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COVENT GARDEN MARKET.
THERE is no rus in urbe like Covent Garden
Market.
The patches of struggling vegetation in square, park, or
garden, whose only commerce with the sun is a sort of bowing acquaintance -
a distant nod exchanged en passant through the chinks of a smoky
cloud - have been wittily designated "Nature put in the pound for
straying." But this is wit at the expense of truth. They are not Nature at
all, but a vile caricature, daubed in charcoal and lampblack. The petrified
trees of a coal-mine have as much claim on our sympathies. They satisfy no
yearnings, but are silent and sullen as the walls that frown on them. They make
no response to the inward voice that "babbles of green fields;" and,
like the windows of a prison, show us a glimpse of the unencompassed world only
through a black grating that reminds us of our imprisonment.
How differently are we affected by Covent Garden Market. Here
Nature empties forth her teeming lap, filled with the choicest produce of her
happiest generation. The loveliness of the land is there and the fatness
thereof. At one glance we pass in review the prime and bloom of vegetation, and
communicate directly with the riches of the earth. It is the metropolitan
congress of the vegetable kingdom, where every [-51-] department of the
"growing" and "blowing" world has its representatives - the
useful and the ornamental, the needful and the superfluous, the esculent and the
medicinal. Here the Londoner fraternizes with the rustic, and acknowledges that
he is not all bricks and mortar - that Nature has still some parental claims
upon him which he cannot entirely away with.
It is a twofold temple, dedicated to Pomona and Flora, in
which daily devotion is paid to the productive divinities. Here, as in a very
temple, all classes and grades, all denominations and distinctions of men,
jostle each other in the humility of a common dependence on the same appetites,
the same instincts, the same organs of taste, sight, and smell - the fashionable
lady who has left her Brougham at the entrance, in quest of the pampered
nursling of the conservatory, and the wan needlewoman, bent on the purchase of a
bunch of wallflowers, or a root of pale primroses to keep her paler cheeks in
countenance; the artizan's wife, purveying for her husband's meal, and the
comfortable housekeeper, primed with the discriminating lore of Mrs. Glass,
making provisions for her winter's preserves; the bloated gourmand, in search of
precocious peas, and the sickly hypochondriac, eager to try the virtue of some
healing herb.
The priestesses who serve the temple form two distinct
classes, those of Pomona and those of Flora - the Basket-woman and the
Bouquet-girl. It is to the first that our artist has dedicated the mingled grace
and vigour of his pencil, and has shown her to us in the midst of her athletic
avocations. Hers is no finikin type of female beauty ; the taper waist and
slender neck would ill befit the rude labours she is devoted to. [-52-] Her portly
figure is rather architectural than sculptural in its graces; and with arms
upraised, in support of the basket balanced on her head, she might serve as a
model for the caryatids of a new temple to the deity she serves.
He who would behold her in full activity must gratify his
curiosity at some expense. He must voluntarily accomplish that which is enforced
upon the vegetable visitor of the market-he must tear himself from his bed,
foregoing the suavities of the morning's sleep to face the bleak air of dawning
day. Unless, indeed, he repair to the scene, as we have often done, as a sort of
"finish "- to use the language of antiquated fast men - after a round
of evening parties, his temples throbbing with an unhallowed mixture of festive
beverages, from the bland negus to the icebound fire of champagne punch; his
senses jaded with a thousand artificial and violent delights; and, perhaps, a
secret wound rankling at his heart - a wound that he has attempted to treat with
light indifference, and to bury under a hecatomb of flirtations, but which now
asserts itself with redoubled pangs, and mingles its reproaches to the.
many-voiced objurgations of conscience to sicken and disgust him with his
existence. Under such circumstances is it that the most striking phase of Covent
Garden - that which it presents on the morning of a market-day - will produce
its fullest effect. It is under such circumstances that it has impressed itself
upon our minds, and that we can speak of it most naturally.
Led by a vague instinct, an unconscious attraction- as
towards some refreshing influence, some healing spring that should comfort the
fevered spirit that lay [-53-] sick within us-we have found ourselves mechanically
following some huge cabbage-laden waggon, as it loomed and rumbled through the
deserted streets until it stopped and ranged itself with its companions round
the market square. Here, with vacant attention, we have watched each process,
joined each busy group, followed with our eyes the contents of each waggon in
its various distribution, snuffing eagerly the mingled perfumes from the
extempore parterres that were spreading before us, and inhaling with joyful and
dilated lungs the countrified atmosphere that was, as it were, being unpacked
with each cart-load of rustic produce.
Gradually, as all impurities seemed cleansed away from our
mind, and a more cheerful and healthy spirit awakened within us, we took a
keener interest in the increasing bustle and variety of the spectacle that
disclosed itself with the full dawn of morning. We watched the nature of each
particular scene and the character of the actors therein, or listened to the
arguments accompanying each bargain, until it was finally completed in the
adjoining public-house, amidst the ceremonial libations of gin, half-and-half,
or heavy wet; scrutinizing the peculiarities of buyer and seller. First, the
various grades of rusticity in the vendors, from the complete bacon-fed bumpkin,
who has come up with a load of turnips, and the semi-countrified market-gardener
- half country half town, like a stagecoach-omnibus - to the cockney nurseryman,
distinguishable only by the inseparable pedantry of his profession. The no less
marked and more numerous distinctions in the purchasers the well-to-do
shopkeeper, with neatly appointed cart and sleek horse; [-54-] the petty dealer,
whose equipage exhibits various stages of rickets; the hawker, with a truck or
donkey- cart, whose stentorian voice will shortly awaken ti~ echoes of many a
tranquil quarter, with the familiar cry of "green gooseberries,"
"all a-growing all a-blowing," or "cherries round and
sound," &c., &c.~ lastly, the stall-woman and the flower-girl-she
of the "two bunches a-penny" - laying out with anxious discretion the
small capital borrowed for the day, and for which exorbitant interest will have
to be paid to some extortionate old hag - some withered she-Rothschild of rags
and tatters - who, by some infernal compact with the devil of usury and a hard
heart in lieu of the philosopher's stone, contrives to reap a golden harvest
from squalid misery.* (*This is a fact. There is a class of money-lenders -
generally women - who furnish capital to the lower class of hawkers, at the most
outrageous profit.)
Amidst this medley of divided interests, of varied ranks and
conditions, of larger or smaller insects, swarming and feeding on the plenteous
growth of Nature, moves the stately form of the Basket-woman, upreared above the
rest by the height of her toppling burden, discharging her simple and unvarying
functions like the embodiment of invisible justice presiding over and regulating
the affairs of men.
Bodily refreshed by approximation with pure and wholesome
objects, gradually diverted from morbid discontent, and restored to something
like equanimity, by the contemplation of persevering industry struggling through
misery less fantastic than our own, we have bent our steps homeward, a wiser and
a more sleepy man.
[-55-] Towards the afternoon another and very different phase
of the market is presented. To the range of heavy tilted carts and waggons has
succeeded a line of brilliant and elegant equipages. The utile has given
place to the dulce, and pleasure now shows itself almost as busy as need.
.Over this period of the day Flora more especially presides, and the
Bouquet-girl - her priestess - is in the height of her ministry. Her delicate
fingers are now busily employed in tricking out the loveliness of nature; for
even her loveliest daughters must be drilled and trained ere they can make their
debut in the world of artifice they are called upon to adorn. Their
slender stems need a wiry support to prop the head, that else would droop in the
oppressive atmosphere of the ball-room or the theatre. Art must draw fresh
beauties from the contrast of each with the other; nor will the self-complacent
ingenuity that paints the lily and gilds refined gold be satisfied till it has
completed their toilet by investing them in a white robe of broidered paper.
The clients of the Bouquet-girl consist almost exclusively of
the sighing herd of lovers. These, with the exception of an occasional wholesale
order from the manager of a theatre with a view to some triumphant debut, form
the staple consumers of her wares. But among the whole tribe she has no such
insatiate customer as he who is struggling in the toils of a danseuse. "If
music be the food of love," bouquets are certainly the very air upon the
regular supply of which hangs its existence; and on such air does the danseuse,
chamelion-like, seem exclusively to live. They are the Alpha and Omega, the
beginning and the end of her life - the symbols of her triumphs public and
domestic [-56-] - the tribute exacted by the achievements of her feet, and the
conquests of her glancing eye. A collection of all the bouquets she receives,
arranged and ticketed according to date and circumstance, would form a minute
record of her career. Not but all passions, even of the humblest nature, are
sufficiently burdensome in this particular, but let any man who as yet has only
"paid attentions," as it is called, in the ordinary sphere of life,
try even a flirtation with a danseuse, and he will see what an overgrown
and ruinous item the article bouquet will form in his yearly expenditure. If he
be not a man of some substance, or prepared to face the inquisitors of Portugal
Street, he had better take us at our word than adventure on the experiment.
Over what a multiplicity of love-affairs, in every stage of
advancement, suspense, or retrogression, does the Bouquet-girl preside and
administer to! For the destruction of how many beleaguered citadels do her
arsenals furnish ammunition - from the open siege, carried on in the eye of the
world, to the secret and artful mine, unsuspected till some terrible explosion
reveals it to universal scandal! How many a course of true love has she traced
through all its windings. The legitimate and successful suit, whose regular
supply of bouquets ends at last with the bridal wreath of orange-flowers; and
the illegitimate suit, whose series of bouquets has no other climax than abrupt
cessation, a gradual dying-off, or a change in the address to which they are
directed.
Depository of secrets so important, upon which depend the
fair name and the happiness of so many, what a bonne fortune would the
confessions of a Bouquet- girl be to a revelation and mystery-mongering
novelist. [-57-] It is to be hoped, however, that she is worthy of the trust
reposed in her; indeed, we firmly and fondly believe it; for ourselves in the
greenness of youth have furnished our little quota of delicate confidences to
the mass of perilous stuff that slumbers in the fair bosom of one in particular,
whom we will not name. With a solemn adjuration to the Bouquet-girl to pursue
her amiable but responsible calling with inviolable secrecy and discretion, for
the sake of mercy and the peace of society in general, we will bid her farewell,
and a long ascendancy of the planet Venus.
CHARLES KENNEY.
[--nb. grey numbers in brackets indicate page number, (ie. where new page begins), ed.--] |