LONDON A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE.
I HAD a vision, and a pleasant vision it was too, the other day in my easy
chair, while the fire crackled and blazed in the grate, the clock ticked on the
mantel-piece, and my dog Rough lay winking at the flickering flame on the rug
beneath, Whether it was a waking dream or a sleeping one is a question which is
not worth inquiring into, and concerning which, moreover, I am not prepared at.
the present moment to render any definite information. So the reader will be so
good as to let that pass. And now for my narrative.
I thought I was a denizen of the air - not borne aloft on a
pair of mighty wings, for I did not want wings - but wafted at will through the
regions of space whithersoever I chose. I thought as well, that by some
delightful, and to me it seemed perfectly natural, arrangement of affairs, I had
leaped the gap of a whole century, and that, securely poised a thousand feet
aloft, and endowed with telescopic vision, I looked down, through a glorious
vista in the sunny summer clouds, upon the London of the year 1957.
"And pray, Mr. Dreamer, what did you see?"
Why, that is just what I am going to tell you. Not having
seen London for a hundred years, as I thought, naturally enough I looked first
for St. Paul's Cathedral. There it stood in its old place just beneath me, the
gilded cross and ball, as they shone in the sun's rays, glittering like a star
in the centre of the sombre-looking dome. In its old place I said, but not in
its old place either, in one sense - for Ludgate Hill had moved off a hundred
paces at least to the westward, and Cheapside had gone fifty yards to the east;
northward, the Row and Newgate market, and all that screen of houses between the
cathedral and Newgate Street had vanished altogether; and southward, over a
clear open space, a grand flight of milk-white marble steps led down to the very
marge of the Thames.
The Thames! could that be the Thames? When I looked into its
crystal waters I could see the clear sand and white pebbles lying at the bottom,
and the shadows of the swift darting fishes, as they shot through the
transparent flood, chequering the river's bed. For the mud, the slime, the
poisonous filth of the past century, had all disappeared, and the finny tribes
had come back to their old domain; and as I looked, the trout sported and the
salmon leaped under the arches of London Bridge, as their progenitors had
done in the far feudal days. Then, the river's bank! instead of shelving shores
of mud, I saw solid walls of' granite, pierced with innumerable arches that led
inwards to miles of convenient wharfage, roofed in by an ample triple road-way -
part laid down with iron rails, part paved for wheel-carriages, and part a
gravelled promenade for the citizens. On both banks, up the stream to Vauxhall
and down the stream to Greenwich, this solid rampart engirdled the winding
river, broken only by swinging bridges at intervals, communicating with vast
clocks, all crowded with merchant vessels from every country on the globe. I
saw, further, that most of the area on either side had been gained from the
river - that it was spanned by not less than twenty new bridges, and that there
was no alternation of flood and ebb tide, only a gentle full. On looking for the
reason of this, I found that where the river narrows at Greenwich Reach, just
below the Asylum, the water was inclosed by a substantial dyke, maintaining it
at a given level, and pierced with a lock opening the passage for vessels at
high water. Far beyond this point, on the left shore of the river, I could see
extensive works, which I knew were the sewer works where the sewerage of the
great city, collected in monster tanks, was manufactured into portable manure,
and thence dispensed throughout the agricultural districts.
And the great city itself - how portentously great it had
become, and what a wonderfully changed face it wore! I looked for Highgate Hill;
and though not yet in the centre of London, in fulfilment of that fateful
prophecy which every one knows, it was the centre of a new London of its own,
and joined in a bond of brotherhood with Hampstead, the two being bound together
by long ranks and rows of spacious streets, squares and crescents, alternating
with pleasant promenades and flower gardens. Hampstead Heath, transformed to a
people's park, yet retained its native wildness -its patches of furze, its
groves of noble trees, and precipitous surface; but gravelled walks had taken
place of the rough sandy tracks; beautiful sheets of water represented the
stagnant ponds; and that rough marshy ground beneath the outlook towards
Harrow was cleared and , levelled for the athletic sports of the populace.
Not less had the city spread in other directions. Like the
stone-crop on a garden-wall, the brick-crop, ever spreading and spreading, had
crept on and on: Kew and Hammersmith were London; Lewisham and Blackheath were
London; Woolwich and Blackwall were London; a circuit of a hundred and fifty
miles would hardly have inclosed the wide domain of brick. And yet of brick in
its bare ugliness, sooth to say, I could see but little. It seemed that some
good genius had inspired the Londoners with the notion, than which nothing can
be truer, that ugliness, besides being a bore, is a positive evil; for barefaced
brick had been put to shame and compelled to wear a decent coat of stucco or
paint, to hide his nakedness from view. All London was gay and lively with
pleasant colours; the old street fronts, where they had not been replaced by
new, had yet mounted new tints; the dingy brown black of the brick had vanished,
and white, green, and pleasant greys laughed instead of frowned in their place.
I knew by this agreeable aspect of affairs that that old
phthisicky nuisance the Fog had had long ago his orders to decamp, and had
decamped accordingly. He had packed up to go, I found, when they began embanking
the river; he couldn't stand that sort of thing long - it was clean against all
precedent - and when that thorough drainage was done, which had to be done to
render the embankment complete, he curled himself up under. a puff' of westerly
wind and rolled off into the German Ocean, never to return.
Still, I thought, the departure of Mr. Fog could never make
London look so bright and clean as I saw it looking. So, swooping down some five
hundred feet or so, and looking a little nearer, I discovered that London had no
longer not only any fog, but also not any smoke. "Ha, ha!" said I to myself,
"that accounts for it." Fact was - for I seemed to know all facts the moment I
wanted to know them - fact was, that some common-sense person, not by any means
a common person though, had discovered, about the year nineteen hundred, that
the production of smoke, for which London I had so long been famed, was not only
a nuisance most destructive in its effects, but a mighty unprofitable business
to the producer. He succeeded (being a rather pertinacious fellow, or he
couldn't have done it) in showing the citizens that in making smoke to choke one
another, they wasted fuel and paid dearly for what was no luxury. He succeeded,
too, in showing them how to burn their fuel instead of wasting it in the form of
smoke, and like sensible people they took to doing it with a right good will.
Some objectors there were, as usual, lovers of good old times, who determined to
go smoking on in the old way; but then, the thing once shown to be practicable,
the Parliament wisely took it in hand, and by a summary law compelled the
recusants to conform.
Fog and smoke gone from London, I thought I would see how the
poor folks benefited by the change, in their miserable quarters. I bent to look
at Spitalfields. Whew! Spitalfields was gone, with all its conglomerate of
dilapidation and trumpery; and in place of the old, dark, tortuous, and fetid
slums of tumble-down tenements, I saw wide roomy thoroughfares and tall white
substantial houses, noble to look at and capital to live in. I knew, by the long
wide windows to let in light, that the silk-weavers were there still, and in
fact I heard the rattle of their looms; and I heard, too, what I had never heard
before in that place, blithe merry voices singing gaily at their labour, and the
delightful prattle of healthy children frolicking in their play. Whether the old
houses had tumbled down from age and decrepitude I did not care to know; here
were the new ones, clean, spacious, and healthy, each containing a score of
families and more, and each family enjoying as much as it chose its own
convenient seclusion among the rest.
I turned from Spitalfields to old Bermondsey, and there the
same transformation had taken place. Thence I glanced over to St·. Giles's, and
thence again to Agar Town, and thence to far Whitechapel and Bethnal Green; all
to no purpose - I could not find these old slums of London anywhere, search in
what quarter I might. All had been cleared away. On the sites of squalid courts
and disease-engendering dens, were wide open spaces dotted with vast edifices
towering far above the old-fashioned house roofs, and which I knew were the
homes of the industrial classes, pervaded by a spirit of order, cleanliness,
sobriety. and brotherly kindness, and the permanent abodes of health and
contentment.
I looked for the gin-shops, which used to be the people's
palaces a hundred years ago; and sure enough I found a good many of them in
their old places at the corners of the streets; but lo! on a nearer view, they
were gin-shops no longer, but reading-rooms, lecture-rooms, and popular
institutions for the promotion of knowledge. I saw how this had come to pass.
When the old slums were routed out, and had given place to comfortable
dwellings, the spirits of the poor rose out of that depression which always
begets recklessness, the sanctuary became more frequented, they began, too, to
take pleasure in their new abodes, in their surroundings, in : their personal
appearance - and so onwards and upwards to the cultivation of the heart and
intellect. As this feeling grew, the gin-shops declined in popular estimation;
as a consequence, they declined in splendour of appearance, and assumed by
degrees a rather dingy and draggled aspect. Then, said the working-man to the
gin-spinner: "We don't want you any longer; your day is past, and you may go
your way. We want to get knowledge; we don't want to get drunk; so off with you,
my friend." And so the gin-spinner had to step out, and then incontinently the
schoolmaster stepped in, and he hung out his banner on the walls, and his cry
was not, "Come and get drunk, to fill my pockets, O swinish multitude;" but,
"Men and brethren, come and get instruction, and perish no longer for lack of
knowledge." Thus Wisdom lifted up her voice in the streets, and I could see
plainly enough that she had not spoken in vain.
I looked down upon Newgate. That old granite fastness had put
on a new face, and throbbed with a new heart, transformed from a city prison to
a national reformatory, it was no longer the receptacle of dark despair and
hopeless remorse, but of sorrow for past sin and of true penitence, and earnest
hearty endeavours to cease from wrong-doing and lead a new life. Good and
faithful men and tender loving women laboured there in the work of social
amelioration, to bring the wanderer back to the path of duty, to instruct the
ignorant, and to qualify the neglected and helpless to earn industriously an
honest living. Crime, I saw, had been vastly diminished. The old predatory
generations had died out; and the juvenile reformatories, the ragged schools of
the last century, and the industrial homes of a later day, had caught up the new
while they were yet young, ,and by gentle discipline and careful moral training,
had won over the majority to the practice of a virtuous life.
What struck me most, among the material changes that had
taken place in the huge Babylon, was the aspect and condition of the streets.
There was no longer a narrow jostled thoroughfare to be found. The entire
Strand, for instance, was a uniform width throughout; and parallel with it a
good part of the way. on the north side, was another street almost as wide, and
devoted exclusively to the heavy traffic of commerce. The old horse omnibusses
had all disappeared, and instead of them numberless light carriages ran in
tram-roads next the foot-way, drawn by some application of electric power, and
stopping at short intervals. Everybody seemed to ride as it suited them, paying
their way by a single smallest coin. These tram carriages were on each side of
the way, and constantly running in contrary directions; the middle space between
them was the horse and carriage route, and from its amplitude, and the absence
of all heavy traffic, formed a convenient and spacious drive.
Then the shops - they also had undergone a grand
transformation. The system of ruinous competition appeared to have worn itself
out. Of placarded puffs, of window-ticketed goods, of promenading wooden
banners, I saw nothing. Many private shops still of course remained, but in not
a few instances shopkeepers had combined together to co-operate for mutual
advantage, instead of competing for mutual destruction; and I beheld vast
associative stores, the depositories of the skilled worker in every craft, where
all that talent could invent or industry produce was displayed in magnificent
abundance beneath one ample roof. One shop of this kind for each single branch
of commerce sufficed for a large district, and the decreased expenditure in
rent, fittings, and service, reduced the cost of management, and consequently
the price of products. But the change had a still better effect: as the producer
and the proprietor were never the salesmen of their own wares, falsification and
adulteration had been abandoned, from motives of policy at least, if not of
honesty, and the buyer might be sure of unsophisticated goods for his money.
Some of these shops were vast magazines of wealth, covering wide areas, and
perfectly dazzling with the splendour of their contents. The purchaser walked
through long galleries, where, ranged in orderly array, glittered and gleamed
the gold, the gems, the jewels of every clime. Some were as rich in works of
pictorial or fictile art; and some, again, had inexhaustible stores of
intellectual wealth. Books on all subjects, and which seemed, from the abundance
of their illustrations, to speak as much to the eye as to the mind, abounded in
inconceivable stores in these repositories; and every household, however
humble, had its family library, and, what was better still, its family of'
readers. I observed that from each of these district shops innumerable electric
wires branched off in all directions, communicating with several houses in the
district to which it belonged. Thus, no sooner did a house-keeper stand in need
of any article than she could despatch the order instantaneously along the wire,
and receive the goods by the very first railway carriage that happened to pass
the store. Thus, she saved her time, and she lost no money, because all
chaffering and cheapening, and that fencing between buyer and seller, which was
once deemed a pleasure, had been long voted a disgraceful, demoralizing
nuisance, and was done away with. The electric wires ran along the fronts of the
houses near the upper stories, crossing the streets at an elevation at which
they were scarcely visible from below; and I noticed that the dwellings of
friends, kindred, and intimates were thus banded together, not only throughout
the whole vast city, but even far out into the provinces, and, in cases where
the parties were wealthy, to the uttermost limits of the realm. One result of
this extended social intimacy and sympathy was pleasingly apparent. The old
walls of separation which had formerly shut out rich from poor and poor from
rich, had crumbled beneath it, and were fast falling to decay. I knew that by
unmistakeable signs. I saw lords and labourers mingling together in manly
sports; the recreation-grounds were numerous; holidays were of weekly
occurrence; the artisan bowled out the gentleman at cricket, and the gentleman
never thought of his gentility in returning the compliment. The nobles had
thrown open their beautiful galleries of art to the people; and the people;
imbued with the love of the beautiful and the true in nature and imagination,
grew refined and gentle under the influence of art. The public squares and
gardens of the city were all thrown open likewise, and, no longer surrounded by
iron rails, were free to all alike. And now, the atmosphere being pure and
sweet, exquisite flowers grew and flourished in all available spots; their
fragrance filled the summer air, and most citizens had their gardens, where the
rich blossoms swayed and nodded in the breeze.
I looked into the churches and places of worship, and there I
saw that in the house of prayer social distinctions far less prevailed; the
gorgeous few, screened off, cushioned and private, had vanished, and with it had
vanished the hard narrow plank that was once the poor man's purgatory. I saw by
that, that rich and poor now really met , and worshipped together before the
throne of Him who is the Maker of them all, and had ceased to parade the vain
and trifling accidents of birth and circumstance in that sacred presence.
I looked into the law courts. I did not see the huge
horsehair wigs and the black gowns. I saw a few sage elders quietly discussing
questions of right, not by points of law and the authority of' precedent, but by
the force of reason, equity, and the common-sense rule of justice. I looked into
the hospitals, where in former times poor stricken humanity,
"Stretched in disease's shapes
abhorred,"
had languished in miserable suffering. Here the change was marvellous indeed.
Though the population of the almost measureless city could now be hardly less
than seven millions, I saw literally no cases of suffering from what could be
strictly defined as disease. Smallpox and fever had vanished; gout, rheumatisms,
lumbagos, had taken themselves off; asthmas and consumptions were things of the
past; cholera was a tradition to be read of in old books, along with black
plague and gaol distemper; and the scourge of typhus had been banished from the
city along with the foul air, the bad drainage, the exhalations of the marshes,
and the fetid odours of the old river's banks. The cases I saw under treatment
were cases mostly of a surgical kind, and were the results of accident. Some few
there were of disorders arising from over exercise, excess in youthful frolics,
unwise exposure to atmospheric action; but of' foul, contagious, endemic
diseases, not one. The reason was, that for the past generation or two the
sources of disease had, on the one hand, been removed; and, on the other, the
medical faculty, having less to do in the cure of such ills, had taken up with
the business of prevention, in which they had finally succeeded so well as to
reduce the amount of preventible deaths, which a hundred years before had been
some thousands per annum, almost to nil; and, you may depend upon it, the
public, whose lives they had saved, did not suffer them to go without their
reward.
During my airy survey, one thing had struck me all the way
along. This was the changed costume of the people. I should hardly have known
them for English by their dress; they wore neither hats nor bonnets, judging
such things by the shapes of the old days. The black cylinder had disappeared
from the heads of the males, and the heads of the females, no longer semi-nude
as I had seen them last, were sheltered in light and graceful coverings which I
am not man-milliner enough to describe. Fashion seemed to have abandoned her
frolics, and given place to propriety and utility in the garments of both sexes.
I am sorry, however, that I cannot go into particulars on this interesting
subject; but I really cannot - for just at this crisis in my survey, that shaggy
dog of mine, Rough, started up from the rug with a tremendous bark at something
he heard behind the wainscot, and roused me out of my dream. In a moment the
monster Babylon of nineteen hundred and fifty-seven rolled itself up like a
scroll, and I saw it no more.
I could not help, however, as I yawned and rubbed my eyes a
little, and poked up the fading fire -I could not help, I say, wishing the
vision were true. Do not you wish the same, reader? Then lend your aid to
attempt its realization.
Leisure Hour, December 10, 1857
[humorous visions of the future from Punch, ed.]
EDISON'S ANTI-GRAVITATION UNDER-CLOTHING.
EDISON'S TELEPHONOSCOPE (TRANSMITS LIGHT AS WELL AS SOUND)
(Every evening, before going to bed, Pater- and Materfamilias set up an electric camera-obscura over their bedroom mantel-piece, and gladden their eyes with the sight of their Children, at the Antipodes, and converse gaily with them through the wire.)
Punch, Almanack, 1879
THE POLICE (OF THE FUTURE).
(Vide Letter to "Daily Chronicle," Feb. 15, 1886)
EXPLANATION.- A. Light Basket-work Shield (old Hamper-top, for instance); B. Quarter-Staff; C. Electric Rattle; D. Water-Tank and Hose-Pipe; E. Money-Bag to pay for 'Bus rides (Special Tax in Police Rates); F. Neck Guard; G. Electric Battery; H. Fireworks, Squibs, &c. ; J. Mob-persuaders; K. Electric Wires up Sleeve to shock Opponent.
Punch, February 27, 1886