The Suburbs of London

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The Suburbs of London
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Henry James

The Suburbs of London

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Quality of Life, Freedom, More time with the ones you Love.

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THE term “suburban” has always seemed to me to have a peculiarly English meaning. It suggests images that are not apt to present themselves in America. American cities have suburbs; but they have to a very limited extent what may be called suburban scenery. The essence of suburban scenery in the western world is to be straggling, shabby, inexpensive; to consist of rail fences and loose planks, vacant, dusty lots in which carpet-beating goes forward, Irish cabins, lumber yards, and rudely bedaubed advertisements of quack medicines. The peculiar function of the neighbourhood of most foreign towns, on the other hand, is to be verdant and residential, thickly inhabited, and replete with devices for making habitation agreeable. Some of the prettiest things in England and France are to be found in the immediate vicinity of the capitals of those countries. There is nothing more charming in Europe than the great terrace at Saint Germain; there are few things so picturesque as Richmond bridge and the view thence along either bank of the Thames. There are certainly ugly things enough in the neighbourhood of London, and there is much agreeable detail to be found within an hour's drive of several American towns; but the suburban quality, the mingling of density and rurality, the ivy-covered brick walls, the riverside holiday-making, the old royal seats at an easy drive, the little open-windowed inns, where the charm of rural seclusion seems to merge itself in that of proximity to the city market—-these things must be caught in neighbourhoods that have been longer a-growing.

Murray (of the Hand-Books) has lately put forward a work which I have found very full of entertaining reading: a couple of well-sized volumes treating of every place of the smallest individuality within a circuit of twenty miles round London. The number of such places is surprising; so large an amount of English history has gone on almost within sight of the tower of the Abbey. From time to time, as the days grow long, the contemplative stranger finds a charm in the idea of letting himself loose in this interesting circle. Even to a tolerably inveterate walker London itself will not appear in the long run a very delightful field for pedestrian exercise. London is too monotonous and, in plain English, too ugly to supply that wayside entertainment which the observant pedestrian demands. The shabby quarters are too dusky, too depressing, English low life is too unrelieved by out-of-door picturesqueness, to be treated as a daily spectacle. There are too many gin-shops, and too many miserable women at their doors; too many, far too many dirty-faced children sprawling between one's legs; the young ladies of the neighbourhood are too much addicted to violent forms of coquetry. On the other hand, the Squares and Crescents, the Roads and Gardens, are too rigidly, too blankly genteel. They are enlivened by groups of charming children, coming out to walk with their governesses or nursemaids, and by the figures of superior flunkies, lingering, in the consciousness of elegant leisure, on the doorstep. But, although these groups—-the children and the flunkies—-are the most beautiful specimens in the world of their respective classes, they hardly avail to impart a lively interest to miles of smoke-darkened stucco, subdivided into porticoes and windows. The most entertaining walk, therefore, is a suburban walk, which will introduce you to fewer butlers and footmen, but to children as numerous and as rosy, and to something more unexpected in the way of architecture.

There is a charming place of refuge from the London streets of which I fain would speak, although it hardly belongs to my modest programme. There was a time when Kensington was a suburb, but the suburban phase of it's history has pretty well passed away. Nothing can well be conceived less suburban than the vast expanses of residential house frontage of which this region now chiefly consists; and yet to go thither is the shortest way of getting out of London. Step into Kensington Gardens, and ten minutes walk will carry you practically fifty miles from the murky Babylon on the other side of the railing. It may really be said that Kensington Gardens contain some of the finest rural scenery in England. If they were not a huge city square, they would be an admirable nobleman's park. To sit down for an hour at the base of one of the great elms and see them studding the grass around you in vistas, which, as you do not perceive their limits, may be as long-drawn as you choose to suppose them, is one of the most accessible as well as one of the most agreeable methods of spending a June afternoon.

Whenever, toward six o'clock, I have mustered the spirit to go to Hyde park, I have ended, after a duly dazzled gaze at the wonderful throng that assembles there, by slinking away into the comparative wilderness of the neighbouring enclosure. I use the expression “slinking,” because I have usually taken this course with a bad conscience. In Hyde park you see fine people; in Kensington Gardens you see only fine trees; and the observant stranger feels that it is upon eminent specimens of the human rather than of the vegetable race that he should bestow his attention. Every one in London, as the phrase is, goes to Hyde park of a fine afternoon; and the spectacle, therefore, may be presumed to have no small impressiveness.

It is certainly a very brilliant mob, and the copper coin which you pay for the use of your little chair is a small equivalent for the greatness of the privilege. Before you is the Drive, with it's serried ranks of carriages; behind you is the Row, with it's misty, red-earthed vista, and it's pacing and bounding equestrians; between the two is the broad walk in which your fellow starers arc gathered together lolling back in the tightly-packed chairs or shuffling along with wistful looks at them. The first time the observant stranger betakes himself to the park, he certainly is struck with the splendour of the show. There seems to be so much of everything; there are so many carriages, so many horses, so many servants, so many policemen, so many people in the carriages, on horseback, in the chairs, on foot. The observant stranger is again reminded of those constant factors in every more distinctively “social” spectacle in England—-the boundless wealth and the boundless leisure. Leisure is suggested even more forcibly if he goes to the park of a fine summer morning. In the afternoon people may be supposed to have brought the days labours to a close, to have done their usual stint of work and earned the right to fiâner. But American eyes do not easily accustom themselves to the sight of a great multitude in a busy metropolis, beginning the days entertainment, a couple of hours after breakfast, by going to sit in a public garden and watch several hundred ladies and gentlemen gallop past them on horseback. To the great commercial bourgeoisie, which constitutes “American society,” this free disposal of the precious morning hours is an unattainable luxury. The men are attending to business; they are immersed in offices, counting-houses, and “stores.” The ladies are ordering the dinner, setting the machinery of the household in motion for the day, finding occupation among their children. To people brought up in these traditions there is, therefore, something very—-what shall I call it?—-very picturesque, in these elegant matutinal groups, for whom the work of life is done to order, and who lose so little time of a morning in beginning the play.

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