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_ As I shut the door of my lodging behind me, and came out into the
streets at six on a drizzling Saturday evening in the last past
month of January, all that neighbourhood of Covent-garden looked
very desolate. It is so essentially a neighbourhood which has seen
better days, that bad weather affects it sooner than another place
which has not come down in the World. In its present reduced
condition it bears a thaw almost worse than any place I know. It
gets so dreadfully low-spirited when damp breaks forth. Those
wonderful houses about Drury-lane Theatre, which in the palmy days
of theatres were prosperous and long-settled places of business,
and which now change hands every week, but never change their
character of being divided and sub-divided on the ground floor into
mouldy dens of shops where an orange and half-a-dozen nuts, or a
pomatum-pot, one cake of fancy soap, and a cigar box, are offered
for sale and never sold, were most ruefully contemplated that
evening, by the statue of Shakespeare, with the rain-drops coursing
one another down its innocent nose. Those inscrutable pigeon-hole
offices, with nothing in them (not so much as an inkstand) but a
model of a theatre before the curtain, where, in the Italian Opera
season, tickets at reduced prices are kept on sale by nomadic
gentlemen in smeary hats too tall for them, whom one occasionally
seems to have seen on race-courses, not wholly unconnected with
strips of cloth of various colours and a rolling ball--those
Bedouin establishments, deserted by the tribe, and tenantless,
except when sheltering in one corner an irregular row of ginger-
beer bottles, which would have made one shudder on such a night,
but for its being plain that they had nothing in them, shrunk from
the shrill cries of the news-boys at their Exchange in the kennel
of Catherine-street, like guilty things upon a fearful summons. At
the pipe-shop in Great Russell-street, the Death's-head pipes were
like theatrical memento mori, admonishing beholders of the decline
of the playhouse as an Institution. I walked up Bow-street,
disposed to be angry with the shops there, that were letting out
theatrical secrets by exhibiting to work-a-day humanity the stuff
of which diadems and robes of kings are made. I noticed that some
shops which had once been in the dramatic line, and had struggled
out of it, were not getting on prosperously--like some actors I
have known, who took to business and failed to make it answer. In
a word, those streets looked so dull, and, considered as theatrical
streets, so broken and bankrupt, that the FOUND DEAD on the black
board at the police station might have announced the decease of the
Drama, and the pools of water outside the fire-engine maker's at
the corner of Long-acre might have been occasioned by his having
brought out the whole of his stock to play upon its last
smouldering ashes.
And yet, on such a night in so degenerate a time, the object of my
journey was theatrical. And yet within half an hour I was in an
immense theatre, capable of holding nearly five thousand people.
What Theatre? Her Majesty's? Far better. Royal Italian Opera?
Far better. Infinitely superior to the latter for hearing in;
infinitely superior to both, for seeing in. To every part of this
Theatre, spacious fire-proof ways of ingress and egress. For every
part of it, convenient places of refreshment and retiring rooms.
Everything to eat and drink carefully supervised as to quality, and
sold at an appointed price; respectable female attendants ready for
the commonest women in the audience; a general air of
consideration, decorum, and supervision, most commendable; an
unquestionably humanising influence in all the social arrangements
of the place.
Surely a dear Theatre, then? Because there were in London (not
very long ago) Theatres with entrance-prices up to half-a-guinea a
head, whose arrangements were not half so civilised. Surely,
therefore, a dear Theatre? Not very dear. A gallery at three-
pence, another gallery at fourpence, a pit at sixpence, boxes and
pit-stalls at a shilling, and a few private boxes at half-a-crown.
My uncommercial curiosity induced me to go into every nook of this
great place, and among every class of the audience assembled in it-
-amounting that evening, as I calculated, to about two thousand and
odd hundreds. Magnificently lighted by a firmament of sparkling
chandeliers, the building was ventilated to perfection. My sense
of smell, without being particularly delicate, has been so offended
in some of the commoner places of public resort, that I have often
been obliged to leave them when I have made an uncommercial journey
expressly to look on. The air of this Theatre was fresh, cool, and
wholesome. To help towards this end, very sensible precautions had
been used, ingeniously combining the experience of hospitals and
railway stations. Asphalt pavements substituted for wooden floors,
honest bare walls of glazed brick and tile--even at the back of the
boxes--for plaster and paper, no benches stuffed, and no carpeting
or baize used; a cool material with a light glazed surface, being
the covering of the seats.
These various contrivances are as well considered in the place in
question as if it were a Fever Hospital; the result is, that it is
sweet and healthful. It has been constructed from the ground to
the roof, with a careful reference to sight and sound in every
corner; the result is, that its form is beautiful, and that the
appearance of the audience, as seen from the proscenium--with every
face in it commanding the stage, and the whole so admirably raked
and turned to that centre, that a hand can scarcely move in the
great assemblage without the movement being seen from thence--is
highly remarkable in its union of vastness with compactness. The
stage itself, and all its appurtenances of machinery, cellarage,
height and breadth, are on a scale more like the Scala at Milan, or
the San Carlo at Naples, or the Grand Opera at Paris, than any
notion a stranger would be likely to form of the Britannia Theatre
at Hoxton, a mile north of St. Luke's Hospital in the Old-street-
road, London. The Forty Thieves might be played here, and every
thief ride his real horse, and the disguised captain bring in his
oil jars on a train of real camels, and nobody be put out of the
way. This really extraordinary place is the achievement of one
man's enterprise, and was erected on the ruins of an inconvenient
old building in less than five months, at a round cost of five-and-
twenty thousand pounds. To dismiss this part of my subject, and
still to render to the proprietor the credit that is strictly his
due, I must add that his sense of the responsibility upon him to
make the best of his audience, and to do his best for them, is a
highly agreeable sign of these times.
As the spectators at this theatre, for a reason I will presently
show, were the object of my journey, I entered on the play of the
night as one of the two thousand and odd hundreds, by looking about
me at my neighbours. We were a motley assemblage of people, and we
had a good many boys and young men among us; we had also many girls
and young women. To represent, however, that we did not include a
very great number, and a very fair proportion of family groups,
would be to make a gross mis-statement. Such groups were to be
seen in all parts of the house; in the boxes and stalls
particularly, they were composed of persons of very decent
appearance, who had many children with them. Among our dresses
there were most kinds of shabby and greasy wear, and much fustian
and corduroy that was neither sound nor fragrant. The caps of our
young men were mostly of a limp character, and we who wore them,
slouched, high-shouldered, into our places with our hands in our
pockets, and occasionally twisted our cravats about our necks like
eels, and occasionally tied them down our breasts like links of
sausages, and occasionally had a screw in our hair over each cheek-
bone with a slight Thief-flavour in it. Besides prowlers and
idlers, we were mechanics, dock-labourers, costermongers, petty
tradesmen, small clerks, milliners, stay-makers, shoe-binders,
slop-workers, poor workers in a hundred highways and byways. Many
of us--on the whole, the majority--were not at all clean, and not
at all choice in our lives or conversation. But we had all come
together in a place where our convenience was well consulted, and
where we were well looked after, to enjoy an evening's
entertainment in common. We were not going to lose any part of
what we had paid for through anybody's caprice, and as a community
we had a character to lose. So, we were closely attentive, and
kept excellent order; and let the man or boy who did otherwise
instantly get out from this place, or we would put him out with the
greatest expedition.
We began at half-past six with a pantomime--with a pantomime so
long, that before it was over I felt as if I had been travelling
for six weeks--going to India, say, by the Overland Mail. The
Spirit of Liberty was the principal personage in the Introduction,
and the Four Quarters of the World came out of the globe,
glittering, and discoursed with the Spirit, who sang charmingly.
We were delighted to understand that there was no liberty anywhere
but among ourselves, and we highly applauded the agreeable fact.
In an allegorical way, which did as well as any other way, we and
the Spirit of Liberty got into a kingdom of Needles and Pins, and
found them at war with a potentate who called in to his aid their
old arch enemy Rust, and who would have got the better of them if
the Spirit of Liberty had not in the nick of time transformed the
leaders into Clown, Pantaloon, Harlequin, Columbine, Harlequina,
and a whole family of Sprites, consisting of a remarkably stout
father and three spineless sons. We all knew what was coming when
the Spirit of Liberty addressed the king with a big face, and His
Majesty backed to the side-scenes and began untying himself behind,
with his big face all on one side. Our excitement at that crisis
was great, and our delight unbounded. After this era in our
existence, we went through all the incidents of a pantomime; it was
not by any means a savage pantomime, in the way of burning or
boiling people, or throwing them out of window, or cutting them up;
was often very droll; was always liberally got up, and cleverly
presented. I noticed that the people who kept the shops, and who
represented the passengers in the thoroughfares, and so forth, had
no conventionality in them, but were unusually like the real thing-
-from which I infer that you may take that audience in (if you wish
to) concerning Knights and Ladies, Fairies, Angels, or such like,
but they are not to be done as to anything in the streets. I
noticed, also, that when two young men, dressed in exact imitation
of the eel-and-sausage-cravated portion of the audience, were
chased by policemen, and, finding themselves in danger of being
caught, dropped so suddenly as to oblige the policemen to tumble
over them, there was great rejoicing among the caps--as though it
were a delicate reference to something they had heard of before.
The Pantomime was succeeded by a Melo-Drama. Throughout the
evening I was pleased to observe Virtue quite as triumphant as she
usually is out of doors, and indeed I thought rather more so. We
all agreed (for the time) that honesty was the best policy, and we
were as hard as iron upon Vice, and we wouldn't hear of Villainy
getting on in the world--no, not on any consideration whatever.
Between the pieces, we almost all of us went out and refreshed.
Many of us went the length of drinking beer at the bar of the
neighbouring public-house, some of us drank spirits, crowds of us
had sandwiches and ginger-beer at the refreshment-bars established
for us in the Theatre. The sandwich--as substantial as was
consistent with portability, and as cheap as possible--we hailed as
one of our greatest institutions. It forced its way among us at
all stages of the entertainment, and we were always delighted to
see it; its adaptability to the varying moods of our nature was
surprising; we could never weep so comfortably as when our tears
fell on our sandwich; we could never laugh so heartily as when we
choked with sandwich; Virtue never looked so beautiful or Vice so
deformed as when we paused, sandwich in hand, to consider what
would come of that resolution of Wickedness in boots, to sever
Innocence in flowered chintz from Honest Industry in striped
stockings. When the curtain fell for the night, we still fell back
upon sandwich, to help us through the rain and mire, and home to
bed.
This, as I have mentioned, was Saturday night. Being Saturday
night, I had accomplished but the half of my uncommercial journey;
for, its object was to compare the play on Saturday evening with
the preaching in the same Theatre on Sunday evening.
Therefore, at the same hour of half-past six on the similarly damp
and muddy Sunday evening, I returned to this Theatre. I drove up
to the entrance (fearful of being late, or I should have come on
foot), and found myself in a large crowd of people who, I am happy
to state, were put into excellent spirits by my arrival. Having
nothing to look at but the mud and the closed doors, they looked at
me, and highly enjoyed the comic spectacle. My modesty inducing me
to draw off, some hundreds of yards, into a dark corner, they at
once forgot me, and applied themselves to their former occupation
of looking at the mud and looking in at the closed doors: which,
being of grated ironwork, allowed the lighted passage within to be
seen. They were chiefly people of respectable appearance, odd and
impulsive as most crowds are, and making a joke of being there as
most crowds do.
In the dark corner I might have sat a long while, but that a very
obliging passer-by informed me that the Theatre was already full,
and that the people whom I saw in the street were all shut out for
want of room. After that, I lost no time in worming myself into
the building, and creeping to a place in a Proscenium box that had
been kept for me.
There must have been full four thousand people present. Carefully
estimating the pit alone, I could bring it out as holding little
less than fourteen hundred. Every part of the house was well
filled, and I had not found it easy to make my way along the back
of the boxes to where I sat. The chandeliers in the ceiling were
lighted; there was no light on the stage; the orchestra was empty.
The green curtain was down, and, packed pretty closely on chairs on
the small space of stage before it, were some thirty gentlemen, and
two or three ladies. In the centre of these, in a desk or pulpit
covered with red baize, was the presiding minister. The kind of
rostrum he occupied will be very well understood, if I liken it to
a boarded-up fireplace turned towards the audience, with a
gentleman in a black surtout standing in the stove and leaning
forward over the mantelpiece.
A portion of Scripture was being read when I went in. It was
followed by a discourse, to which the congregation listened with
most exemplary attention and uninterrupted silence and decorum. My
own attention comprehended both the auditory and the speaker, and
shall turn to both in this recalling of the scene, exactly as it
did at the time.
'A very difficult thing,' I thought, when the discourse began, 'to
speak appropriately to so large an audience, and to speak with
tact. Without it, better not to speak at all. Infinitely better,
to read the New Testament well, and to let THAT speak. In this
congregation there is indubitably one pulse; but I doubt if any
power short of genius can touch it as one, and make it answer as
one.'
I could not possibly say to myself as the discourse proceeded, that
the minister was a good speaker. I could not possibly say to
myself that he expressed an understanding of the general mind and
character of his audience. There was a supposititious working-man
introduced into the homily, to make supposititious objections to
our Christian religion and be reasoned down, who was not only a
very disagreeable person, but remarkably unlike life--very much
more unlike it than anything I had seen in the pantomime. The
native independence of character this artisan was supposed to
possess, was represented by a suggestion of a dialect that I
certainly never heard in my uncommercial travels, and with a coarse
swing of voice and manner anything but agreeable to his feelings, I
should conceive, considered in the light of a portrait, and as far
away from the fact as a Chinese Tartar. There was a model pauper
introduced in like manner, who appeared to me to be the most
intolerably arrogant pauper ever relieved, and to show himself in
absolute want and dire necessity of a course of Stone Yard. For,
how did this pauper testify to his having received the gospel of
humility? A gentleman met him in the workhouse, and said (which I
myself really thought good-natured of him), 'Ah, John? I am sorry
to see you here. I am sorry to see you so poor.' 'Poor, sir!'
replied that man, drawing himself up, 'I am the son of a Prince!
MY father is the King of Kings. MY father is the Lord of Lords.
MY father is the ruler of all the Princes of the Earth!' &c. And
this was what all the preacher's fellow-sinners might come to, if
they would embrace this blessed book--which I must say it did some
violence to my own feelings of reverence, to see held out at arm's
length at frequent intervals and soundingly slapped, like a slow
lot at a sale. Now, could I help asking myself the question,
whether the mechanic before me, who must detect the preacher as
being wrong about the visible manner of himself and the like of
himself, and about such a noisy lip-server as that pauper, might
not, most unhappily for the usefulness of the occasion, doubt that
preacher's being right about things not visible to human senses?
Again. Is it necessary or advisable to address such an audience
continually as 'fellow-sinners'? Is it not enough to be fellow-
creatures, born yesterday, suffering and striving to-day, dying to-
morrow? By our common humanity, my brothers and sisters, by our
common capacities for pain and pleasure, by our common laughter and
our common tears, by our common aspiration to reach something
better than ourselves, by our common tendency to believe in
something good, and to invest whatever we love or whatever we lose
with some qualities that are superior to our own failings and
weaknesses as we know them in our own poor hearts--by these, Hear
me!--Surely, it is enough to be fellow-creatures. Surely, it
includes the other designation, and some touching meanings over and
above.
Again. There was a personage introduced into the discourse (not an
absolute novelty, to the best of my remembrance of my reading), who
had been personally known to the preacher, and had been quite a
Crichton in all the ways of philosophy, but had been an infidel.
Many a time had the preacher talked with him on that subject, and
many a time had he failed to convince that intelligent man. But he
fell ill, and died, and before he died he recorded his conversion--
in words which the preacher had taken down, my fellow-sinners, and
would read to you from this piece of paper. I must confess that to
me, as one of an uninstructed audience, they did not appear
particularly edifying. I thought their tone extremely selfish, and
I thought they had a spiritual vanity in them which was of the
before-mentioned refractory pauper's family.
All slangs and twangs are objectionable everywhere, but the slang
and twang of the conventicle--as bad in its way as that of the
House of Commons, and nothing worse can be said of it--should be
studiously avoided under such circumstances as I describe. The
avoidance was not complete on this occasion. Nor was it quite
agreeable to see the preacher addressing his pet 'points' to his
backers on the stage, as if appealing to those disciples to show
him up, and testify to the multitude that each of those points was
a clincher.
But, in respect of the large Christianity of his general tone; of
his renunciation of all priestly authority; of his earnest and
reiterated assurance to the people that the commonest among them
could work out their own salvation if they would, by simply,
lovingly, and dutifully following Our Saviour, and that they needed
the mediation of no erring man; in these particulars, this
gentleman deserved all praise. Nothing could be better than the
spirit, or the plain emphatic words of his discourse in these
respects. And it was a most significant and encouraging
circumstance that whenever he struck that chord, or whenever he
described anything which Christ himself had done, the array of
faces before him was very much more earnest, and very much more
expressive of emotion, than at any other time.
And now, I am brought to the fact, that the lowest part of the
audience of the previous night, WAS NOT THERE. There is no doubt
about it. There was no such thing in that building, that Sunday
evening. I have been told since, that the lowest part of the
audience of the Victoria Theatre has been attracted to its Sunday
services. I have been very glad to hear it, but on this occasion
of which I write, the lowest part of the usual audience of the
Britannia Theatre, decidedly and unquestionably stayed away. When
I first took my seat and looked at the house, my surprise at the
change in its occupants was as great as my disappointment. To the
most respectable class of the previous evening, was added a great
number of respectable strangers attracted by curiosity, and drafts
from the regular congregations of various chapels. It was
impossible to fail in identifying the character of these last, and
they were very numerous. I came out in a strong, slow tide of them
setting from the boxes. Indeed, while the discourse was in
progress, the respectable character of the auditory was so manifest
in their appearance, that when the minister addressed a
supposititious 'outcast,' one really felt a little impatient of it,
as a figure of speech not justified by anything the eye could
discover.
The time appointed for the conclusion of the proceedings was eight
o'clock. The address having lasted until full that time, and it
being the custom to conclude with a hymn, the preacher intimated in
a few sensible words that the clock had struck the hour, and that
those who desired to go before the hymn was sung, could go now,
without giving offence. No one stirred. The hymn was then sung,
in good time and tune and unison, and its effect was very striking.
A comprehensive benevolent prayer dismissed the throng, and in
seven or eight minutes there was nothing left in the Theatre but a
light cloud of dust.
That these Sunday meetings in Theatres are good things, I do not
doubt. Nor do I doubt that they will work lower and lower down in
the social scale, if those who preside over them will be very
careful on two heads: firstly, not to disparage the places in
which they speak, or the intelligence of their hearers; secondly,
not to set themselves in antagonism to the natural inborn desire of
the mass of mankind to recreate themselves and to be amused.
There is a third head, taking precedence of all others, to which my
remarks on the discourse I heard, have tended. In the New
Testament there is the most beautiful and affecting history
conceivable by man, and there are the terse models for all prayer
and for all preaching. As to the models, imitate them, Sunday
preachers--else why are they there, consider? As to the history,
tell it. Some people cannot read, some people will not read, many
people (this especially holds among the young and ignorant) find it
hard to pursue the verse-form in which the book is presented to
them, and imagine that those breaks imply gaps and want of
continuity. Help them over that first stumbling-block, by setting
forth the history in narrative, with no fear of exhausting it. You
will never preach so well, you will never move them so profoundly,
you will never send them away with half so much to think of. Which
is the better interest: Christ's choice of twelve poor men to help
in those merciful wonders among the poor and rejected; or the pious
bullying of a whole Union-full of paupers? What is your changed
philosopher to wretched me, peeping in at the door out of the mud
of the streets and of my life, when you have the widow's son to
tell me about, the ruler's daughter, the other figure at the door
when the brother of the two sisters was dead, and one of the two
ran to the mourner, crying, 'The Master is come and calleth for
thee'?--Let the preacher who will thoroughly forget himself and
remember no individuality but one, and no eloquence but one, stand
up before four thousand men and women at the Britannia Theatre any
Sunday night, recounting that narrative to them as fellow
creatures, and he shall see a sight! _
Read next: CHAPTER V - POOR MERCANTILE JACK
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