London: The Biography полностью

There are some birds, such as the robin and the chaffinch, which are less approachable and trustful in the city than in the country. Other species, such as the mallard, grow increasingly shyer as they leave London. There has been a severe diminution of the number of sparrows, while blackbirds are more plentiful. Swans and ducks have also increased in number. Some species, however, have all but vanished. The rooks of London are, perhaps, the most notable of the disappeared, their rookeries destroyed by building work or by tree-felling. Areas of London were continuously inhabited by rooks for many hundreds of years. The burial ground of St. Dunstan’s in the East and the college garden of the Ecclesiastical Court in Doctors’ Commons, the turrets of the Tower of London and the gardens of Grays Inn, were once such localities. There was a rookery in the Inner Temple dating from at least 1666, mentioned by Oliver Goldsmith in 1774. Rooks nested on Bow Church and on St. Olave’s. They were venerable London birds, preferring to cluster around ancient churches and ancient buildings as if they were their local guardians. Yet, in the words of the nineteenth-century song, “Now the old rooks have lost their places.” There was a grove in Kensington Gardens devoted to the rooks; it contained some seven hundred trees forming a piece of wild nature, a matter of delight and astonishment to those who walked among them and listened to the endless cawing that blotted out the city’s noise. But the trees were torn down in 1880. The rooks have never returned.

Yet other birds haunt the city. These are the caged birds, the canaries and the budgerigars, the larks and thrushes, who sing out of their confinement in a manner reminiscent of Londoners themselves. In Bleak House, Dickens’s novel which is so much a symbolic restatement of London vision, the caged birds belonging to Miss Flite are a central emblem of urban imprisonment. The occupants of Newgate were known as the “nightingales of Newgate” or “Newgate birds.” In Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) Orwell noted that the inhabitants of doss-houses or low lodging-houses kept caged birds, “tiny, faded things that had lived all their lives underground.” He recalled in particular one “old Irishman … whistling to a blind bullfinch in a tiny cage,” suggesting that there is a strange affinity between the luckless in London and the incarcerated birds. On the stone wall of the Beauchamp Tower, in the Tower of London, was inscribed with a nail “Epitaph on a Goldfinch”:

Where Raleigh pin’d within a prison’s gloom

I cheerful sung, nor murmur’d at my doom …

But death, more gentle than the law’s decree,

Hath paid my ransom from captivity.

Beneath it are engraved the words, “Buried, June 23, 1794, by a fellow-prisoner in the Tower of London.” The names of Miss Flite’s imprisoned birds were “Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheapskin, Plunder.”

There was a trade in caged birds, of course, with street-markets in St. Giles and Spitalfields devoted to selling them. Most in demand was the goldfinch, with a regular supply of trapped and caught birds offered at sixpence to a shilling each; their attraction lay in their longevity, upwards of fifteen years, and in the possibility of cross-breeding. Chaffinches and greenfinches were also popular, although the latter bird was described by one street vendor to Henry Mayhew as “only a middling singer.” Freshly caught larks were sold at between sixpence and eightpence. Mayhew witnessed “the restless throwing up of the head of the caged lark, as if he were longing for a soar in the air”; yet he was trapped in a small and dirty cage in a nineteenth-century slum. The nightingale had also become a favourite of London’s bird dealers by the mid-nineteenth century but, again according to Mayhew, “shows symptoms of great uneasiness, dashing himself against the wires of his cage or aviary, and sometimes dying in a few days.”