Nothing could well be deader or emptier than an unoccupied house of whose former inhabitants we have no knowledge; and it is impossible to take a real interest in a house now occupied by strangers, even though it was aforetime the residence of some famous man, unless we are acquainted with that man’s personality, and know what he thought and did and said whilst he was living there. I have attempted to do little more than supply that information here as the complement of my brother’s drawings, and to this end have been less concerned to give my own descriptions and opinions than to bring together opinions and descriptions that were written by such famous residents themselves or by guests and visitors who saw and knew them. As far as possible I have quoted from contemporary Diaries and Memoirs, especially from letters that were written in or to these houses, or from Journals that their tenants kept whilst they dwelt there, supplementing all this with a narrative of incidents and events that might help to recreate the life and recapture the atmosphere that belonged to such places in the days that have made them memorable. Whenever I have adventured into any general biography, or expressed any personal opinion, it has been merely with the object of adding so much of history and character as would serve to fill in the outline of a man’s portrait, give it a sufficient fulness and colour of life, and throw into clear relief the space of time that he passed in some particular house that can still be seen in a London street.

I think I have throughout made due acknowledgment to the authors of various volumes of Recollections and Table Talk from which I have drawn anecdotes and pen-portraits, and I should like to mention at the outset that for biographical facts and much else I have been particularly indebted to such books as Elwin and Courthope’s edition of the Poems and Letters of Pope; Austin Dobson’s William Hogarth, and H. B. Wheatley’s Hogarth’s London; Boswell’s Johnson, of course, and Forster’s Lives of Goldsmith and of Dickens; Gilchrist’s Life of Blake; Leslie’s and Holmes’s Lives of Constable; Arthur B. Chamberlain’s George Romney; Lord Houghton’s Life and Letters of Keats, and Buxton Forman’s Complete Works of John Keats; Leigh Hunt’s Autobiography; De Quincey’s English Opium Eater; Hogg’s and Peacock’s Memoirs of Shelley; Carew Hazlitt’s Memoirs of Hazlitt; Blackman’s Life of Day; Byron’s Journals and Letters, and Lewis Bettany’s useful compilation from them, The Confessions of Lord Byron; Lockhart’s Life of Scott, and Scott’s Journal; Talfourd’s and Ainger’s Lives of Lamb, and Lamb’s Letters; Walter Jerrold’s Life of Thomas Hood; Cross’s Life of George Eliot; Sir William Armstrong’s Life of Turner, and Lewis Hind’s Turner’s Golden Visions; Joseph Knight’s Rossetti; Froude’s Thomas Carlyle, and W. H. Wylie’s Carlyle, The Man and His Books; Allingham’s Diary; E. R. and J. Pennell’s Life of Whistler; Trollope’s Thackeray, and Lady Thackeray Ritchie’s prefaces to the Centenary Edition of Thackeray’s works.

A. St. J. A.