JOHNSON’S LONDON.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18805, 6 July 1929, Page 23 (Supplement)

JOHNSON’S LONDON.

(Continued from page 19.) As for the public executions that were such a feature of London life. Johnson appears to have taken little interest in them, although they invariably drew enormous crowds. . . . There are still corners of Johnson’s Lon don to be found to-day. His house in Gough Square, a little to the north of Fleet Street, where he lived from 1748-58. and where he compiled his Dictionary, is preserved as a museum of his literary relics—manuscripts and first editions. The house—brick, and four-storeyed—is in the Georgian style, and has been restored carefully to its eighteenth century condition. But “the whole of Fleet Street and its neighbourhood is, in effect, a memorial to Dr Johnson, so closely does his name attach to it. From the Church of St Clement Danes .... to St Paul’s Cathedral, wherein he stands in marble effigy, toga-clad Johnsonian memories may be evoked. . . .” (Walter Jerrold.) But for the most part, the Georgian era in London is only a memory. It has gone with its sedan chairs, its powdered wigs, its ruffles of lace, and its swords . . . The old theatres, the Haymarkct Covent Garden, Drury Lane and others ex;ist to-day, but in very different form from the “playhouses” of the eighteenth century. The “beautiful landscape fornied by the hills of Hampstead and Highgate” is no more—it has been sub merged by London's endless suburbs. . People no longer walk across the fields to Chelsea for the country air. Both

the fields and the country air vanished when London began to sprawl further and further into the country. But in spite of all this change that has swept away the London of the first three Georges as surely as the Great Fire swept away the London of the Tudors and Stuarts, two things re main:— In the middle of the Strand, at the point where Aldwych now meets Fleet Street., the Church of St Clement Danes stands as it did when Dr Johnson worshipped there. . . . And at the other end of Fleet Street, on Ludgate Hill, the grey dome of St Paul’s broods over the city.