Stories of London

There are many kinds of ignorance which, for lack of time and opportunity, we may rightly tolerate in ourselves. Ignorance of the stories that cling around and beautify the home-place is not one of these. A place, indeed, is not a home unless human life has woven a thread of story through and through it. Happy are those who dwell as children in a place well clad with racy memories and legendary lore. The city-home of the London child is just such a place. Here we have a city with an old old history losing itself in the mists of time, and preserving itself in the memorials of its ancient sites and the tales that grow like ivy round its odd place-names. Of all this the careless city-dweller takes no note, but the London child should be a different kind of being. London stories are racy of London; they reflect its life in every age; and the London child is heir to them all.

The stories of London in this little book are interesting to everybody, whether young or old; they cannot fail to be so, because London is interesting, more or less, to everybody in the world. But the book is written more particularly for the children of London, so that they may not be careless city-dwellers, as so many are, but may grow up into real citizens of this great London, loving their old city in all its nooks and corners for its own dear sake, feeling it in all the twists and turns of its varied history, as if their life and its life were bound up in one.

But this is not all that the study of London's stories may {4} do for the London child. The natural beginning of interest in history--including the literature that collects around it--arises out of interest in the story of the place in which we live. We walk about the place and picture the events of which we read as happening within it. The place is transfigured, is filled with life; and the story is transfigured too as seen against the background to which it really belongs. In the case of London, moreover, there is a good deal of useful work for the imagination to do in sufficiently restoring that background to its primitive simplicity. So the London child who knows the London stories thoroughly--so thoroughly as to be able to see them in their real setting, as they happened in that city by the river on the marshes in the olden time--has learnt to know how every other story, including the history proper of any other town or country, should be known. Thus, the study of the home story is for each of us the true beginning of our education in that exercise of historical imagination on which our appreciation of history largely depends.

It is hoped that these Stories of London will be specially interesting to the London child, but not to him alone. The story of London is central in the story of England, and appeals to the interest of every English-speaking child.

SOPHIE BRYANT.

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CONTENTS

I. SOME VERY OLD STORIES II. WESTMINSTER ABBEY III. THE CHARTER HOUSE IV. TWO FAMOUS CHARITIES V. THE STORY AND THE HISTORY OF DICK WHITTINGTON VI. WHEN ELIZABETH WAS QUEEN VII. THE STORY OF ST. PAUL'S

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1. AN OLD RIVER-WALL OR EMBANKMENT (CHELSEA) . . . . . . Frontispiece

2. PART OF THE OLD BUILDINGS OF THE CHARTER HOUSE SCHOOL, ITS CHAPEL AND PLAYGROUND

3. WESTMINSTER ABBEY, THE TOMB OF EDWARD THE CONFESSOR

4. THE FIRST CORONATION IN THE ABBEY

5. A ROOM IN THE TOWER WHERE STATE PRISONERS WERE LODGED

6. SIR THOMAS MORE AND HIS DAUGHTER WATCH THE CARTHUSIAN PRIORS GOING AWAY TO DIE

7. OLD PENSIONERS AND SCHOOLBOYS IN THE CHARTER HOUSE CHAPEL

8. ST. BARTHOLOMEW'S CHURCH BEFORE IT WAS RESTORED

9. AN EXCITING GAME; OLD CHRIST'S HOSPITAL, LONDON

10. ENTRANCES OF THE OLD CHRIST'S HOSPITAL AND OF CHRIST'S CHURCH, LONDON

11. AN ARCH OF LONDON BRIDGE, TOWER BRIDGE IN THE DISTANCE