by George Augustus Sala (uncredited).
Originally published in Household Words (Bradbury & Evans) vol.5 #107 (10 Apr 1852).
The English Nation have always been distinguished by a strong predilection for a "bogey"—a dreadful bugbear, hated, feared, talked about by everybody. For a bogey of bogeys—a bugbear about whom there can be no mistake—a thorough, right-down, sanguinary, man-eating, woman-murdering, child-roasting, raw-head-and-cross-bones bogey, give me Bonaparte.
In the time of the original "Boney" the cry was very strong. The French were continually landing (in imagination) somewhere or other. Not a smuggler attempted a peaceable run of brandy on a moonlight night, but the hated Corsican—jack-boots, cocked hat and all—was presumed to be in full march on the Metropolis; not a little boy sent up his harmless rocket, or discharged his innocuous squib, but fearful reports were circulated of a French-kindled conflagration, or at best of the simultaneous illumining of the beacon fires. Boney, his marshals, and his much redoubted invasion were here, there, and everywhere.
We had a slight invasion panic in the year '40 (when Commodore Napier beat the Egyptians with their famous instrument of torture—a stick). Our "Boney" then was an astute old gentleman, with a pear-shaped head, who, assuming the patronymic of Smith, abdicated sovereignty in a hack-cab. He was to invade us in the twinkling of a bed-post—he, Monsieur Thiers, Marshal Bugeaud, and the Chasseurs d'Afrique; all about some Eastern question, the merits of which, if anybody understood or understands, I am sure I don't. The year '43 came, and that terrible pamphlet by the good-natured Prince Admiral, who so kindly stood godfather to our Joinville cravats. He was to blow us to pieces with steam-frigates; to bombard Brighton; to demolish Dover; to lay Lowestoff low; to turn Great Grimsby into a Golgotha, and Harwich into a howling desert. '45 came; Pritchard, Tahiti, Queen Pomare, and the grim Guizot. War! war! war! cried the bogey-fearers. Lamoricière, Pélissier, Changarnier were to land the day after to-morrow. '48 came, and a few thousand National Guards, who, despite the fears of the alarmists, were provided with railway return tickets in lieu of mortars and howitzers. '51 came, and another foreign invasion, the results of which, it appears to us, we have already described in this journal.
And now the trumpet-cry sounds louder than ever. Now that the shores of England and France are united by the electric wire, by the iron hand-shaking of railroads, by a hundred thousand bonds of friendship and interest besides, we are to have a real invasion—a dreadful invasion—an invasion in earnest. It is all up with London, England, Great Britain, and the Colonies! Our soldiers can't fight, and our ships can't sail; our guns won't fire, nor will our bayonets pierce. Tilbury Fort is of no use, and the Guards must march out of London at one end as the French enter it by the other. We haven't got a decent fortification, or a serviceable gun, or an efficient soldier. As for "Veritas," "Civilian," "Q in the corner," the "Constant Readers," and the "Occasional Correspondents," they give up all hope. It is all over with us. Let us put sackcloth and ashes on our heads.
But what is the use, my friends, of crying "Wolf!" when the foe has already entered our sheepfolds—when he has already carried away the most succulent of our young lambs from their bleating mothers, and thirsts now, with his ravening jaws all dripping with gore, for our lives?
Shall we be invaded?
We are invaded; root and branch, body and bones, horse and foot, neck and heel, outfang and infang. The invasion has been going on for years, and we recked nothing of it. The insidious enemy, burrowing like a mole underground, has sapped our foundations; has undermined our institutions. An unscrupulous army of mercenaries (principally Irish) have carried out his iniquitous behests. We are compassed round about, hemmed in, surrounded by his fortalices—not masked batteries or stockaded forts—but defiant, brazen-faced strongholds. Great, and getting greater day by day, is the invasion of London. We are beleaguered by Brigadier Bricks and Field-Marshal Mortar. Their weapons of offence have been scaffold-poles and bricklayers' hods; their munitions of defence, hoarding and wheelbarrows. This is what I call the "real invasion."
Take up this map of the Metropolis, published last year, and glance at that little kernel, coloured scarlet, called the City, and then at the prodigious extent of Nutshell surrounding it, all loudly demanding, (and meriting) to be included in the general title "London." Yet this little scarlet kernel, with some scattered streets about Westmonasterian marshes, was the whole of London once. It was big enough to give laws to all England, and to great part of France, for hundreds of years. It was big enough to hold a Lombard Street; which, even then, stood in no unfavourable degree of comparison with a China orange. It was big enough to have Lord Mayors who bearded Kings; to be a constant source of anxiety and uneasiness to the Sovereign; to be the philosopher's stone of Jack Cade's ambition; to be, as it always has been, a monarch among cities. But the nutshell? How small the kernel looks, with his rubicund boundary! Throw in Westminster and Southwark, as the three appear in Hollar's print: how diminutive they are with the big nutshell around! Take a map of London, hydrographed even within the memory of man—within thirty years let us say—the nutshell has still the best of it, and the kernel shrinks woefully, even amidst its layers upon layers of cuticle.
The prodigious enlargement of London seems more to me in the act of the country closing round the town, than of the town advancing on the country—more as a giant hand gradually closes up its Titanic fingers on a shrivelled dwarf, than as the dwarf growing into the giant, and throwing up earthheaps in its struggle for emancipation from the parent monster. The fat has grown round the heart, and the heart has grown torpid and sluggish in the midst. Do you think it is that scarlet kernel—once the whole City of London—that has pushed out mandibles, crab-like feelers, on every side, and, cancer-like, has spread over the green fields and shady lanes? Do you think the kernel is the spider, and Westminster and Southwark the web? It may be so; but I rather incline to the theory that the advancement is towards, and not from, the kernel. That is why I call it an invasion: and the invasion seems to me gradually but surely driving, into a constantly diminishing circle, all sorts of old abuses, old nuisances, old vested interests, old "time-honoured institutions," towards the shrivelled old kernel, which, though she knows (excuse the gender) she might be rid of them by the aërial locomotive of progress, seeks rather (happily impotently) to cause them to permeate through sewers into healthier streams, poisoning them meanwhile; or she would strenuously seek (always impotently) to cast them, as so much guano, on to the invader's fields around her, where they would produce a nice rich crop of gingerbread coaches, men in brass, prejudice, dirt, water-bailiffs, over-driven bullocks, choked sewers, reeking slaughter-houses, and coal and corn committees. What will the nut-shell do? Will its invasion, hugging, in boa-constrictor fashion, the old, musty, shrivelled, yet wealthy kernel, hug it into better shape? or will it crush it and cause it to collapse entirely; forcing it, by some hidden phœnix process of its own, to reproduction in another guise to entire rejuvenescence?
It is natural for large cities to grow larger. Pine-apples grow; so do little boys, and lawyers' bills of costs—why not capitals? The little island of St. Louis once held all there was of Paris. Vienna has outgrown its glacis; Madrid, Naples, Venice, have all grown; and Constantinople—no; for Constantinople will be to me always a mystery, even as Smyrna is. They are always being burnt down, yet never seem to get smaller or larger. But London has not grown in any natural, reasonable, understandable way. It hasn't grown bigger consistently. It hasn't increased by degrees, like the pine-apple or the little boy. The lawyer's bill may be a little more like it; for, like that dreadful document, it has swollen with frightful, alarming, supernatural rapidity. It has taken you unawares; it has dropped upon you without warning; it has started up without notice; it has grown with stealthy rapidity, from a mouse into a mastodon.
Thirty years ago!—Boney the first, had just finished eating his heart on a rock. Thistlewood and others had been decapitated. A grave judicial discussion had not long before been closed as to whether a murderer and ravisher had a right to the "appeal by battle." The Old Bailey Monday morning performances yet took place before crowded and unfashionable audiences. Samuel Hayward had just been hanged for burglary, and Fauntleroy was yet to suffer for forgery; women were yet whipped for larceny; and George, the gentleman of gentlemen, was king. There were no railroads, and no police, save the red-coated Bow Street runners and the purblind old watchmen. There were no coffee-shops, no reading-rooms; and the coffee-houses were taverns resorted to (in the paucity of clubs) by the nobility and gentry. It was considered aristocratic to beat the watch; it was esteemed "Corinthian" to get drunk in the purlieus of Drury Lane; it was very "tip-top" to patronise a prize-fighter. We have been invaded by manners and customs somewhat different since the gentleman of gentlemen was king.
Concerning the brick-and-mortar invasion: There was no Regent's Park, no Victoria Park, no Belgravia, and no Tyburnia. Tyburn Gate, indeed, yet stood where Tyburn Gallows not so many years before had stood, and beneath which mouldered the bones of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw. Paddington was, but it was countryfied; and the Edgeware Road was simply a rural road leading to Edgeware, as formerly Oxford Street was but the high-road to Oxford. Portland, Somers, Camden, and Kentish Towns were no more integral portions of London, as they now are, than is Footscray in Kent, or Patcham in Sussex. The New Road was dangerous to walk in at night, and the open fields about St. Pancras Church (catch any open fields about there now) a favourite rendezvous for body-snatchers and burkers to hide their "shots" (so the bodies they had rifled from graves, were called). Clerkenwell, it is true, was thickly populated; but Pentonville, about where the Model Prison is now (and there was no Model Prison then), was quite rural. Islington, as far as concerns the High Street and the neighbourhood of the "Angel," was suburbanly Londonified, but Holloway was still a journey. As to Highgate and Hornsey, they were nowhere—terrae incognitae, almost, or at best as difficult of access as Windsor or Reading. Touching the irregular cube, bounded at the base by the Whitechapel and Mile End Roads, on the east and west by Hackney and by the Dalston and Kingsland Roads, and on the north by the London and North-Western branch line (from Camden Town to Blackwall)—which irregular cube comprises within its limits, Hackney, Globe Town, Bethnal Green, Dalston, Kingsland, and the crowded districts known as the Tower Hamlets—I have no hesitation in saying, that, swarming with houses and inhabitants as it is now, it was in 1822 very little better than a waste. Goodman's Fields and the entourage of the London Docks had even then their tens of thousands; but where the Commercial Road stretches now, through Stepney, Bow, and down towards Limehouse, it stretches through strongholds of the real invaders of London—the brick-and-mortar warriors, who are compassing the city round about.
In '22, where was Chelsea? Rurally aquatic. Chiswick, Hammersmith, Kew? All plainly and distinguishably separated from London; but where are they now? Millbank was far off; Pimlico was in the country; no man had yet heard of Belgrave Square. Crossing Vauxhall Bridge, what were Newington, Kennington, Vauxhall, Lambeth, Walworth, Camberwell, Brixton, in the year 1822? What sort of road was the Old Kent Road in those days? And were not Deptford and Greenwich separated from London by miles of green fields? Bermondsey and the Borough were always, within my recollection, integral London; but how about Rotherhithe? How about Blue Anchor Road, Spa Road, the neighbourhood of the Commercial Docks, Millpond Fields, the Saltpetre Works, the Halfpenny Hatch, the—
I am out of breath! Here is the real invasion! Don't tell me that the old London, the grim old kernel, far away over the water yonder, has done all this—has simply outgrown herself? It is an invasion, I tell you—stalwart provincials marching upon a devoted metropolis. Brighton, I know, will be bursting into the station at London Bridge very shortly; Greenwich is London already; so is Brentford; so are Clapham, Wandsworth, and Brixton; so are Kilburn, Cricklewood, and Crouch End. I am looking out for the arrival of Liverpool daily; and I should not be in the least surprised to meet, at no very distant period, Manchester, all clad in cotton, smoking an enormous chimney, arm-in-arm with Salford, marching gravely along the Great North Road, to make a juncture with London at Highgate.
To have a complete and comprehensive view of the progress of the invaders and the plight of the invaded; to form anything like a just view of the astonishing growth of London since the year '22; to see it as it is, monstrous, magnificent, the largest city in the world, and its capital, you should, properly, be a bird: say an eagle, or at least the gentle lark. Soaring on high, you should pause a moment on the wing, and drink in at a glance the wonders that lie beneath you. You can't be a bird, you say. Professors of metempsychosis are not so plentiful as those of mesmerism, clairvoyance, or the discernment of character from handwriting. Besides, you don't believe in the transmigration of souls. Very well! You believe in balloons? Here is one, just ready to ascend from the Royal Gardens, no matter where. The "aërostat" is inflated; the last bottle of champagne imbibed; the amateur aëronauts try to look easy and unembarrassed, and fail dismally in the attempt; the signal gun is fired; the aëronaut vociferates "Let go!" A cheer! Two cheers! Some ridiculously inappropriate music is played by a brass band. More cheers! fainter and fainter, as the earth, in a most, uncalled-for and inconsistent manner, appears to sink from beneath you. You do rise; for anon is silence, stillness, in the calm air, through which the occasional remarks of your companions ring sharp and clear like rifle cracks. There: never mind the neck of the balloon; that is the aëronaut's business, not yours. Take a firm grip of the side of the car, and look down. Look down with wonder, admiration, gratitude.
The City is all burnished gold; for the setting sun of a September day has put it into a warm bath—a "bath of beauty," as pantomime poets say. The river is all silver; save what are spangles and diamonds. It winds, and twists, and writhes, like a beautiful serpent, as it is magnificently beautiful without, and foully poisonous (bless the scarlet kernel!) within. Those black lines crossing the river are the bridges. That fleeting, evanescent darkness, tarnishing the gold on the houses and the silver on the river, is the shadow of a cloud. That transparent blue haze hanging quite over the City, like a gauze drapery to the golden houses, cut exactly to the shape of the City, thinner, and almost ragged where parks, or squares, or open places are, is the smoke—the smoke of London, hanging over it, shrouding it, blackening its edifices, poisoning its inhabitants.
Keep looking down, and look towards where my finger points. That thing, like a golden pine-apple much foreshortened (the sun is strong upon it), is St. Paul's. Those crowds of small black ants toiling through that narrow lane, are men, women, and children, in carriages, on horses, on foot; driving, riding, or walking, eastward or westward. The Monument is a Christmas Candlestick; the Tower is a Doll's House. There is not a man in London as large as Shem, Ham, or Japhet, in the toy Noah's Ark. Where is the roar of London, and the rattle of wheels; the speechifying, the bargain-driving, the laughing and the weeping? Faster and faster we rise into space. And the silence is more intense, and the City below us is no bigger than a man's hand.
Now, if you had ascended with M.M. Garnerin, Blanchard, or Pilatre de Rosier; had you taken a flight with old Mr. Sadler, the aëronaut in 1822, when George the Gentleman was King, you would be sore astonished now, gazing at London, under the auspices of a "gallant and intrepid aëronaut" in 1852. Where all was green before, you would find long lines of compact masses of houses. The crowds of black ants would have increased an hundred-fold; the blue, gauzy, ragged smoke blanket would have stretched marvellously; you would have appreciated and acknowledged the effects of the Bricklayers' Invasion.
On ascending at night (which, by-the-bye, cautious old Mr. Sadler never did), you would be struck with pleasurable astonishment at the aspect of London by night, as compared with London as it was thirty years ago. In the place of a Cimmerian darkness, through which vainly endeavoured to pierce a few blinking, sputtering, feeble-minded lamps—you would have an elaborate and exquisitely beautiful network of gas spangles—a delicate tracery of glow-worm lights, of brilliant pin-holes, sparkling dots, clearly defining the outline of every street, square, and alley of the world City; stretching out less thickly towards where the brick invasion had relaxed its vigour, dotting long lines of suburban roads, where the metropolitan constabulary drops off, and the horse patrol begin to be visible, getting small by degrees and beautifully less till they end in the blue blackness of the far-off country, twenty or thirty miles away on either side of you.
In no part of London is the invasion of bricks and mortar so perceptible as on the line of railway which, commencing at Camden Town (they are about to extend it to Kilburn, I think), runs through Islington, Hackney, Bow, Stratford, Old Ford. Stepney, and Limehouse to Blackwall. It extends nearly half round the Middlesex side of London. It is an eccentric railway, for I have measured the distance (on the map) from Camden Town to Blackwall, and my friend the railway goes miles out of its road to take you to the last-named locality; though, curiously enough, it rattles you thither in quicker time than the omnibus would do. I have seen irascible old gentlemen clench their umbrellas, muttering fiercely that they didn't understand being taken to Hackney on their way to Fenchurch Street; and middle-aged females reduced to a piteous state of mental imbecility by Islington being near Limehouse; afterwards piteously demanding which was Bow (which they were given to understand was in Cheapside), and inextricably confounding Stratford with the birth-place of the Swan of Avon. The last time I patronised this cheerful line, there was no glass to the window of the carriage in which I sat. Complaining mildly to four separate porters at four separate stations, and pleading rheumatism, I received consecutive answers of "Dear me!" "Oh, ah!" "So it is!" and "Can't help it;" which (taking them to be somewhat evasive and unsatisfactory in their construction) prompted me to give vent to vague threats of memorialising the public journals. I should like to become better acquainted with that philosopher (he must have been a philosopher) who, seeing me irate, administered cold comfort to me by telling me that the last time he travelled by the line in question, his carriage had no door. "And it was night, sir!"
As this iron and not immaculate railroad (it has its good points, notwithstanding) pursues its circuitous route, you may—if you don't mind looking out of the window, and running all the adverse chances of easterly winds, and ashes from the engine—see many curious and edifying things. Anon, the train rushes through mangy, brown-turfed fields, where the invasion has just begun; where rubbish may be shot; where poles, with placards affixed to them, denote the various "lots" which are "To be Sold or Let, on Building Leases." Melancholy-looking cows, misanthropic donkeys, pigs convinced of the hollowness of the world, wander pensively about these fields, gazing at the building-lots, grubbing about the lines of foundation for rows of houses which are to be erected; lamenting, perhaps, in their vaccine, asinine, or porcine hearts, the ruthless march of bricks and mortar. These semi-suburban animals feed strangely. Feeling themselves to be in a state of transition, perhaps, like their pasture-grounds, they accommodate themselves to all kinds of food. I think the cows eat quite as much broken crockery-ware as grass; the donkeys eat anything, from saucepan-lids to pieces of fractured bottles; and there is a pig of my acquaintance—residing in an impromptu pigstye in the neighbourhood of Hoxton—which, before my eyes, ate a straw-hat of considerable dimensions; and which, being subsequently (by the juvenile and indignant proprietor of the hat) lapidated with a decayed flower-pot, ate that too!
Bricks and mortar invade market-gardens; they elbow green-houses; they jostle conservatories; they thrust summer-houses away. Still looking from the carriage-window, do we see streets upon streets growing up in commons, and what were once shady lanes; filling up ditches; tumbling down hedges everywhere; crushing up the country in its concrete grasp. Here and there a solitary pollard-willow stands among scaffold-poles and wheelbarrows, seeming to wonder very much how it got there, and feeling itself, doubtless, an anachronism. Again, the train rushes over houses—or rather on a viaduct parallel with the tops of the houses. The impertinent locomotive gives "knowing looks " into little, queer, poky attics, where gentlemen are giving the last turn to their whiskers, and ladies the last tug at the laces of their corsets. Curious Asmodeus-like peeps do we get of the internal life of these houses. The knowing locomotives wink at the windows, and the washing hung out in the back garden; and, with an impertinent whistle and a puff of smoke, rushes on.
Diverge at Bow, and you can go through Old London to Fenchurch Street. Keep on towards Blackwall, and the traces of New London, in its invading form, meet you at every step. Factories, dye-houses, bone-boiling establishments, are surrounded by houses, where they were (and ought to be) removed from the contiguity of a metropolis. Chapels, devoted to the service of all imaginable creeds, start up in these invading streets. New Jerusalemites, Mormonites, Johanna Southcotonians, Howlers, Jumpers, and Shakers, join the army of invaders, and are fiercely pious in Meeting-houses, the roofs of which occasionally tumble in, not with age, but for pure want of seasoning—so new they are.
Try to get out of town any way, and the bricks drive you back, the mortar hangs on your skirts, and harasses you fiercely. I remember the time when London finished at Padlock House, and when Kensington was almost in the country. Kensington, Hammersmith, Turnham Green (the "Pack Horse"), is a mere omnibus "public" now!—Brentford—Isleworth almost—what are they now? A line of houses—that is all.
Where is it all to end? When will the invasion cease? Will the whole island be covered with houses? Or even as the great wheel keeps turning round and round; even as the winter gives place to spring, and so round to winter again and again; even as the new grows old, and then new again; so, perhaps, will the great City grow and grow, and its growth yet resolve itself into insignificance—till the great becomes small, as small as when the boatman ferried St. Peter over the pond to Westminster, or the Danes fought at Holborn Bars, or Eleanor's corse rested at the village of Charing.