Produced by Steve Schulze, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.This file was produced from images generously made availableby the CWRU Preservation Department Digital Library
Author of "Untrodden English Ways," etc.
1909
For all races of Teutonic origin the claim is made that they areessentially home-loving people. Yet the Englishman of the sixteenthand seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially of the latter,is seen to have exercised considerable zeal in creating substitutesfor that home which, as a Teuton, he ought to have loved above allelse. This, at any rate, was emphatically the case with theLondoner, as the following pages will testify. When he had perfectedhis taverns and inns, perfected them, that is, according to thelight of the olden time, he set to work evolving a new species ofpublic resort in the coffee-house. That type of establishmentappears to have been responsible for the development of the club,another substitute for the home. And then came the age of thepleasure-garden. Both the latter survive, the one in a form of amore rigid exclusiveness than the eighteenth century Londoner wouldhave deemed possible; the other in so changed a guise thatfrequenters of the prototype would scarcely recognize therelationship. But the coffee-house and the inn and tavern of oldLondon exist but as a picturesque memory which these pages attemptto revive.
Naturally much delving among records of the past has gone to themaking of this book. To enumerate all the sources of informationwhich have been laid under contribution would be a tedious task andneed not be attempted, but it would be ungrateful to omit thankfulacknowledgment to Henry B. Wheatley's exhaustive edition of PeterCunningham's "Handbook of London," and to Warwick Wroth's admirablevolume on "The London Pleasure Gardens of the Eighteenth Century."Many of the illustrations have been specially photographed from rareengravings in the Print Boom of the British Museum.