-
1. Water Baby
- Southern Illinois University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
I Water Baby Each summer thousands of Americans visiting England make a special pilgrimage to the home of Charles Dickens, one of London's colorful tourist attractions. Armed with maps and cameras, they board the Piccadilly Line Underground and exit at Russell Square, via a creaky and cramped elevator thatshakes and shimmies as itchugs to the surface. Once the elevator doors open and the visitors get their bearings, they walle east to Doughty Street, passing the playgrounds of Coram's Fields on the way. Doughty Street is a quiet, wide thoroughfare , lined with rows of brick, Georgian, terrace houses built in the late eighteenth century. Originally, both ends of the short street had gates attended by porters wearing gold-laced hats and the Doughty coat of arms on the buttons of their mulberry uniforms. It was while Dickens lived at 48 Doughty Street that the great Victorian author's fame was established. It is a handsome, threestory home, with a formal dining room, a morning room that overlooks a little courtyard garden at the rear, and a dignified Regency staircase that leads to bedrooms, a study, and a drawing room. During the two brief years he lived there, 1837-39, Dickens penned some of his most distinguished literary works. His evenings were often spent entertaining. Artist Leigh Hunt, illustrator George Cruikshank, or popular romantic novelist W. Harrison Ainsworth were frequent guests. As tourists approach the home of this famous novelist and social reformel; they take no notice ofanother historic address so very close by. Today, at 42 Doughty Street, can be fotUld the offices ofthe Society of Graphical and Allied 1bdes and the London Home Counties Area Organizers. But sixty years after Dickens left Doughty Street for a larger home, this address was shelter to another important person, a woman who eventually migrated to America and, like the Victorian writer, became a great artist and refonner-Eva Le Gallielme. She was born at 7:00 A.M., January 11,1899, two months after her mother had 1 2 I The Lives ofEva Lc Gallienne taken up residence in the shadow ofd1e birthplace ofPickwick Papers, Nicholas Nicklehy, and Oliver TWist. It was a significant time in English history. Mid-nineteenth century had marked the climax ofBritish power, prestige, and prosperity. By 1880 Britain's colonial possessions covered about 7.7 million square miles, with 268 million inhabitants. Clearly, Brittannia ruled the seas and assumed the "white man's burden" to extend dominion over a vast commonwealth. Bm now it was the end ofthe century, thefin de sieele, the end ofan era that began with Queen Victoria's coronation in 1837. During the funeral for Alfred Lord Tennyson in 1892, all of London had stood hushed and bareheaded outside Westminster Abbey. Many, including Eva Le Gallienne's father, had viewed his death as a foreshadowing of the Queen's death and, subsequendy, of the passing of the old Victorian order. Indeed, the last quarter of the century saw Britain's supremacy questioned within several international arenas. People were well aware that they were living amidst changes and struggles. Weary ofcenturies of exploitation by the English ruling classes, the Irish renewed their drive for independence. But in 1886, when Gladstone introduced the first Home Rule Bill to provide a separate parliament for Ireland, it split his Liberal party, aroused bitter debate among the voters, and eventually lost him the election. A second attempt to pass the bill was thrown out by the House ofLords in 1893. Passions became so heated that the country soon teetered on the edge ofcivil war. The struggle to overpower the Dutch and rule supreme in South Mrica created even more tension. Only a few months after Eva was born, Parliament declared war on the two Boer Republics ofSouth Mrica. Expected to last only a few months, it wore on for over two and a half years and caused great internal dissension in England. But there were changes at home as welL The quadrupling of England's population during the nineteenth century resulted in largescale unemployment and poverty. Slum conditions were so severe in some areas, in fact, that even as late as 1900 every other child was dead by the age ofone. By the 1890s most large cities were considered giant polluted bedlams. Women spent the major part of each day cleaning house, due to the increased amount of dirt in the air. The trams, railroads, petrol-engined buses, underground trains, and horse carts produced deafening clatter in...