A Literary Pilgrimage Among the Haunts of Famous British Authors. Theodore F. Wolfe
St. Thomas's Church in this neighborhood formerly stood the hospital in which Akenside was physician and Keats a student. A little farther along the High Street we come to a passage at the left leading into a paved yard which was the court of the Marshalsea,Marshalsea and the high wall at the right is believed to have been a part of the old prison where Dickens's father was confined in the rooms which the novelist assigns to William Dorrit, and where "Little Dorrit" was born and reared. In this court the Dickens children played, and under yonder pump by the wall Pancks cooled his head on a memorable occasion. Just beyond is St. George's Church, where "Little Dorrit" was baptized and married, with its vestry where she once slept with the register under her head; adjoining is the church-yard, once overlooked by the prison-windows of Dickens and Dorrit, where the disconsolate young Chivery expected to be untimely laid under a lugubrious epitaph. Another block brings us to dingy Lant Street—"out of Hight Street, right side the way"—where the boy Dickens lived in the back attic of the same shabby house in which Bob Sawyer afterward lodged and gave the party to Pickwick. Beyond the next turning stood King's Bench Prison, where Micawber was incarcerated by his stony-hearted creditors, and beyond this again we come to the tabernacle where Spurgeon preached. Turning at the site of Micawber's prison, the Borough Road conducts us, by the sponging-house where Hook was confined, to the Christ Church of Newman Hall—successor to Rowland Hill: it is a beautiful edifice, erected largely by contributions from America, its handsome tower being designed as a monument to Abraham Lincoln and marked by a memorial tablet. A little way southward, we find among the buildings of Lambeth Palace the library of which Green, the historian of the "English People," was long custodian, and the ancient room where Essex and the poet Lovelace were imprisoned.
Thames-Side
Recrossing Father Thames and passing the oft-described shrines of Westminster we come to Millbank, the region into which Copperfield and Peggotty followed the wretched Martha and saved her from suicide. Out of Millbank Street, a few steps by a little thoroughfare bring us into the somnolent Smith Square in which stands the grotesque church of St. John, where Churchill once preached—described in "Our Mutual Friend" as a "very hideous church with four towers, resembling some petrified monster on its back with its legs in the air." To this place came Charley Hexam and his school-master and Wrayburn, for here in front of the church, at a house near the corner, Lizzie Hexam—the best of all Dickens's women—lodged with Jenny Wren. It was a little house of two stories, and its dingy front room—the shopShop of Jenny Wren of the dolls' dress-maker—later was used as a cheap restaurant, where we once regaled ourselves with a dish of equivocal tea while we looked about us and recognized the half-door across which Wrayburn indolently leaned as he chatted with Lizzie, the seat in front of the wide window where Jenny sat at her work with her crutch leaning against the wall, the corner to which she consigned her "bad old child" in his drunken disgrace, the stairs which led to Lizzie's chamber—objects all noted by the observant glance of Dickens as he peered for a moment through the door-way. Sauntering southward by Grosvenor Road, where Lizzie walked with her brother and Headstone, we have beside us on the left the river, glinting and shimmering in the morning sunlight and alive with every sort of craft that plies for trade or pleasure. It was along these curving reaches of the Thames that the merry parties of the olden time, destined like ourselves to Chelsea,Old Chelsea used to row over the miles that then intervened between London and the ancient village, and here, too, Franklin, then a printer in Bartholomew Close, once swam the entire distance from Chelsea to Blackfriars Bridge. The way along which we are strolling then lay in the open country, with leafy lanes leading aside among groves and sun-flecked fields. But woods and fields have disappeared under compact masses of brick and mortar, and the quaint old suburb is linked to the city by continuous streets and structures. Contact has not altogether destroyed the distinctive features of the ancient suburb, and we know when our walk has brought us to its borders. Few of its thoroughfares retain the dreamful quiet of the olden time, few of its rows of sombre and dignified dwellings have wholly escaped the modern eruption of ornate and staring architecture; the old and the new are curiously blended, but enough of the former remains to remind us that Chelsea is olden and not modern, and to revive for us the winsome associations with which the place is permeated. The suggestion of worshipful antiquity is seen in sedate, ivy entwined mansions of dusky-hued brick, in carefully kept old trees which in their saplinghood knew Pepys, Johnson, or Smollett, in quaint inns whose homely comforts were enjoyed by illustrious habitués in the long ago.
Our stroll beyond the Grosvenor Road brings us to the famous "Chelsea Physick Garden," presented to the Apothecaries' Society by Sloane, the founder of the British Museum, who was a medical student here; it was to this garden that Polyphilus of the "Rambler" was going to see a new plant in flower when he was diverted by meeting the chancellor's coach. At the adjoining hospital dwelt the gifted Mrs. Somerville, whose husband was a physician there; and the ancient mansion of dingy brick, in which WalpoleWalpole lived, and where Pope, Swift, Gay, and Mary Wortley Montagu were guests, is a portion of the infirmary—the great drawing-room in which the brilliant company met being a hospital ward. A little way northward, by Sloane Street, we come to Hans Place, where, at No. 25, the sweet poetess Letitia Landon ("L. E. L.") was born in a tiny two-storied house; she attended school in a similar house of the same row, where Miss Mitford and the authoress of "Glenarvon" had before been pupils. Along the river again we find beyond the hospital a passage leading to the place of Paradise Row, where, in a little brick house, the witching Mancini was visited by Charles II. and poetized by the brilliant Evremond. Here, at the corner of Robinson's Lane, Pepys visited Robarte in "the prettiest contrived house" the diarist ever saw; not far away a comfortable old inn occupies the site of the dwelling of the historian Faulkner, in the neighborhood where the essayist Mary Astell—ridiculed by Swift, Addison, Steele, Smollett, and Congreve—had her modest home. Robert Walpole's later residence stood near Queen's Road West, and its grounds sloped to the river just below the Swan Tavern, near the bottom of the lane now called Swan Walk. It was at this river inn that Pepys "got affright" on being told of an eruption of the plague in Chelsea.
For a half-mile or so westward from the Swan, picturesque Cheyne Walk—beloved of the literati—stretches along the river-bank. Its many old houses, with their solemn-visaged fronts overlooking the river, their iron railings, dusky walls, tiled roofs, and curious dormer-windows, are impressive survivors of a past age. Homes of George Eliot and RossettiAt No. 4, a substantial brick house of four stories, with battlemented roof and with oaken carvings in the rooms, are preserved some relics of George Eliot, for this was her last home, and here she breathed out her life in the same room where Maclise, friend of Carlyle and Dickens, had died just a decade before. No. 16, a spacious dwelling with curved front and finely wrought iron railing and gate-way, was the home of Rossetti for the twenty years preceding his death. With these panelled rooms, which he filled with quaint and beautiful objects of art, are associated most of the memories of the gifted poet and painter. The large lower room was his studio, where one of his last occupations was painting a replica of "Beata Beatrix," the portrait of his wife, whose tragic death darkened his life. Around the fireplace in this room a brilliant company held the nightly séances which a participant styles feasts of the gods. Through the passage at the side the famous zebu was conveyed, and reconveyed after his assault upon the poet in the garden. The rooms above were sometime tenanted by Meredith, Swinburne, and Rossetti's brother and biographer, who was also Whitman's editor and advocate. Later, the essayist Watts, to whom Rossetti dedicated his greatest work, resided here to cherish his friend. The garden, where Rossetti kept his odd pets and where neighbors remember to have seen him walking in paint-bedaubed attire for hours together, is now mostly covered by a school. At first, many luminaries of letters and art came to him here—Jones, Millais, Hunt, Gosse, Browning, Whistler, Morris, Oliver Madox Brown, whose death elicited Rossetti's "Untimely Lost," and others like them; later, when baneful narcotics had sadly changed his temperament, he dwelt in seclusion, exercising only in his garden and seeing such devoted friends as Watts, Knight, Hake, "The Manxman" Hall Caine, and the gifted sister, author of "Goblin Market," etc., who was pictured by Rossetti in his "Girlhood of Mary Virgin," and who lately died. In his study here he produced his best work; here he revised the poems exhumed from his wife's grave and wrote "The Stream's Secret" and other parts of the volume which made his fame and occasioned the battle between the bards Buchanan and Swinburne; here he wrote the magnificent "Rose Mary," "White Ship," etc., and completed the series of sonnets which has been pronounced "in its class the