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74 MELODRAMA
secret. Old Armytage, suspecting seduction because the girl is his lodge-keeper's daughter, disinherits his son. Clifford, a nephew, becomes the heir at Armytage Hall, where he seduces the daughter of another retainer, Seth Preene. There is robbery with violence and Harold is the victim of circumstantial evidence. He is sentenced to hard labour but escapes. While hunted by the police he is given shelter in a showman's caravan until he finds his wife. They become outcasts, vagabonds of the casual wards. One evening in Regent's Park, when the " real " boy from the real Park has removed the chairs, they wander to " the Slips ". There the villainous nephew, angry at being asked to marry the girl he has ruined, happens at the moment to be throwing her father over the bridge into the canal. Harold dives to the rescue and Seth Preene swears, " You have saved my life. I will save yours."
The scene of the Borough on Saturday night exposes, " the dirt and degradation of London life, where drunkenness, debauchery and depravity are shown in all their naked hideousness ". The escaped convict is hiding in a garret, where he is found by his cousin. There is a deadly fight but it is interrupted by the police. Harold crawls along a roof, drops to the street below, and struggles among a yelling crowd until overwhelmed at last. When the scene changes swiftly to a police-station, with the same crowd surging outside, Seth Preene is there to confess how he and the villainous nephew were guilty of the robbery.
At the Princess's in 1882, Sims' The Romany Rye, founded on his own novel, "Rogues and Vagabonds", was pronounced "bad and mischievous ". From a fancier's shop full of real birds and real rabbits, the villain tried to abduct the screaming heroine. After her wedding a ship bore her away while the bridegroom was decoyed into Ratcliffe Highway in order to be " bashed " by hired murderers — the Thames was then well-stocked with " bashed bodies " through undetected crimes — who dragged him to a slimy cellar. There they bound him to a hook in a wall while an old hag (who reminded everybody of La Frochard) prepared to hocus him with a sleeping draught. But as he resembled her long-lost son, she let him merely pretend to be drugged before the scene changed to a beautiful picture of the moonlit Thames. The boat put out. He knocked out the bashers, reached the ship just as it was sinking, hacked his way through spars and shrouds, and swam with his bride to a lifeboat.
Late Victorianism showed at its best in Sims. His friendliness, his frankness, his air of well-being, made him the most popular of journalists. " Early in the 'eighties ", his autobiography mentions, " I