THE "PROVINCIAL" CIIA.RA.CTER OF LONDON.
[TO WTI RIAT011 Oil' TOE .OPROTATOit."]
Sie,—The fact that I am a Seotchinan will be amply apparent in what is to follow ; also the other fact that I am fresh from the far north and new to London and its ways. Believing, as I do, that impressions made upon any mind, not in itself absolutely colour- less, when placed under circumstances peculiar or novel, must he of public interest, even of value if honestly stated, I crave a corner of your paper for the following thoughts which have daily sug- gested themselves to me since I came to your city. My experience of London is, I venture to say, representative, and therefore have at once euflicient reason and courage for addressing you frankly upon the subject. London is doubtless the great centre of British, if not of European thought, and consequently the source from which radiates English influence upon the doings of the time. It II not, therefore, without a certain hazy awe that many approach it for the first time. But an outsider living among the people and bearing them talk, finds London in reality to be a widely different place from the London to which he had certainly looked forward, or the London which the general assumption would imply.
In coming to London from the quiet of rural life or even the petty bustle of some country town, one's ruling thought le &strong belief that the change is to be from the altogether local to the altogether national,---from the, in every sense, narrow and restricted, to the world-embracing or the cosmopolitan. This notion is, I believe, one of the very first delusions which experience dispels. The first thing I learnt abed London was, that its general mental grasp and tone is much more really restricted and narrow—much more provincial, in short—than is that of the most ordinary country town in Scotland. The majority of your tradesmen and shopkeepers, Sir, cannot open their mouths without proving that their intelligence is a long way below the average of that which obtains in our Scotch towns and villages. Englishmen of this degree may know more of one thing, may be sharper in business perhaps ; but that one thing, as a rule, so engrosses their faculties, that they have no force to spare out of the necessarily narrow rut, and thus, as it seems to me, is a great part of the London provincialism produced. I shall give you an illustration of what I moan. Little more than a fortnight ago a friend and I set out for Chelsea, in order to see the residence of Thomas Carlyle, or, mayhap, the old man himself, in a quiet way, should he chance to be enjoying his walk. A river boat soon brought us to that interesting but sleepy suburb of. London. None of us had the slightest idea where Carlyle'e residence was situated, or in what direction the most likely locality lay. Entering it grocer's shop, over the counter of which presided a bright-looking and showily-dressed young man of, say, tWenty- five, I, as spokesman, asked if he could tell me where Carlyle stayed. "Carlyle Street, Sir ? No, Sir, don't know it, Sir." 44 Carlyle's house," I said, the residence of Thomas Carlyle," " Don't know him, Sir, never heard of him, in fact, but y" the gentleman's name be at all known in theneighbanrhood, the shoemaker next door, who delivers the parcels, will most likely know." I thanked my informant, and we came away. We did not "inter- view "the parcel-delivering shoemaker, but asked an intelligent policeman, who obligingly directed us to the proper route. We resolved, however, to test more fully the depth of devotion to hero.worship and the amount of iatelligence which existed in Chelsea, so we called upon a big fishmonger, within a few yards of the street where Carlyle lives. I said, 44 Could you tell me, Sir, if Thomas Carlyle lives about here?" "No, Sir, don't know the name, Sir," and immediately adding, "what does he do?" Very gravely I answered, " He makes books." " Makes books, does be ? " said the man of fish, while a glare of incipient devilry shot through his eye as he looked at his wife, seemingly to say, " these ge'mnen are not fooling me, are they, missis ?" But we left him alone with his oysters. I asked other five different
individuals before I met a " fine old English gentleman," who showed us the "royal" residence, and expressed his sur- prise at the ignorance of shopkeeping Chelsea. Now, I venture to say that in Scotland you might search days on end among the shopkeeping and tradesman class of the present generation with- out finding fire who did not know the name of Carlyle, while many would be ready to &num, his merits as a writer or his claims to reverence as a man. But here in the space of a few minutes were six Englishmen all in a row, all within a hundred yards of the house of the man whose influence, as one mind upon contem- porary thought, has been, perhaps, the most potent of modern times, and yet they " hadn't the slightest idea" where he resided, had never even hoard of his name 1 This surely is ample proof of the assertion with which I started, and no comment is necessary to enforce the truth it conveys.
Bet it in not alone among the shopkeeping claas that this name narrowness and provinciality prevails. If we rise a grade higher, to what are usually called " City men," or "sharp City men," according to one's preference for adjectives, we find the same quality equally rampant there. There is not a more contemptible or one-sided character to be met with in the pettiest " burgh town " than is your sharp City man," who is that and nothing elee ; and, the type is by no means rare. Of course, there are marked exceptions, men whose clear intellects and vigorous busi- ness capabilities cuter into all departments of thought and life, but these are not the majority. Tlie larger number have, as George Eliot says of souse one, " the energetic will and muscle, the self-confi- dence, the quick perception and the narrow imagination which make what is admiringly called the practical mind." The same writer aptly describes another representative character as having " a certain thin eagerness in his aspect which was attributed to the life of the metropolis, where narrow space had time sarne sort of effect upon men as upon thickly-planted trees." If you enter into conversation with the typical City man, you find him, as a rule, almost alarmingly familiar with the particular branch of business with which he is connected, but all is as good as blank beyond. Stockbrokers of course know nothing beyond the horizon of the Exchange. Among the general company you find one man "well up" in railways, another equally glib about the particular lino of shipping in which he may be engaged, while a third may be eloquent on trade with China, or denunciatory of the difficulties which attend the working of the patent laws. And BO on, each for himself, and no one "for the State." Of course, you will not miss some frothy chat on the politics of the day, crude opinions expressed upon the basis of imperfeetly gathered facts, or platitudes skimmed from the newspapers and rattled off with extreme volubility and air of universal knowledge but this arises from the simple fact that an Englishman can talk about anything, whether he understand it or not,—the less he understands it the better. The keen competi- tion which is characteristic of metropolitan life tends to make the energies of its votaries run in grooves, and to be as helpless when out of them as a locomotive off the rails. As in the construction, for instance, of steam-engines, or among artizans in large estab- lishinente generally, each workman has allotted to him the making of some small part of the whole, or the fitting of it after it is forged, and this repeated day after day and year after year,—so it seems that in the keen competition of the crowded marts of the metropolis, one must direct all his energies to a single object in order to make any show in the race after wealth, or secure euccess, in the more pressing struggle for a living. This mode of life tends to stunt mental development, to deaden all true sympathy, aumi narrow One's range of mental vision.
I do not know, Sir, whether I dare charge your daily press with being quite as provincial in reality as many of those newspapers which, speaking geographically, are called by that name. Stuart Mill says, " There are now in this country, we may say, but two modes left in which au ihdividual mind can hope to produce much direct effect upon the minds and destinies of his countrymen gene- rally, as a member of Parliament or editor to a London news- paper." And yet, in the face of this and in the face of a well- written article in an early number of St. Paul's, endeavouring to prove that soon all newspapers published out of London would have to become altogether local in their tone, as the discussion of national questions and the providing of national news would be more amid more centralized in London, I venture to assert that the London daily press of to-day is quite as local, quite as provincial, in tone as the leading newspapers of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Man- chester, Birmingham, Bradford, or Leeds. Since the days of
"special wires' were inaugurated, we find. Parliamentary reports
hi these newspapers, as a rule, equally complete, often more com- prehensive than those which appear in the Tines, the Telegraph, the Doily News, or the Standard,--of course I mean in the first issue
of each paper after the occurrence has taken place. If anybody had attended the late Bushey Park review, and having next day
read in the Telegraph an account of the doings, had turned to any of tlie " provincial" papers whose head-quarters I have mentioned, for purposes of comparison, I confidently assert that in these he would have got the facts without the wretched bombast, the truth
without the miserable chaos in which the "young lion" of the I national (?) paper would have embedded it. It is, perhaps, trite to say the leading matter in these so-called proviacial dailies will compare not unfavourably with the contents of the leading columns of the London daily press. Your news- papers, Sir, have no shadow of right, save a geographical one, to claim for themselves the title of national, while we see that so many others come up to them in all that is truly of Imperial range. Your daily newspapers, Sir, cram their columns with the names of persons who may have attended a London ball or banquet on the previous night, while these are of no more national interest than the aederunt of a Scotch parochial board meeting or the names of the magnates at a district ball. You write columns of operatic, dramatic, and musical critiques, which are as essentially local in their nature as the puff paragraphs which swell the columns of struggling prints in decaying towns ; and London affairs, however petty, always crush out matter from the pro- vinces, and take precedence of events which may be truly national, although occurring far away from the towers of West- minster and beyond the sound of Bow Bells. Local and " pro- vincial" newspapers act on the self-same principle.
A contemptible kind of London provincialism arises from the very fact of its metropolitan situation. Many persons living in London are accustoined to think that anything happening in Eng- land or Scotland out of it is unworthy of notice. Intelligent persons living in the country are accustomed to understand their own affairs, and to be more or less intimate with those of London too. But London (common, working, eating, selling, and sleeping London) understands none but its own. It does not those even of its nearest neighbour. In this very fact there is a wideness given to the provincial view which is almost national, and a narrowness imparted to the would-be-national stand-point which is altogether and entirely provincial.—I am, Sir, &e., A SCOTClimAN.
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