very servant wenches have upon their heads and backs better bonnets, shawls, and gowns than the grandmothers of their mistresses ever dreamed of. Is it an outside calculation to say, that at noon on any given summer Sunday the apparel then actually worn by every inhabitant of London, including dukes and costermongers, duchesses and beggar-women, might be set at 1l. per head as an average term? Why then you have the sum of 2,500,000l. sterling, walking about and airing itself in the streets; lounging in fashionable chapels, or waiting about to fetch the baked shoulders of mutton and potatoes, nicely browned, from the various bakers, as soon as service is over. If 2,500,000l. is actually worn, surely another equal value is in reserve in cupboards, drawers, wardrobes, and what not. Then you have 5,000,000l. worth of clothes at once; and this stock is in course of constant renewal. I wish I knew how to set about making an approximative guess at the money value of London as it stands; but the task is beyond my powers of calculation. No doubt some of those wonderful men who practise as actuaries, and who assist Mr. Mann in his ingenious inquiries, could give us an idea upon this subject.
There then is the golden pippin—but how do men get a bite at it? There are the various trades and professions; there is speculation; there is the marriage-market. Of course it is but fair to notice, in a cursory way, the fact that innumerable fortunes which are made elsewhere are spent in London. River frontages at Melbourne drive about Hyde Park, drawn by pairs of well-stepping bays. The money which pays for calomel in London was earned at Calcutta. All this, however, is beside the purpose of our present inquiry. When we have exhausted all the categories of what may be called, though merely for distinction’s sake, the legitimate trades and professions, there remain countless other fashions of getting on in an irregular way. The gleaners sometimes do better on their own account than the harvest-men. Then we have amongst us a numerous class of Bedouins and Mohicans who live comfortably enough, as long as the career lasts, by plundering the community. There are the begging-letter writers, a most ingenious class, admirable for their industry: the regular beggars, who spend the proceeds of their day’s whining upon gin, and ham, and eggs: the people who live by loan-offices: the people who live by burning their houses down, and cheating the insurance office: the bill swindlers: the horse chaunters: and so forth. All these people get on somehow; though, happily, it is a well-established rule, that London rogues give themselves the greatest amount of trouble, and produce the smallest results. Lazy men should take to honesty as to an easy-chair.
It may, I think, be safely asserted, that the first and most difficult step for any young adventurer who seriously wants to get on in London, is to pass from the class of servants to that of free-agents. The term “service” must be understood in a wide sense, and applies equally to an upper clerk in the Foreign Office. I hope that is a genteel calling—as to the servant who sits beside the coachman on the box of his wife’s brougham. So long as any other man, or set of men, have a right to discount your labour, to circumscribe your field of action, to monopolise what you would call the sweat of your brow, if you were a ploughman—but which, as you are a Londoner, I will rather speak of as the sweat of your brain—you are not a free-agent, but a servant. If you are a man of moderate wishes and aspirations, you may stand still under these conditions quietly and comfortably enough, and be at sixty years of age cashier in the bank which you entered as junior clerk when you were a boy. If what is termed an appointment was procured for you to Somerset House or the Admiralty, you may ultimately rise to a magnificent income of 700l. or 800l. a year, live in a nice little semi-detached villa residence at Stamford Hill, and procure admission for one of your children to the Blue Coat School. You may become an admirable specimen of the British Paterfamilias, which is a very respectable position—but I scarcely think you could be said to have “got on” in London. I say that the man who really gets on, is either he who forces his way to distinction by a coup—as a fortunate marriage, or a lucky speculation,—or the man who seriously says to himself, from childhood upwards, “if I can induce every Londoner—man, woman, and child—to give me one penny sterling, I shall realise considerably more than 10,000l., and with that sum of 10,000l., I may become a Rothschild or an Overstone: or if I prefer quiet, I can invest it safely in 4½ per cent. securities, and sit upon a swing-gate and whistle for the remainder of my earthly pilgrimage.” That is your style of man to get on. Of course a man does not precisely say this to himself in terms. The more usual calculation is to bring the battering engine to bear upon a particular section of the community, and to extract from each of that section a larger sum; or to become a candle-maker, or tailor, or a brewer, or distiller, or to deal in a wholesale way in bricks or timber, or in some article of general demand, and divide the spoil with a numerous band of competitors or fellow-labourers. Observe throughout, I have taken the acquisition of wealth, or at least competence, as the test of “getting on;” for if I were to speak of philosophers and men of science, and benefactors to their species who care for none of these things,—I wonder where they live—it might lead me a little too far. But if you want to get on in trade, there is the little preliminary difficulty of finding capital, which must be overcome. The difficulty is not uncommonly met by starting in business without it; but then the chapter of accommodation-bills, and selling under cost price, is soon opened, and Basinghall Street looms heavily under your lee—to make no mention of another thoroughfare which connects Ludgate Hill on the south with Aldersgate Street on the north.
It is, however, to be remarked that the greatest fortunes which have been realised in London trade have been made by men who have started with nothing—I believe it is the more usual thing to say, who came to London, each future millionaire, with half-a-crown in his pocket. It is never one shilling, or one sovereign—the