD WIFE
ALICE

WHO IS MAKING THE BEST OF A
BAD BARGAIN



M199G2Q



THE trifles which compose this book are selected from
the following magazines and journals, beginning with
the Cornhill Magazine; whilst the latest contribution,
" Gloomsbury," is taken from the Morning Leader.

Lloyd's, Man of the World, National Observer, Cornhill
Magazine (THACKERAY editor), Sketch, Table-Talk, Man-
chester Umpire, Sphinx, Whitehall Review, Sala's Journal,
Pall Mall Gazette, Saturday Review, Star, Morning Leader,
Daily Mail, and Punch. I have to thank the editors and
proprietors of all for leave to republish.

The verses are mostly from Punch and the Manchester
Umpire.



CONTENTS



THACKERAY - . .

DICKENS

THE AWAKENED PUPPET

ONLY A MONGREL

THE EVOLUTION OF THE TAVERN

THE POT-BOY -

THE 'GOOD DRY SKITTLE-GROUND 7 -

THE RAT AND COCKROACH -

THE ILLEGAL PERIWINKLE

THE PIONEERS OF EARL'S COURT

MY IDEAL FLAT

IDEAL HOUSES

NEIGHBOURS -

THE PAROCHIAL MIND

A PENITENTIAL MATINEE

BOHEMIA IN LONDON -

GLOOMSBURY -

A SO-SO SABBATH IN LONDON



PAGE

I

9
20

34
46

5i

54
59
63
65
74
80

102
124
141
152
157
164



x CONTENTS

PAGE

4 LET US ALL BE UNHAPPY ON SUNDAY* - 170

THE DAWN OF THE PRESENT CENTURY - 176

KIPPERED HAMBURG - - 185

THE DEATH OF OLD CALAIS - - 1 93

A TRAIN OF PLEASURE - 198

ZOLA, BEWARE! - - 202

' SMITH ' - 206

EXIT SILVER - - 209

CURIOSITIES OF PASTE AND SCISSORS - 2l6

'AN INKWICH' - - - - 220

LICENSED AND UNLICENSED VICTUALLING - - 223

SOOTHING THE SAVAGE BREAST - 228

THE CAN-CAN OF DEATH - 234

HATCHED HUMANITY - -236

PHYSICAL SLOP-WORK- - 238

THE OCTOPUS- - 240

THE MOSQUITO - 242

THE CAB-' OS' - 244

OLD SMITHFIELD 1837 - 246

THE ORGAN-GRINDER- - 247

THE SOUP-KITCHEN - - 249

THE RICH MAN'S BURDEN - - 251

THE POOR MAN'S BURDEN - - 252

THE HAPPY EXILE - - 253

EAT YOUR PUDDING AND HOLD YOUR TONGUE - 255

THIRD CLASS THEN AND NOW - 257



CONTENTS xi



PAGE



BRITONS NEVER, NEVER ! - 259

BLUE BLOOD - - 261

MIDGET-MAYORS AND ALDERMANNIKINS - 264

* TIME ! GENTLEMEN, TIME !' - - 266

THE SAME HAT FITS ME STILL - 268

BISHOPS THEN AND NOW - 270

LYING ON THE TABLE - 271

THE VOLUNTEERS - - 272

OUR STREET SOLDIERS - 273

SHELLEY AND WATER- - 276

PARIS - - - 277

NEW YORK - " 2 79

VENICE - 280

BERLIN - 28l

GREECE - 282

THE GIFT OF THE GAB - 284

SIXPENCE A MILE! - - 285

THE WINDOW CLEANER - 288

FAUSTLING AND MARGUERITTLE - 289

THE CONDESCENDING DUCHESS IN THE 'BUS - - 293

MOTHER WAS SO HAPPY THAT SHE DIED - - 296



ACCORDING TO MY LIGHTS



THACKERAY

THE interest taken in Dickens and Thackeray
is much greater in America than it is in
England; and the interest in Dickens far
exceeds the interest in Thackeray. Dickens
is worshipped; Thackeray is admired. My
known connection with both these distinguished
men invited much examination -in -chief, and
even cross-examination, when about ten years
ago I visited the United States. I had to
describe the two men, their appearance, their
tastes and habits, and their points of re-
semblance, which were very few.

Thackeray was an exceptionally tall man,
with very long legs. These gave him his
height of six feet three inches, or more. He



ACCORDING TO MY LIGHTS



was rarely seen without his spectacles, which
rested on the flat bridge of his nose. This
bridge had been broken in a youthful fight at
the Charterhouse School. He was quiet and
deliberate in his manner, and fond of putting
one hand in his trousers pocket. He was a
moderate playgoer, preferring the dinner-table
with congenial society. He was essentially a
clubbable man. His favourite night resort was
' Evans's ' supper and singing-rooms in Covent
Garden Market a man's music-hall. He
smoked and drank 'grog' in moderation, and
listened to the part-singing by the choir-boys
with manifest enjoyment. He was always
more or less in pain from an internal disease,
and this temperate recreation, according to his
own account, relieved him, ' Evans's ' at that
time (in the fifties) was one of the three West
End cellar music-halls beginning business at
eleven o'clock at night, after the theatres. The
other two were the ' Coal Hole/ in the Strand,
now the site of Terry's Theatre, and the ' Cider
Cellars,' in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, now
a night club.

The characteristics of these three places in
the thirties had been described in the ' New-



THACKERAY 3

comes ' by Thackeray, who thoroughly knew
his midnight London. With the extension of
* Evans's' by the opening in 1854 of the new
concert-room, built over the back-garden where
the cottage stood in which the Kembles lived,
the programmes became more refined, as ladies
were now admitted to the Right Hand Gallery,
screened with w r ire gauze like nuns at a convent.
The singers, all men, were in most cases the
same Sam Cowell, Penniket, Sharp, Jongh-
manns, Ross, Von Joel, Sam Collins, and
others ; but the songs were very different from
those heard by Colonel Newcome in the * Cave
of Harmony.' The music-hall, as we know it
now, was just coming into the world to compete
on equal terms with the theatres, and not to act
merely as their recognised grill-rooms. The
sturdy generation of those days took its steak,
chop, baked potatoes, and stout, in place of
going to bed, immediately after its tragedies,
farces, or comedies. The law allowed them,
and they obeyed the law. Mollycoddling
legislation had not been invented.

Thackeray had no artificiality, no assumed
dignity, no ' side,' as it is now called. He
was always simple and natural. He was not

i 2



4 ACCORDING TO MY LIGHTS

a severe and methodical worker. He kept a
secretary an Irishman who was no more
business-like than his master. This secretary
had acted in the same capacity with Thomas
Carlyle. His name was Langley. He was
a feeble secretary, but a good companion.
Thackeray's workroom or study in Onslow
Square was at the top of the house the great
man sitting at a table in front of one window,
and the secretary sitting at a similar table in
front of the other window overlooking the
square. The back-room, seen through folding-
doors that were always wide open, was very
sparingly furnished (like the front -room), a
small truckle-bed of the kind used by the
great Duke of Wellington being the chief
article of furniture. Thackeray, when he was
working late (which was not often), would sleep
upon this anchorite couch, so as not to disturb
his daughters and the household. His writing
habits were peculiar. He wrote a very small,
neat hand, and used slips of note-paper. These
he would often gather up and put in his coat-
pocket, leaving his secretary at work, and stroll
down to the Athenaeum Club. Here, if he
could get a comfortable table and was not



THACKERAY 5

waylaid by any gossip, to whom he was always
ready to give an attentive ear, he would pull
out his slips, and carry his story a few steps
further. In an hour or two he would again
collect the scattered papers and go on to the
Garrick Club, where, if not interrupted, he
would resume his writing. This habit of com-
posing in public frightened many of the old club
fogies, who thought they were being caricatured
for posterity, and no doubt helped to get him
blackballed at the Travellers'.

Thackeray was not proud or ' stuck - up/
He was not ashamed to ride outside a cheap
omnibus, preferring to sit by the side of the
driver. I have often seen him going through
Regent Street in the middle of the day with
one of his long legs hanging down far below
the footboard. He was not so well known in
the streets as Charles Dickens he was not so
much of a ' people's man ' and he could pass
in a crowd as a quietly-dressed, unobtrusive
gentleman.

He was candid and truthful. In 1862 I was
walking through the International Exhibition
with him, and we came across Benjamin
Disraeli. They saw each other, but showed



6 ACCORDING TO MY LIGHTS

no signs of recognition. ' He has never spoken
to me/ said Thackeray voluntarily, ' since I
wrote the short parody of " Coningsby " (called
" Codlingsby ") in Punch' Disraeli was a
dealer in wit and repartee ; but a seller, not a
buyer.

When Thackeray started the Cornhill
Magazine or Mr. George Smith, the
publisher, started it for him he did me the
honour to make me one of his original staff,
and offered to put me up at the Garrick Club.
At that time I could not afford such a luxury,
He tried hard (hard for him) to get a new set
of writers together, but the same old hacks
turned up. When we met at the inaugural
dinner at Mr. Smith's house in Gloucester
Square, Hyde Park, it was Tom, Dick, and
Harry shaking hands with Bill, Sam, and Bob,
and our chief standing before the fire smiling,
with his hands under his coat-tails. ' It's no
use/ he said, ' trying to get new men ; there's
only a certain number of cabs upon the stand.
Come to dinner/ We swarmed down the
stairs, and sat in the room that had belonged
to Sadleir, the fraudulent banker. I fancied I
saw the silver cream -jug on the sideboard



THACKERAY 7

containing the poison which he swallowed on
Hampstead Heath. I tried to interest G. A.
Sala with the gloomy topic, but he preferred
the soufflde de volailles aux truffles which the
servants were distributing.

Thackeray the editor was Thackeray the
man kind, gentle, amiable, accessible, and
gentlemanly. He was turning the play which
Alfred Wigan foolishly refused to produce at
the Olympic into the novelette of ' Lovel the
Widower.' This was the master's first con-
tribution to the Cornhill Magazine ; as a play
it never saw the light. Both Thackeray and
Dickens were not so versatile as Charles
Reade and Bulwer. The two greater men
were novelists, but not playwrights.

Thackeray was essentially a last-century man.
He knew and loved the age of * tie-wigs and
square-cuts/ to use theatrical jargon. To find
him living in Onslow Square, in a neighbour-
hood of stucco, and in a house with a portico
like a four-post bedstead, was a shock to the
nerves an anachronism. His place was
Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, or Gerard Street,
Soho. I told him so, and as old houses are
generally gloomy and unhealthy, having, as a



8 ACCORDING TO MY LIGHTS

rule, been ill-kept and neglected, he built him-
self a modern Queen Anne mansion in Ken-
sington Palace Gardens, the * old court suburb/
and, I am afraid, expended much more money
than he originally intended. As I have said
before, he was not a business man, and all the
office drudgery of the Comhill Magazine was
taken off his hands by the publishers.



DICKENS

CHARLES DICKENS was as great a contrast to
Thackeray in appearance as he was in his
writings. Dickens was a short, upright man
of spare figure, who held his head very erect,
and had an energetic, industrious, not to
say bustling, appearance. He was very
methodical, and he looked it. His time was
mapped out on a business-like system. He
was, of course, materially assisted by his sub-
editor, friend, and companion, Mr. W. H.
Wills, who came with him from the Daily
News ; but Household Words, and after it All
the Year Round, was really edited by Dickens,
who also took a large share in its trade
management. He selected his contributors,
interviewed them when necessary, and ex-
amined many details which Thackeray left to
Mr. George Smith, his publisher. Dickens



io ACCORDING TO MY LIGHTS

was a born trader, with a considerable power
of organization, and his plans were laid down
with financial prudence. ' Fancy prices' for
magazine work in the early fifties were neither
demanded nor expected. The repeal of the
paper duties was yet to come, and bring with
it shoals of competitive journals. These
journals in due course increased the supply
of writers bad, good, and indifferent. The
demand for writing also grew, and the wages
for writing were soon affected by a rising
market. The tariff for writing on Household
Words and its successor, All the Year Round,
was never at any time a sentimental tariff; but
extra work, as distinguished from English com-
position, was paid for when demanded. As
the ' Champion Out - Door Young Man ' I
fixed my own payment. I charged for my
time and expenses like a commercial traveller,
receiving another payment for my ' copy/
measured by the two-foot rule, with the liberty
of republication in book form within a reason-
able period. Dickens liked descriptive articles
of life and odd corners of life, for in the early
fifties the daily newspaper purveyed news only
with social and political comment, and had not



DICKENS ii

turned itself into a daily magazine. I supplied
these articles freely, as they gave me outdoor
employment, which suited my active tempera-
ment ; but I also occasionally wrote ' short
stories/ I presume these stories 'gave satis-
faction to my employer/ as, like his own
4 Oliver,' he * asked for more/ I explained to
him that the construction of a short story
involved as much labour as the construction
of a novel or a novelette, while the pay was
never in the same proportion.

Dickens was supposed to do all his literary
writing work from ten in the morning up to
two in the afternoon, but when he was strug-
gling with a new and perhaps difficult story,
this hard and fast rule was relaxed. At two
o'clock he would start on those monotonous
twenty-mile walks, undertaken with a mistaken
idea that intellectual work required to be
balanced with a plentiful amount of physical
exercise. His walks were always walks of
observation, through parts of London that he
wanted to study. His brain must have been
like a photographic lens, and fully studded with
'snap-shots/ The streets and the people, the
houses and the roads, the cabs, the buses and



12 ACCORDING TO MY LIGHTS

the traffic, the characters in the shops and on
the footways, the whole kaleidoscope of Metro-
politan existence these were the books he
studied, and few others. He was a master in
London ; abroad he was only a workman.
His foreign pictures, his American notes, his
Italian sketches, were the work of a genius
who could never write anything that had not
striking features ; but in spirit they were
deficient in sympathy, and often defaced by
narrow insular prejudices. He could not paint
a French scene with the same cosmopolitan
touch as Thackeray, and although he might
have been equal to a ' Bouillabaisse Ballad/ he
never wrote one.

Those monotonous walks, those four miles
an hour by the clock, one mile an hour by the
milestone and the stop-watch, five hours of this
pedestrian drudgery a day, regulated by an un-
bending system and a delusive theory, ' took too
much out of him/ He suffered from lumbago,
and no wonder. His tow r n house in the fifties
was in Tavistock Place, Tavistock Square ; but
his favourite home was Gadshill, Higham-by-
Rochester, Kent, on the direct coach-road from
London to Dover. Gadshill, I believe, is



DICKENS 13

about twenty-eight miles from the Strand, and
to see him with head erect, walking like
Weston, the professional walker, over Waterloo
Bridge about mid -day on his road to his
Kentish residence, was to see a man possessed
by an idea which was not his servant, as it
ought to have been, but his master. His
appearance, with his far-off look, reminded one
of the passage in the ' Ancient Mariner ' :

c As one who on a lonely road doth walk with fear and

dread,
And, having once turned round, walks on and turns no

more his head,
Because he knows a frightful fiend doth close behind him

tread !'

He realized this picture more often in the
night, when struggling with a new story in its
earlier stages. Too restless to sleep in Tavi-
stock House, he would get up and walk on in
the darkness hour after hour, until he reached
daybreak and Gadshill at the same time. One
morning he went into a roadside inn near
Higham for a glass of rum and milk. He
tried to pay for it with a very greasy and
suspicious half-crown which had come in contact
in his pocket with a bit of French chalk. The



i 4 ACCORDING TO MY LIGHTS

landlord eyed the coin (and his visitor) \vith
suspicion, and refused to take it. He had
lived near his great neighbour up to that
moment without knowing him.

Dickens's taste in clothes was a little ' loud ' ;
he never altogether forgot the dandyism of the
D'Orsay period. I have seen him (at his own
house) in a bastard evening-dress, consisting of
black trousers, patent boots, white cravat, a
green plush waistcoat, and a black velvet
smoking-jacket. He liked ' plain living/ the
living he immortalized in his books. In the
fifties, supper, as a meal, had not been put
down by Act of Parliament an Act (the Act
of 1872) which was got by mollycoddling
legislation out of make-believe respectability,
and suckled by a knot of temperance fanatics
(the legitimate descendants of the fire-lighters
of Smithfield) who are trying to raise toast-
and-water to the level of a Sacrament. Dickens
liked suppers, and after a visit to the theatre
a meal was always laid in the upstairs rooms
at the office in Wellington Street, Strand, now
occupied by Mr. Richard Elliott, the well-
known music-hall agent, and husband of Miss
Lucy Clarke. I say Maid' advisedly, for in



DICKENS 15

the winter a man from Rule's was in an outer
room with a tub of ' natives,' ^and a baked-
potato man from the street was in the same
room with his can of ' murphies/ Albert
Smith, who copied Dickens in most things,
copied him in this, and at his house in Percy
Street, Tottenham Court Road, where Mr.
Dolaro now carries on a much-needed night
club, in defiance of ' raids ' and the fussy police,
the can and the tub were present, supported by
a piece of boiled beef that might have stood as
a model to one of the painters present for the
rock of Gibraltar.

Dickens, like Thackeray, was not much of
a music-hall frequenter. Thackeray died in
the very early sixties before the music-hall, by
a process of evolution, had developed from the
'free and easy' and the 'tea-garden' (to say
nothing of the two patent theatres, Drury Lane
and Covent Garden) into the theatre of
varieties. I helped to found the first of these,
the Alhambra, in Leicester Square, in 1865.
Thackeray, as I have said before, spent most
of his nights at Evans's singing-rooms in Covent
Garden, when the place was under the manage-
ment of Paddy Green. Dickens went once to



16 ACCORDING TO MY LIGHTS

the old Mortonian Canterbury (De Morton nil
nisi bonum) with George Augustus Sala, but
Sala wrote the article that sprang from this
visit

On another occasion he went to the Royal
(then called Weston's) in Holborn with Wilkie
Collins, and Wilkie wrote a rapturous article in
Household Words, in which he glorified the
late Mr. Stead, 'the Perfect Cure,' counted his
jumps during the singing of his popular song,
which amounted, I think, to about 1,600, and
was astonished (and so was Dickens) at his
power of physical endurance.

The Royal was built upon the site of the
National Hall, Holborn, a favourite Sunday
night lecturing-hall of Mr. W. J. Fox, the
well-known Unitarian Minister of South Place,
Finsbury (where Dickens used often to go on
a Sunday morning), anti-Corn Law League
orator, and sometime M.P. for Oldham, in
Lancashire. The first music-hall an oblong
structure with private boxes on each side, built
much on the plan of the present London
Pavilion was called Weston's, after its founder,
Mr. Edward Weston. It was a sociable,
middle-class hall, managed with much enter-



DICKENS 17

prise and spirit, occasionally attracting fashion-
able West End audiences when stars like the
late lamented Nelly Power were engaged.
Edward Weston was very fond of getting up
comic song contests, his favourite champion
being the late ' Sarah Walker ' Taylor. Taylor
was a good ' character' singer, his best im-
personations being old women and idiots. He
had a pliable face, and stood pre-eminent as
what the French call a grimacier. As an all-
round comic singer, he was inferior to many
comiques of the time (notably Vance), and the
contests which he invariably won at Weston's
were given in his favour by a not altogether
unfriendly jury. Charles Dickens's elder brother,
Mr. Alfred Dickens, a regular habitud of
Weston's, was generally one of the jurymen.

Charles Dickens, though he never succeeded
as a dramatist, was always an admirer of the
stage, and on intimate and friendly terms with
the leading actors and actresses of his time.
He was a clever amateur actor (he could do
nothing badly), but I can hardly agree with
many of his friends who looked upon him as a
second Edmund Kean who had deserted the
stage for literature. He was an intimate friend

2



i8 ACCORDING TO MY LIGHTS

and supporter of Charles Fechter, and was
Fechter's financial ' backer ' at the Lyceum,
although Lady Burdett-Coutts was popularly
supposed to occupy this position. ' The Tale
of Two Cities ' was one of his stories, written
and produced by Fechter, in which Dickens
did some of the work as a dramatist. This
drama was the innocent cause of one of those
curiosities of dramatic criticism which appear
about once in half a century. The production
was viewed with no very friendly eyes by an
eminent critic, who was not on the best of
terms with Fechter and Dickens. A rather
severe analytical notice of the drama and the
acting appeared in an important critical journal,
which notice, as the Americans say, was a little
'too previous/ The production of the piece,
at the last moment, was postponed for a week,
without the critic being aware of the alteration.
I have no means of knowing how Thackeray
regarded his valuable literary work in connec-
tion with posterity, but I have more knowledge
of Dickens's self -consciousness. He had no
doubts about his rightful position in the world
of letters. For the last twelve or fifteen years
of his life he never read any notices of his



DICKENS 19

writings. He knew and felt that he had
earned his tombstone in Westminster Abbey.
That he retired to this resting-place as soon as
he did I fully believe was mainly due to his
mechanical walks, and the exhaustion and
excitement caused by his 'dramatic readings.'
A day or two before he died, I am told on
good authority, he was found in the grounds
of Gadshill, acting the murder scene between
Sikes and Nancy.



THE AWAKENED PUPPET

THERE are countless souls floating aimlessly in
the vast sea of life which are not housed, and
probably never will be housed, in perishable
bodies. These souls have asserted their divine
right of free will, and have declined to be
imbedded in an earthly form, which rarely com-
mands affection or respect, and more often
excites aversion and contempt. I am one of
those unattached souls. The scheme of life
was put before me. I saw the short and
doubtful span, the promised three-score years
and ten in one direction, the smaller mathe-
matical average in another ; the drawbacks of
sleep and illness ; the curse or blessing of mad-
ness ; the joy or sorrow of human feeling ; the
Ten Commandments held to me in one direc-
tion, the Thirty-nine Articles in another ; the
fight of churches, anointed and unanointed, to



THE AWAKENED PUPPET 21

mould my present and control my future ; the
penalty of drudging work or bitter starvation ;
the whirlpool of meanness, selfishness, envy,
hypocrisy, ingratitude, and pride in which I
was expected to plunge, with no guide that I
felt I could trust to save me from sinking.
Right or wrong, I had but one answ r er : I will
remain an irresponsible atom of the universe.
Without trouble, exertion, faith, hope, or
charity, I will silently watch the antics and
pretensions of the superior animals around me,
especially that very superior animal, man, who
was evolved by electricity acting on the spawn
of a frog.

I am a puppet a hard, unthinking puppet.
In an educational museum, in my raw state,
being wood and tough wood, too I should
be labelled as a ' vegetable product ' of course,
with a Latin name, to puzzle the visitors and
justify a catalogue and a custodian. I fell into
other hands. A workman of that class who
once cut gargoyles, as a labour of love, for
cathedrals, took me in hand, and by some un-
conscious instinct carved me into human form,
square-headed, solid, determined, and repulsive.