Vox Meditantis

Monday, 26th November 1894

You find me, dear reader, upon the summit of the tower at twenty minutes past three o’clock this Monday afternoon, the twenty-sixth of November in the year of Our Lord eighteen hundred and ninety-four. The light is failing early, as is the habit of these November days, and the city below spreads itself before me like some great ledger whose entries I have been employed to decode. The air is damp with coal-smoke and the promise of fog, and I can discern, even at this height, the clatter of the omnibus upon the cobbles, the cry of the muffin-man making his rounds, the steady rhythm of boots upon pavement as clerks hurry homeward to their suppers.

I have climbed the iron staircase – one hundred and forty-seven steps, I have counted them often enough – to reach this vantage, and each ascent reminds me of my peculiar station in life. For is not the work of the intelligencer much like the climbing of stairs? One begins at the bottom, amongst the ordinary commerce of the street, where men buy their tobacco and women haggle over the price of herrings. Then, step by step, one ascends through layers of meaning, gathering fragments of conversation, the careless word dropped in a public house, the letter glimpsed upon a desk, the pattern of comings and goings at a certain address. And at last one reaches the summit, where all these scattered particulars arrange themselves into a picture of significance. Yet the curious thing, the thing which occupies my thoughts this grey afternoon, is that the view from the heights depends entirely upon what transpires below. Without the muffin-man and the clerk, without the housewife counting her pennies and the drayman watering his horses, there would be nothing of consequence to observe at all.

My masters believe I watch for great matters – the movements of foreign agents, the passing of secret documents, the machinations of those who would do harm to the realm. And so I do, after a fashion. But I have come to understand that it is in the small rituals of daily existence that the truth of a man’s character, and therefore his intentions, may be read most clearly. Does he take his tea at the same establishment each morning? Does he vary his route to his place of employment, or does he keep to habit? What quality of paper does he purchase, and how much? These trifles speak volumes to one who has trained himself to attend to them. I have watched a conspiracy unravel because a gentleman ordered a second bottle of claret when his custom was to take but one. I have seen a man’s loyalties shift because he ceased to attend divine service on Sunday mornings and began instead to frequent a certain coffee-house where seditious pamphlets were known to circulate.

This brings me to a question which has lately exercised my mind, particularly during these long hours of vigil when the city sleeps and I remain wakeful at my post. If a man were freed from the necessity of sleep – if those seven or eight hours each night might be reclaimed and put to productive use – what manner of labour might he accomplish? What good might be done, or what mischief prevented? I confess that my thoughts upon this matter have taken a hopeful turn. For if I did not require sleep, I should not spend those extra hours in the reading of great books or the contemplation of philosophy, as perhaps a better man might do. No, I should watch. I should station myself at a window, or walk the streets below, and I should observe the lives of ordinary folk with even greater attention than I now bestow upon them.

I should note the hour at which the lamplighter completes his rounds in each quarter of the city, and whether he hurries or dawdles. I should mark which households burn their lights long into the night, and which retire at a respectable hour. I should learn the routes of the policemen on their beats, the schedules of the night-soil men, the comings and goings at the railway stations when most respectable persons are abed. I should catalogue the sounds of the city in darkness – the rattle of late carriages, the distant whistle of the river steamers, the church bells marking each quarter-hour. For it seems to me that a nation’s character is revealed not in its public pronouncements but in these private, unremarked habits. The clerk who rises faithfully at six each morning, the widow who sets her few coals to catch before dawn so that her room may be warm when her children wake, the night-watchman making his solitary rounds – these are the true guardians of order, though they know it not. And if I might witness their constancy, their small acts of duty performed when no eye is upon them save mine own, I believe I should come to understand something essential about the soul of this city, and this age.

Some would say such thoughts are fanciful, that I attribute too much significance to the trivial. Yet I hold that the future of our nation, the shape of the century soon to dawn, shall be determined not by the great men whose names appear in the newspapers, but by the accumulated choices of the humble and the overlooked. Whether a people may be trusted, whether they possess the capacity for self-governance and improvement, whether they shall rise to meet the challenges which surely lie ahead – all this may be discerned in the texture of their daily lives. Do they honour their obligations? Do they speak truthfully in small matters? Do they show kindness to those weaker than themselves, even when no advantage is to be gained thereby?

From this tower I can see the lights beginning to glow in a thousand windows, as clerks and shopgirls and labourers return to their lodgings, as fires are laid and kettles set to boil, as children are called in from their play and families gather for their evening meal. Each lighted window represents a small world of duty and affection, of struggle and hope. And though I am employed to watch for treachery and danger, I confess that what I see most often is simply the persistence of ordinary goodness. The man who shares his newspaper with a fellow passenger on the omnibus. The woman who leaves a portion of bread for the stray cat that haunts the alley. The boy who runs an errand for an elderly neighbour without expectation of payment. These things occur a thousand times each day, unremarked and unrecorded, yet they form the true foundation upon which our civilisation rests.

I am, by the nature of my occupation, a man set apart, a watcher who does not fully participate in the life he observes. Yet standing here in the gathering dusk, listening to the sounds of the city preparing for night, I am seized with a powerful conviction that the age which is coming – the new century which waits just beyond the horizon – shall be shaped by the collective virtue of common men and women far more than by the schemes of the powerful. And if I can play some small part in protecting the conditions under which that virtue may flourish, then my peculiar life shall not have been spent in vain. The ladder I have climbed to reach this height has lifted me above the streets, but it is to the streets that my thoughts continually return, for it is there that the true work of the world is done.

Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.