"Literary Links" - London - Waterloo Bridge

"Literary Links" is a series of posts celebrating Britain's wonderful links with great authors, dramatists and poets.

Charles Dickens

For some reason a number of suicidal Victorians chose Waterloo Bridge as their spring board into the eternities.   Charles Dickens made mention of these poor unfortunate souls as he approaches Waterloo with a night police patrol rowing on the Thames:

“Every colour but black seemed to have departed from the world.  The air was black, the water was black, the barges and hulks were black, the piles were black, the buildings were black, the shadows were only a deeper shade of black upon a black ground.   Here and there, a coal fire in an iron cresset blazed upon a wharf; but, one knew that it too had been black a little while ago, and would be black again soon.  Uncomfortable rushes of water suggestive of gurgling and drowning, ghostly rattling of iron chains, dismal clankings of discordant engines, formed the music that accompanied the dip of our oars and their rattlings in the rullocks.  Even the noises had a black sound to me …” 

   “There was need of encouragement on the threshold of the bridge, for the bridge was dreary… the river had an awful look, the buildings on the banks were muffled in black shrouds, and the reflected lights seemed to originate deep in the water, as if the spectres of suicides were holding them to show where they went down. “

He used these dark feelings in David Copperfield when Martha Endell  says, 

“I can’t keep away from it.  I can’t forget it.  It haunts me day and night.  It’s the only thing in all the world that I am fit for, or that’s fit for me.  Oh, the dreadful river!”

And in Oliver Twist he has Nancy declare,

“Look before you, lady. Look at that dark water. How many times do you read of such as I who spring into the tide, and leave no living thing, to care for, or bewail them. It may be years hence, or it may be only months, but I shall come to that at last.”

Thomas Hood

Thomas Hood (1799-1845) wrote a lengthy poem about a real young woman called Mary Furley who jumped in with her young child (1844).  The child died but Mary lived through the ordeal.  Hood relabelled Waterloo as “The Bridge of Sighs.”   The most famous section of the poem goes:

The bleak wind of March
Made her tremble and shiver;
But not the dark arch,
Or the black flowing river:
Mad from life's history,
Glad to death's mystery,
Swift to be hurl'd—
Anywhere, anywhere
Out of the world!
 In she plunged boldly—
No matter how coldly
The rough river ran—
Over the brink of it,
Picture it—think of it,
Dissolute Man!
Lave in it, drink of it,
Then, if you can! Take her up tenderly,
Lift her with care;
Fashion'd so slenderly,
Young, and so fair!

Anyone who did reclaim a body from the River would do well to take it to the southern side.  In Victorian times the Surrey officials would pay a crown for the corpse, whereas on the northern bank the stingy Middlesex officials only paid half a crown.  

This is an excerpt from the tour London River Walk - South Bank which explores the southern bank of the River Thames.  The full tour is found on   www.obelisktours.co.uk