South London . the playlasted twenty minutes : it was always a melodrama of per-secuted and virginal innocence—in white. The joy of thewhole performance was to children beyond all power of words :the play : the music : the ethereal beauty of the actresses : therollicking fun of the clown : the sense of fleeting pleasure con-veyed by the roughness of the benches and the grass underour feet: and the general festivity of the noise, the music, thebawling outside make me remember Richardsons Theatreand Messrs. Doggetts and Penkcthmans, with the greatestpleasure and the most poignant regret. I fear,
South London . the playlasted twenty minutes : it was always a melodrama of per-secuted and virginal innocence—in white. The joy of thewhole performance was to children beyond all power of words :the play : the music : the ethereal beauty of the actresses : therollicking fun of the clown : the sense of fleeting pleasure con-veyed by the roughness of the benches and the grass underour feet: and the general festivity of the noise, the music, thebawling outside make me remember Richardsons Theatreand Messrs. Doggetts and Penkcthmans, with the greatestpleasure and the most poignant regret. I fear, then, that Lady Fair became, in the evening especi-ally, a place in which everybody went * as he pleased, and thatwith so much dancing, drinking, love-making, singing, play-ing on the flowery slope that the authorities had to is, indeed, a most melancholy circumstance that the peoplecannot be allowed to amuse themselves in the way theywould choose. May P^air first, Lady Fair next, one after the. i88 SOUTH LONDON ^ ^ -li^ other the Fairs of London have been suppressed. Lady Fail; succumbed in 1760, when it was,finally abolished. f May one say a word of two other fairs even more disre-;putable—those of Charlton and of Greenwich ? Charlton Fairwas founded in the year 1268, so that it was a very ancientinstitution, to be held on three days in the year—* the Eve, theday, and the morrow of the Trinity. The time of the Fairwas, however, changed at some time to the day of St. Luke,on October 18. It was one of those Fairs which acquired adistinctive character. Just as Barnet Fair became a HorseFair, Charlton became a Horn Fair. The obvious—and there-fore popular—kind of fooling to be made out of horns andtheir associations—which are now quite lost and forgotten—aswell as the day, which was also connected with those associa-tions—made this Fair extremely popular. The people fromLondon went down to Deptford by boat, joined the peoplefrom Greenwich and Deptfor
Size: 1190px × 2099px
Photo credit: © The Reading Room / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: ., bookauthorbesantwa, bookcentury1900, bookdecade1910, bookyear1912
