A road-book to old ChelseaStuart, G. B. (Grace Benedicta)
History
A road-book to old Chelsea
Stuart, G. B. (Grace Benedicta)
Chelsea (London, England) -- Guidebooks
IN the Embankment Gardens, facing Cheyne Row and Queen’s House
respectively, are the statue of Carlyle by Boehm and the Drinking
Fountain Memorial to Rossetti, with a portrait in relief by his friend,
Ford Madox Brown. Both are excellent likenesses, though Carlyle’s is a
peaceful presentment, and Rossetti’s mournful and rather repellent.
Passing through the gardens, I have often been reminded of the Greek
painter and the birds who pecked at his grapes, for the children
often stop to finger the pile of books under Carlyle’s chair. “They’m
real books, ain’t they, missus, wat the old genelman wrote?” Thus
we talk of Carlyle still, a stone’s throw from his study windows.
It is interesting to know that the annual number of visitors to the
Carlyle House increases steadily, and the custodian assures us that
the knowledge of his works—intelligent, not merely curious—increases
also, though among Colonials and Americans he is better known than
among ordinary English people. And for “Colonials” read Scotch, or
Scotch extracted.
Leaving Cheyne Walk behind and walking eastward, we pass blocks of
new flats and modern houses where once was Queen’s Road and beautiful
Paradise Row—a terrace of houses that three hundred years ago was a
centre of life and fashion. Here lived Hortense Duchesse de Mazarin,
who dared not marry Charles II. in his days of exile, but flirted with
him extensively later, and accepted a pension from him of £4,000 a
year, which she spent on riotous entertainments rather than on paying
her just rates and debts. Charles, Duke of St. Albans, son of Nell
Gwynn and the Merry Monarch, lived here, and so did Mary Astell, the
Suffragette of her times, whose advanced views found little favour
with the wits at the Don Saltero or the fashionables of the Court,
though serious John Evelyn sees fit to commend her. Dukes and earls and
“smart” bishops jostled each other in Paradise Row in the gay Stuart
days, then artists, physicians, scientists, and schoolmasters succeeded
to the fine old houses with their stately forecourts, and Elizabeth
Fry established her “School of Discipline” for homeless and vagabond
girls at the corner in 1828. Finally, in 1908 it was swept away, and
re-created to meet modern requirements as Royal Hospital Road.
Tite Street turns off towards the river, and holds two buildings of
note: Mr. Whistler’s White House, which looks as if it had strayed out
of its way from Constantinople, and the Victoria Hospital for Children,
a splendid new building, embracing, as its nucleus, Gough House, built
by the Earl of Carberry in Charles II.’s time. Sir Richard Gough, who
succeeded the Earl, gave it its name. The hospital is an unspeakable
boon to the poor of the district; it has seventy beds, and a very
extensive out-patients’ department, as well as a convalescent home at
Broadstairs. Visitors can visit it daily between 2 and 4 p.m., and all
parents must owe it their gratitude for its devotion to the cause of
all children in illness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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