From 221B Baker Street to the Old Curiosity Shop Read online

  On the opposite side of the Albert Embankment from Vauxhall Cross is a small park called Spring Gardens, adjacent to Vauxhall station. This was once one of London’s main centres of entertainment. Opened in about 1660 it became known in 1785 as Vauxhall Gardens and was furnished with Chinese pavilions, restaurants, tightrope walkers, discreet venues for assignations and entertainments such as firework displays, hot air balloon ascents and orchestras. In 1749 Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks attracted an audience of 12,000 and Thomas Arne, composer of Rule Britannia, was the director of music there for thirty years from 1745. Tobias Smollett in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker referred to ‘a composition of baubles, over-charged with paltry ornaments, ill-conceived and poorly-executed; without any unity of design or propriety of disposition’ though he later relented and called it ‘a place crowded with the gayest company, ranging through those blissful shades, or supping in different lodges on cold collations, enlivened with mirth, freedom and good humour, and animated by an excellent band of music.’ Wordsworth, after a visit at the age of 18, wrote in The Prelude, Book VII, Residence in London of its:

  … green groves, and wilderness of lamps

  Dimming the stars, and fireworks magical,

  And gorgeous ladies, under splendid domes,

  Floating in dance, or warbling high in air

  The songs of spirits!

  Thackeray, in Vanity Fair, makes the gardens the scene of one of Becky Sharp’s failed attempts to trap the amiable, wealthy and indolent Jos Sedley into a proposal of marriage. In 1859 the gardens closed and the park we see at Vauxhall is a small relic of its former extensive grounds.

  Broadway, St James’s Park, was formerly home to the SIS and Ian Fleming throughout the Second World War. (Chris Sampson)

  WANDSWORTH, HAMMERSMITH & FULHAM

  Further to the south, in the borough of Wandsworth, is Wandsworth Prison, a prominent feature of Graham Greene’s early work It’s a Battlefield (1934), which the author describes as his ‘first overtly political work’. It concerns the story of a Communist bus driver called Jim Drover, who stabs an undercover police officer who is about to hit Drover’s wife at a Communist rally they are attending. Drover is condemned to hang and spends time in Wandsworth Prison where little is heard of him throughout the novel whose themes are more concerned with the implications of his sentence than the fate of the individual himself. As Greene himself said, the theme of the book is ‘the injustice of man’s justice’ as Drover’s Communist colleagues hope for his execution in the belief that its injustice will rouse the sympathy of the public. Greene visited a prison to inform his depiction of life inside its walls and a match factory so that he could describe such a factory where Drover’s sister-in-law worked. The novel draws parallels between the lives of factory workers and those of prison inmates. He called the work ‘a panoramic novel of London’, the detective story being a vehicle by which he can explore the nature of class conflict, capitalism and politics. As in many of Greene’s novels, few characters are ever happy for long.

  Further to the west is Putney, which in the nineteenth century was a suburb of London. It was the home of Dora Spenlow in David Copperfield after the death of her father, where she was despatched to live with maiden aunts. Consequently the love-struck David spent many fruitless hours there, on one occasion walking there from the city with his friend Traddles in order to ingratiate himself with the two maiden ladies. The marriage of David and Dora eventually takes place and a reference to ‘boatmen strolling in’ to the church suggests that the building Dickens had in mind for the ceremony was Putney parish church, which lies on the riverside and is most often seen at the start of the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race. On the opposite bank of the river is ‘a pretty villa at Fulham, on the banks of the Thames, which was one of the most desirable residences in the world when a rowing-match happened to be going past’. This was the home of Sir Barnet and Lady Skettles in Dombey and Son where Florence Dombey stayed, walking along the river bank while she lamented her rejection by her father whose interest lay only in his son. The riverside villas are no more, but the most notable of them, Craven Cottage, which was the home of Dickens’s friend and fellow author Edward Bulwer-Lytton, is remembered in the name of stadium of Fulham Football Club which overlooks the river.

  Further along the river to the west, The Dove Inn at 19 Upper Mall, Hammersmith, opened as the Dove Coffee House in 1796 and is one of London’s best known riverside inns. William Morris lived next door and the humorous writer A.P. Herbert used The Dove as a model for the pub The Pigeons in his novel The Water Gypsies. The Scottish writer James Thomson (1700–48) also wrote the words for Rule Britannia at The Dove, which is one of the most popular vantage points from which to watch the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race.

  GREENWICH

  St Alphege’s Church in Greenwich is a fine Baroque structure designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor in 1714 and sympathetically restored in 1953 after being bombed in 1941. This was the scene of the marriage of John Harmon and Bella Wilfer in Our Mutual Friend, the ceremony taking place without the knowledge of Bella’s hostile mother. An earlier church saw the baptism of Henry VIII who was born in Greenwich.

  The Trafalgar Tavern in Park Row, Greenwich, was patronised by many writers including Charles Dickens, W.M. Thackeray and Wilkie Collins and in Our Mutual Friend Dickens chose it for the wedding feast of Bella and John. It was noted for its fresh fish, particularly whitebait, and Dickens wrote: ‘What a dinner! Specimens of all the fishes that swim in the sea surely had swum their way to it!’ It was extensively used, also for ‘Whitebait dinners’, by Victorian cabinet ministers, the last official such dinner being celebrated by Gladstone’s administration in 1880. In the 1980s the tradition was revived when a dining club called Saints and Sinners, comprising members of Mrs Thatcher’s cabinet, resumed the practice of dining there. John and Bella move to a ‘bright and fresh’ cottage at Blackheath, an area familiar to Dickens as he would cross it on his way from his homes in London to Gad’s Hill near Rochester.

  At the opening of A Tale of Two Cities the Dover Mail is ascending Shooter’s Hill, Blackheath, which was also, according to the author, the home of David Copperfield’s hated school Salem House. In fact the school was almost certainly based upon Wellington House Academy in Mornington Crescent.

  10

  OUTER LONDON AND BEYOND

  Literary associations are not, of course, confined to the relatively small part of inner London to which space has confined this work. Zadie Smith, for example, in her novel White Teeth, celebrates Willesden with its rich and ironic mixture of often bewildered members of different racial groups, political views and faiths. It gives a charming and optimistic account of a multicultural community, its personalities and events bathed in humour, its multilingual character described as ‘Babelian’. It occupies an honoured place in a tradition stretching back to Chaucer.

  Travelling further north-west we find Harrow, where Anthony Trollope went to school and lived in a farmhouse which became the model for his novel Orley Farm, the name of the novel having been adopted in the nineteenth century by the school which purchased Trollope’s former home and still occupies the site. Byron also attended Harrow School, though his ‘favourite spot’ was in the churchyard where a marble plaque is engraved with a verse from his ‘Lines written beneath an Elm’.

  To the south, in Kingston-upon-Thames, the extensive childhood home of John Galsworthy, Coombe Leigh, was later occupied by a school and was the model for Robin Hill in The Forsyte Saga, the home to which Soames planned to take his wife Irene in the hope of gaining her affection: a hope frustrated when she fell in love with the architect Philip Bosinney.

  To the south-east, in Eltham, is the former home of Sir Thomas More’s daughter Margaret Roper, which gave its name to Moat House, the home of E. Nesbit’s Bastable family in her 1899 work The Story of the Treasure Seekers.

  And one could venture further to Gravesend, in Kent, off whose shore Joseph Conrad’s
story Heart of Darkness is narrated on a boat lying in the Thames.

  But all these, and much more, are for another time and another book …

  COPYRIGHT

  First published in 2013

  The History Press

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  © Stephen Halliday, 2013

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