- 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.
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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 Oldstreet-
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-andtwenty
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 cheekbone
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
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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
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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.'
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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
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-serve
r 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 fellowcreatures,
born yesterday, suffering and striving to-day, dying tomorrow?
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
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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