The very name of
Grosvenor struck a note of grandeur. The long suite of lofty,
gilded rooms with their gilded furniture; the portraits; the
terraces; the gardens, the landscape; the sense of superiority in
the England of the fifties, actually set the rich nobleman apart,
above Americans and shopkeepers. Aristocracy was real. So was the
England of Dickens. Oliver Twist and Little Nell lurked in every
churchyard shadow, not as shadow but alive. Even Charles the
First was not very shadowy, standing on the tower to see his army
defeated. Nothing thereabouts had very much changed since he lost
his battle and his head. An eighteenth-century American boy fresh
from Boston naturally took it all for education, and was amused
at this sort of lesson. At least he thought he felt it.
Then came the journey up to London through Birmingham and the
Black District, another lesson, which needed much more to be
rightly felt. The plunge into darkness lurid with flames; the
sense of unknown horror in this weird gloom which then existed
nowhere else, and never had existed before, except in volcanic
craters; the violent contrast between this dense, smoky,
impenetrable darkness, and the soft green charm that one glided
into, as one emerged -- the revelation of an unknown society of
the pit -- made a boy uncomfortable, though he had no idea that
Karl Marx was standing there waiting for him, and that sooner or
later the process of education would have to deal with Karl Marx
much more than with Professor Bowen of Harvard College or his
Satanic free-trade majesty John Stuart Mill.
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