A Block in Fetter Lane. Fun (15 December 1866): 139. Most of the plates in this long series have William S. Brunton’s monogram or last name as artist and the Dalziels as engravers, but these two plates have neither. Courtesy of the Suzy Covey Comic Book Collection in the George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida. Click on image to enlarge it.]
By the title I assume that the author means “a traffic jam” in Fetter Lane rather than the land and roadway between two streets as in the American city “block.” Fetter Lane appears fairly frequently throughout the Victorian Web as, for example, the location of one of organizations of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism and an important leader of the Evangelical revival. Conversely, Anthony Trollope places the offices of those involved with August Melmotte, his great swindler, there. — George P. Landow
Accompanying Text
Fetter-lane — and certainly not the Rosherville Gardens — is the place to spend happy day. You can do it cheaply too, for it is only a sixpenny fare from one end to the other, and if you are anything like lucky yoa will find it take up a good portion of the twelve hours to effect the passage. This is very charming, beeause Fetter-lane is a sort of artery leading between these twe great channels of traffic, Fleet-street and Holbern, and the transition from the bustle of these streets to the stagnation of the lane is refreshing — when you are not in a hurry.
We have had, on occasions when we have been slowly filtered through this — it weuld be almost a mockery to call it a theroughfare — ample opportunity for conjecturing the cause of the chronic state of choke under which it labeurs. One reason is, that almost every other shop in the lane is under the unavoidable necessity of having an empty or full cart standing at its door half the day. Another is, that the inhabitants consume large quantities of coal, and insist on receiving their supplies in the middle of the day: it is, perhaps, as an acknowledgment of this patronage that all the coal-carts going from any whore to anywhere else contrive to take Fetter-lane on the way. Then, because Fetter-lane is so narrow that twe average hansoms can hardly pass, it has been selected as the right sort of street for a railway receiving-house, and a slow stream of heavy vans is always setting up and down it. Add to these causes of obstruction a baker’s truck or so, a printer's truck, a greengrocer's truck, and a slight sprinkling of costermongers’ berrows, and you have alt the means of spondiug a happy day.
England, thank goodness, is a free country. We havo no despots here, we are grateful to think. If Fetter-lane happened to be in Paris, the liberty of the subject to inconvenience everybedy else weuld be grossly interfered with, A respectable citizen weuld be forbidden to take in his coals at the hour least suitable for his neighbour's comfort; and a decent tradesman would be deprived of the harmless luxury of contemplating his own vehicle standing at the door, obstructing these of others. Nor, we believe, would the railway, the Palladium of the British nation (whose money it absorbs, and whose houses it knocks down) be permitted to establish its receiving-house in the street. It would be ordered off on the absurd ground that there wan no room for it. Happy are we that don't live in France! We observe, with deep regret, that the drivers of the various vehicles which clog this thoroughfare are, to a marked degree, wanting in
“——————————— that repose>
Which marks the caste of Vere de Vere.”
They lose their tempers, and take refuge in the vocabulary. They are tenacious of their rights — and wrongs; and the Hansom cab wen't back an inch so that the railway van may pass the coal-cart, and the coal-cart declines to pull in and allow the four-wheeler to turn round the dust-cart.
Why can't these people take the policeman for their model? He stands at the corner of the street cracking walnuts, and bestowing an approving smile when one driver gives another driver the latest bit of chaff out. He is calm and happy, as the good always are. He notes the tide of life pass him — at a snail's pace, and he is at peace with the world. Oh, why cannot the headlong hansom and the fidgety four-wheeler copy him? Why don’t they take things quietly, and submit to the block gracefully, as Mary Queen of Scots did? Some of them, by the way, do lose their heads on coming to it, much at she did.
The present age is a go-ahead age. We Live too fast (we don't mean that we spend our time at the Alhambra and other halls of revelry), and it is the pace that kills. These facts are being constantly impressed on us by the learned. Let us be grateful, therefore, for our Fetter-lane, where we'll defy anybedy to be too fast, where the pace it not the pace that kills, but the pace that buries, being about the speed of an undertaker's horse.
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Last modified 8 June 2018