“IT has been said with some justice that we know more about the Victorian Period in England than we do of any one of the intervening nine centuries, even of those which lie closest to our own time, and even of such events as have taken place upon our own soil in the Malay Peninsula. I will attempt to put before you very briefly, as a sort of introduction to the series of lectures which I am to deliver, a picture of what one glimpse of life in London towards the end of the Nineteenth Century must have resembled. “It is a sound rule in history to accept none but positive evidence and to depend especially upon the evidence of documents. I will not debate how far tradition should be admitted into the reconstruction of the past. It may contain elements of truth; it must contain elements of falsehood, and on that account I propose neither to deny nor to admit this species of information, but merely to ignore it; and I think the student will see before I have done with my subject that, using only the positive information before us, a picture may be drawn so fully detailed as almost to rival our experience of contemporary events.
[91]“We will imagine ourselves,” continued the professor, with baleful smile of playful pedantry, “in Piccadilly, the fashionable promenade of the city, at nine o’clock in the morning, the hour when the greatest energies of this imperial people were apparent in their outdoor life; for, as we know from the famous passage which we owe to the pen of the pseudo-Kingsley, the English people, as befitted their position, were the earliest risers of their time. We will further imagine (to give verisimilitude to the scene) the presence of a north-east wind, in which these hardy Northerners took exceptional delight, and to which the anonymous author above alluded to has preserved a famous hymn.
“Piccadilly is thronged with the three classes into which we know the population to have been divided—the upper class, the middle, and the lower, to use the very simple analytical terms which were most common in that lucid and strenuous period. The lower class are to be seen hurrying eastward in their cloth caps and ‘fustian,’ a textile fabric the exact nature of which is under dispute, but which we can guess, from the relics of contemporary evidence in France, to have been of a vivid blue, highly glazed, and worn as a sort of sleeved tunic reaching to the knees. The headgear these myriads are wearing is uniform: it is a brown skull cap with a leather peak projecting over the eyes, the conjectural ‘cricket cap,’ of which several examples are preserved. It has been argued by more than one[92] authority that the article in question was not a headgear. It appears in none of the statuary of the period. No mention of it is made in any of the vast compilations of legal matter which have come down to us, and attempts have been made to explain in an allegorical sense the very definite allusions to it with which English letters of that time abound. I am content to accept the documentary evidence in the plain meaning of the words used, and to portray to you these ‘toiling millions’ (to use the phrase of the great classic poet) hurrying eastward upon this delightful morning in March of the year 1899. Each is carrying the implement of his trade (possession in which was secured to him by law). The one holds a pickaxe, another balances upon his head a ladder, a third is rolling before him a large square box or ‘trunk’—a word of Oriental origin—upon a ‘trolley’ or small two-wheeled vehicle dedicated to some one of the five combinations of letters which had a connection not hitherto established with the system of roads and railways in the country. Yet another drags after him a small dynamo mounted on wheels, such as may be seen in the frieze illustrating the Paris Exhibition of ten years before.
“Interspersed with this crowd may be seen the soldiery, clad entirely in bright red. But these, by a custom which has already the force of law, are compelled to occupy the middle of the thoroughfare. They are of the same class as the labouring men round them, and like these carry the implements of[93] their trade, with which we must imagine them from time to time threatening the passers-by. All, I say, are hurrying eastward to their respective avocations in the working part of this great hive.
“Appearing as rarer units we perceive members of the second or middle class proceeding at a more leisurely and dignified pace towards their professional or commercial pursuits, the haunts of which lie less to the eastward and more in the centre of the city. These are dressed entirely in black, and wear upon their heads the round hat to which one of my colleagues erroneously gave the title of a religious emblem, a position from which, I am glad to see, he has recently receded. Nothing is more striking in the scene than the absolute uniformity of this costume. In the right hand is carried, according to the ritual of ............