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30,000 from the whole of Scotland; but 110,000 from Ireland prove how enormous must have been the stream of human beings flowing eastward to the great centre. Every sixteenth adult, on an average among the adults of London, was born in the Emerald Isle. Foreigners of all climes have sent us 30,000 residents, of whom 10,000 are German, and 7,000 French. The children and young persons, i. e. those under twenty years of age, are, of course in a much greater ratio born in the city which they now inhabit; yet even here we meet with the somewhat startling fact that there are 20,000 children and young persons in London who were born in Ireland, besides children and young persons born in London of Irish parents. It is impossible to avoid seeing that much of good or of evil, or of both combined, must result from this strong infusion of youthful Celtic blood in the masses of the Metropolis.

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The population is so vast, that we are apt to lose sight of items which, considered separately, would appear enormous. That there are 80,000 children born yearly in London - that there are 350,000 marriageable but unmarried women - that there are 50,000 persons always resident in poor houses, prisons, and other establishments where they are daily fed out of national or public resources that there are 1,200 places of worship, in which, despite our vice and alleged Sabbath desecration, there are generally a million attendances at divine worship on a Sunday, including the services at different times of the day,that there are nearly 6,000 schools, on the books of which are 600,000 scholars,- all these striking facts have been ascertained by the Census Commissioners. We have taken no further liberties with their tables and returns, than to add a small ratio of increase for the five years elapsed since the census was taken. Numerous other curious items present themselves. although we are quarrelling with the health of the Metropolis, there are, nevertheless, thirty inhabitants not less than 100 years old, let the excess above a hundred be what it may. There are 20,000 persons engaged in killing and selling animal food, a greater number in preparing and selling vegetable food, and nearer 30,000 in making and selling beverages. More than 30,000 tailors are plying the needle in London; while 40,000 boot and shoe-makers are fashioning and cobbling our leathern understandings. Nearly 25,000 professional men are supplying the daily and weekly quotas of divinity, law, and physic; and about an equal number of authors and printers furnish us with books and newspapers. The domestic servants in London, male and female, reach the almost incredible number of 200,000. The worthy ancient females of the Mrs. Gamp school,

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together with their co-labourers the charwomen, washerwomen, and manglers, present a corps of 60,000 strong. There are more than 100,000 women and girls in the Metropolis who earn a living- in most cases, it may be feared, a scanty living-by the use of the needle. Nearly 30,000 clerks are always quilldriving in relation to some commercial matters or others. Thus we find that, so astounding is the amount of population, the persons engaged in any one of the above occupations would equal in number the entire inhabitants of a large town.

Mr. George Dodd, in his volume on the Food of London,' has presented us with a curious sketch of the means by which the commissariat of this enormous aggregation of human beings is carried on. It is the most striking vindication of the power of the laws of trade, left to their free operation and complete development, that this vast supply is perpetually sustained by the collective interests of the community, and that results are obtained by the mere co-operation of the trading classes which the foresight of the wisest statesman, the omnipotence of the legislature, and the thousand hands of the executive government would utterly fail to ensure. Mr. Dodd's account of the process by which two millions and a half of human beings are fed is ingenious and amusing; but it is necessarily imperfect, for the data on which these computations are made have no certainty in them, and it is to be regretted that we do not possess more accurate statistical particulars of the consumption of food by the London community.

Where and when the growth of the Metropolis is to terminate, no one can yet form the faintest conjecture. There do not yet visibly appear any of the opposing forces which will check further extension. If any future Shrapnell should make another Stradametrical Survey of London,' it is impossible to anticipate how many thousand miles of street and lane would have to pass under his ken. In the extraordinary production under this title, some two hundred pages are crammed with about twenty columns each of figures, denoting the distances from any one to any other of about five hundred separate points in the Metropolis: the book, a work of prodigious labour, was a virtual declaration of war against the cabmen; but it will also remain as a permanent record of the wonderful extent of London in these days. As to the opposing forces which might check further extension, where are they? We have fields in plenty beyond the present limits, to be passive recipients of blocks of houses, whenever man's interests shall prompt to farther building. We are talking of vast sewerage schemes which, if carried out, would be as adequate for a population of five millions, as our

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present system is for a population of half that amount. are gradually completing arrangements for obtaining water above the tidal pollutions of the Thames, which, unless the Thames run dry, ought to render our water-supply better rather than worse in future years. We are closing all our pent-up and unwholesome graveyards, and establishing others in open districts. We are so improving our channels of coal-supply, by means of screw-colliers, collier-docks, and railway-depôts, that we can kindle any number of parlour-fires and kitchen-ranges, with less fear of monopoly than ever. We are making and maintaining several public parks at the national expense, which will remain open breathing-spots when London shall extend far beyond them. We have increased almost every variety of humanising institution in the Metropolis, within the last halfcentury, in a greater ratio than the population itself has increased; and there seems no reason why the same relatively greater increase should not be maintained in the remaining moiety of the century. In short, none of the elements of progression, so far as regard the number of inhabitants in the Metropolis or the area of ground occupied by the streets and houses, yet encounter other elements of retrogression of equal force. The Registrar-general, taking equal areas to render the comparison a fair one, finds that the population of London has increased in the following way during the present century:

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The same indefatigable functionary, whose census of 1851 was by far the most complete performance of the kind ever accomplished in this country, looks forward with a prophetic eye to the probable future growth of the Metropolis. He possesses no means, other than all possess, to determine whether the births and deaths in London will bear the same ratio to each other in the next ten years, as that which they bore in the ten years last passed; nor whether the two decennial periods will present the same ratio between the immigrants who come to find a living in London, and the emigrants who depart to seek their fortunes elsewhere; but assuming that these ratios will remain the same as in the years from 1841 to 1851, he calculates that the population of London will rise to six millions of souls before the end of the present century. The Metropolis already covers eighty thousand acres: it is bewildering to think of its prospective vastness when thus peopled. And some of these acres, in the heart of the Metropolis, are acquir

ing a money value probably never equalled in any other time or country. Small patches of ground, in the centre of the city, have lately been let on building-leases, at rentals which, calculated at thirty years' purchase, would amount to a price of 300,000, 500,000l., and 800,000l., per acre; nay, in one case, the price, thus calculated, actually exceeds one million sterling per acre. Gloomy forebodings occupy some minds on the subject of the future of this large Metropolis. History does not record such a stupendous civic population; and, having no precedent to serve as its basis, men are at a loss to picture the possible economy of six millions of human beings living in one city.

ART. IV.-Recollections of the Table Talk of SAMUEL ROGERS; to which is added Porsoniana. London: 1856.

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more than half a century a small house in a quiet nook of London has been the recognised abode of taste, and the envied resort of wit, beauty, learning, and genius. There, surrounded by the choicest treasures of art, and in a light reflected from Guidos and Titians, have sat and mingled in familiar converse the most eminent poets, painters, actors, artists, critics, travellers, historians, warriors, orators, and statesmen of two generations. Under that roof celebrities of all sorts, matured or budding, and however contrasted in genius or pursuit, met as on the table land where (according to D'Alembert) Archimedes and Homer may stand on a perfect footing of equality. The man of mind was introduced to the man of action, and modest merit which had yet its laurels to win, was first brought acquainted with the patron who was to push its fortunes, or with the hero whose name sounded like a trumpet note. It was in that dining-room that Erskine told the story of his first brief, and Grattan that of his last duel: that the Iron Duke' described Waterloo as a battle of giants:' that Chantrey, placing his and on a mahogany pedestal, said, Mr. Rogers, do you re'member a workman at five shillings a day who came in at that door to receive your orders for this work? I was that workman.' It was there, too, that Byron's intimacy with Moore commenced over the famous mess of potatoes and vinegar: that Madame de Stal, after a triumphant argument with Mackintosh, was (as reCorded by Byron) well ironed' by Sheridan: that Sydney Smith, at dinner with Walter Scott, Campbell, Moore, Wordsworth and Washington Irving, declared that he and Irving, if the only

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prose-writers, were not the only prosers in the company. It was through that window, opening to the floor and leading through the garden to the Park, that the host started with Sheridan's gifted grand-daughter on The Winter's Walk' which she has so gracefully and feelingly commemorated. It was in the library above, that Wordsworth, holding up the original contract for the copyright of Paradise Lost (1600 copies for 51.), proved to his own entire satisfaction that solid fame was in an inverse ratio to popularity; whilst Coleridge, with his finger upon the parchment deed by which Dryden agreed for the translation of the Eneid, expatiated on the advantages which would have accrued to literature, if 'glorious John' had selected the Iliad and left Virgil to Pope. Whilst these and similar scenes are passing, we can fancy the host murmuring his well-known lines:

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'Be mine to listen; pleased but not elate,
Ever too modest or too proud to rate
Myself by my companions, self-compell'd
To earn the station that in life I held.'

This house, rich as it was in varied associations, was only completed in 1801 or 1802; but the late owner's intimacy with men and women of note goes back to a long antecedent period. He had been, some years before, proposed at Johnson's clubthe club, as it is denominated still-by Fox, seconded by Windham, and (as he fully believed) black-balled by Malone. He had met Condorcet at Lafayette's table in 1789. In the course of a single Sunday at Edinburgh in the same eventful year, he had breakfasted with Robertson, heard him preach in the forenoon, and Blair in the afternoon, taken coffee with the Piozzis, and supped with Adam Smith.

There is surely something more in this position, than the extraordinary prolongation of human life, or than its utility as a connecting link between two or three generations, the point of view in which hitherto it has been almost exclusively considered. It leads naturally and necessarily to reflections on the state of our society, especially in relation to the literary, artistic and intellectual elements, during the last seventy years; and we feel eager to profit by the experience and sagacity of a nonogenarian who has enjoyed such ample opportunities for appreciating mankind. Fortunately Mr. Rogers's mental habits and tendencies strongly disposed and qualified him for turning his length of years to good account. His writings teem with maxims of worldly wisdom, enforced or illustrated by remarkable incidents, and his conversation was replete with anecdotes selected

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