The Bath Road: History, Fashion, & Frivolity on an Old HighwayHarper, Charles G. (Charles George)
History
The Bath Road: History, Fashion, & Frivolity on an Old Highway
Harper, Charles G. (Charles George)
Bath Road (England); England -- Description and travel; England -- Social life and customs
and embarked upon a further series of murders in London. Eventually
detected, he was convicted and transported for life to the Australian
colonies, where he is credibly said to have poisoned others. Murder by
poison was, in fact, an obsession with this man, although he was
sufficiently sane and sordid to select victims whose deaths would bring
him pecuniary advantage. Wainewright's _métier_ in literature was chiefly
art criticism, and his style narrowly resembles that of a revolting
person, now ostracised from Society, who also dabbled in Art and actually
wrote and published an "appreciation" of the poisoner some few years
since.
Linden House was pulled down some fifteen years ago, and its site is
marked by the modern villas of Linden Gardens. The recollection of it
brings a train of reminiscences.
X
[Sidenote: _SUBURBAN CHANGES_]
Reminiscences are soon accumulated in these times. It needs not for the
Londoner to be in the sere and yellow leaf for him to have known many and
sweeping changes in the pleasant suburbs which used to bring the country
to his doors, and the scent of the hawthorn through his open window with
every recurring spring. For myself, I am not a lean and slippered
pantaloon, on whose head the snows of many winters have fallen. The
crow's-feet have not yet gathered around the corners of my eyes; and yet I
have known many rural, or semi-rural, villages around the ever-spreading
circle of the Great City which in my time have been for ever engulfed in
the on-rolling waves of bricks and mortar. It is no effort of memory for
me, or for many another, to recall the market gardens, the orchards, the
open meadows, and the fine old seventeenth and eighteenth century
red-brick mansions, each one enclosed within its high garden walls, with
the jealous seclusion of a monastery, which occupied the sites where the
streets of Brompton, Earl's Court, Fulham, Walham Green, and Putney now
stretch their interminable ramifications, and are accounted, justly
enough, as London. Tell me, if you can, what are the bounds of London,
north, south, east, or west. Does from Forest Gate on the east, to
Richmond on the west, span its limits in one direction? and from Wood
Green on the northern heights, to Croydon on the south, encompass it on
the other? They may in this year of grace, but where will the boundary of
continuous brick and mortar be set ten years hence? and where will then be
the pleasant resorts of the present-day wheelman? They will all be ruined,
and not, mark you, ruined from the commercial point of view, for the
coming of the builder spells riches for the suburban freeholder, whose
land, in the slang of the surveying fraternity, has become "ripe." These
rustic places are, nevertheless, ruined from the point of view of the
lover of the picturesque, and when he sees the old mansions going, the
meadows trenched for foundations, and the lanes widened and paved by the
newly constituted vestry, he groans in spirit. I am, for instance,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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