The Express.
London, England, 1864-08-31 00:00:00

LONDON, WEDNESDAY EVENING, AUGUST 31, 186 g.

OUT OF THE SEASON.

concerning whom we hear a whispered legend that
Ihe has "danced before the Queen ;" here the
dancing girls have the privilege of selling biscuits
instead of being paid a salary, and sit or drink
with Jack, and mingle with their sisterhood
amongst the audience upon terms of fascinat-
ing equality • here the landlord bee a griev-
ance oonnected with the license he has just
lost, and complains bitterly that "it's only the
music that fetches 'em," and that now he's debarred
from providing that, he may as well " shut up shop
at. once ; " there are tawdry women talking to
every variety of the genus sailor •, there we see
every variety of the genus sailor talking to tawdry
women, and that is all. There are no mad orgies,
nothing of wilds revelry, or reckless debauch, in
these public singing and dancing taverns now,
whatever may have been the case in years gone by.
The constant and übiquitous supervision of the po-
' lice, and the prompt withdrawal of the license where
—as inthe case of our fat and rather snivelling friend,
who might have been the " fawning publican" to
whom fihylock compared Antonio—the least irre-
gularity is proved, make such things impossible
now. Again, the opening of the Victoria
by taking away many of the ships formerly statocrn
at the adjacent one of London, has played serious
havoc with these sailors' pleasure houses. Every-
where their owners are complaining of " slackness •',
nowhere does the demand seem equal to the
amount of accommodation supplied. Many
large conoert-rooms—notably the handsome and ex-
pensively fitted upstairs one at the "Paddy's
Goose" aforesaid—are closed for lack of custom; and
the paltry shabbiness of the amusements we saw
elsewhere provided is amounted for by the steady
decline in the taste and demand for this particular
class of entertainment during the last ten years.
The schoolmaster has been abroad here, as else-
where ; Jack looks for something higher than the
old tavern-keepers of the old school are
able or enterprising enough to give him,
and the result is stagnation in, and decadence of
Ratcliffe-highway. It is true that there are un-
usually few ships in dock at this particular time,
but these observations apply generally to the dis-
trict, and are confirmed by both tavern-keepers and
police. The ill-favoured Hamm stroll from house
to house, so that the visitor making a round comes
across the same faces with puzzling fre-
quency, and asks himself whether the
women are really all alike, or whether, say, the
, high-sliouldered lady in the crimson check (whom
our landlord pronounces to be " most respectable
of her sort ') has really been preceding him at
one tavern after another. During an inspection
of some hours, when we had ample opportu-
nities of estimating the entertainments provided foe
Jack we failed to find a single oasis in the barren
desert of unattractive dulness ; and it is almost
with a sensation of relief that the explorer finds
himself conducted down the dark and sordid Blue-
gate-fields and Palmer's Folly, to sojourn for a
while at the Chinese opium smoking-bowie in New-
court.

Essrus PLEASURE ROUSES.-NO. I.

Where female apparel of the coarsest and
gaudiest kind flaunts from doorways and is piled up
in windows—where shill), water-proof coats hang
flaccidly in shops open to the road, like seaweed
thermometers steadfastly predicting rain, and long
rows of black tarpauling wide-peaked cape are
ranged like strings of Saturn-ringed cannon-
balls—where huge clasp knives, with holes in their
common hafts, are festooned with fancy pipes and
metal tobacco-boxes—where red and brown sheathed
Toledo blades, aneroids, sextants, and cases of
mathematical instruments are foremost amongst
I the unredeemed pledges at the pawnbrokers—where
parrots, monkeys, love-birds, and foreign produce
are common items in the general dealers' stock—
where rodghly-coated coarse blue and red flannel-
shined sailors divide the pavement with bonnetless
females, whose bare arms and necks, short petti-
coats, ample crinolines, and common rings and
necklaces combine to give them • distinctive look
—where the tribes of Judah may be heard chat-
fering
over their counters, orseen smokinga peaceful
calumet at their doors—where the language is
polyglot, and, when intelligible, strong—where I
each nationality has its house of call, and the
Sleswig-Holstein coffee-shop enjoys equal conei-1
with the depot for Bavarian beer—where
all the commodities on sale relate to those who " Rol
down to the sea in skips, that do business in great
waters"—where "outfitting" sometimes means ad-
vancing money on an able-seaman's note of hand,
and pandering to his weaknesses by supplying
him with cash—where the courts and alleys are
dark and noisome, and the gin-ahopsevenmore than
usually brilliant and gay—where the prevailing
aroma is of tar, ropes, and salt fish, as if dried
haddocks were being vended in the musty hold of
a superannuated ship--where all these phenomena
are welded together in an incongruous olla podrida,
the music and dancing license known as the
25th of George IL is extensively taken out. It has
been the means of lighting up first floors, of adding
spacious back rooms to already unwieldy premises,
and of bringing together fiddlers, pianoforte
players, castanet clinkers, clog dancers, patter and
other song singers, burlesque performers, infant
phenomena, and ruddled elderly gymnasts,
to display their talents and exercise their art.
These for the entertainers. The entertained are
migratory, bibulous, and easily amused. Down a
court leading from the Wellclose-square previously
described, and entering the open door of a large,
tavern to the left, we meet with plenty of both
classes. In the long cexpetless upstairs room,
where the violins are giving out a very pronounced
schottische, are some hfty or sixty people of both
sexes, few of whom are English, and al: of whom
are regular patrons of the place. Ladies, the
counterpart of those you have men patrolling the
streets, are crowding the little parlour to the right of
the bar, cluster aoout the court approaches to the bar
itself, are dancing together or with male partners,
or are giggling behind handkerchiefs on the seats
round the room. There is a sprinkling of finery,
such as red morocco masquerade boots with mili-
tary heels, light semi-bedgown semi-ball dress gar-
ments, and massive head dresses wherein the blue
and white artificial cabbage rose is conspicuously
prominent ; but the geueral tone of costume is quiet.
Gentlemen of Teutonic mould, with bushy beards,
rings on forefingers, and large brooches in cravats,
dance or converse with ladies, or proffer them
refreshment, or eye them critically from the
vantage-ground afforded by a bare apace of
wall at end of room. Much curiosity
at appearance of Inspector of Police, who
is affably weloomed by proprietor, and keenly though
carelessly scrutinised by the people round. Foreign
inscriptions setting forth the superiority of some
German beer, where we are accustomed to see the
placards of Guinness or Bass, framed legends and
rules in a strange tongue, and many strong gut-
tends in the speech around. Such are the first
impressions of a visitor to the tavern, which is, we
should remark, patronised almost exclusively by the
German sugar bakers of the district and their
friends. The men and women before you all conic
under this category, tut the place seems quiet
and orderly as • temperance ball-room. The women
were originally inveigled (in many katauces an
obviously long time ago) from home by specious
promises of situations in the city pared with gold—
London. The standard of beauty is not high, the
amount of excitement is not great, and the whole
affair has a placid, beery, semi-comatose look,
which not even an extra stamp of the foot in the
schottische rouses into life. The other dances
scarcely vary from the ones in vogue iu England ;
and if—as seems most improbable—there should
be the slightest approach to romping or skittish-
ness on the part of the dancers, the sight of the land-
lord's uplifted admonitory forefinger suffices to quell
the unwonted disposition to vivacity. Leaving
these specimens of a peaceful, cud-chewing, rumi-
nating race, who bake their sugar, drink their beer,
smoke their pipe, and talk to their female com-
panions in regular rotation, and regard one to be
as much a portion of the grave business of life as
the other, we proceed through more doorways and
up more lighted stairs, and the same scene is several
times repeated on a smaller scale, and with a
gradual and increasing admixture of the British
maritime element. The sailor's regular dancing
place, the " Jack's Delight," or the world-
known " Paddy's Goose "—so called from
an Irishman saying of its sign (a swan),
" A mighty foine goose, that, anyhow"—'
and the hundred and one other places of the
kind wherewith Shadwell, Wapping, and Rat- I
cliff-highway are studded, do not greatly differ
from those frequented by Germans only. The
music is the same, the women are of the same
order, but English; and the drink is not both beer,
but such as Jack has loved ever since seamanship
became a profession. All orderly enough, and, to
be plain, a little dull, though this may be partly
attributed to the presence of Mr. Inspector, who in
closely buttoned coat and leather-crowned
bat, evokes a whispered " hush," and the sort
of indescribable movement school children make
I when in the midst of their sports the eye
of the pedagogue is felt to be upon them. Next to
the prosaic routine character of the proceedings
the surpassing plainness of the women seemed
most remarkable. Splay feet, coarse skins, hard
irregular features, dresses which obscured good
figures, and aggravated bad ones into deformity,
were not condoned by the least vivacity of manner,
or the faintest intelligence of expression. They all
looked heavy, uninteresting, stupid, dull. Vice
here is really a monster of hideous mien, and if
Jack doesn't bate it, it can only be that he sees
it through the glamour produced. by a long absence
from England, by the innate, deeply-rooted sailor
gallantry which invests every woman with beauty,
or that he chooses his mistresses as King James 11.
was said to do—as a strictly mortify -
I
iug penance. A visit to one of these
places is • visit to all. They are stationed at short
intervals on both sides of Ratcliff-highway, and
>1: few distinctive features. Item, a coarsely
decorated,'R bare, gaunt room ; item, two or three
musicians on benches ; item, some dancing couples
on floor ; item, other 'couples on seats round room ;
item, landlord or manager in shirt-sleeves to pre-
serve order and to see that orders are given. In
some rooms the women have brought their work,
and are calmly sewing away to the strains of the
band or the click of the little boy's feet who is
going through the Lancashire clog dance with
such an air of supreme indifference and pro-
found melancholy. Here is a stout middle-
female in dirty pink fleshings, and a white
skirt—like a soiled and elderly ballet girl—who
capers professionally with a man in buff slippers
and a pepper-and-salt suit. Here is a poor fool,
with rouged nose and whitened face, who tumbles
and grimaces for the coppers which are sparsely
thrown ; hers is a comic jig-dancing Irishman,