Esoteric London

Museum Street, London, WC1. Photo © Roger Dean 2012

All The Year Round – 1877:

‘And your half-holidays, on Saturdays? What do you do then?’
There was quite a little chorus of explanation; quite a whole row of holiday-enjoying eyes. Some went blackberrying, whilst the summer lasted [...] some went in steamboats up and down the river. As to where the blackberrying could be done, the boys were full of precise and very happy memory. They went by the near Eastern Railway to Epping Forest; a few halfpence took them there; and if any argument be wanted to strengthen the entreaties that this forest should remain a forest, and suffer no cultivation or encroachment, does not this fact yield it? Then, as to what the young workmen did when there was no summer weather, nothing but London rain, London mud, London fog, there was again plenty of evidence forthcoming. One of them kept white mice, with the pastime of setting some to swim in tubs, by which they caught cold and died [...].

[ All the Year Round was a Victorian periodical, a weekly literary magazine founded and owned by Charles Dickens. The text above was taken from an article on the lives of tobacco workers in the capitol. R.D.]