Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century; London (England) -- Description and travel
Between the pieces, we almost all of us went out and refreshed. Many of
us went the length of drinking beer at the bar of the neighbouring
public-house, some of us drank spirits, crowds of us had sandwiches and
ginger-beer at the refreshment-bars established for us in the Theatre.
The sandwich—as substantial as was consistent with portability, and as
cheap as possible—we hailed as one of our greatest institutions. It
forced its way among us at all stages of the entertainment, and we were
always delighted to see it; its adaptability to the varying moods of our
nature was surprising; we could never weep so comfortably as when our
tears fell on our sandwich; we could never laugh so heartily as when we
choked with sandwich; Virtue never looked so beautiful or Vice so
deformed as when we paused, sandwich in hand, to consider what would come
of that resolution of Wickedness in boots, to sever Innocence in flowered
chintz from Honest Industry in striped stockings. When the curtain fell
for the night, we still fell back upon sandwich, to help us through the
rain and mire, and home to bed.
This, as I have mentioned, was Saturday night. Being Saturday night, I
had accomplished but the half of my uncommercial journey; for, its object
was to compare the play on Saturday evening with the preaching in the
same Theatre on Sunday evening.
Therefore, at the same hour of half-past six on the similarly damp and
muddy Sunday evening, I returned to this Theatre. I drove up to the
entrance (fearful of being late, or I should have come on foot), and
found myself in a large crowd of people who, I am happy to state, were
put into excellent spirits by my arrival. Having nothing to look at but
the mud and the closed doors, they looked at me, and highly enjoyed the
comic spectacle. My modesty inducing me to draw off, some hundreds of
yards, into a dark corner, they at once forgot me, and applied themselves
to their former occupation of looking at the mud and looking in at the
closed doors: which, being of grated ironwork, allowed the lighted
passage within to be seen. They were chiefly people of respectable
appearance, odd and impulsive as most crowds are, and making a joke of
being there as most crowds do.
In the dark corner I might have sat a long while, but that a very
obliging passer-by informed me that the Theatre was already full, and
that the people whom I saw in the street were all shut out for want of
room. After that, I lost no time in worming myself into the building,
and creeping to a place in a Proscenium box that had been kept for me.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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