If we take those on the east, we shall first come to Aldford Street,
which was known for a century and a half (until 1886) as Chapel
Street. Much of the street has been rebuilt, and therefore some of
its intrinsic interest has disappeared, notably the house in which
Beau Brummell once lived, and where he was wont to receive the Prince
Regent at those “_petits soupers_,” and at those wonderful ceremonies
of the toilet, the details of which Captain Jesse has recorded with
so much gusto. But a greater than Brummell was once a resident in
Aldford Street, for, at No. 23, the poet Shelley was staying in the
same year (1813) in which we have encountered him in Half Moon Street.
Beyond this solitary celebrity, however, there is nothing to delay our
passing on to South Street, which runs parallel to Aldford Street in a
southerly direction.
[Sidenote: SOUTH STREET.]
This street was formed about 1737, and till nearly the middle of the
18th century, the chapel attached to the Portuguese Embassy (formerly
at 74, South Audley Street), where Garrick was married, was situated in
it.
Brummell once lived here (at No. 24), and so did, in 1837, Lord
Melbourne (at No. 39), while among other names of note connected with
it mention may be made of Charles James Fox, Lord and Lady Holland,
and John Allen, so indissolubly connected with the annals of Holland
House; Mademoiselle d’Este, the daughter of the Duke of Sussex; the
Duke of Orleans, better known as Philippe Egalité, and Miss Florence
Nightingale whose name is a household word in two hemispheres.
[Sidenote: DEANERY AND TILNEY STREETS.]
Deanery Street passes by the side of Dorchester House (which I must
leave for notice till we reach Park Lane) to Tilney Street. The former,
a small serpentining thoroughfare, takes its name from the Dean and
Chapter of Westminster, who are the ground-landlords, and to whom Lord
Chesterfield made an amusing reference in his will. It was first called
“Dean and Chapter Street,” and was formed at the same time as South
Street.
Tilney Street is perhaps chiefly remembered as the residence of Mrs.
Fitzherbert, whose house was at the corner facing Park Lane, the bow
windows of which still indicate it. Here it was that, in June, 1800,
after their temporary separation, Mrs. Fitzherbert and her husband,
George, Prince of Wales, were openly reconciled at a public breakfast,
which “proclaimed to the fashionable world of London that her relations
with the Prince were resumed on the old footing.”
Soame Jenyns also lived in Tilney Street, and died there in 1787.
Forgotten nowadays, he was in his time a prolific writer, and his style
was considered as a model of clearness and ease. His epigram on Johnson
is generally supposed to have been the only ill-natured thing he ever
produced; here it is:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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