: What I Remember Volume 1 by Trollope Thomas Adolphus - Authors English 19th century Biography; Trollope Thomas Adolphus 1810-1892

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INDEX 397

WHAT I REMEMBER

I have no intention of writing an autobiography. There has been nothing in my life which could justify such a pretension. But I have lived a long time. I remember an aged porter at the monastery of the "Sagro Eremo," above Camaldoli, who had taken brevet rank as a saint solely on the score of his ninety years. His brethren called him and considered him as Saint Simon simply because he had been porter at that gate for more than sixty years. Now my credentials as a babbler of reminiscences are of a similar nature to those of the old porter. I have been here so many, many years. And then those years have comprised the best part of the nineteenth century--a century during which change has been more rapidly at work among all the surroundings of Englishmen than probably during any other century of which social history has to tell.

Of course middle-aged men know, as well as we ancients, the fact that social life in England--or rather let me say in Europe--is very different from what it was in the days of their fathers, and are perfectly well acquainted with the great and oftentimes celebrated causes which have differentiated the Victorian era from all others. But only the small records of an unimportant individual life, only the memories which happen to linger in an old man's brain, like bits of drift-weed floating round and round in the eddies of a back-water, can bring vividly before the young of the present generation those ways and manners of acting and thinking and talking in the ordinary every-day affairs of life which indicate the differences between themselves and their grandfathers.

I was born in the year 1810 at No. 16, Keppel Street, Russell Square. The region was at that time inhabited by the professional classes, mainly lawyers. My father was a barrister of the Middle Temple to the best of my recollection, but having chambers in the Old Square, Lincoln's Inn. A quarter of a century or so later, all the district in question became rather deteriorated in social estimation, but has, I am told, recently recovered itself in this respect under the careful and judicious administration of the Duke of Bedford. The whole region appeared to me, when I was recently in London, about the least changed part of the London of my youthful days. As I walked up Store Street, which runs in a line from Keppel Street to Tottenham Court Road, I spied the name of "Pidding, Confectioner." I immediately entered the shop and made a purchase at the counter. "I did not in the least want this tart," said I to the girl who was serving in the shop. "Why did you take it, then?" said she, with a little toss of her head. "Nobody asked you to buy it." "I bought it," rejoined I, "because I used to buy pastry of Mr. Pidding in this shop seventy years ago." "Lor', sir!" said the girl, "did you really?" She probably considered me to be the Wandering Jew.

I remember well that my father used to point out to me houses in Russell Square, Bedford Square, and Bloomsbury Square in which judges and other notable legal luminaries used to live. But even in those days the localities in question, especially the last named of them, were beginning to be deserted by such personages, who were already moving farther westward. The occasion of these walks with my father through the squares I have named--to which Red Lion Square might have been added--was one the painful nature of which has fixed it in my memory indelibly.

Of which more anon.

My father was in the habit of returning from his chambers to a five o'clock dinner--rather a late hour, because he was an industrious and laborious man. Well! we, that is my next brother and myself, used to walk from Keppel Street to Lincoln's Inn, so as to arrive in time to walk back with my father. He was a fast walker; and as we trotted along one on each side of him, the repetition of our morning's poetical achievements did not tend, as I well remember, to facilitate the difficulty of "keeping our wind."

But I can recall no less vividly certain expeditions of a kind which appeared to our imaginations to be--and which perhaps really were in some degree--fraught with a certain amount of peril. Stories had reached us of sundry mysteriously wicked regions, where the bandit bands of the great city consorted and lived outlaw lives under circumstances and conditions that powerfully excited our young imaginations. Especially accounts of a certain lane had reached us, where it was said all the pocket handkerchiefs stolen by all the pickpockets in London were to be seen exposed in a sort of unholy market. The name of this place was Saffron Hill. Whether any such place still exists, I know not. It has probably been swept away by the march of recent improvement. But it did in those days veritably exist. And to this extraordinary spot--as remote and strange to our fancy as the realms of Prester John--it was determined after protracted consideration by my brother and myself, that our next long ramble should be devoted. We had ascertained that the dingy land of our researches lay somewhat to the westward of Smithfield--which had already been the object of a most successful, adventurous, and delightful expedition, not without pleasurable perils of its own from excited bullocks, still more excited drovers and their dogs--and by dint of considerable perseverance we reached it, and were richly rewarded for our toil and enterprise. Report had spoken truly. Saffron Hill was a world of pocket-handkerchiefs. From every window and on lines stretched across the narrow street they fluttered in all the colours of the rainbow, and of all sizes and qualities. The whole lane was a long vista of pennon-like pocket-handkerchiefs! We should have much liked to attempt to deal in this strange market, not so much for the sake of possessing any of the articles, as with a view of obtaining experience, and informing ourselves respecting the manners and customs of the country. But we were protected from the possibly unpleasant results of any such tentative by the total absence from our pockets of any coin of the realm. We doubtless had pocket-handkerchiefs, and I have no recollection of their having been stolen. Probably it was ascertained by the inhabitants that they were not worth their notice.

But the subject reminds me of an experience of the pocket-picking world which occurred to me some twenty years later. It was at Naples. People generally in those days carried silk pocket-handkerchiefs instead of the scraps of muslin which are affected nowadays. And five silk pocket-handkerchiefs were abstracted from my pockets during my walks abroad in as many days. I then took to wearing very common ones, and lost no more! An American then at Naples, whose experiences of the proclivities of that population had been similar to mine, was not so fortunate in the result of the defensive measures he adopted. He sewed strongly into the interior of his pocket a large fish-hook. The result which he anticipated followed. The thief's hand was caught, and the American, turning sharply, seized him by the wrist and held him in a grasp like a vice till he could hand him over to a gendarme. But within a fortnight that American was stabbed to the heart one night as he was going home from the theatre. The light-fingered fraternity, it would seem, considered that such a practice was not within the laws of the game; whereas my more moderate ruse did not offend their sense of justice and fair play.

My brother and I reached home safely enough after our expedition to thief-land; and were inexhaustible in our accounts of the wonders we had witnessed. For it formed no part of our plan, and would not have been at all in accordance with the general practice of our lives to conceal the facts from our parents. Probably we had a sufficient suspicion of the questionable nature of the expedition we contemplated to prevent us from declaring it beforehand. But our education and habits would have forbidden any dream of concealing it.

Among the few surviving remembrances of those childhood's years in Keppel Street, I can still recall to the mind's eye the face and features of "Farmer," the highly trustworthy and responsible middle-aged woman who ruled the nursery there, into which a rapid succession of brothers and sisters was being introduced in those years. Farmer, as I remember her, inspired more awe than affection. She was an austere and somewhat grim sort of body. And somehow or other the obscurely terrible fact that she was an Anabaptist had reached the world of the nursery. I need hardly say that the accusation carried with it no sort of idea whatever to our minds. I don't think we had any knowledge that the mystic term in question had reference to any forms or modifications of religious belief. But we were well assured that it implied something mysterious and terrible. And I am afraid that we gracelessly availed ourselves of what we should have considered a misfortune, if we had at all known what it meant, to express on occasions of revolt against discipline, our scorn for an individual so disgraced by nature. I have still in my ear the lilt of a wicked chorus the burthen of which ran:--

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