From 221B Baker Street to the Old Curiosity Shop Page 10

  BELGRAVIA

  South-west of Mayfair, to the south of Hyde Park, are the Belgravia and Pimlico districts. Like Bloomsbury, these were created by the builder Thomas Cubitt (1788–1855) in the early nineteenth century on marshy land which, in this case, belonged mostly to the Grosvenor family, who also own much of Mayfair. The area is bounded to the north and south by Hyde Park and the Thames; and to the east and west by Buckingham Palace Road and Sloane Street. As in Mayfair itself the family’s names and properties are reflected in names of streets and other features of the area. Belgravia itself takes its name from one of the family’s properties at Belgrave in Leicestershire; Eaton Square is named after Eaton Hall, the Grosvenor country home in Cheshire; and Lupus Street, in Pimlico, remembers Lupus Grosvenor, 1st Duke of Westminster (1825–99). Belgravia, from an early date, was a very fashionable area owing to its proximity to Buckingham Palace. It is now the home of many embassies and Joseph Conrad, in his novel The Secret Agent, places the Russian Embassy there in the 1880s, his double agent Verloc, spy, agent provocateur and pornographer walking from his premises in Soho to the embassy via Rotten Row in Hyde Park.

  Belgravia quickly acquired a reputation for affluence, not always accompanied by generosity, as reflected in Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘West London’:

  Crouched on the pavement, close by Belgrave Square,

  A tramp I saw, ill, moody and tongue-tied.

  A babe was in her arms, and at her side

  A girl, their clothes were rags, their feet were bare.

  Some labouring men, whose work lay somewhere there,

  Passed opposite; she touched the girl, who hied

  Across, and begged, and came back satisfied.

  The rich she had let pass, with frozen stare.

  Thought I ‘Above her state this spirit towers;

  She will not ask of aliens, but of friends,

  Of sharers in a common human fate’.

  Platform 9¾ at King’s Cross station, made famous by the Harry Potter stories. (Lauren Manning)

  6

  CAMDEN AND ISLINGTON

  The London boroughs of Camden and Islington contain many places which are rich in literary associations. John Keats’s home in Keats Grove, Hampstead is now a museum to the poet’s memory, while the Bloomsbury squares which are strongly associated with Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey and others retain much of the tranquillity which attracted members of that oddly fascinating and self-absorbed group of friends, though it is doubtful whether they could afford to live there now. Charles Dickens’s home in Doughty Street is the only one of his many London homes which survives (and bears a Blue Plaque to mark the fact) and in more recent times King’s Cross station has featured prominently in the Harry Potter books and films.

  KING’S CROSS STATION

  Like John Betjeman, G.K. Chesterton was moved to verse by a railway station in his 1900 poem ‘King’s Cross Station’:

  The circled cosmos whereof man is god

  Has suns and stars of green and gold and red,

  And cloudlands of great smoke, that range o-er range

  Far floating, hide its iron heavens o-erhead.

  God! Shall we ever honour what we are,

  And see one moment ‘ere the age expire,

  The vision of man shouting and erect,

  Whirled by the shrieking steeds of flood and fire?

  Platform 9¾ at King’s Cross is, of course, the point from which the Hogwarts Express departs, carrying Harry Potter and his friends to Hogsmeade station and their destination at Hogwarts boarding school where young wizards and witches are taught magic by Albus Dumbledore and others. Hogwarts itself is somewhere in Scotland, a destination served from King’s Cross by the Flying Scotsman as well as by J.K. Rowling’s mythical train. In an interview J.K. Rowling admitted that she confused the platform layout at King’s Cross with that of Euston when writing her books, so King’s Cross gained an unintended distinction. King’s Cross station was in fact used in filming some of the Harry Potter movies, as was Goathland on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, which runs steam trains of the kind that have long been absent from King’s Cross itself. When filming at King’s Cross, a notice was placed on the ground outside platforms 9 and 10 pointing to the Hogwarts Express. It was later removed and a ‘Platform 9¾’ sign was erected on a wall of the real platforms 9 and 10.

  CLERKENWELL

  Dickens placed much of the action in Oliver Twist in the Clerkenwell area, describing in detail the route taken in the novel by the Artful Dodger as he leads Oliver to Fagin’s den in Saffron Hill (then a disreputable quarter) where Fagin awaits Oliver. Much of the route the two boys follow may easily be followed on a map today:

  They crossed from the Angel into St John’s road; struck down the small street which terminates at Sadler’s Wells Theatre; through Exmouth Street and Coppice Row…thence into Little Saffron Hill and so into Saffron Hill the Great; along which the Dodger scuttled at a rapid pace, directing Oliver to follow close at his heels … A dirtier or more wretched place he had never seen … and from several of the doorways great ill-looking fellows were emerging; bound, to all appearance, on no very well-disposed or harmless errands.

  As they walked past New River Head, adjacent to Sadler’s Wells, they would have passed the residence of Uriah Heep in David Copperfield. It is likely that the story of Oliver Twist’s association with Fagin and the Artful Dodger arose from a report in The Times on 14 January 1834 of the case of Edward Trabshaw, who had run away from a good home after a dispute with his father and been picked up by John Murphy, a boy of about his age, in Regent Street. Murphy took Trabshaw to Murphy’s father ‘Old Murphy the child stealer’ (who had ‘a countenance in which cunning and ferocity were strongly blended’), where he joined about a dozen other children in a ‘dark and filthy room’ in Cross Lane, which was then near Drury Lane. Old Murphy told Trabshaw that he could stay ‘provided he did everything he desired him to do’, the requirement being that he should bring back sixpence or a shilling every time he left the dwelling. Murphy’s den was raided by police and Edward Trabshaw was reunited with his father, Murphy protesting that he took the boy in ‘out of pure charity’. Dickens began to write Oliver Twist shortly after the case was reported and the similarities between Murphy’s activities and Fagin’s den of young thieves are striking, though Murphy was evidently of Afro-Caribbean stock while Fagin was portrayed as Jewish. Murphy’s fate is unknown but Fagin, of course, paid with his life.

  The Museum Tavern on Great Russell Street, the inspiration for the Alpha Inn in the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle. (Ewan Munro)

  Clerkenwell, which in the nineteenth century was an area of much crime and poverty, is the scene of George Gissing’s 1889 novel The Nether World which, like Somerset Maugham’s 1897 work Liza of Lambeth, is concerned with the hopeless lives of the poor. It opens in Clerkenwell Close, where ‘every alley is thronged with small industries’ as it still does, much of the road having survived development. The themes of the novel are poverty, loveless marriages, jealousy, illness and death with little of the hope for the future, which permeates many of the novels of Dickens.

  BLOOMSBURY

  Bloomsbury, the area behind the British Museum roughly bounded by Grays Inn Road and Tottenham Court Road to the east and west and by Euston Road and New Oxford Street to the north and south, is most often associated with the Bloomsbury Group of writers and artists who were friends of the family of Sir Leslie Stephen, first author of the Dictionary of National Biography and father of Vanessa and Virginia (later Virginia Woolf). Blue Plaques in Gordon Square remind the visitor that, containing as it does the homes of Virginia Stephen and her family (at No. 46) and of Lytton Strachey (No. 51), this was the centre of the group’s social activity. The area was developed in the 1820s by the builder Thomas Cubitt (1788–1855), who turned its waterlogged meadows (on the Duke of Bedford’s estate) into comfortable houses for middle-class families whose fathers worked in the City
. The name ‘Bloomsbury’ is derived from the manor, or ‘bury’, of William Belmond, who bought it in the thirteenth century, but its streets and squares reflect the fact that it later passed into the hands of the Dukes of Bedford. So it contains Bedford Square; Russell Square (the Bedford family name); Tavistock Square (the eldest son of the duke is the marquis of Tavistock; and Woburn Square (Woburn Abbey being the duke’s home). Charles Dickens moved to 48 Doughty Street nearby, in 1836, and lived there for three years.

  On the corner of Great Russell Street, opposite the British Museum, is the Museum Tavern, a grand old pub that lays claim to having been the inspiration for Conan Doyle’s Alpha Inn in the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle. In the story, the proprietor of the Alpha Inn purchases its festive geese from Breckinridge’s stand in Covent Garden. One of the geese has the stolen carbuncle hidden in its crop.

  WHAT SHALL WE HAVE FOR DINNER?

  In Tavistock Square, Tavistock House (now replaced by the headquarters of the British Medical Association), was for nine years (1851–60) the home of Dickens, where he wrote Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities and part of Great Expectations. And it was while living here that Catherine, Dickens’s neglected wife, wrote one of the first cookery books, What Shall We Have For Dinner? under the name ‘Lady Maria Clutterbuck’. It is still in print. It was while living at Tavistock House that Charles and Catherine separated, to her great distress, to make way for Dickens’s young mistress, the actress Nelly Ternan. Catherine was virtually exiled to Camden and lived apart from Dickens and their children until the author died in 1870. Catherine lived for another nine years and on her deathbed she handed to her daughter Kate the letters that Charles had written to her, instructing her: ‘Give these to the British Museum that the world may know he loved me once.’

  Tavistock Square in Bloomsbury was the home of Charles Dickens when he wrote Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities and part of Great Expectations. (Ewan Munro)

  At No. 52 Tavistock Square Leonard and Virginia Woolf lived and ran the Hogarth Press. It had been founded in 1917 to provide congenial, therapeutic work for Virginia Woolf while she was recovering from one of her frequent spells of ill-health and was named after their house in Richmond where it began in 1917. The press moved to Tavistock Square in 1924 and remained there until the outbreak of war in 1939. Their first publication, Two Stories, contained a short story by each of them, but besides the novels of Virginia Woolf herself they went on to publish works by E.M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield and, most notably, The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, first published in 1924.

  Tavistock Square was also the fictional home of the Cadaver Club, whose members include P.D. James’s detective superintendent Adam Dalgleish and other men ‘with an interest in murder’.

  In Dickens’s early short story ‘A Bloomsbury Christening’, published in 1834 before he moved to Doughty Street, Mr and Mrs Charles Kitterbell live at No. 14 Great Russell Street, now a delicatessen which bears a Blue Plaque to record its place in literature. The ‘Bloomsbury Christening’ of the title occurs at St George’s Church, Hart Street, which has since been renamed Bloomsbury Way. The church’s unusual spire is clearly visible in Hogarth’s 1750 print Gin Lane and in the same year the novelist and magistrate Henry Fielding published his Inquiry into the increase of London robberies and attributed the problem to the increase in gin drinking which had been brought to England earlier in the century by William of Orange. You could be ‘drunk for a penny and dead drunk for twopence’ at a time when gin carried no duty and was widely used as a sedative for infants, turning them into alcoholics before they were weaned.

  Nearby is Great Ormond Street, home of the famous children’s hospital which was founded in 1852 and of which Dickens was an enthusiastic supporter, both writing and giving public readings of A Christmas Carol to raise funds, the latter activity launching his very successful career of public readings. It is probably the hospital to which Betty Higden’s grandson Johnny is taken to die in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, and the hospital was also supported by J.M. Barrie (1860–1937) who left to the hospital the royalties of Peter Pan.

  Our Mutual Friend, published in 1865, is the story of John Harmon, who has been committed to marry the shrewish Bella Wilfer under the terms of his wealthy father’s will. John conceals his identity on return from abroad to learn something of Bella’s character, a deception made easier by the widespread belief that he is dead. Mr and Mrs Boffin, the kindly employees of old Harmon, contrive a series of incidents through which young John Harmon and Bella Wilfer come to appreciate each other’s qualities and the two marry. The book contains a number of important minor characters, notably Jenny Wren the dolls’ dressmaker and Lizzie Hexham, the daughter of a boatman.

  FOUNDLINGS AND VANITY FAIR

  A further link with both authors is to be found in nearby Coram Fields, just to the north of Great Ormond Street. This was the original home of the Thomas Coram Foundation or Foundling Hospital, founded by the sea captain of that name in 1739 as a home for abandoned children. Dickens, whose home in Doughty Street was close by, wrote of it in 1853 that ‘This home of the blank [i.e. nameless] children is by no means a blank place … the Governors of this charity are a model to all others’. In Little Dorrit the character Tattycoram is a Coram Foundling. At the first performance of Peter Pan in 1904 Barrie insisted that children from the Foundling Hospital be in the audience, confident that the laughter of children would have an infectious influence on the audience. The stratagem worked. Coram Fields remains the only park in London which adults may not enter unless accompanied by a child. Dickens also places two of his landladies in the area. In one of his early short stories ‘The Boarding House’ he places Mrs Tibbs in Great Coram Street:

  The house of Mrs Tibbs was decidedly the neatest in all Great Coram Street, as clean and bright as indefatigable white-washing and hearth-stoning and scrubbing and rubbing could make them. The wonder was that the brass door-plate with the interesting inscription MRS TIBBS had never caught fire from constant friction, so perseveringly was it polished.

  Great Coram Street, with its charming Victorian terraces, was demolished in the 1970s to make way for the concrete mass of the Brunswick Centre which lies between Brunswick Square and Marchmont Street, though much of the surrounding area has been preserved, including Dickens’s former home in Doughty Street. Another landlady, Mrs Lirriper, in Dickens’s early story of that name, was also in Great Coram Street though she soon moved to 81 Norfolk Street, Strand, located, according to her advertisement in Bradshaw’s Railway Guide, ‘mid-way between the City and St James’s’ where she could charge as much as eighteen shillings a week to the businessmen who were now her clients.

  Dickens’s contemporary W.M. Thackeray set much of Vanity Fair (1847–48) in Bloomsbury which, by the date of the book’s publication, had become a well-established residential area for the aspiring middle classes and particularly for those engaged in commerce in the City. Thackeray lived with his family in Coram Street in 1837–43 and his eldest daughter Anne was born there in 1838. In ‘The Ballad of Eliza Davis’ he wrote:

  Perhaps you know the Foundling chapel,

  Where the little children sing,

  Lord I like to hear on Sunday

  Them there pretty little things.

  In Vanity Fair Mr Todd lives in Coram Street while the Osborne family, whose great wealth derives from the City, live at No. 96 Russell Square and occupy ‘the best pew at the Foundlings [hospital]’ through support of which they hope to gain social advancement. Their son, the feckless George Osborne, is disinherited by his ambitious father for marrying Amelia Sedley whose family, also City merchants, live at No. 62 Russell Square but lose their fortune and have to move to the less salubrious Fulham. However, before the family’s fall from wealth and grace the innocent Amelia is visited in Russell Square by her penniless and ruthless school friend Becky Sharp, who attempts to charm Amelia’s indolent brother
Jos, the ‘Collector of Boggley Wallah’, into marriage, an enterprise in which she fails. Becky manages to maintain a handsome lifestyle with her hopeless husband Rawdon Crawley by becoming the mistress of Lord Steyne, who lives in Gaunt House, an imaginary location which appears to be in the Bloomsbury area. Becky, tired of Rawdon, ensures his death by securing his appointment as governor of fever-ridden Coventry Island.