Here are Wapping Old Stairs. Come with me through the narrow court and stand upon the stairs leading down to the river. They are now rickety old steps and deserted. Time was when the sailors landed here when they returned from a voyage; then their sweethearts ran down the steps to meet them.

And here, when Polly had spent all his money for him, Jack hugged her to his manly bosom before going aboard again. Greeting and farewell took place in the presence of a theater full of spectators. They were the watermen who lay off the stairs by dozens waiting for a fare, at the time when the Thames was the main highway of the City. The stairs were noisy and full of life. Polly herself had plenty of repartee in reply to the gentle badinage of the young watermen; her Tom had rivals among them. When he came home the welcome began with a fight with one or other of these rivals. The stairs are silent now; a boat or two, mostly without any one in it, lies despondently alongside the stairs or in the mud at low tide.

Sometimes the boats pushed off with intent to fish; the river was full of fish, though there are now none left; there were all kinds of fish that swim, including salmon; the fishery of the Thames is responsible for more rules and ordinances than any other industry of London. The boatmen were learned in the times and seasons of the fish. For instance, they could tell by the look of the river when a shoal of roach was coming up stream; at such times they took up passengers who would go a-fishing, and landed them on the sterlings—the projecting piers of London Bridge—where they stood angling for the fish all day long with rod and line.

Next to the Wapping Old Stairs is Execution Dock. This was the place where sailors were hanged and all criminals sentenced for offenses committed on the water; they were hanged at low tide on the foreshore, and they were kept hanging until three high tides had flowed over their bodies—an example and an admonition to the sailors on board the passing ships. Among the many hangings at this doleful spot is remembered one which was more remarkable than the others. It was conducted with the usual formalities; the prisoner was conveyed to the spot in a cart beside his own coffin, while the ordinary sat beside him and exhorted him. He wore the customary white nightcap and carried a prayer-book in one hand, while a nosegay was stuck in his bosom; he preserved a stolid indifference to the exhortations; he did not change color when the cart arrived, but it was remembered afterward that he glanced round him quickly; they carried him to the fatal beam and they hanged him up. Now, if you come to think of it, as the spot had to be approached by a narrow lane and by a narrow flight of steps, while the gallows stood in the mud of the foreshore, the number of guards could not have been many. On this occasion, no sooner was the man turned off than a boat’s company of sailors, armed with bludgeons, appeared most unexpectedly, rushed upon the constables, knocked down the hangman, hustled the chaplain, overthrew the sheriff’s officers, cut down the man, carried him off, threw him into a boat, and were away and in midstream, going down swiftly with the current before the officers understood what was going on.

When they picked themselves up they gazed stupidly at the gallows with the rope still dangling—where was the man? He was in the boat and it was already a good way down the river, and by that kind of accident which often happened at that time when the arrangements of the executive were upset, there was not a single wherry within sight or within hail.

Then the ordinary closed his book and pulled his cassock straight; the hangman sadly removed the rope, the constables looked after the vanishing boat, and there was nothing to be done but just to return home again. As for the man, that hanging was never completed and those rescuers were never discovered.

As an illustration of the solitude of this place, before its settlement under Queen Elizabeth, one observes that there was a field called Hangman’s Acre, situated more than a quarter of a mile from the river, where in the year 1440 certain murderers and pirates were hanged in chains upon a gallows set on rising ground, so that they should be seen by the sailors in the ships going up and down the river. There was not therefore at that time a single house to obstruct this admonitory spectacle.

The “hamlet” of Shadwell is only a continuation of St. George’s or Ratcliffe Highway; its churchyard is converted into a lovely garden, one of the many gardens which were once burial grounds; the people sit about in the shade or in the sun; along the south wall is a terrace commanding a cheerful view of the London docks, with their shipping. There is a fish-market here, the only public institution of Shadwell; there are old houses, which we may look at and perhaps represent, but there is little about its people that distinguishes them from the folk on either hand.

In the year 1671 the church was built; Shadwell was already a place with a large population, and the church was built in order to minister to their spiritual wants. What could be better? But you shall learn from one example how the best intentions were frustrated and how the riverside folk were suffered to go from bad to worse, despite the creation of the parish and the erection of the church. The first rector was a nephew of that great divine and philosopher, Bishop Butler. He was so much delighted with the prospect of living and working among this rude and ignorant folk, he was so filled and penetrated with the spirit of humanity and the principles of his religion, that his first sermon was on the text, “Woe is me that I sojourn in Mesech, that I dwell in the tents of Kedar!” This good man, however, received permission from the bishop to live in Norfolk Street, Strand, about three miles from his church. And so, with a non-resident clergy, with no schools, with no restraints of example or precept, with little interference from the law, what wonder if the people reeled blindly down the slopes that lead to death and destruction?

The name of Ratcliffe or Redcliff marks a spot where the low cliff which formerly rose up from the marsh curved southward for a space and then receded. It is a “hamlet” which at first offers little to interest or to instruct. It consists of mean and dingy streets—there is not a single street which is not mean and dirty; none of the houses are old; none are picturesque in the least; they are rickety, dirty, shabby, without one redeeming feature; there is a church, but it is not stately like St. George’s-in-the-East, nor venerable like that of Stepney; it is unlovely; there are “stairs” to the river and they are rickety; there are warehouses which contain nothing and are tumbling down; there are public houses which do not pretend to be bright and attractive—low-browed, dirty dens, which reek of bad beer and bad gin. Yet the place, when you linger in it and talk about it to the clergy and the ladies who work for it, is full of interest. For it is a quarter entirely occupied by the hand-to-mouth laborer; the people live in tenements; it is thought luxury to have two rooms; there are eight thousand of them, three quarters being Irish; in the whole parish there is not a single person of what we call respectability, except two or three clergymen and half a dozen ladies; there are no good shops, there are no doctors or lawyers, there is not even a newsvender, for nobody in Ratcliffe reads a newspaper. But the place swarms with humanity; the children play by thousands in the gutters: and on the door-steps the wives and mothers sit all day long and in all weathers, carrying on a perpetual parliament of grievance. Here once—I know not when—stood Ratcliffe Cross, and the site of the cross—removed, I know not when—was one of the spots where, in 1837, Queen Victoria was proclaimed. Why the young Queen should have been proclaimed at Ratcliffe Cross I have never been able to discover. I have asked the question of many persons and many books, but I can find no answer. The oldest inhabitant knows nothing about it; none of the books can tell me if the accession of the Queen’s predecessors was also proclaimed by ancient custom at Ratcliffe Cross. Unfortunately, it is now extremely difficult to find persons who remember the accession of the Queen, not to speak of that of William IV.

Ratcliffe has other historical memories. Here stood the hall of the Shipwrights’ Company. This was a very ancient body; it existed as the fraternity of St. Simon and St. Jude from time immemorial; the Shipwrights’ Company formerly had docks and building yards on the south of the Thames; then they moved their hall to this place on the north bank, and seem to have given up their building yards.

Here was a school, founded and maintained by the Coopers’ Company, where Lancelot Andrewes, the learned bishop, was educated.

There is another historical note concerning Ratcliffe. It belongs to the year 1553. It was in that year that Admiral Sir Hugh Willoughby embarked on that voyage of discovery from which he was destined never to return. He was sent out on a roving commission to “discover regions, dominions, islands, and places unknown,” and he began by an attempt to discover the northeast passage. Remember that geographers knew nothing in those days of the extent of Siberia. Willoughby had three ships; their tonnage was, respectively, 160 tons, 120, and 90. His crews consisted of 50, 35, and 27 men, respectively. With such tiny craft they put forth boldly to brave unknown Arctic seas. It was from Ratcliffe Stairs that Willoughby went on board on May 10, 1553. Half a mile down the river the flotilla passed Greenwich Palace, where the young King, Edward VI, was residing. It was within a few weeks of his death; consumption had laid him low. When the ships passed the palace they “dressed” with flags and streamers, they fired cannons of salute, they blew their trumpets. The young King was brought out to see them pass. It was his last appearance in public; on July 6th he was dead. As for Willoughby, he parted with one of his ships, and after being tossed about off the coast of Lapland he resolved to winter at the mouth of the river Argina. Here, in the following spring, he was found with his companions, all dead and frozen. A strange story of English enterprise to be connected with these forlorn and ramshackle stairs.

Here is another story about Ratcliffe. In a street by the river, beside the stairs, are two or three big ruinous warehouses, mostly deserted. One of these has a double front, the left side representing a private house, the right a warehouse. What was stored in the warehouse I know not; the whole riverside is lined with warehouses and stores. The place is now for a third time deserted, and stands with broken windows. It has been deserted, so far as the original purpose was concerned, for many years. Some thirty years ago a young medical man began to live and to practise in Ratcliffe. He became presently aware that the death-rate among the children was frightful. There was no hospital nearer than the London Hospital in the Whitechapel Road, and that was two miles away; there were no nurses to be obtained and there were no appliances; if a child was taken ill it had to lie in the one room occupied by the whole family, without ventilation, without proper food, without skilled care, without medicines. Therefore in most cases of illness the child died.

He found this rickety old warehouse empty; he thought that he would do what he could, being quite a poor man, to make a hospital for children. He did so; with his slender funds he got a few beds and quickly filled them. He was physician, surgeon, dispenser, druggist, everything; his wife was nurse and everything else. Together these two devoted people started their hospital. Well, it grew; it became known; money began to come in; other doctors and nurses were taken on; all the rooms, there were many, were filled; the children began to recover. Presently the house became so prosperous that it was resolved to build a separate Children’s Hospital, which was done, and you may see it—a noble place. But for the founder this crown of his labors came too late. The work killed him before the new hospital was completed; one of the wards, the Heckford Ward, is named after the man who gave all his strength, all his mind, all his knowledge, all his thoughts; who gave his life and his death; who gave himself, wholly and ungrudgingly, to the children. His patients recovered, but their physician died. He gave his own life to stay the hand of death.

Then the house stood empty for a time; it was presently taken over by the vicar of the parish and made into a playhouse for the little children in the winter after school hours, from four to seven; I have told you how the children swarm in the Ratcliffe streets. After seven the house was converted into a club for the rough riverside lads, where they could box and play single stick and subdue the devil in them, and so presently could sit down and play games and listen to reading and keep out of mischief. But the house is condemned; it is really too ramshackle; it is empty again, and is now to be pulled down.

There is still another story whose scene is laid at Ratcliffe. There is a house beside the church which is now the vicarage. It is a square, solid house, built about the end of the seventeenth century. It is remarkable for a dining-room whose walls are painted with Italian landscapes. The story is that there lived here, early in the eighteenth century, a merchant who rode into London every day, leaving his only daughter behind. He desired to decorate his house with wall-paintings, and engaged a young Italian to stay in the house and to paint all day. Presently he made the not unusual discovery that the Italian and his daughter had fallen in love with each other. He knew what was due to his position as a City merchant, and did what was proper for the occasion—that is to say, he ordered the young man to get out of the house in half an hour. The artist obeyed, so far as to mount the stairs to his own room. Here, however, he stopped, and when the angry parent climbed the stairs after the expiration of the half hour to know why he was not gone, he found the young lover, dead, hanging to the canopy of the bed. His ghost was long believed to haunt the house, and was only finally laid, after troops of servants had fled shrieking, when the wife of the vicar sat up all night by herself in the haunted chamber, and testified that she had neither seen nor heard anything, and was quite willing to sleep in the room. That disgusted the ghost, who went away of his own accord. I wish I could show you one room in the house. It was the old powdering-room. When your wig had been properly curled and combed you threw a towel or dressing-gown over your shoulders and sat in this little room, with your back to the door. Now, the door had a sliding panel, and the barber on the other side was provided with the instrument which blew the white powder through the panel upon the wig. The operation finished, you arose, slipped off the dressing-gown and descended to your coach with all the dignity of a gold-laced hat, a wig white as the driven snow, lace ruffles, a lace tie, and a black velvet coat—if you were a merchant—with gold buttons, and white silk stockings. A beautiful time it was for those who could afford the dignity and the splendor which made it beautiful. For those who could not— Humph! Not quite so beautiful a time.

After Ratcliffe we pass into Limehouse. It was at Limehouse Hole that Rogue Riderhood lived.

The place is more marine than Wapping; the public houses have a look, an air, a something that suggests the sea; the shops are conducted for the wants of the merchantmen; the houses are old and picturesquely dirty; the streets are narrow; one may walk about these streets for a whole afternoon, and find something to observe in every one, either a shop full of queer things or a public house full of strange men, or a house that speaks of other days—of crimps, for instance, and of press gangs, and of encounters in the streets; there are ancient docks used for the repair of wooden sailing ships; there are places where they build barges; a little inland you may see the famous church of Limehouse, with its lofty steeple; it was only built in 1730. Before that time there was no church at Limehouse; since that time nobody has gone to church at Limehouse, speaking of the true natives, the riverside folk, not of those who dwell respectably in the West India Dock Road. It is, however, doubtless a great advantage and benefit to a sea-going population to have a churchyard to be buried in.

At Limehouse the river suddenly bends to the south, and then again to the north, making a loop within which lies a peninsula. This is a very curious place. It occupies an area of a mile and a half from north to south, and about a mile from east to west. The place was formerly a dead level, lower than the river at high tide, and therefore a broad tidal marsh; it was, in fact, part of the vast marsh of which I have already spoken, now reclaimed, lying along the north bank of the river. This marsh was dotted over with little eyots or islets, sometimes swept away by the tide, then forming again, composed of rushes, living and dead, the rank grasses of the marsh, and sticks and string and leaves carried among the reeds to form a convenient and secure place where the wild birds could make their nests. When the river wall was built the marsh became a broad field of rich pasture, in which sheep were believed to fatten better than in any other part of England. Until recently it had no inhabitants; probably the air at night was malarious, and the sheep wanted no one to look after them; the river wall was adorned with half a dozen windmills; dead men, hanging in chains, preached silent sermons by their dolorous example to the sailors of the passing craft; there was instituted at some time or other before the seventeenth century a ferry between its southern point and Greenwich, a road to meet the ferry running north through the island. Pepys crossed once by this ferry in order to attend a wedding. It was in the plague year, when one would have thought weddings were not common and wedding festivities dangerous things. But there was still marrying and giving in marriage. He was with Sir George and Lady Carteret; they got across from Deptford in a boat, but found that their coach, which ought to have met them, had not come over by ferry, the tide having fallen too low. “I being in my new colored silk suit and coat trimmed with gold buttons and gold broad-lace round my hands, very rich and fine, ... so we were fain to stay there in the unlucky Isle of Dogs, in a chill place, the morning cool, the wind fresh, to our great discontent.” Why does he call the Isle of Dogs unlucky?

In the middle of the island stood, all by itself, a little chapel. Nothing is known about its origin. I am inclined to think that, like many other chapels built on this river wall, on town walls, and on bridges, it was intended to protect the wall by prayers and masses, sung or said “with intention.” We have already found a hermitage by, or on, the wall at Wapping, another place of prayer for the maintenance of this important work.

Why this peninsula was called the Isle of Dogs no one knows. One learned antiquary says that the King kept his hounds there when he stayed at Greenwich Palace. Perhaps. But the antiquary produces no proof that the royal kennels were ever set up here, and the person who trusts a little to common sense asks why the King should have sent his hounds across a broad and rapid river by a dangerous ferry when he had the whole of Greenwich Park and Black Heath in which to build his kennels. “Drowned dogs,” suggests another, but doubtfully. No. I have never heard of drowned dogs being washed ashore in any number, either here or elsewhere. Drowned dogs, it is certain, were never an appreciable factor in the flotsam and jetsam of the Thames. “Not the Isle of Dogs,” says another, “but the Isle of Ducks. Ducks, you see, from the wild ducks which formerly—” No; when the wall was built, which was probably in the Roman time, the wild ducks vanished, and as no tradition of any kind can be traced among the Saxons concerning the Roman occupation they never heard of these ducks. For my own part, I have no suggestion to offer, except a vague suspicion that, as Pepys thought, there was a tradition of bad luck attaching in some form to the place, which was named accordingly. If a man on the downward path is said to be going to the dogs, a place considered as unlucky might very well have been called the Isle of Dogs. Now a level marsh without any inhabitants and adorned by gibbets and dangling dead bodies would certainly not be considered a lucky place. You must not expect anything in the place of the least antiquity. Yet a walk round the Isle of Dogs is full of interest. To begin with, the streets are wide and clean; the houses are all small, built for working-men; there are no houses of the better sort at all; the children swarm, and are healthy, well fed, and rosy; the shops are chiefly those of provisions and cheap clothing. All round the shore there runs an unbroken succession of factories. These factories support the thousands of working-men who form the population of the Isle of Dogs. All kinds of things are made, stored, received, and distributed in the factories of this industrial island; many of them are things which require to be carried on outside a crowded town, such as oil storage, oil, paint, color, and varnish, works; disinfectant fluid works, boiler-makers, lubricating-oil works; there are foundries of brass and iron, lead-smelting works, copper-depositing works, antimony and gold-ore works. All kinds of things wanted for ships are made here—cisterns and tanks, casks, steering-gear, tarpaulin, wire rope, sails, oars, blocks, and masts; there are yards for building ships, barges, and boats.

Of public buildings there are few: two churches and one or two chapels. There are Board-schools and church schools; there are no places of amusement, but posters indicate that theaters and music-halls are within reach. On the south of the island the London County Council has erected a most lovely garden. It is four or five acres in extent; there are lawns, trees, and flower-beds; there is a stately terrace running along the river; there are seats dotted about, and on certain evenings in the summer a band plays. Above all, there is the view across the river. All day long that pageant, of which we have already spoken, goes up and down, never ending; the ships follow each other—great ships, small ships, splendid ships, mean ships; the noisy little tugs plow their way, pulling after them a long string of lighters heavily laden; the children, peeping through the iron railings, know all the ships, where they come from and to what “line” they belong. Beyond the river is Greenwich Hospital, once a splendid monument of the nation’s gratitude to her old sailors, now a shameful monument of the nation’s thanklessness. Would any other country so trample upon sentiment as to take away their hospital from the old sailors, to whom it belonged and to whom it had been given? The old pensioners are gone, and the people have lost the education in patriotism which the sight and discourse of these veterans once afforded them.

It is needless to say that there is not a single book-shop in the Isle of Dogs; we do not expect a book-shop anywhere in East London; there are also very few news-agents. I saw one, the whole of whose window was tastefully decorated with pictures from the “Illustrated Police Budget.” These illustrations are blood-curdling: a lady bites another lady, such is the extremity of her wrath; a burglar enters a bedroom at night; a man with a revolver shows what revenge and jealousy can dare and do, and so on. I am sure that the people read other things; the “Police Budget” is not their only paper, but I confess that this was the only evidence of their favorite reading which I was able to discover when I was last on the island. There are no slums, I believe, on the Isle of Dogs. I have never seen any Hooligans, Larrikins, or any of that tribe—perhaps because they were all engaged in work, the harder the better. You will not see any drunken men, as a rule, nor any beggars, nor any signs of misery. We may conclude that the Isle of Dogs contains an industrious and prosperous population; the air that they breathe, when the fresh breeze that comes up with the tide has dropped, is perhaps too heavily charged with the varied fragrance of the multitudinous works, with the noise of various industries: as for the hammering of hammers, the grinding and blowing and whirring of engines, to these one gets accustomed. It is a place where one might deliberately choose to be born, because, apart from the general well-being of the people and the healthfulness of the air, there is a spirit of enterprise imbibed by every boy who grows up in this admirable island. It is engendered by the universal presence of the sailor and the ship; wherever the sailor and the ship are found there springs up naturally in every child the spirit of adventure.

A large part of the island is occupied by docks—the West India docks, the Blackwall Basin, and the Millwall Dock. We need not enter into the statistics of the tonnage and the trade; it is sufficient to remember that the docks are always receiving ships, and that the sailors are always getting leave to go ashore, and that some of them have their wives and families living in the Isle of Dogs. That would be in itself sufficient to give this suburb a marine flavor; but think what it means for a boy to live in a place where at every point his eyes rest upon a forest of masts, where he is always watching the great ships as they work out of dock or creep slowly in; think what it means when, in addition to living beside these great receiving docks, he can look through doors half open and see the old-fashioned repairing dock, with the wooden sailing ship shored up and the men working at her ribs, while her battered old figurehead and her bowsprit stick out over the wall of the dock and over the street itself. The Tritons and the Oceanides, the spirits of the rolling sea, open their arms with invitation to such a boy. “Come,” they say, “thou too shalt be a sailor, it is thy happy fate; come with a joyful heart; we know the place, deep down among the tiny shells of ocean, where thou shalt lie, but not till after many years. Come. It is the sweetest life of any; there is no care or cark for money; there is no struggle on the waves for casual work and for bare food; no foul diseases lurk on the broad Atlantic; the wind of the sea is pure and healthy, the fo’c’sle is cheerful, and the wage is good.” And so he goes, this favorite of fortune.

For some strange reason the gates of the docks are always bright and green in spring and summer with trees and Virginia creepers, which are planted at the entrance and grow over the lodge. Within, flower-beds are visible. Outside, the cottages for the dock people also have bright and pleasant little front gardens. To the forest of masts, to the bowsprit sticking out over the street, to the ships that are warped in and out the dock, add the pleasing touch of the trees and flowers and the creepers before we leave the Isle of Dogs—that “unlucky” isle, as Pepys called it.

The last of the East London riverside hamlets is Blackwall. Where Blackwall begins no one knows. Poplar Station is in the middle of the place, included in the map within the letters which spell Blackwall. And where are the houses of Blackwall? It is covered entirely with docks. There are the East India docks and the Poplar docks and the basin. There are also half a dozen of the little old repairing docks left, and there is a railway station with a terrace looking out upon the river; there is a street running east, and another running north. Both streets are stopped by Bow Creek; the aspect of both causes the visitor to glance nervously about him for a protecting policeman. And here, as regards the riverside, we may stop. Beyond Bow Creek we are outside the limits of London. There follow many more former hamlets—West Ham, East Ham, Canning Town, Silverton, and others—now towns. These places, for us, must remain names.