Ticky: fine satirical fantasy

I mentioned a while back (see Westwood) about the Vintage Classics reprints of Stella Gibbons novels, and just very much enjoyed reading the 2011 Vintage edition of her 1943 Ticky, a satirical fantasy about English military institutions.

The Long Memory

Moving to a setting just a few miles eastward from Erith ... The Long Memory (1953) is my favourite British 1950s film, acclaimed as one of the best British attempts at film noir. Having just tracked down a copy, I decided to get the 1951 Howard Clewes novel it's based on.

The men of Erith and other limericks

Literary attribution is a bit of a paradox on the Internet: misattribution spreads so easily, despite this being a time when wide digitisation of books has made it relatively simple to trace attribution. I just solved a minor attribution puzzle: the origin of a strange limerick about Erith, a district of south-east London (not a village since the late 1800s).

After the Crash (1923)

In November 2012 (Muriel ... and After the Crash) I posted a brief critique of Maxwell Gray's short story After the Crash, "written about 1908 or 1910" but not published until her final book, the 1923 story collection A Bit of Blue Stone.

After the Crash, while I think it has weaknesses, is an interesting story, both as an example of the "Where London Stood" genre, and as a personal milestone for Maxwell Gray. She'd spent her whole career writing mainstream fiction - chiefly melodramatic romances with a certain amount of social commentary - but in her 60s broke out of that frame and wrote a single post-apocalyptic SF story that powerfully crystallises her own fears (expressed in earlier works) of disastrous consequences of the social changes brought by the 20th century.


I've posted a scan - see After the Crash - at the official site for my biography of Maxwell Gray, A Wren-like Note.

- Ray

Vigilant in Topsham

I'm not terribly into boats, but Friday had a break from the recent "gray afternoon was wearing on to its chill close" weather; and to shake out the cobwebs, I pottered down to Topsham Quay to look at the Vigilant, a 1904 Thames barge that recently arrived here for renovation.

The owners have put an explanatory plaque on the side:

Vigilant
1904 Thames Barge

The Vigilant was built in Ipswich and is a class spritsail Thames Barge rigged with a bowsprit.

She is listed in the Historic Ships Register. Although there were hundreds of these working sail boats on the Thames, only about thirty are still in existence.

Vigilant was built as a working barge for the Horlock Family, who were the Eddie Stobart of the 1900s. These barges worked around the coast transporting massive loads, when Topsham was a working port, they would have been frequent visitors to the Quay.

Vigilant weighs 74 tonnes, could carry 120 tonnes, and was used to ferry grain. When fully loaded up to their marks, these barges would be virtually submerged. They were powered by massive ochre-coloured sails, engines only being fitted in the 1930s. The main sail alone took three men to hoist.

As well as working, these barges were built with racing in mind. The barge racing matches still continue to this day, with racing matches off the Thames Estuary during summer. In 1928, Vigilant was a class race winner. She continued to be sailed until the 1930s, when she was converted into a houseboat.

Vigilant has travelled from the River Colne in Essex down the Channel to Topsham, and will be sympathetically restored to enable her to once again take to the seas under her red ochre sails as a racing barge.

If you would like to be a friend of Vigilant, please email info@vigilantbarge.com

The Society for Sailing Barge Research site has a few more specifics on its barges listing:

Vigilant
Of Harwich
Staysail Class
Official No. 116176, 73 ton. Built of wood at Ipswich in 1904 by Orvis & Fuller. Owned by Alfred Horlock and converted to a yacht in 1932. Sold back into trade and converted to motor barge by Whiting Bros. Passed to L.R.T.C. Owned by Dawes, Thomas and Martin. as private barge yacht until sold to Ms. Lynn Johnson & Graham Head late 1997 and now based at Woodbridge, Suffolk. moved to St Osyth 2004.

- Ray

Muriel ... and After the Crash

 Further to the previous Sweet Water Grapes, I just read the two shorter middle stories - Muriel and After the Crash - in Maxwell Gray's 1923 collection A Bit of Blue Stone.

Muriel (dated 1923, which makes it probably the author's final work) is rather a static mood piece, repeating the theme of Sweet Water Grapes: disillusionment softened by the promise of continuity. As he sits watching the sunset in a harbour town, a successful politician, Edward Grantham, meditates on his failure to connect emotionally with his daughter Muriel, who has just married. A cold man who has buried in work all his sadness at bereavement, and farmed off the upbringing of his children to his sister-in-law, he regrets the loss of both children: his son William to World War One, and Muriel, who has departed to India with her Civil Service husband.

A colleague, Jack Bennett, tries to talk Grantham out of this mood by telling them that there can be positive outcomes. He tells the story of a young English soldier who escaped from prison camp, made his way to America, and started a new life there. This soldier, like Grantham, was bereaved, but has come back to England with his child. The biographical details mount up - the soldier had a hard father, and was brought up in a rectory by his aunt - until the reader, if not Grantham, knows exactly who it's going to be, and it is. The long-lost William introduces himself, and father and son are reconciled. He hands his baby daughter, who is also called Muriel, to Grantham:

"And the world is still full of beauty," he replied, taking the little figure presented to him with embarrassment mixed with terror and a throb of deep joy.

I'll move on rapidly to After the Crash. In September 2010 - Maxwell Gray .... where London stood - I mentioned having seen a brief Times Literary Supplement review that mentioned A Bit of Blue Stone having a post-apocalyptic story. The story is footnoted "Written about 1908 or 1901, mislaid, and forgotten till now".

After the Crash tells of the visit of Brother Bernard, a pilgrim who has come from The Holy One of Canterbury, and before that from Australia, to seek a tribal leader called the Ancient of Kingston "to gather knowledge of England, and more particularly of those golden days before the Great Trouble that had preceded the downfall of the European civilization".

Arriving, Bernard sees scenery that makes it clear we're in a "where London stood" story:

Far off in the clear and smokeless air a dull blue dome rising above dull grey masses of broken masonry, partly overgrown by bush and creeper, was traced upon the sky. Here and there among the masonry were trees and woods, and towards the east "four grey walls with four grey towers" * stood, as they had already stood after a thousand years before this, unbroken. West of the dome, the grey towers of the abbey, its walls and windows beached and broken here and there, still watched the waters' never-ending flow from behind the battered and half-ruined palace of Westminster that had seen an empire's rise and fall and survived the crash of civilisation.
...
"And this," mused the pilgrim, contemplating the waste of crumbled brick and mortar and shattered spire, "was London, the London of Shakespeare and Milton, Wordsworth and Tennyson."

* MG's quotes, an allusion to Tennyon's The Lady of Shalott.

Bernard first meets a savage who "grunts jerkily in a clipped degraded dialect that had some far-off resemblance to Cockney English". After Bernard placates him with a crucifix and "Peace be with you", he directs Bernard to the encampment of the Ancient of Kingston. The Ancient, like Bernard, knows "the beautiful old tongue, the written English", and the two converse. After discussing the church's efforts to bring back civilisation, the Ancient, who is 108, tells how he met in his boyhood a man of 90 who had been born in the Famine following the "Downfall", and who told him of its cause.

"The downfall of Western civilisation was, indeed, caused by socialisms, democracy pushed to a logical conclusion, and its sequence, materialism ... So absorbed were [the ancient English] in money-making they refused to defend their country against invasion ... Moreover the Great Trouble, the anarchy of democracy, was far more acute on the continent than here. State-fed men refused to work or to fight, except among themselves."

Bernard asks the cause of the subsequent international collapse and breakdown of trade and food production.

"They of the century, Brother Bernard, had destroyed authority. They had forgotten God and the needs of the spirit ... The sum of human enjoyment had grown so immense in consequence of innumerable mechanical inventions and scientific discoveries and the enormous amount of wealth and bodily gratification developed by them, the civilised mankind sought its heaven on earth, and ever-growing democracies, grudging that any one man should enjoy more than any other, goaded the craving of material luxury to madness ... Democracy forbade the imposing of religious texts on teachers, or definite religious teaching in schools, people of any religion and no religion being equal. Democracy ... in its revolt against authority and discipline, it threw away every restraint of morality and religion. For pure democracy is the disintegration of humanity, the dissolution of society, the destruction of the atomic cohesion of the race. If you are versed in the science of the Golden Age, you will know that unless atom clings to atom the mass disappears; hence the explosion of society; the vanishing of civilisation."

Bernard, after hearing news of how "John of Kent" is retaking London, including the Tower, from the savages that occupy it, settles to banquet with the clan of the Ancient. He hears how books are being rediscovered; how the chief lady of the clan knows by heart Tennyson's Morte d'Arthur and portions of Shakespeare, Milton, Byron and Shelley; and how the clan are to reinstall as king a young man who is the last descendant of the "Great Empress Queen".

Bernard assures the Ancient in return that "English hearts are beating still" in the old colonial lands, if not so much in England, and on that hopeful note settles down to sleep, thinking "Had the English been prepared, they might have saved a civilisation".

This is an extraordinary story for Maxwell Gray having made such a radical experiment in genre writing, but it is overtly polemical. As I've said before, in the preceding couple of decades, MG's works had been giving away signs of her becoming increasingly grumpy and reactionary ...

"Now Art is god, and Pleasure, and the Beautiful is master
Of soul and sense and life; let us worship these!" we cried;
But the old bright gods are dead, as the Christ, so our disaster
Is that nought is left to paint but our hearts unsatisfied.
"Ourselves are gods," we laughed—" are gods in might and glory;
The universe asks vainly for something that is higher
Or holier than the human in nature or in story;
So man himself is god, and his good fulfilled desire."
...
- The Cry of the Nineteenth Century, 1890 (poem)

this very enlightened, hypercivilised day at the close of the century, a day so perfectly informed, so thoroughly schooled, as to have lost faith in virtue, honour, and truth; in decency, authority, and government; so surfeited with fairy tales of science, and rich in the long result of time, as to believe in nothing—save only steam, bacteria, natural selection, natural appetites, money and ghosts.
- The House of Hidden Treasure, 1899

... and After the Crash turns the tap full on.

Even if the story were not killed by this overload of authoritarian anti-modern polemic, After the Crash is not very good science fiction. A plus point is the plausibility of the Church as a uniting factor and preserver of knowledge; this at least has a Canticle of Leibowitz flavour. But the language is faux-mediaeval (there are expressions such as "Nay, brother" and "Not so, Lord"), as is the culture; this isn't a believable post-apocalyptic society derived from early-1900s Londoners. OK, I wouldn't expect Riddley Walker or A Scientific Romance, from Maxwell Gray, but the characters' lack of relict cultural fixtures, after less than two centuries, is a sign of the author not exploring the scenario in any historically or linguistically realistic way. There's no sign even that the narrator is Australian.

It's interesting to see a long-established mainstream author try her hand at SF; and I'm always interested in stories where Macaulay's "New Zealander" makes an appearance, of which this is a late example. After the Crash is also a good example of apocalyptic imaginings as a mirror of the author's own anxieties and dissatisfactions with the world. As such, it's a powerful expression of MG's fears about the collapse of civilisation through war and the rise of socialism. But the idea of the its recovery taking the form of an idealised feudal English court is a bit, and the story for me was very disappointing overall, and not a creditable late work for Maxwell Gray.

The Times Literary Supplement for May 24th 1923 mentioned the story briefly, noting the central problem: that the collapse of civilisation, portrayed as starting in the very early years of the 20th century, hadn't actually happened.

"The Crash" ... looks far into the future and pictures England sunk again in primitive existence as the result of a terrible revolution; "the battered and half-ruined Palace of Westminster" is almost the only relic of today. It is a careful short study, but scarcely carries conviction, for its gloom is at variance with the facts of history.

Addendum 29th July 2013: I've posted a scan at After the Crash (1923).

- Ray

The Great Tower, London, 1890

D Vernon's tower design
click to enlarge

Pertaining loosely to the recent opening of the Shard, John Ptak of Ptak Science Books kindly sent me a nicely apposite link to Descriptive illustrated catalogue of the sixty-eight competitive designs for the great tower for London (compiled and edited by Fred. C. Lynde for the Tower Company, Limited, St. Stephen's Chambers, Westminster, London, S.W. Published 1890 by "Industries", London - Internet Archive ID descriptiveillus00lynd).

The designs were submissions to a competition run by The Tower Company Limited of Westminster, which was set up to fund and build a London equivalent of the Eiffel Tower on the high ground of Wembley Park.

A contemporary publication commented:

Eighty-six designs in all have been sent in for competition. Of these, however, only sixty-eight fall within the scope of the specification. All of the designs, are now on exhibition to the public free of charge in the Hall of the Drapers’ Company, Throgmorton Street, London, E.C.

It would be remature to pronounce any opinion upon the merits of the designs, as the jurors have not yet delivered their award. The designs exhibit considerable range of style. The Eiffel Tower design, more or less modified, appears in several of them. Some are apparently suggested by the conventional pictures of the Tower of Babel, others are ecclesiastical towers whose proportions have simply been expanded, others are magnified screws, while some are glass fumaces of monstrous size. The lure of £500 has brought into the net not a few curiosities. There is the Chinese lantern design, the design on half a. sheet of note paper, the factory chimney design, the gigantic mast design, the candelabrum design. More than one of the designers aim at a tower of 2,000ft. in height. One of these proposes that the base of his tower shall occupy sixty-four acres, or about twenty times the area of the Albert Hall.
- Industries and Iron, 2nd May 1890

The seriously weird ones include, for instance, Design No. 6, S Fisher's "monument of hieroglyphics" served by a spiral railway; J Horton's Design No. 17, also spiral; the positively scary Design No. 19, JW Coucham's skinny single-vertical "Century Tower"; Design No. 29, Albert Brunel's scaled-up granite replica of the Tower of Pisa; and Design No. 38 by AF Hills (Arnold Hills of the London Vegetarian Society) which was to feature an "aerial colony" and to be capped by a one-twelfth scale replica of the Great Pyramid. Quite a few are modern in concept and, like the Shard, wouldn't just be a skeleton but would also incorporate residential and office space.

The first prize of 500 Guineas was awarded to Design No. 37 by Messrs. A. D. Stewart, J. M. McLaren and W. Dunn, of London: a 1200-foot octagonal tower "of Oriental character" which would feature a principal stage at 200 feet, containing an octagonal central hall and a 90-bedroom hotel. Work on this "Watkin Tower" - so nicknamed after its instigator, the railway magnate Sir Edward Watkin - started in 1893, not using the winning design, but that of a simpler copy of the Eiffel Tower.

It was a project that revolved tightly around the financial interests of its creator. As described in The Infernal Tower at London Particulars, the whole thing was centrally a scheme to drive money toward the Metropolitan Railway Company, of which Watkin was chairman. Its line ran next to the Wembley site, and it conveniently opened a new station serving the site in 1893. Watkin's own company The Tower Company Limited (aka the Wembley Park Tower Company) was the ground landlord of Wembley Park, and it  received rent from another company of his, the Metropolitan Tower Construction Company Limited, set up to organise the building (and which, at his direction, received payments from the Metropolitan Railway Company).

The whole scheme went belly-up with the liquidation of the Metropolitan Tower Construction Company Limited in 1899, and the completed base - the "London Stump" - was demolished over 1904-1907. There's a good account of the whole saga at the Giles Milton blog: A tale of two towers: the fabulous folly of Edward Watkin. The site is now occupied by Wembley Stadium.

John Ptak also noted a Topsham connection: Design No. 2 is by a "D Vernon, Topsham, Devon". I haven't been able to find who D Vernon was, or what qualification he/she had for designing a tower.

Incidentally, I like the picture on page 4 of the catalogue, comparing different buildings. It's reminiscent of the architectural capriccios I mentioned a while back: see Architectural fantasies.

- Ray

The Last Generation

click to enlarge

Department of Where London Stood: by an entirely accidental Google hit, I just ran into this curious little post-apocalyptic novelette The Last Generation: A Story of the Future by the poet, novelist and playwright James Elroy Flecker.

A fable directed at human hubris, told through the vehicle of the narrator being contacted by the time-travelling "Wind of Time", it tells of the extinction of humanity: not through external disaster, but through a dictator's plan - out of his disillusionment with human progress - for a collective suicide pact.

A visionary Birmingham politician, Joshua Harris, attains world domination as "King Harris". Through a scheme of female sterilization, with death sentences for non-compliance, the discovery of a universal contraceptive, "Smithia", and a fostering of cheerful acceptance among a hedonistic intellectual elite, he succeeds in fulfilling his aim that that this will be the last generation of humanity.

The Wind takes the narrator through the decades of decline that follow until he finds the last man, who dies at the altar of "a massive half-ruined Dome that had been used for the worship of some God" (the book cover suggests it to be St Paul's). But then, it's implied, the whole cycle starts again:

I saw the vast Halls and Palaces of men falling in slowly, decaying, crumbling, destroyed by nothing but the rains and the touch of Time. And looking again I saw wandering over and above the ruins, moving curiously about, myriads of brown, hairy, repulsive little apes.

One of them was building a fire with sticks.

The Last Generation: A Story of the Future (JE Flecker, London / New Age Press, 1908, Internet Archive ID lastgenerationst00flec).

- Ray

Full Dark House

Euw. I just spent most of the day in bed coughing, courtesy of a bug I picked up mid-week. But it gave me a chance to read Christopher Fowler's Full Dark House.

I mentioned Fowler's "Bryant & May" detective series in 2010, when I read his 2008 The Victoria Vanishes. Possibly I dropped into the series at the wrong point (i.e. its then final book), but I've remedied that by reading the first, which Felix kindly sent me.

Full Dark House starts with the rather bold device of introducing an elderly duo of London detectives - Bryant and May - via killing one of them off in a bomb explosion. Then the story proceeds by intercutting the surviving partner's investigation with a flashback to their first case together, a series of gruesome murders (apparently themed serial murder based on the Greek muses) in the Palace Theatre in November 1940, during the London Blitz.

Police procedural is a staple of fiction, but Fowler's angle is that Bryant & May work for the bizarre and underfunded "PCU" (Peculiar Crimes Unit) which - with the exception of the dapper and stoical May - is largely staffed by misfits from other departments. Bryant, heading it, is a "tortoise-like" badly-dressed hypochondriac who sees no problem in consulting mediums as an aid to the investigation of crimes such as the "Leicester Square Vampire". Again, the idea of mismatched detective partners is pretty staple, but Bryant and May are extremely likeable, and Full Dark House is populated with similarly sympathetic grotesques.

The plot is, essentially, an extended 'contrafactum' on The Phantom of the Opera, and the book skilfully portrays the gothic atmosphere, and the relationships and conflicts within a theatre company producing a revival of Offenbach's satirical Orphée aux enfers in what proves to be a controversial adaptation: the faux-nude costumes risk breaching the Lord Chamberlain's then censorship of theatrical nudity. Fowler neatly slots this fictional production into the theatre's real timeline - a gap between summer 1940, when a revival run of Chu Chin Chow ceased due to bombing, and summer 1941, when it restarted. Overall the novel is a vigorous and historically accurate take on Blitz-era London - darkly comic without being the least flippant about the horror of the time - and Fowler's general fascination with the little-known corners and 'deeps' of London shines through (for example, I'd never heard of The Other St Paul’s on Vauxhall Bridge) - but without the book turning into a "research dump" of what the author found out. I highly recommend it.

The only downside is that this is a book where (at least, if you're me) you constantly want to Google the details. The Palace Theatre, of course, still exists, and deserves to be considered in its own right a character in Full Dark House. As is easily findable online, it started out in 1891 as Richard D'Oyly Carte's Royal English Opera House, but rapidly failed in that role (in part due to its initial run of Sullivan's lacklustre Ivanhoe) and became The Palace Theatre of Varieties in 1892. Ir's a building of the astonishing complexity required to contain all the machinery of top-of-the-range stage productions. The arthurlloyd.co.uk Musical Hall and Theatre site has a special feature - The Royal English Opera House - Now the Palace Theatre - with photos, contemporary sketches, and even floor plans of its many levels.

As I mentioned back in 2010, there's more of interest at Christopher Fowler's website. His Independent series on forgotten authors is also worth checking out: the Neglected Books site has usefully collated archive links: “Invisible Ink".

- Ray

Wild at Heart

A sentence in an article I cited in the previous post just jogged my memory:

An attempt to recreate the river trip immortalised in Jerome K Jerome's classic book with two girl friends turns into a strange hybrid of Wind in the Willows and Apocalypse Now, writes Joanne O'Connor
- How three women in a boat took a trip back in time, The Observer, Sunday 2 July 2006

As it so happens ... I wrote this short story a few years ago. It's failed to get placed in a number of competitions, notably the Kenneth Grahame Society's 2008 competition (despite its invitation for creative angles on The Wind in the Willows). So, rather than have it languishing on file forever (furthermore, a file that I very nearly lost through computer crashes), I thought I'd post it here. I don't recall having read the Observer article back then, but it could conceivably have been the inspiration. Enjoy.

Update: I've moved the post here - Wild at Heart.

- Ray

The Stream of Pleasure

 

Henley - from The Stream of Pleasure, 1891

This afternoon - it was very quite in the the shop - I was reading a very nice book: The stream of pleasure. A narrative of a journey on the Thames from Oxford to London (1891, Joseph Pennell & Elizabeth Robins Pennell, illustrated Joseph Pennell, Internet Archive streamofpleasure00penn).

As I mentioned previously (see Elizabeth Robins Pennell on Margate and London at play: on Margate's sands) ERP was an American journalist, writer and critic whose work in the late 19th and early 20th century including affectionate portraits of London life and leisure for the US market. The Stream of Pleasure is an evocative account, co-written with her artist husband Joseph (who also produced the illustrations), of a trip down the Thames, from Oxford to Richmond, in the Rover, a Thames camping skiff:

It was only a pair-oared skiff, shorter and broader than those generally seen on the Thames — "a family boat," an old river man called it with contempt ; but then it had a green waterproof canvas cover which stretched over three iron hoops and converted it for all practical purposes into a small, a very small, house-boat. By a complicated arrangement of strings the canvas could be so rolled up and fastened on top as — theoretically — not to interfere with our view of the river banks on bright days ; or it could be let down to cover the entire boat from stern to bow — an umbrella by day, a hotel by night.

Under it we could camp out without the bother of pitching a tent. We had already talked a great deal about the beautiful nights upon the river, when we should go to bed with the swans and rise up with the larks, and cook our breakfast under the willows, and wash our dishes and ourselves in quiet clear pools. What if river inns were as extortionate and crowded as they are said to be ? we should have our own hotel with us wherever we went. In the midst of a weak and damp hurrah from one ancient boatman, and under a heavy baptism not of champagne, but of rain, the Rover was at last pushed off her trestles and with one vigorous shove sent clean across the Thames to the raft where we stood under umbrellas, while Salter's men at once began to load her with kitchen and bedroom furniture. They provided us with an ingenious stove with kettles and frying-pans fitting into each other like the pieces of a Chinese puzzle, a lantern, cups and saucers and plates, knives and forks and spoons, a can of alcohol, and, for crowning comfort, a mattress large enough for a double bedstead. It filled the boat from stern to bow, covering the seats, burying the sculls and boat hooks, bulging out through and over the rowlocks. It was clear if it went we must stay, and so we said, as if we rather liked the prospect of roughing it, that we could manage just as well and be just as comfortable if we slept on our rugs ; for we carried all the Roman blankets and steamer rugs we possessed, together with a lot of less decorative blankets borrowed from our landlady in London, and the bundle they made took up the place of two people in the boat. The locker was stored with our supply of sardines, jam, chocolate, tea, sugar, biscuits, towels, and tea-cloths. Our bags were stowed away with the kitchen things. And then at last we crawled into the long green tunnel.

Despite all these mod cons, on the first night the Pennells went all nesh and stayed in an inn because it was raining, and thereafter abandoned the option of camping out in the skiff. Nevertheless, it's still an interesting journey, a genteel account of the inns, villages and towns they visit en route during their month-long trip. The book could be viewed as a serious countertext to Jerome K Jerome's 1891 Three Men in a Boat (which also involved a skiff holiday on the Thames, between Kingston and Oxford). Both books were written in the same time-slot, when commercial traffic on the upper Thames had ceased, and boating holidays had become a Victorian craze.

Much of the flavour of the Thames of the time is captured in the works of the Oxford photographer Henry Taunt, who was both a documenter and populariser of the upper Thames, chiefly through his guidebook Taunt's Illustrated Map of the Thames, which in the 1875 fifth edition covered the whole river from Thames Head to the Houses of Parliament. Another, later, good guide is the 1897 The Thames Illustrated: a picturesque journeying from Richmond to Oxford (Internet Archive thamesillustrate00leylrich), which is copiously illustrated with high-quality photos.

The riverscape has changed remarkably little since these books were written. In 2010, a Millennium Project by photographers Jeff Robins and Graham Diprose, In the footsteps of Henry Taunt, revisited and rephotographed Taunt's locations; the English Heritage Viewfinder site has a 22-page photo-essay, In the footsteps of Henry Taunt, with a number of comparison images such as Salter's boatyard in Oxford, the Beetle & Wedge pub, and the church of St Thomas of Canterbury at Goring.

You can even still  take Thames skiff holidays - though personally, being in a shallow-draft rowing boat alongside powered river traffic doesn't sound my idea of a relaxing holiday. I may be wrong - see How three women in a boat took a trip back in time (Joanne O'Connor, The Observer, 2 July 2006). But the Thames Path National Trail looks more to my taste.

Related further reading:

• The book of the Thames : from its rise to its fall (Samuel Carter Hall, 1859, Internet Archive bookofthamesfrom00hall).
• Evenings on the Thames; or, Serene Hours, and what they require, Volume 2 (Kenelm Henry Digby, 1864, Google Books)
• Dickens's dictionary of the Thames, from its source to the Nore: an unconventional handbook (Charles Dickens, 1883 and other eds., Internet Archive dickenssdictiona1885dick).

- Ray

The dust-heap of history

The Great Dust Heap, Kings Cross
EH Dixon, watercolour, 1837. Wellcome Library.
Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 UK: England & Wales License

From Mark Liberman at Language Log: The what of history?, an interesting analysis of US and UK variants on the "dustbin of history", to which defunct institutions are rhetorically consigned.

The context is kind of interesting, in that the British terms dustbin" (a domestic refuse bin), "dustman" (a refuse collector) and "dustcart" (a refuse collection vehicle) - the latter two folksy names persist despite decades of rebranding - preserve an archaic meaning of "dust", meaning "refuse". It's not merely a euphemism; as indicated by the largely archaic warning embossed on plastic dustbins - "no hot ashes" - domestic refuse consisted, historically, in large part of dust: ashes and cinders from the fire (see Bins and the history of waste relations). Dustbins are a relatively recent invention - early 1900s - and mid-Victorian houses had a room, a "dusthole", where ashes and refuse were stored (see p111, Magazine of Domestic Economy, 1837) and whose contents were regularly carted away to the local dust-heap.

The dust-heap was the scene of, by modern standards, heroic recycling.

A Dust-heap of this kind is often worth thousands of pounds. The present one was very large and very valuable. It was in fact a large hill, and being in the vicinity of small suburb cottages, it rose above them like a great black mountain. Thistles, groundsel, and rank grass grew in knots on small parts which had remained for a long time undisturbed; crows often alighted on its top, and seemed to put on their spectacles and become very busy and serious; flocks of sparrows often made predatory descents upon it; an old goose and gander might sometimes he seen following each other up its side, nearly midway; pigs rooted around its base,--and now and then, one bolder than the rest would venture some way up, attracted by the mixed odors of some hidden marrow-bone enveloped in a decayed cabbage-leaf--a rare event, both of these articles being unusual oversights of the Searchers below.

The principal ingredient of all these Dust-heaps is fine cinders and ashes; but as they are accumulated from the contents of all the dust-holes and bins of the vicinity, and as many more as possible, the fresh arrivals in their original state present very heterogeneous materials. We cannot better describe them than by presenting a brief sketch of the different departments of the Searchers and Sorters, who are assembled below to busy themselves upon the mass of original matters which are shot out from the carts of the dustmen.

The bits of coal, the pretty numerous results of accident and servants' carelessness, are picked out, to be sold forthwith; the largest and best of the cinders are also selected, by another party, who sell them to laundresses, or to braziers (for whose purposes coke would do as well;) and the next sort of cinders, called the breeze, because it is left after the wind has blown the finer cinders through an upright sieve, is sold to the brick-makers.

Two other departments, called the "soft-ware" and the "hard-ware," are very important. The former includes all vegetable and animal matters--everything that will decompose. These are selected and bagged at once, and carried off as soon as possible, to be sold as manure for plowed land, wheat, barley, &c. Under this head, also, the dead cats are comprised. They are generally the perquisites of the women searchers. Dealers come to the wharf, or dust-field, every evening; they give sixpence for a white cat, fourpence for a colored cat, and for a black one according to her quality. The "hard-ware" includes all broken pottery pans, crockery, earthenware, oyster-shells, &c., which are sold to make new roads.

The bones are selected with care, and sold to the soap-boiler. He boils out the fat and marrow first, for special use, and the bones are then crushed and sold for manure.

Of rags, the woollen rags are bagged and sent off for hop-manure; the white linen rags are washed, and sold to make paper, &c.

The "tin things" are collected and put into an oven with a grating at the bottom, so that the solder which unites the parts melts, and runs through into a receiver. This is sold separately; the detached pieces of tin are then sold to be melted up with old iron, &c.

Bits of old brass, lead, &c., are sold to be molted up separately, or in the mixture of ores.

All broken glass vessels, as cruets, mustard-pots, tumblers, wine-glasses, bottles, &c., are sold to the old-glass shops.

As for any articles of jewelry, silver spoons, forks, thimbles, or other plate and valuables, they are pocketed off-hand by the first finder. Coins of gold and silver are often found, and many "coppers."

Meantime, everybody is hard at work near the base of the great Dust-heap. A certain number of cart-loads having been raked and searched for all the different things just described, the whole of it now undergoes the process of sifting. The men throw up the stuff, and the women sift it.

- Dust: or Ugliness Redeemed, pp379-384, Household Words, A Weekly Journal, conducted by Charles Dickens,  No. 16, July 13, 1850.

Of the Dustmen of London, in Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, volume 2, gives a similar account. It recalls the rag-pickers of Dharavi; a striking example of how Victorian London resembled a modern Third World megalopolis. The Household Words article is uncredited, but it's very likely by Dickens himself, as it strongly recalls a central theme of his 1864 Our Mutual Friend, in which Nicodemus Boffin has acquired the nickname The Golden Dustman because he has inherited a fortune acquired from dust.

'The man,' Mortimer goes on, addressing Eugene, 'whose name is Harmon, was only son of a tremendous old rascal who made his money by Dust.'

'Red velveteens and a bell?' the gloomy Eugene inquires.

'And a ladder and basket if you like. By which means, or by others, he grew rich as a Dust Contractor, and lived in a hollow in a hilly country entirely composed of Dust. On his own small estate the growling old vagabond threw up his own mountain range, like an old volcano, and its geological formation was Dust. Coal-dust, vegetable-dust, bone-dust, crockery dust, rough dust and sifted dust,—all manner of Dust.'

An article in the Eclectic Review, 1865 - Mr Dickens's Romance of a Dust Heap, a review of Our Mutual Friend - noted the connection, mentioning another account.

... Mr Dickens has now, to our knowledge, for sixteen years been haunted by a great Dust-heap.
...
Following Mr Dickens's observant eye and rapid foot, other visitors have traversed and circumambulated these extraordinary mounds. In that excellent and arousing little book, The Missing Link, there is a chapter entitled 'The Bible Woman among the Dustheaps;' and many facts recited in that interesting little chapter go to confirm the more imaginative settings of the great social novelist.

Sorting a dust-heap at a County Council depot
from London's Toilet, PF William Ryan, in Living London, George Robert Sims, 1902

As Dickens described, the owners of commercial dust-heaps could become very wealthy, and occasionally even the workers made a good living, since a perk of the job was being allowed to keep any high-value items they found. For the majority, however, it was a disgusting drudge.

Despite the grim reality, at least two poets managed to find enlightening metaphorical symbolism in dust-heaps. In 1851, George Washington Dewey wrote in Sartain's Union Magazine of Literature and Art:

The dust-heap has a poetry — a hieroglyphic art,
An eloquence as sacred as the Pyramids impart!
The relics which are gathered from the hot and noisy way,
Are laden with the memories of many a summer day.
...
Familiar objects catch your eye among the rubbish there;
You recognize some fragments of your boyhood's " wear and tear " —
Some buckle, strap, or button — or bobbin apron string.
Which held you in the leash of home, ere youth had taken wing!
There is no fancy striving for a counterfeit of truth —
The dust-heap on the common was the crucible of youth!
And Time is yet the Alchymist all metals to assay; —
Then be thine age the purer — for the dross shall melt away.

And in 1863 Alfred Saxelby West, in his anthology Poems of an Interval, wrote Lines on a Dust-Heap, which found uplighting symbolism about mortality in the not infrequent possibility of finding something of value in a dust-heap.

Yea, e'en the naked dust is nature's child,
And not to be accounted dross ; she rears it
For future form, a fair and pleasing thing.
And am not I — nay, are we not all dust?
And shall we not be so again ere long?
But does no treasure mingle with the mass?
Aye ! One shall find, and snatch the shining jewel
From out the putrid heap, to deck His realms,
To stud heaven's fields with spangled treasures fair;
Poor dust below, but shining dew-drops there!

For further reading: Dusty Bob: a cultural history of dustmen, 1780-1870 (Brian Maidment, Manchester University Press, 2007) looks worth finding:

Why did dustmen exercise an extended hold over the imagination of many Regency and Victorian artists and writers, including George Cruikshank, Henry Mayhew, Charles Dickens as well as numerous little known dramatists, caricaturists, print makers, journalists and novelists? This book, the first study of the cultural representation of the dust trade, provides many varied answers to this question by showing the ways in which London dustmen were associated with ideas of contamination, dirt, noise, violence, wealth, consumerism and threat. Drawing on an extraordinary range of sources, including plays, novels, reportage and, especially, visual culture, Dusty Bob describes the ways in which dustmen were perceived and mythologized in the first seventy years of the nineteenth century.

See also the previous post John Petty: The Face, which looks at the autobiography of a modern scavenger.

- Ray

My Jolly Sailor Bold: update

A pointer to an update. On further reading, I have a theory that the previously-mentioned shanty My Jolly Sailor Bold (documented in 1891, and featuring in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides) is actually a London-tailored ripoff - quite probably a late 19th century one - of the traditional Irish ballad The Banks of Claudy, since the first verses have close textual similarity. See the addendum to My Jolly Sailor Bold, 1891.

- Ray

My Jolly Sailor Bold, 1891

Don't you hate it when that happens ...

Still on the maritime theme: there's a deal of discussion online about the authenticity or otherwise of the widely-circulated song My Jolly Sailor Bold, which featured as a shanty in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.

The short answer is that it does pre-date the movie, but the sole source of the lyrics appears to be an 1891 collection, Real Sailor-Songs by John Ashton ("author of A Century of Ballads, Romances of Chivalry, &c, &c, &c."), Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., Ltd, London. Here are the lyrics from the book:

My Jolly Sailor Bold

Upon one summer's morning, I carelessly did stray,
Down by the Walls of Wapping, where I met a sailor gay,
Conversing with a bouncing lass, who seem'd to be in pain,
Saying, William, when you go, I fear you will ne'er return again.

His hair it does in ringlets hang, his eyes as black as sloes,
May happiness attend him wherever he goes,
From Tower Hill, down to Blackwall, I will wander, weep and moan,
All for my jolly sailor bold, until he does return.

My father is a merchant—the truth I now will tell,
And in great London City in opulence doth dwell,
His fortune doth exceed £300,000 in gold,
And he frowns upon his daughter, 'cause she loves a sailor bold.

A fig for his riches, his merchandize, and gold,
True love is grafted in my heart; give me my sailor bold:
Should he return in poverty, from o'er the ocean far,
To my tender bosom, I'll fondly press my jolly tar.

My sailor is as smiling as the pleasant month of May,
And oft we have wandered through Ratcliffe Highway,
Where many a pretty blooming girl we happy did behold,
Reclining on the bosom of her jolly sailor bold.

Come all you pretty fair maids, whoever you may be,
Who love a jolly sailor bold that ploughs the raging sea,
While up aloft, in storm or gale, from me his absence mourn,
And firmly pray, arrive the day, he home will safe return.

My name it is Maria, a merchant's daughter fair,
And I have left my parents and three thousand pounds a year,
My heart is pierced by Cupid, I disdain all glittering gold,
There is nothing can console me but my jolly sailor bold.

Ashton's notes give no indication of the tune or the provenance, although he claims all the songs in the book to be authentic.

In collecting these Sailor-Songs I have had to reject very many not only for want of space, but that they were too obviously the manufacture of—that despised of Jack—the land-lubber: and I have omitted the whole of Dibdin's, as they were songs for Sailors, but not necessarily Sailors' Songs.

Nevertheless, the lyrics recycle a lot of stock folksong and shanty phrases; along with the archaic formalisms, the flavour is of a broadsheet of the late 1700s or early 1800s, as-published rather than filtered through oral tradition. The POTC: On Stranger Tides credits describe it as "Jolly Sailor Bold Arranged by John DeLuca, Dave Giuli and Matt Sullivan", but the actual tune may be that sung by Sandra Kerr on the 1967 folk album of London songs Sweet Thames Flow Softly.

Addendum: I'll look into this when I have more time, but Googling key phrases, I just ran into what I think could be the origin of this song, the trad Irish ballad The Banks of Claudy (aka Clody):

It was on a summer's morning all in the month of May
Down by the Banks of Claudy I carelessly did stray.
And there I heard a pretty maid, in sorrow did complain
All for her absent lover that sailed the ocean main.
- one version of The Banks of Claudy

Upon one summer's morning, I carelessly did stray,
Down by the Walls of Wapping, where I met a sailor gay,
Conversing with a bouncing lass, who seem'd to be in pain,
Saying, William, when you go, I fear you will ne'er return again.
- My Jolly Sailor Bold

Similar or what? Interestingly, The Banks of Claudy has a large family of variants within the range you expect from a song floating around on the oral tradition. That My Jolly Sailor is a complete isolate makes me suspect strongly that it's a version of The Banks of Claudy rewritten for a London context, but which never actually got into the oral tradition.

- Ray.

London at play: on Margate's sands

See the following post - Elizabeth Robins Pennell on Margate - for an explanation.

---

A donkey-ride

LONDON AT PLAY
on Margate’s sands

Margate is London’s Coney Island, its big suburb by the sea, only far enough away for a long morning’s voyage in a steamboat. It is easy to forget in town how near the coast is; but already at Charing Cross sometimes, when the tide is high, you can smell the fresh salt air through the London smoke; in winter the white gulls haunt the bridges at Waterloo and Blackfriars; and it is just after the widening Thames has lost itself in the North Sea that Margate stretches out its pier into the water. There are plenty of other places on the same cliffs—Broadstairs and St. Leonard's and Westgate, and a dozen more; but Margate first, with Ramsgate as an alternative, is the cockney's choice. This is why some people agree with Mrs. Tuggs 1 that it is altogether too low—«nobody there but tradesmen!» But then, without the London crowd Margate would not be—well, Margate.

If you wish, you can take a train that starts from Charing Cross or Victoria, and, after a long, rambling tour through Kent, eventually gets to Margate. But half the fun is in going by boat. The lower Thames is supposed to be entirely commercial, but from time immemorial it has been the classic stream for the Londoner's frolic. You remember Dr. Johnson taking water to Billingsgate on the night of his famous « frisk» with Topham Beauclerk; and Hogarth sailing with his four jolly companions for Gravesend; and Elia in the «old Margate hoy,» which he was right in thinking «ill exchanged for the foppery and fresh-water niceness of the modern steam-packet»; and Boz on so many of those very youthful excursions of his; or, to come down to our own contemporaries, Ally Sloper, that delightful British «Mayeux,» and his party, dancing on deck, as Baxter shows them in one of his wonderful Sloper drawings? Besides, Margate virtually begins when you meet the crowd hurrying down through the narrow, dirty streets leading to the Old Swan Pier, and you struggle with babies and bandboxes at the ticket-office, and you rush down the long gangway, where you get wedged in so tight that you cannot move hand or foot, while a cool official keeps calling: «This wye for the Sovering—the Royal Sovering. Passengers for Southend pass on to the houter boat. Passengers for Margit and Ramsgit on the Sovering—the Royal Sovering! Show your tickets, please! Move on! This wye for Southend! This wye for Margit!» And from rival boats at the next pier come a still louder screaming and yelling. It all sounds like a page out of Dickens or Thackeray.

When you are fairly off, when you have scrambled successfully for a seat, and the Southend boat has steamed away, and the Royal Sovereign 2 has whistled playfully,—as only a Margate boat can, and very much as the bad boy shrieks when he wishes to make you jump,—you gradually discover that this is the way to see the Thames. For there, at the start, is St. Paul's lifting its dome above the grimy warehouses; and you pass under London Bridge, where swarms of idlers watch you safely through, hoping all the time that you will hit the arches and go to the bottom for their pleasure; and you steam by the Tower, and between the open gates of Tower Bridge, which, once well weather-stained, will be as imposing a feature as the river can boast; and on again, between miles and miles of docks, and «plantations of ship-masts and forests of steam-chimneys»; and on every side are the boats—huge ocean steamers, little penny steamboats, red-sailed barges, big sailing-ships, puffing, smoke-belching tugs. And then, presently, it is Greenwich, with the beautiful buildings of Inigo Jones, and the memories of fish dinners eaten by yourself or in friendly books, and Rosherville, and Gravesend with its gardens, and the broad flats that make you think of Pip and his «great expectations.» 3

And all the while, if, you know how to do the thing in style, a sandwich is in one hand and a pot of porter in the other; for everybody on the boat is eating sandwiches and drinking porter. And by everybody I mean precisely the same company you jostle in the third-class carriages of the «underground » on the day of the University boat-race, or travel with by road down to the Derby,—«the mighty London populace,» Mr. James calls it,—its «female contingent» conspicuously sharing Mrs. Boffin's inclination toward fashion, while a baby, apparently, is as necessary to a Margate outfit as an umbrella on a rainy day. Of course there are musicians on board, —«Italians from the Strand,» is Mr. Mourey's description of the Thames boat band—gold laced and tarnished, out at elbows, playing their poor fiddles and harps and flutes first in the bow, then in the stern, up the middle and back again, and taking up an endless collection. And as the breeze grows brisker and the air keener, as the shores recede farther and farther, there seems to be, as in Mr. Punch's music-hall song, a call for «a drop o' something shorter» 4; for the little bar on deck is filled with men—and women, too: has no long practice in the public-house taught the Englishwoman how to take her drink standing like a man? Already by noon, faces are redder, laughs lighter. There are races round the deck. A few figures are huddled up suggestively against the railings. There are wild shrieks and playful giggles. And in the midst of it children are dancing, children are sick, children are yelling, children are sleeping. And the boat stops no more, though the cliffs are dotted with little towns, until all the gay crowd that does not mean to go on to Ramsgate is emptied upon the pier at Margate, where a crowd as gay watches its arrival..

Carried ashore

Margate is fairly big—a substantial town, in fact, not the least like the American seashore place. There is an embankment instead of the familiar board walk, blown away regularly every season by the worst storm remembered for years. There are houses and shops of brick and stone, instead of the wooden cottages and hotels that can be wheeled off at a moment's notice. Indeed, I believe if you explore far enough you can find old gables and markets and assembly-rooms, and probably Baedeker or Murray would chronicle a creditable number of inhabitants. But for London people the only Margate is the beach. Nothing else counts, unless it is the pier in the evenings, or when the tide is in, or when the London boats arrive. I suppose the people do go into the town occasionally, for they must sleep somewhere, and there are not enough hotels and lodging-houses directly on the sea to hold them all. But wherever they sleep, they live on the beach. It is a very good one for the English coast, though perhaps not to be compared to the beautiful sweep of sands at Atlantic City and many another little town on the Jersey coast. However, not a square foot of it is wasted. There the London crowd squats—there is no other word for it; the same crowd, partly small tradesmen, partly swaggering clerks, partly well-to-do workmen, partly professional loafers, and largely their wives and daughters, that you see picknicking and betting on the Downs at Epsom, or scattered over the river-banks at the Henley regatta, or packed into a solid mass at the Lord Mayor's show. The only difference is in the background and the way the holiday is spent.

Oh, I love to sit a-gyzing on the boundless blue horizing
When the scorching sun is blyzing down on sands and sea!
And to watch the busy figgers of the happy little diggers,
Or to listen to the niggers when they choose to come to me.

There you have it in Mr. Anstey's «idyllic» verse 5. Only no one can ever sit« a-gyzing » in romantic solitude. Not even in Santa Lucia in Naples have I seen people herded so close together, and living an outdoor life with such unembarrassed frankness. Rows upon rows, groups upon groups, of men and women sprawl on low steamer-chairs, open-mouthed and snoring without shame. Lovers lie in each other's arms prone upon the sand—the disconcerting spectacle 'Any and 'Arriet always present in their hour of courtship. Family parties sit within neatly dug-out inclosures, mothers with the week's mending, fathers with their pipes. And children by the dozen, by the hundred, by the thousand, barelegged, frocks and knickerbockers rolled well up into little bathing-drawers, are digging and paddling and building; while in a space apart, marked by a gay red flag, poor little pale-faced cripples are hobbling about in the sand, a show for the pennies of the compassionate. And down into this mess of people, too stupefied by sunlight and sea air to seek amusement, come the same beloved negro minstrels who turn up at Epsom and Henley and Hammersmith, and at chance London street-corners on a Saturday afternoon. But they are ten times more gorgeous at Margate: faces shinier, coats and trousers gaudier, sashes wider, buttonhole bouquets huger, hats jauntier, some in tights, some in flannels, with bones, tambourine, and banjo all complete. And a wide space is made for them hours beforehand, and the audience collects, first a circle of children low on the sands; then circle after circle of the steamer-chairs; then people standing behind the chairs, and more people on the Embankment. For the late-comer there is no getting near enough to hear a joke or a song. And when finally the morning's heroes arrive, they bring another audience with them—men, women, and children dogging their every step through the streets, patiently waiting outside every public-house where it pleases them to stop. Talk of the success of a Patti or a Melba: it is nothing to that of the minstrels at Margate!

The crowd

And down, too, on the beach come the seedy German bands, and the unblackened strolling singers, and the men with pianos and concertinas and cornets and harmoniums, and the preachers, and the photographers. And down, too, comes the Punch-and-Judy man, but not the summer I was at Margate; for Mr. Brown, who had the monopoly, was ill, —so I learned upon inquiry,— and not another Punch of such irreproachable morals was to be found in all England. The fact is, though you would not believe it, the police have a strict eye upon the program of the beach performance.

The bathing-machines

Through the crowd boys push and wriggle with trays of nougat or fruit or buns. And over the chorus of noises you hear the ceaseless «Hi! hi!» of the donkey-boys, and the shrieks of giddy young ladies clinging to the donkeys as they gallop full tilt along the sands, and the screams of delighted children in the little goatcarriages on the Embankment above. Away out beyond, standing in a white-and-green line, wheel-deep in the surf, are the absurd bathing-machines; and between them and the dry beach an old cart loaded with people is being continually driven backward and forward; while fat old bathing-women, as out of date as Sairey Gamp herself, wait gossiping in the water; and farther still bathers are splashing, men and women apart—as well they may be, for the costume of the men would be a scandal anywhere save in prudish England.

This is the scene presented by Margate sands every day, and every hour of the day, during the season—serenely domestic at moments, boisterously hilarious at others, especially when a big excursion is let loose upon the place. Then you have the courting that is done by blows and thumps; then you see 'Arry and 'Arriet exchanging hats; then you have horse-play bedlam; and mounted police show themselves in the near streets, and magistrates, the next morning, are officially shocked by the conduct of the «savages» from London.

It is true there is a more elegant end to the sea-front, partly for invalids whose doctors prescribe Margate air, which has the name of being the purest and most bracing in England, the number of Bath chairs proving medical compulsion. There is no promiscuous herding here. Groups take their books and work and gossip into railed-off spaces, with a haughty assumption of the privacy that costs a penny. The very amusements are distinctly genteel: archery, lawntennis, and a lightning draftsman making portraits in a tent while you wait; and as the shore has risen into cliffs, bathers are discreetly screened from public gaze, and the narrow sands are as decorous as in that picture of «Pegwell Bay,» by Dyce, in the National Gallery 6 —a picture of a shingly beach, and two or three lone figures, in the absurd costumes of the fifties, gathering shells in polite isolation.

The pier

But upon the cliff end the real Margate crowd never intrudes. Why should it? There are far better ways of enjoying itself. If you wish to give the Briton a really good time, put him in some sort of vehicle, averaging from the donkey «shay» that «knocked 'em in the old Kent road» 7 to the brake and cornet, and send him off driving. Where the Embankment widens into a great square above the sands, brakes and busses are always ready to start for St. Leonard's or Westgate or Pegwell Bay—above all, for Ramsgate. There's the place for a «'appy day »! The drive over is short,—about half an hour or so,—but quite long enough to need a half-way house, where everybody stops for a drink, and the conductor takes up a collection for no better reason than that nothing can be done in Margate without a collection; the real marvel is that your landlord does not come with his hat instead of his bill! I have always wondered why Mrs. Tuggs, when she found Margate too low, went over to Ramsgate. It is really Margate all over again, but Margate exaggerated, intensified, concentrated. The beach is smaller, the people are huddled closer together, and the crowd is the same, —negroes, strolling players, donkeys, goatcarts, bathers, children, lovers, preachers, photographers, peddlers, sleepers, cockshies, and bathing-machines,—but in so dense a mass that it looks as if a swarm of human bees or ants had alighted upon the sands. The very air seems close, and one would as soon bathe in the Thames at London Bridge as in the sea just here. If Trouville made Flaubert long to hide himself in the Sandwich Islands or in the virgin forests of Brazil, what, what would he have felt here at Ramsgate? Yet not even in an Eastern bazaar or market could there be more dazzling color; and as for character, there is enough to set up a new Dickens or Charles Keene for life.

If you do not care to go to Ramsgate, there are boats in the harbor, with their «boatmen so beguiling,» 8 and the menagerie with its beasts to be fed, and the music-hall attached, with its «stars » from London, who'd «all be in the workhouse should their antics cease to dror!» 9 —an inducement for women and babies and nurses, who would be quite out of place in the palaces of Leicester Square, to flock to this «hall by the sea.» And there are shops full of the indispensable china « souvenirs from Margate.» And first and last and always, there are tea and shrimps! Many things may have changed. Gillray's 10 little phaeton, with the round apron front, and its boy in jack-boots on one of the horses, has disappeared from the beach; the saucer hats and swirling crinolines of Leech 11 are no more: but tea and shrimps are as essential elements to Margate life as the sea and the sky. You are not supposed to need or to wish anything else, and in vain you may try the little restaurants that are perched on the cliffs as delightfully as the Neapolitan cafes on the Posilipo, or those others that set out their tables on balconies looking seaward. If you would dine, you must fall back upon the pompous hotel table d'hôte, which you share with the last theater company down from London. But one other thing you can order at the restaurant, to be sure—champagne. To be in the Margate fashion, you must drink it without so much as a biscuit to eat. On the pier, which is as select as the twopence charge for admission can make it, couples of those stupendously vulgar people you do not believe in when you see them on the pages of papers like «PickMe-Up» 12 —indeed, you hardly believe in them when you see them in life—may be found as early as eleven in the morning pledging each other over a magnum of extra dry. And the Margate swell will bring his friends into one of the restaurants, at any hour after his evening meal of tea and shrimps, and call loudly for champagne, just to let you know that he can do the thing in style when he chooses, and pay for his bottle with the biggest lord or «dook » of them all!

I hesitate to mention beauty as another of Margate's charms, so little has it to do with the popularity of the place. But for all that, very beautiful it is; and its sands every morning and afternoon arrange themselves into a picture as brilliant and gay as you could find at Trouville or Abbazia, at Coney Island or Newport. To follow the cliffs beyond the hotels and villas is to find one's self at once in as pretty English country as Constable ever painted—a country of broad meadows and plowed fields, of hedge-rows and stately elms, of old farm-houses and gray ruins, of cloud-swept skies and misty blue distances. Toward twilight, when the tide is coming in and the beach is deserted except by the small boy kindly giving the necessary spot of black here and there, and the occasional barge left high and dry on the sands, the lines are as lovely as those that the Venetian Lagune make at low water. As for the barges, with their half-furled sails, they are really finer than anything at Venice; while every evening there is the atmosphere for which on the Adriatic you might have to wait a year. And as dusk deepens, lines of light on the Embankment curve with the curving shore, and torches flame from the barrows of the periwinkle-men, and the black, shadowy pier crosses the deep blue of sea and sky as fantastically and decoratively as in a color-print by Hiroshige. And, gradually, what people are pleased to call the vulgarity of Margate is lost in the beauty of night, only broken momentarily by the shriek of 'Arry sporting with 'Arriet in the «shide»!

- Elizabeth Robins Pennell, pp 569-575, The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, Volume 54, 1897 (illustrations by Joseph Pennell)

1. From The Tuggs's at Ramsgate (Sketches by Boz, Volume 2, by Charles Dickens) in which the Tuggs family make this trip. Her actual quote about Margate is "nobody there, but tradespeople".
2. The Margate paddle steamer Royal Sovereign was still in service in 1919, and the British Pathé archive has this nice clip of it setting sail from Old Swan Pier at Charing Cross:

Margate boat - 'Royal Sovereign'

3. See Noir and the North Kent marshes.
4. A reference to The Poor Old 'Orse, a parody music hall song in F Anstey's 1892 Mr. Punch's model music-hall songs & dramas:

For we 'ad to stop o' course,
Jest to bait the bloomin' 'orse,
So we'd pots of ale and porter
(Or a drop o' something shorter),
While he drunk his pail o' water,
He was sech a whale on water!
That more water than he oughter,
More water than he oughter,
'Ad the poor old 'orse!

5. Also a parody music-hall song from Mr. Punch's model music-hall songs & dramas: The Joys of the Seaside.
6. And still so: Pegwell Bay, Kent - a Recollection of October 5th 1858. A classic painting of the beach and chalk cliffs further round the Kent coast, it shows in the sky the faint trail of Donati's comet (see previously: Comet apocalypse, 1857).
7. From Albert Chevalier's 1892 music-hall song Wot Cher! or, Knocked ’em in the Old Kent Rd.
8, 9. More quotes from The Joys of the Seaside (see 5).
10/ The caricaturist James Gillray convalesced in Margate in 1807.
11. John Leech, also a caricaturist, was a Margate regular.
12. Pick-Me-Up was a weekly comic magazine with topical articles and cartoons, that ran from 1888 to 1909.