Bloomfield’s London Residences, by Hugh Underhill and Sam Ward

Here is a quiz question: what is the connection between the following nursery rhyme or popular song and Robert Bloomfield?

Half a pound of tuppenny rice,
Half a pound of treacle.
That’s the way the money goes,
Pop goes the weasel.

Up and down the City road,
In and out the Eagle,
That’s the way the money goes,
Pop goes the weasel.

Every night when I go out
The monkey’s on the table.
Take a stick and knock it off
Pop goes the weasel.

A penny for a ball of thread
Another for a needle,
That’s the way the money goes,
Pop goes the weasel.

All around the cobbler’s bench
The monkey chased the people;
The donkey thought ’twas all in fun,
Pop goes the weasel.

In 1800, after the initial success of The Farmer’s Boy, Robert was able to move with his family to a small house standing in its own grounds in Shepherdess Walk just off the City Road. We have so far been unable to trace the exact location of this house, but we know that it stood near an ‘ale-house’ called the Shepherd and Shepherdess – curiously appropriate for a man who had once been employed shepherding on his uncle’s farm. In letters from this time he gives his address as ‘Near the Shepherd and Shepherdess, City Road, London’ (see, for example, a letter of January 1802 to ‘the Right Hon. C.J. Fox’ – none other than Charles Fox). Prior to this, according to his brother George, he had lodged on first arriving in London at the age of fourteen at 7 Fisher’s Court, Bell Alley, Coleman Street, then in furnished lodgings at Blue Hart Court, Bell Alley, and then, having married Mary Anne Church in December 1790, ‘by dint of hard working…he acquired a bed of his own, and hired the room up one pair of stairs, at 14 Bell Alley’. His daughter Hannah had been born in October 1791, and there was an obvious need for more adequate accommodation (though one suspects no. 14 was only marginally so).

Bell Alley, though nominally still in existence, is transformed by modern building and no trace of any of these addresses is now to be found. Shepherdess Walk, however, remains a prominent thoroughfare, if very far from possessing the rural character suggested by its name – it was originally a path across fields from the city to Islington. It seems that the air was considered purer here than in the city and this made the area an attraction, though the City Road, so named because it led to the City from the direction of Islington, had been cut through the surrounding meadowland in 1761. In a letter of 1824 to Joseph Weston, after Robert’s death, George writes:

The only luxury I ever knew him [Robert] indulge in, was a Cockney garden; and here he was more to be pitied than blamed. He staid some time after he came into money in his old lodgings in Mulberry-court, till he was literally hunted out of it. [Mulberry Court is a little south of City Road.] Persons of consideration, who came in great numbers to see him, complained of the place being disagreeable. Mr Peter Gedge, the printer, called on him—gave him half-a-guinea, and advised him to get into a better situation. Robert then hired a respectable lodging in Short-street, Moorfields. His landlord put the key under the door in the night, and left Robert to pay £9 rent to the proprietor of the house, or lose his goods. He then hired a very small house near the Shepherd and Shepherdess, in the City Road. Here he had, what was certainly, a large Cockney garden!

Readers may recall that Robert’s own watercolour drawing of his Shepherdess Walk garden, authenticated on the verso in his daughter Hannah’s handwriting and bearing the Lot no. 189 from the sale of his goods at Shefford in 1824, was reproduced in Newsletter no. 7. The original is now in the possession of Bloomfield Society members Nina and Alan Grove.

Clearly visible from the corner of Shepherdess Walk with the City Road stands the Eagle pub. This, we know, occupies a site on or near that of the Shepherd and Shepherdess in Bloomfield’s time. An alehouse and tea gardens, the Shepherd and Shepherdess had stood there since 1743 and was pulled down about 1825. One Thomas Rouse, a contractor active in developing the area, then built the Eagle Tavern as the centre of what became a very popular resort for Londoners, with a Grecian saloon and theatre, tea-gardens and dancing pavilion. We know, of course, that Robert had himself visited one of the popular London pleasure-gardens, Ranelagh, near the Chelsea Hospital, in 1802, recorded in his poem ‘A Visit to Ranelagh’ in Wild Flowers, where the Peace of Amiens in that year was being marked. This was clearly an exception to his usual habits: ‘To Ranelagh, once in my life, / By good-natur’d force I was driven’. He confidently deploys a playful anapaestic line to mock the absurdities of the fashionable behaviour he observes there, and we are left in no doubt of his view of the pointless frivolity of these goings-on. He also wittily describes his impressions of the famous pleasure-garden at Vauxhall, in a letter of July 1800, addressed to the merchant William Vaughan. He would, one supposes, have been less than enthralled by such a pleasure-garden, had he still lived there, so close to his own house.

There are, perhaps inevitably, Dickensian associations. David Mander in More Light, More Power: an Illustrated History of Shoreditch (1996: contains information about the Eagle together with striking illustrations) claims ‘Dodd the Dustman’, who had his dust heaps at the north end of Shepherdess Walk by the Regent’s Canal, as the ‘model’ for Mr. Boffin in Our Mutual Friend, though in the novel ‘Boffin’s Bower’ is situated further west on the canal, at Battle Bridge near King’s Cross. But the Eagle certainly features in the story ‘Miss Evans and the Eagle’ in Sketches by Boz, describing in some detail the various amusements and facilities available. Samuel Wilkinson takes his fiancée Jemima Evans – or in the pronunciation generally applied, ‘Miss Ivins’ – together with Miss Ivins’s ‘friend’ and ‘friend’s friend’, to the Eagle for an evening’s entertainment. The evening ends in an unseemly fracas as a result of the ladies being brazenly admired by two other gentlemen.

The Eagle was rebuilt again in 1901 as a public house and this appears to be the building which still stands. This present-day Eagle displays upon its side wall, easily to be seen from the City Road, a large painted board with the words and tune of the second verse of ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’. (According to Mander, the tune is that of an old Morris Dance.) This is not quite the innocuous nonsense rhyme it may now appear. A variation on London street-ballad, evolving, one assumes, orally through various versions (different versions survive) before being recorded in print, this, as an example of popular verse, though definitively urban rather than rural, might have held some interest for Bloomfield had he known it. No doubt the City Road, in common with many other London streets, had a pawnbroker’s shop and the OED cites to pop as mid-eighteenth-century slang for ‘to pawn’. Once essential groceries have been bought (‘tuppenny rice’, ‘treacle’) funds are running low for drinks at the Eagle. Something called a weasel is being pawned in order to pay for more drinks. The long, straight City Road is on a steady incline, so ‘up and down’ may apply in two senses. It has been suggested that weasel here is either some kind of tool or possibly a tailor’s iron (since needle and thread occur later), or Cockney rhyming slang: weasel and stoat, a coat. The monkey in the third verse must be ‘a receptacle for liquor’ (OED quotes Mrs. A.M. Bennett, 1797: ‘A goodish wench in the main, if one keeps a sharp look-out after her, else she will sup the monkey’). A stick appears to have been a shot or dash of spirits, often one slipped into tea or coffee, and still current is the phrase ‘to knock it off’, to knock back a drink, requiring another trip to the pawnbroker. Why in the fourth verse tailor’s requisites were needed is anybody’s guess, though perhaps this is simply a reference to basic necessities of any household. Again, the monkey chasing people around the cobbler’s bench in the fifth verse, as well as the donkey, may contain topical or slang references which are now lost, unless one takes them for hallucinations produced by an advanced stage of inebriation. (For an interesting discussion of the rhyme and its symbolism, see Chris Roberts, Heavy Words Lightly Thrown: The Reason Behind the Rhyme (London: Granta, 2004)).

In a letter dated 7 April 1812, Robert respectfully addresses the 4th Duke of Grafton reminding him of the ‘donation’ of fifteen pound yearly which his father the third Duke had made him. He hopes to have this continued. ‘I would not thus intrude now,’ he writes, ‘had I not determin’d to live in the Country and actually sent my Goods and Wife and five Children to Shefford in Bedfordshire for I find the expenses of London housekeeping too heavy for my precarious income, and have besides by no means good health.’ This appears to be his last extant letter written before the move to Shefford, for from May of that year the majority of his letters are superscribed ‘Shefford. Beds.’. After this, Bloomfield did stay in London on several occasions, principally to spend time with one or other of his children, or to conduct negotiations with his booksellers and literary advisers; and, towards the end of his life, it would seem as though he contemplated a permanent return to the City. In September 1819, he wrote to Hannah that on the previous Saturday he had ridden to Paddington: ‘and had a long intensive search for a dwelling but about there the houses are large and very dear. I find I still like the City Road, but that is undergoing a great change for the large gardens on each side by the Old Turnpike are cutting up to form a Basin for the Regents canal.’