CHRISTOPHER SHRIMBLE ON THE “DECLINE OF ENGLAND.”

To Mr. Ledru Rollin.

Sir,

I generally believe everything that is going to happen; and as it is a remarkable fact that everything that is going to happen is of a depressing nature, I undergo a good deal of anxiety. I am very careful of myself (taking a variety of patent medicines, and paying particular attention to the weather), but I am not strong. I think my weakness is principally on my nerves, which have been a good deal shaken in the course of my profession as a practising attorney; in which I have met with a good deal to shock them; but from which, I beg leave most cheerfully to acquaint you, I have retired.

Sir, I am certain you are a very remarkable public gentleman, though you have the misfortune to be French. I am convinced you know what is going to happen, because you describe it in your book on “The Decline of England,” in such an alarming manner. I have read your book and, Sir, I am sincerely obliged to you for what you have made me suffer; I am very miserable and very grateful.

You have not only opened up a particularly dismal future, but you have shown me in what a miserable condition we, here, (I mean in Tooting, my place of abode, and the surrounding portion of the British Empire) are at this present time; though really I was not aware of it.

270I suppose that your chapter on the law of this land is the result of a profound study of the statutes at large and the “Reports of Cases argued,” &c.; for students of your nation do not take long for that sort of thing, and you have been amongst us at least three months. In the course of your “reading up” you must doubtless have perused the posthumous reports of J. Miller, Q. C. (Queen’s Comedian). There you doubtless found the cause of Hammer v. Tongs, which was an action of tort tried before Gogg, C. J. Flamfacer (Serjeant)—according to the immortal reporter of good things—stated his case on behalf of the plaintiff so powerfully, that before he could get to the peroration, said plaintiff’s hair stood on end, tears rolled down his cheeks in horror and pity at his own wrongs, and he exclaimed, while wringing his pocket-handkerchief, “Good gracious! That villain Tongs! What a terrific box on my ear it must have been! To think that a man may be almost murdered without knowing it!”

I am Hammer, and you, Mr. Rollin, are Tongs. Your book made my ears to tingle quite as sharply as if you had actually boxed them. I must, however, in justice to the little hair that Time has left me, positively state that, even while I was perusing your most powerful passages, it showed no propensity for the perpendicular. I felt very nervous for all that; for still—although I could hardly believe that a French gentleman residing for a few months in the neighbourhood of Leicester Square, London, could possibly obtain a thorough knowledge, either from study or personal observation, of the political, legislative, agricultural, agrarian, prelatical, judicial, colonial, commercial, manufacturing, social, and educational systems and condition of this empire—yet, from the unqualified manner in which you deliver yourself upon all these branches, I cannot choose but think that your pages must, like certain fictions, be at least founded on some fact; that to have concocted your volume—of smoke—there must be some fire somewhere. Or is it only the smell of it?

For, Sir, even an alarm of fire is unpleasant; and, to an elderly gentleman with a very small stake in the country (prudently inserted in the three per cent. consols), reading of the dreadful things which you say are to happen to one’s own native land is exceedingly uncomfortable, especially at night; when “in silence and in gloom” one broods over one’s miseries, personal and national; when, in fact, your or any one else’s bête noire is apt to get polished off with a few extra touches of blacking. Bless me! when I put my candle out the other night, and thought of your portrait of Britannia, I quite shook; and when I lay down I could almost fancy her shadow on the wall. Even now I see her looking uncommonly sickly, in spite of the invigorating properties of the waves she so constantly “rules;” the 271trident and shield—her “supporters” for ages—can hardly keep her up. Grief, and forebodings of the famine which you promise, has made her dwindle down from Great to Little Britain. The British Lion at her feet is in the last stage of consumption; in such a shocking state of collapse, that he will soon be in a condition to jump out of his skin; but you do not point out the Ass who is to jump into it.

Fortunately for my peace I found, on reading a little further, that this is not Britannia as she is, but Britannia seen by you, “as in a glass darkly”—as she is to be—when some more of her blood has been sucked by a phlebotomising Oligarchy and State-pensionary; by an ogreish Cotton lordocracy; by a sanguinary East India Company, whose “atrocious greediness caused ten millions of Indians to perish in a month;” by the servile Parsonocracy, who “read their sermons, in order that the priest may be able to place his discourse before the magistrate, if he should be suspected of having preached anything contrary to law;” by the Landlords, whose oppressions cause labourers to kill one another “to get a premium upon death;” and by a variety of other national leeches, which your imagination presents to our view with the distinctness of the monsters in a drop of Thames water seen through a solar microscope.

But, Sir, as Mr. Hammer said, “to think that a man may be almost murdered without knowing it!” and so, I say, (one trial of your book will prove the fact) may a whole parish—such as Tooting—or an entire country—such as England. If it had not been for your book I should not have had the remotest notion that “English society is about to fall with a fearful crash.” Society at large, so far as I can observe it (at Tooting, and elsewhere), seems to be quite innocent of its impending fate; and if one may judge from appearances (but then you say, we may not),—we are rather better off than usual just now: indeed, when you paint Britannia as she is at the present writing, she makes a rather fat and jolly portrait than otherwise. In your “Exposition” (for 1850) you say: “The problem is not to discover whether England is great, but whether her greatness can endure.” In admitting, in the handsomest manner possible, that England is great, you go on to say, that “Great Britain, which is only two hundred leagues long, and whose soil is far from equal to that of Aragon or Lombardy, draws every year from its agriculture, by a skilful cultivation and the breeding of animals, a revenue which amounts to more than three billions six hundred millions francs, and this revenue of the mother-country is almost doubled by the value of similar produce in its colonies and dependencies. Her industry, her commerce, and her manufactures, create a property superior to the primal land-productions, and all owing to her inexhaustible mines, her natural wealth, 272and her admirable system of circulation by fourscore and six canals, and seventy lines of railway. The total revenue of England then amounts to upwards of twelve billion francs. Her power amongst the nations is manifest by the number and greatness of her fleets and of her domains. In Europe she possesses, besides her neighbour-islets, Heligoland, Gibraltar, Malta, and the Ionian Islands; in Asia, she holds British Hindostan with its tributaries, Ceylon, and her compulsory allies of the Punjab and of Scinde—that is to say, almost a world; in Africa she claims Sierra Leone with its dependencies, the Isle of France, Seychelles, Fernandez Po, the Cape of Good Hope and Saint Helena; in America, she possesses Upper and Lower Canada, Cape Breton, the Lesser Antilles, the Bermudas, Newfoundland, Lucays, Jamaica, Dominica, Guiana, the Bay of Honduras, and Prince Edward’s Island; lastly, in Oceania, she has Van Dieman’s Land, Norfolk Island, Nova Scotia, Southern Australia; and these hundred nations make up for her more that one hundred and fifty millions of subjects, including the twenty-seven to twenty-eight millions of the three mother kingdoms. As to her mercantile marine, two details will suffice to make it known; she has about thirty thousand sailing-vessels and steamers, without counting her eight thousand colonial ships; and in one year she exports six or seven hundred millions of cotton stuffs, which makes for a single detail an account beyond the sum total of all the manufacturing exportation of France.”

But now for the plague spot! All this territory, and power, and commercial activity is, you say, our ruin; all this wealth is precisely our pauperism; all this happiness is our misery. What Montesquieu says, and you Mr. Ledru Rollin indorse with your unerring imprimatur, must be true:—“The fortune of maritime empires cannot be long, for they only reign by the oppression of the nations, and while they extend themselves abroad, they are undermining themselves within.”

Upon my word, Mr. Rollin, this looks very likely: and when you see your neighbours gaily promenading Regent Street; when you hear of the “Lion of Waterloo” (at whom you are so obliging as to say in your Preface, you have no wish “to fire a spent ball”) giving his usual anniversary dinner to the usual number of guests, and with his usual activity stepping off afterwards to a ball; when you are told that a hundred thousand Londoners can afford to enjoy themselves at Epsom Races; and that throughout the country there is just now more enjoyment and less grumbling than there has been for years, I can quite understand that your horror at the innocent disregard thus evinced at the tremendous “blow up” that is coming, must be infinitely more real than that of Serjeant Flamfacer. “Alas!” you exclaim 273with that “profound emotion” with which your countrymen are so often afflicted; “Government returns inform me that during the past year English pauperism has decreased eleven per cent., and that the present demand for labour in the manufacturing districts nearly equals the supply? The culminating point is reached; destruction must follow!”

Heavens! Mr. Rollin, I tremble with you. The plethora of prosperity increases, and will burst the sooner! We, eating, drinking, contented, trafficking, stupid, revolution-hating, spiritless, English people, “are undermining ourselves within.” We are gorging ourselves with National prosperity to bring on a National dyspepsia, and will soon fall asleep under the influence of a national nightmare! Horrible! the more so because

“Alas! unconscious of their fate,

The little victims play.”

Now, Sir, I wish to ask you calmly and candidly, if there is any fire at the bottom of your volumes of smoke? or have you read our records, and seen our country through a flaming pair of Red Spectacles, that has converted everything within their range into Raw-Head-and-Bloody-Bones?

Indeed I hope it is so; for though I am very much obliged to you for putting us on our guard, you have made me very miserable. This is the worst shock of all. With my belief in “what is going to happen,” I have led but a dog-life of it, ever since I retired from that cat-and-dog life, the Law. First, the Reform Bill was to ruin us out of hand; then, the farmers threatened us with what was going to happen in consequence of Free Trade; and that was bad enough, for it was starvation—no less. What was going to happen if the Navigation Laws were repealed, I dare not recall. Now we are to be swept off the face of the earth if we allow letters to be sorted on a Sunday. But these are comparative trifles to what you, Mr. R., assert is going to happen, whatever we do or don’t do. However, I am resolved on one thing—I won’t be in at the death, or rather with the death. I shall pull up my little stake in Capel Court, and retire to some quiet corner of the world, such as the Faubourg St. Antoine, the foot of Mount Vesuvius, or Chinese Tartary.

Yours truly,

Christopher Shrimble.

Paradise Row, Tooting.

Monthly Supplement of ‘HOUSEHOLD WORDS,’

Conducted by Charles Dickens.

Price 2d., Stamped 3d.,

THE HOUSEHOLD NARRATIVE

OF

CURRENT EVENTS.

The Number, containing a history of the past month, was issued with the Magazines.

274Published at the Office, No 16, Wellington Street North, Strand. Printed by Bradbury & Evans, Whitefriars, London.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

Fixed typos; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.

Renumbered footnotes.