London in the nineteenth century / by Sir Walter Besant.

  • Walter Besant
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: London in the nineteenth century / by Sir Walter Besant. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    30/490 page 12
    did not then exist. The potato-man after Christmas had a few oranges in his window; strawberries, cherries, and other fruit were hawked about the streets, the cherries tied to sticks, a stick of twelve for a penny. Fulham, Hammersmith, Brompton, Hackney, were covered with market gardens. In the season girls came up from the country to carry baskets of fruit, especially strawberries, to the market; there were rests about five feet high, on the way, one or two of which still survive. For breathing spaces in London there were the four parks. These, however, were not considered to belong to the working classes at all. Three of them, at least, belonged exclusively to the aristocracy except on Sunday evening in the summer. The other. Regent’s Park, only recently laid out, had as yet attracted few visitors; it was a broad open field with ornamental water in one corner and few trees to break the monotony. The Green Park was the playground of children, the children of the people who lived on its north and east sides; cattle grazed over it; through the middle of the Park ran a little brook which made a quagmire and a hollow, Hyde Park was used for its ride and its two walks along the south and the east. The rest of the broad space was a desert untravelled and unkept. Kensington Gardens belonged to the Palace and were not yet open to the public. I have already spoken of the omnibus. The means of communication with the outside world were the mail-coaches, the stage-coaches, the waggons, and the carts, not to speak of the post-chaise. The mail-coaches of course carried the letters. They all drew up at the General Post Office shortly before eight every morning ; received their letters and their passengers; and started punctually at eight o’clock. All the towns within a hundred and twenty miles of London received their letters next morning, that is to say, before two o’clock, so that they were very nearly as well off as ourselves. There were in addition an enormous number of stage- coaches. More than 1500 started from London, though not every day. Of these nearly the half were the short stages running to places like Richmond, Hampstead, and Chislehurst. It was not until the last years of the stage-coach that persons of position would travel in one ; they either travelled by post or in their own carriages. A great many railways were beginning; in 1834 the London and Greenwich line was opened ; the passengers were at first attracted by bands of music at the stations; the third class carriages had neither roof nor seat; the second class had no cushions ; at first everybody knew his own station, his place in the class that belonged to his station. The country gentleman in the first class, with him the barrister, the physician, the beneficed clergyman, the officer of the army or navy; in the second class were seen the surveyor, the solicitor, the respectable tradesman, the gentleman’s servant; in the third, everybody else. Other lines in progress were the London and Birmingham, the London and Southampton, the London and Bristol, the London and Croydon, the London
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