London Impressions Etchings and Pictures in Photogravure

Excerpt

THE LONDON SUNDAY

This seems to be a thing that all exclaim against, and but few see. The phrase is never varied—a sure sign of lack of experience. One cries, ‘Oh, the London Sunday!’ and another, ‘It must be too dreadful for foreigners!’ and before the topic disappears something yet vaguer has been said, in a flickering manner, as to the Boulevards. But in fact London Sunday is little understood even by those who know its aspect, and the greater number do not know even so much.

A Forgotten Corner.

Obviously, it is one thing in the summer of livelong sunshine, and another thing in winter. When the tops of the steeples fly a blue and white sky as far as the eye may see—a broad flag for the streets, and a narrow, wavering pennon for the alleys; when the reluctant faces of grey houses are compelled by the fires of the day to bandy reflections with the grey houses opposite; when the sun himself is lodged in every window, so that the town multiplies his very face, and sets up suns to the west in the morning and to the east in the evening—suns in rows, and suns that run fluctuating along the windows of a long, unequal street; when the plane-tree is fresh and the leaf of the elm already dry, the London Sunday, from beginning to end, is passed by the London people out of doors. For this reason it is difficult to understand it; you cannot tell whither these streams of people are bound. They all have the gait of making for some end; they do not stroll, and there is doubtless some excursion afoot. The number of young men, in proportion to the numbers of older men, of women, girls, and children, is curious, especially in the further east. They go in great straggling gangs, and though they do nothing—not even much talking—they give a false air of lawlessness to the streaming street. They are the ugliest of all the populace, their clothing, besides, being the most dull and indescribable, and their bearing indefinitely defiant. The men of other kinds and ages, and the women, who needs must balance such a horde of men of twenty, seem to spend less of their Sunday on the road, and you may see them, accordingly, in great numbers in the open spaces—the vague lands on the other side of Clapton, for instance. Very few people of any kind seem to be within their houses in the free afternoon.

In spite of the length of London, you may pass from the furthest west to the extreme east, and from the last country field to the first, so quickly as to get a continuous Sunday impression—the day and the people flowing, unfolding, and closing, from suburb to remote suburb, through ‘town,’ through the City, through the east, and to the verge of breathless and unfragrant meadows, divided by a league-long tramway line lost in the distances of Epping, whither the smoke, from which a south-west wind has set all London radiantly free, is trailing a broken wing.

Even in the centre of the City it cannot be said that the main streets are deserted; for they evidently are all thoroughfares towards the unknown places to which these thousands and thousands of crossing feet are bent....