Imperial London

I don’t know who’s responsible for this online text of Arthur Henry Beavan’s 1901 charmer ‘Imperial London’, but, whoever they are, they’ve done a service.

Beavan can be acute:

I would remark that, topographically, Modern London is essentially Protean, and there can be no finality in its depiction.

He can be forensic, as with this description of a typical ’seamy’ London street:

The houses are chiefly one story, or at the most two stories high; the shops, small, and such as minister solely to the necessities of life: butchers’, who deal in cheap New Zealand mutton and inferior beef; fishmongers’, whose stock-in-trade is of uncertain age, with mussels and whelks, and every kind of dried fish well to the fore; pork-butchers’, and ham-and-beef shops, generally of superior size, and well patronized; “purveyors” of cow-heel and ox-cheek, of tripe and trotters, their windows innocent of provisions until the day’s “boiling” or “dressing” is accomplished, then overflowing with these popular dainties; fried-fish shops, very much to the front up to all hours of the night; and general-dealers, who sell anything from firewood to tinned salmon; public-houses, of course, but of a subdued order, with plate-glass, paint, and gilding waiting to be renewed.

He is tremendously a Victorian male. There are, for instance, separate chapters on ‘Utilitarian London’ and ‘Romantic London’. But, my goodness, by romantic London Beavan means that which is found in the romances (novels), so we get a guide to places found in the novels of Dickens and Thackeray.

Finally, Beavan is, to my surprise, the T-leaf’s friend. Consider this overhelpful note on the monetary habits of the Daily Telegraph:

Its advertisements - the life-blood of a newspaper - usually occupy forty-six out of a total of eighty-four columns of an ordinary twelve-paged issue; and it is an open secret that every day in the week, the trusted clerk, who, well-shadowed by a private detective, pays the cash receipts into the Bank, leaves the premises with a sum generally running into four figures.

A seamy side of Beavan you perhaps wouldn’t have anticipated. I note that he also published a book with the not entirely unambigous title ‘Birds I Have Known’.