Last Sunday night Mr. Max Beerbohm uttered, with a characteristic grace of phrase, microphonic lamentations over London revisited. London he now finds a cheerful, bright, salubrious Hell. To me it seems curious that any city which earns the three good marks of happiness, radiance, and health can also merit the severe epithet of “hellish.” Is it possible that a town can be gloomy, dark, unhealthy – and heavenly?

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I too have some boyhood memories of London and they are memories of squalor and darkness, memories of a London in which there was no unemployment insurance “dole,” if you must call it so, a London paraded by huge gangs of starving beggars miserably chanting “We’ve got no work to do-ooo.” (There were “depressions” before 1930.) Public vehicles were slow and shabby. One crawled over Blackheath in a horse-bus lined with straw, as though intended to convey cattle, and slowly proceeded to Charing Cross in a dilatory and dirty steam train. Or one took three-quarters of an hour to be jolted in a horse-bus from Hampstead to Oxford Street, a journey which now takes me eleven and a half minutes in a warm, dry electric train.

Everybody burned coal fires, and the grime of a great city was vastly more repulsive than it is to-day. For some reason or other the hansom-cab, an absurd vehicle, shares with the tedious tinkling of the muffin-man the office of magnet for nostalgic melancholy. The taxi-cab, especially if it is this year’s model, is an incomparably better conveyance, just as the electric train is incomparably more serviceable and more sanitary than the old steam train of the suburban and underground lines.

Does Mr. Beerbohm really look back with regret to the old Metropolitan tunnels of Victorian London? The City below the surface was then a choking, sulphurous labyrinth of smoke and smuts. If the word “hell’’ is to be applied at all, I should reserve it for that inferno of London unelectrified.