Coronation in London in 1902
Edward VII (1841 – 1910) was crowned in August 1902 though he took the throne of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions and also became Emperor of India in January 1901.
A then rising and young American author Jack London happened to observe the festivity as he was living in London at the time to observe and study real lives in the slum quarter of London.
THE PEOPLE OF THE ABYSS
Jack London
(First published by Macmillan, 1903)
CHAPTER 12
CORONATION DAYhttp://london.sonoma.edu/Writings/PeopleOfTheAbyss/
To have enjoyed the Coronation procession, I should have come straight from America to the Hotel Cecil, and straight from the Hotel Cecil to a five-guinea seat among the washed. My mistake was in coming from the unwashed of the East End. There were not many who came from that quarter. The East End, as a whole, remained in the East End and got drunk. The Socialists, Democrats, and Republicans went off to the country for a breath of fresh air, quite unaffected by the fact that forty millions of people were taking to themselves a crowned and anointed ruler. Six thousand five hundred prelates, priests, statesmen, princes, and warriors beheld the crowning and anointing and the rest of us the pageant as it passed....
Princes and princelings, dukes, duchesses, and all manner of coroneted folk of the royal train are flashing past; more warriors, and lackeys, and conquered peoples, and the pageant is over. I drift with the crowd out of the square into a tangle of narrow streets, where the public houses are a-roar with drunkenness, men, women, and children mixed together in colossal debauch. And on every side is rising the favorite song of the Coronation:
The rain is pouring down in torrents. Up the street come troops of the auxiliaries, black Africans and yellow Asiatics, beturbaned and befezed, and coolies swinging along with machine guns and mountain batteries on their heads, and the bare feet of all, in quick rhythm, going slish, slish, through the pavement mud. The public houses empty by magic, and the swarthy allegiants are cheered by their British brothers, who return at once to the carouse.
`And how did you like the procession, mate?' I asked an old man on a bench in Green Park.
`'Ow did I like it? A bloody good chawnce, sez I to myself, for a sleep, wi' all the coppers aw'y, so I turned into the corner there, along wi' fifty others. But I couldn't sleep, a-lyin' there 'ungry an' thinkin' 'ow I'd worked all the years o' my life an' now 'ad no plyce to rest my 'ead; an' the music comin' to me, an' the cheers an' cannon, till I got almost a hanarchist an' wanted to blow out the brains o' the Lord Chamberlain.'
Why the Lord Chamberlain, I could not precisely see, nor could he, but that was the way he felt, he said conclusively, and there was no more discussion.
As night drew on, the city became a blaze of light. Splashes of color, green, amber, and ruby, caught the eye at every point, and `E. R.,' in great cut-crystal letters and backed by flaming gas, was everywhere. The crowds in the streets increased by hundreds of thousands, and though the police sternly put down mafficking, drunkenness and rough play abounded. The tired workers seemed to have gone mad with the relaxation and excitement, and they surged and danced down the streets, men and women, old and young, with linked arms and in long rows, singing, `I may be crazy, but I love you,' `Dolly Gray,' and `The Honeysuckle and the Bee,'--the last rendered something like this:
Yew aw the enny, ennyseckle, Oi em ther bee,
Oi'd like ter sip ther enny from those red lips, yew see.
I sat on a bench on the Thames Embankment, looking across the illuminated water. It was approaching midnight, and before me poured the better class of merrymakers, shunning the more riotous streets and returning home. On the bench beside me sat two ragged creatures, a man and a woman, nodding and dozing. The woman sat with her arms clasped across the breast, holding tightly, her body in constant play,--now dropping forward till it seemed its balance would be overcome and she would fall to the pavement; now inclining to the left, sideways, till her head rested on the man's shoulder; and now to the right, stretched and strained, till the pain of it awoke her and she sat bolt upright. Whereupon the dropping forward would begin again and go through its cycle till she was aroused by the strain and stretch.
Every little while, boys and young men stopped long enough to go behind the bench and give vent to sudden and fiendish shouts. This always jerked the man and woman abruptly from their sleep; and at sight of the startled woe upon their faces the crowd would roar with laughter as it flooded past.
This was the most striking thing, the general heartlessness exhibited on every hand. It is a commonplace, the homeless on the benches, the poor miserable folk who may be teased and are harmless. Fifty thousand people must have passed the bench while I sat upon it, and not one, on such a jubilee occasion as the crowning of the King, felt his heart-strings touched sufficiently to come up and say to the woman: `Here's sixpence; go and get a bed.' But the women, especially the young women, made witty remarks upon the woman nodding, and invariably set their companions laughing.
To use a Briticism, it was `cruel'; the corresponding Americanism was more appropriate--it was `fierce.' I confess I began to grow incensed at this happy crowd streaming by, and to extract a sort of satisfaction from the London statistics which demonstrate that one in every four adults is destined to die on public charity, either in the workhouse, the infirmary, or the asylum.
Jack London became a successful writer in the US. He even visited Japan as a reporter to cover the Japanese-Russo War (1904-1905). He became so rich but died in a tragic manner eventually.
In 1905, London purchased a 1,000 acres (4.0 km2) ranch in Glen Ellen, Sonoma County, California, on the eastern slope of Sonoma Mountain, for $26,450.By the way, at the time of this coronation, the notable Japanese author Soseki Natsume was also in London, though he was then a Japanese-Government-financed scholar studying the English literature in London.
London died November 22, 1916, in a sleeping porch in a cottage on his ranch. London had been a robust man but had suffered several serious illnesses[citation needed], including scurvy in the Klondike.[40] Additionally, during travels on the Snark, he and Charmian may have picked up unspecified tropical infections.[citation needed] At the time of his death, he suffered from dysentery, uremia, and late stage alcoholism; he was in extreme pain and taking morphine, and it is possible that a morphine overdose, accidental or deliberate, may have contributed to his death.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_London#Second_marriage
Natsume wrote in his diary that he did not even go out to see the pageant as he had been so tired when he went out to look on the state funeral of Queen Victoria before. After returning to Japan, Natsume became one of the leading authors in the modern Japanese literature. However, during his stay in London for two years, he experienced a kind of emotional malaise. One of his Japanese friends in London wrote to the authority in Tokyo that Natsume looked like going crazy. Soseki Natsume must have observed poor people in London, too. The experience probably gave some impact on his study in the English literature, though it has not been fully discussed in Japan.
Something cruel or fierce may be the core of the Anglo Saxon society that must be reflected in their literature. And the Gospels also include some elements of cruelty and fierceness even if it was only for emphasizing sinfulness of anti-Christ Romans and Judaist priests.
(Maybe in the era of Shakespeare, London was not so horribly cruel since many poor people must have been able to live and work in villages and rural communities, since the Industrial Revolution was not yet started. However, London must have been always dangerous for those who were regraded as an enemy of the royal authority. Catholic William Shakespeare probably could not feel at ease in London.)
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Joh 8:4 They say unto him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act.
Joh 8:5 Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou?
Joh 8:6 This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not.
Joh 8:7 So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.