“The Pickwick Papers”; Mrs. Bardell’s House—The Spaniards’ Inn [Wellington Academy]. “Oliver Twist”; Mr. Brownlow’s Residence—Fagin and Bill Sykes. “Nicholas Nickleby”; The London Tavern—Mrs. Nickleby and Kate in Thames Street—Mortimer Knag’s Library—General Agency Office—Messrs. Cheeryble Brothers—Residence of Mrs. Wititterly. “Barnaby Rudge”; The Golden Key—Cellar of Mr. Stagg—The Black Lion Tavern. “Martin Chuzzlewit”; Anthony Chuzzlewit and Son—Montague Tigg, Esq., Pall Mall—Tom Pinch and Ruth at Islington. “Dombey & Son”; Polly Toodles at Staggs Gardens—Miss Tox and Major Bagstock, Princess Place—Mrs. MacStinger and Captain Cuttle, No. 9 Brig Place. “David Copperfield”; Mr. Creakle’s Establishment, Salem House—The Micawber family—Residence of Mrs. Steerforth—Doctor and Mrs. Strong—Mr. and Mrs. D. Copperfield—Mr. Traddles’s lodgings. “Bleak House”; Addresses of Mr. Guppy and his Mother—Apartments of Mr. Jarndyce—Mr. and Mrs. Smallweed, Mount Pleasant—George’s Shooting Gallery—Mr. and Mrs. Bagnet—Harold Skimpole and family. “Little Dorrit”; The House of Mrs. Clennam—Residence of Mr. Tite Barnacle—The Patriarchal Casby. “Tale of Two Cities”; Old Church of St. Pancras in the Fields. “Great Expectations”; Private Residence of Mr. Jaggers—Wemmick’s Castle, Walworth—Mr. Barley, alias old Gruff-and-Glum. “Our Mutual Friend”; Gaffer Hexam’s House—The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters—Rogue Riderhood and his Daughter—Mr. Twemlow’s Lodgings—The Veneerings and the Podsnaps—Boffin’s Bower.—Mr. R. Wilfer’s Residence—Establishment of Mr. Venus. “Mystery of Edwin Drood”; The Opium Smokers’ Den.

The various localities referred to in the foregoing Rambles comprise all the more interesting and better-known points which the Reader of Dickens would most naturally desire to visit. In addition to these, however, there are several places mentioned in the many works of “The inimitable Boz” which may be enumerated, but cannot for the following reasons be included in such specified routes:—

(1) Neighbourhoods have, in course of years, altogether changed, making it extremely difficult (in many cases impossible) to specify with exactitude the former situation of old houses, which have long become part and parcel of the forgotten past, “lost to sight” and now only “to memory dear.”

(2) The indications given in the various tales have, in some cases, been purposely rendered vague and uncertain; it being the evident aim of the author to avoid precision, and to afford no definite clue to the position of many places named.

(3) Some of the localities specified are situated at a considerable distance from any main line of route, and can be visited only by separate excursion specially undertaken for the purpose.

In the following addendum these uncertain or distant addresses are given under the headings of those books in which they respectively occur; in order that Ramblers, if so disposed, may—in the words of Mr. Peggotty—“fisherate” for themselves.

THE PICKWICK PAPERS.

Mrs. Bardell’s House was located in Goswell Street, certainly in a central position; for we read that, as Mr. Pickwick looked from his chamber-window on the world beneath,

“Goswell Street was at his feet, Goswell Street was on his right hand, as far as the eye could reach, Goswell Street extended on his left, and the opposite side of Goswell Street was over the way.”

The “Spaniards’ Inn” at Hampstead may be remembered as the scene of the tea-party at which Mrs. Bardell and a few select friends enjoyed themselves, previous to her unexpected arrest and removal to the Fleet Prison, at the suit of Messrs. Dodson and Fogg. There still exists the “Spaniards” at Heath End, Hampstead Heath.[Visitors to Hampstead may be disposed to visit the site once occupied by Mr. Jones’s School, called the “Wellington Academy,” at which Dickens received some two years’ technical education; being a little over fourteen years old when he left. The house is now in possession of the Inland Revenue Office, at the corner of Granby Street, 247 Hampstead Road; part of the premises abutting on the London and North-Western Railway, the formation of which demolished the old schoolroom and playground.]

The “Spaniards,” Hampstead Heath

OLIVER TWIST.

Mr. Brownlow’s Residence, in “a quiet shady street near Pentonville,” cannot he fairly localised. In the days of “Oliver Twist,” Mr. George Cruikshank, the illustrator of the book, lived at Myddelton Terrace, Pentonville; and possibly Dickens bethought himself of this vicinity in consequence.

Fagin’s House in Whitechapel and the residence of Bill Sykes cannot, with any fairness, be accurately indicated. The latter is spoken of as being in “one of a maze of mean and dirty streets, which abound in the close and densely populated quarter of Bethnal Green.”

NICHOLAS NICKLEBY.

The London Tavern, at which was held the Meeting in promotion of “The United Metropolitan Improved Hot Muffin and Crumpet Baking and Punctual Delivery Company,” once (many years since) occupied the site of the Royal Bank of Scotland, 123 Bishopsgate Street Within, on the left hand entering the street from Cornhill.

Mrs. Nickleby and her daughter Kate lived, per favour of their amiable relative, in Thames Street. This business thoroughfare has undergone considerable reconstruction since the days of their tenancy, and the particular dwelling intended cannot be identified. The place is described as a “large, old dingy house, the doors and windows of which were so bespattered with mud that it would have appeared to have been uninhabited for years.”Mr. Mortimer Knag kept a small circulating library “in a by-street off Tottenham Court Road,” where also lived his sister, Miss Knag, the presiding genius of Madame Mantalini’s establishment; and we may remember the evening when Mrs. Nickleby and Kate were graciously invited to supper at this abode of literary genius.

The General Agency Office, at which Nicholas Nickleby obtained the address of Mr. Gregsbury, M.P., Manchester Buildings, Westminster (also one of the lost localities of London), and where he first met Madeline Bray, has no specified direction in the book. There have been few such agencies existent in a central position in London.

Messrs. Cheeryble Brothers had their place of business in a small City square. “Passing along Threadneedle Street, and through some lanes and passages on the right,” we read that Nicholas was conducted by Mr. Charles Cheeryble to the place in occupation of the firm—

“The City square has no enclosure, save the lamp-post in the middle, and no grass but the weeds which spring up around its base. It is a quiet, little-frequented, retired spot, favourable to melancholy and contemplation, and appointments of long waiting. . . . In winter-time the snow will linger there long after it has melted from the busy streets and highways. The summer’s sun holds it in some respect, and while he darts his cheerful rays sparingly into the square, keeps his fiery heat and glare for noisier and less imposing precincts. It is so quiet, that you can almost hear the ticking of your own watch, when you stop to cool in its refreshing atmosphere. There is a distant hum—of coaches, not of insects—but no other sound disturbs the stillness of the square.”

The Residence of Mrs. Wititterly is referred to as having been pleasantly situated in Cadogan Place, Sloane Street—

“Cadogan Place is the one slight bond which joins two extremities; it is the connecting link between the aristocratic pavements of Belgrave Square and the barbarism of Chelsea. It is in Sloane Street, but not of it. The people of Cadogan Place look down upon Sloane Street, and think Brompton low. They affect fashion, too, and wonder where the New Road is. Not that they claim to be on precisely the same footing as the high folks of Belgrave Square and Grosvenor Place, but that they stand, in reference to them, rather in the light of those illegitimate children of the great, who are content to boast of their connexions, although their connexions disavow them.”

BARNABY RUDGE.

“The Golden Key”—the house of honest Gabriel Varden, the locksmith—was in Clerkenwell, situated in a quiet street not far from the Charter House—

“A modest building, not very straight, not large, not tall, not bold-faced, with great staring windows, but a shy, blinking house, with a conical roof going up into a peak over its garret window of four small panes of glass, like a cocked hat on the head of an elderly gentleman with one eye. It was not built of brick, or lofty stone, but of wood and plaster; it was not planned with a dull and wearisome regard to regularity, for no one window matched the other, or seemed to have the slightest reference to anything beside itself.”

This was its description one hundred years ago, and its exact whereabouts cannot now be ascertained. There are some old plaster-fronted houses, evidently belonging to the last century, still to be found in Albemarle Street, near St. John’s Square, but none of these fairly correspond with the description of “The Golden Key.”

The Cellar of Mr. Stagg was situated in Barbican. We read that its position was “in one of the narrowest of the narrow streets which diverge from that centre, in a blind court or yard, profoundly dark, unpaved, and reeking with stagnant odours.”

“The Black Lion” Tavern can only be identified as being situated in Whitechapel. It was a favourite resort of Mr. John Willett, landlord of the “Maypole Inn” at Chigwell, when he came to town; and we may remember it as the scene of Dolly Varden’s satisfactory interview with her lover Joe, after his return from “the Salwanners.”

MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT.

Anthony Chuzzlewit and Son had their place of business near Aldersgate Street. Their dreary residence was the bridal home of Mercy Pecksniff—married by Jonas Chuzzlewit—and we may recollect her reception at this establishment by the worthy Sairey Gamp. To this house Jonas returned after the murder of Montague Tigg, and was here arrested by his relative Chevy Slyme, in the presence of his uncle and Mark Tapley. Its situation is described as being in

“A very narrow street, somewhere behind the Post Office, where every house was in the brightest summer morning very gloomy; and where light porters watered the pavement, each before his own employer’s premises, in fantastic patterns in the dog-days; and where spruce gentlemen, with their hands in the pockets of symmetrical trousers, were always to be seen in warm weather contemplating their undeniable boots in dusty warehouse doorways, which appeared to be the hardest work they did, except now and then carrying pens behind their ears.”

Montague Tigg, Esq., the Chairman of the Anglo-Bengalee Insurance Company, lived in luxurious chambers in Pall Mall; and we may remember the morning when Jonas Chuzzlewit called at the residence of his chief, and was disagreeably surprised to find his friend in full possession of his secret history—with Mr. Nadgett in attendance.

Tom Pinch and his sister Ruth lodged at “Merry Islington,” “in a singular little old-fashioned house, up a blind street,” where they were accommodated with two small bedrooms and a triangular parlour, the householder being the inscrutable Mr. Nadgett. In “Martin Chuzzlewit” are contained many pleasant episodes associated with these modest apartments; where, as we all know, little Ruth made her first culinary experiment, and was pleasantly surprised the next morning to find the merry present of a cookery-book awaiting her in the parlour (sent by John Westlock), with the beefsteak pudding leaf turned down and blotted out.

DOMBEY AND SON.

Polly Toodles (otherwise Richards) lived with her husband and her “apple-faced” family, at Stagg’s Gardens, Camden Town, at the time when the London and North-Western Railway was in course of construction—

“As yet the neighbourhood was shy to own the railroad. One or two bold speculators had projected streets, and one had built a little, but had stopped among the mud and ashes to consider further of it. A bran new tavern, redolent of fresh mortar and size, and fronting nothing at all, had taken for its sign the ‘Railway Arms;’ but that might be rash enterprise—and then it hoped to sell drink to the workmen. So the Excavators’ house of Call had sprung up from a beer-shop, and the old-established Ham and Beef Shop had become the Railway Eating House, with a roast leg of pork daily, through interested motives of a similar immediate and popular description.”

In a later chapter of “Dombey” we read of Stagg’s Gardens having vanished from the earth—

“Where the old rotten summer-houses once had stood, palaces now reared their heads, and granite columns of gigantic girth opened a vista to the railway world beyond. The miserable waste ground, where the refuse matter had been heaped of yore, was swallowed up and gone, and in its frowzy stead were tiers of warehouses, crammed with rich goods and costly merchandise. The old bye-streets now swarmed with passengers and vehicles of every kind: the new streets that had stopped disheartened in the mud and waggon-ruts, formed towns within themselves, originating wholesome comforts and conveniences belonging to themselves, and never tried nor thought of until they sprung into existence.”

Miss Lucretia Tox had apartments at Princess Place, an address not included in the London Directory; and Major Bagstock also had chambers in the immediate vicinity, a genteel but somewhat inconvenient neighbourhood. Miss Tox’s residence is described as

“A dark little house, that had been squeezed at some remote period of English history into a fashionable neighbourhood at the west end of the town, where it stood in the shade, like a poor relation of the great street round the corner, coldly looked down upon by mighty mansions. It was not exactly in a court, and it was not exactly in a yard, but it was in the dullest of No-Thoroughfares, rendered anxious and haggard by double knocks. . . . There is a smack of stabling in the air of Princess Place, and Miss Tox’s bedroom (which was at the back) commanded a vista of mews, where hostlers, at whatever sort of work engaged, were continually accompanying themselves with effervescent noises, and where the most domestic and confidential garments of coachmen and their wives and families usually hung like Macbeth’s banners on the outer walls.”

Mrs. MacStinger presided at No. 9 Brig Place, finding accommodation for Captain Cuttle as her first floor lodger, previous to the time of his hurried and secret removal to the quarters of The Wooden Midshipman. We read that the house was situated

“On the brink of a little canal near the India Docks, where the air was perfumed with chips, and all other trades were swallowed up in mast, oar, and block making, and boat building. Then the ground grew marshy and unsettled. Then there was nothing to be smelt but rum and sugar. Then Captain Cuttle’s lodgings, at once a first floor and a top storey, in Brig Place, were close before you.”

DAVID COPPERFIELD.

Mr. Creakle’s educational establishment, “Salem House,” was, we are told, “down by Blackheath.” A large, dull house, standing away from the main road among some dark trees, and surrounded by a high wall. The character of Mr. Creakle seems to have been drawn from life; being, in fact, a portrait of the proprietor of the “Wellington Academy,” Hampstead Road, previously referred to. Dr. Danson, an old schoolfellow of Dickens, writing to Mr. Forster, states that this “Mr. Jones was a Welshman, a most ignorant fellow, and a mere tyrant, whose chief employment was to scourge the boys.” Also, Mr. Forster, speaking of the school, says, “it had supplied some of the lighter traits of Salem House for ‘Copperfield.’”

Mr. Micawber lived in Windsor Terrace, City Road, at the time he first received young David Copperfield as a lodger, and previous to the crisis in his pecuniary affairs which removed him to King’s Bench Prison in the Borough.

We also read, later in the book, of the Micawbers as located in a little street near The Veterinary College, Camden Town, what time Mr. Traddles was their lodger; and we may remember how the astute Mr. Micawber took advantage of the circumstance, by obtaining the friendly signature of his inmate as security, in the matter of two bills “not provided for.”

Mrs. Steerforth resided in “an old brick house at Highgate, on the summit of the hill; a genteel, old-fashioned house, very quiet, and very orderly,” from which position a comprehensive view was obtainable of “all London lying in the distance like a great vapour, with here and there some lights twinkling through it.” In connection with this house we may recall the characters of Rosa Dartle and the respectable serving-man Littimer.

Doctor and Mrs. Strong also lived in a cottage at Highgate after their removal from Canterbury; and Mr. and Mrs. David Copperfield resided in the same neighbourhood, with Betsy Trotwood established in a convenient cottage near at hand.

Mr. Traddles, in his bachelor days, had lodgings behind the parapet of a house in Castle Street, Holborn. This thoroughfare has now changed its name, and is known as Furnival Street. It may be found on the south side of Holborn, and west of Fetter Lane, leading to Cursitor Street.

BLEAK HOUSE.

Mr. Guppy mentioned his address as 87 Penton Place, Pentonville; but the London Directory does not now include the number specified. The residence of Mrs. Guppy, his mother, is stated as having been 302 Old Street Road; previous to the time when a house was taken (by mother and son) in Walcot Square, Lambeth, on the south side of the Thames, and Mr. Guppy started on his independent professional career.

Mr. Jarndyce once sojourned in London, “at a cheerful lodging near Oxford Street, over an upholsterer’s shop,” at which also Ada Clare and Esther Summerson were accommodated.

Mr. and Mrs. Smallweed vegetated, with their grandchildren, “in a rather ill-favoured and ill-savoured neighbourhood, though one of its rising grounds bears the name of Mount Pleasant.” This beatific neighbourhood will be found north of Clerkenwell Road (approached by Laystall Street), in the neighbourhood of the Middlesex House of Correction.

George’s Shooting Gallery is memorable as the place where Gridley—“the man from Shropshire”—died; where also Poor Jo, clinging to the spars of the Lord’s Prayer, drifted out upon the unknown sea. It is described as “a great brick building, composed of bare walls, floors, roof-rafters, and skylights; on the front of which was painted ‘George’s Shooting Gallery.’” Its location is given as being up a court and a long whitewashed passage, in

“That curious region lying about the Haymarket and Leicester Square, which is a centre of attraction to indifferent foreign hotels and indifferent foreigners, racket courts, fighting men, swordsmen, foot-guards, old china, gambling-houses, exhibitions, and a large medley of shabbiness and shrinking out of sight.”

Mr. Bagnet and his “old girl” kept house and home on the Surrey side of the river; but no more precise indication of their whereabouts is given than is contained in the following reference:—

“By Blackfriars’ Bridge, and Blackfriars’ Road, Mr. George sedately marches to a street of little shops lying somewhere in that ganglion of roads from Kent and Surrey, and of streets from the bridges of London, centreing in the far-famed Elephant who has lost his castle.”

The Town House of Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock was situated in a dull aristocratic street in the western district of London,

“Where the two long rows of houses stare at each other with that severity, that half-a-dozen of its greatest mansions seem to have been slowly stared into stone, rather than originally built in that material. It is a street of such dismal grandeur, so determined not to condescend to liveliness, that the doors and windows hold a gloomy state of their own in black paint and dust, and the echoing mews behind have a dry and massive appearance, as if they were reserved to stable the stone chargers of noble statues.”

Harold Skimpole and family had their residence in the Polygon, near to the Euston Terminus (on the east side), in the centre of Clarendon Square, Somers Town. The house is described as being sadly in want of repair—

“Two or three of the area railings were gone; the water-butt was broken; the knocker was loose; the bell-handle had been pulled off a long time, to judge from the rusty state of the wire; and dirty footprints on the steps were the only signs of its being inhabited.”

LITTLE DORRIT.

The House of Mrs. Clennam was situated not far from the river, in the neighbourhood of Upper Thames Street. We read that Arthur Clennam, on his arrival in London,

“Crossed by Saint Paul’s and went down, at a long angle, almost to the water’s edge, through some of the crooked and descending streets which lie (and lay more crookedly and closely then) between the river and Cheapside . . . passing silent warehouses and wharves, and here and there a narrow alley leading to the river, where a wretched little bill, ‘Found Drowned,’ was weeping on the wet wall; he came at last to the house he sought. An old brick house, so dingy as to be all but black, standing by itself within a gateway.”

Mr. Tite Barnacle had his residence in Mews Street, Grosvenor Square—

“It was a hideous little street of dead wall, stables, and dunghills, with lofts over coach-houses inhabited by coachmen’s families, who had a passion for drying clothes, and decorating their window-sills with miniature turnpike-gates. The principal chimney-sweep of that fashionable quarter lived at the blind end of Mews Street. . . . Yet there were two or three small airless houses at the entrance end of Mews Street, which went at enormous rents on account of their being abject hangers-on to a fashionable situation; and whenever one of these fearful little coops was to be let (which seldom happened, for they were in great request), the house agent advertised it as a gentlemanly residence in the most aristocratic part of the town, inhabited solely by the Élite of the beau monde.”

The Patriarchal Casby, with his daughter—the irrepressible Flora—and Mr. F.’s Aunt,

“Lived in a street in the Gray’s Inn Road, which had set off from that thoroughfare with the intention of running at one heat down into the valley, and up again to the top of Pentonville Hill; but which had run itself out of breath in twenty yards, and had stood still ever since. There is no such place in that part now; but it remained there for many years, looking with a baulked countenance at the wilderness patched with unfruitful gardens, and pimpled with eruptive summer-houses, that it had meant to run over in no time.”

TALE OF TWO CITIES.

In this Tale we read of the funeral of Cly, the Old Bailey Informer; the interment taking place in the burial-ground attached to the ancient church of St. Pancras in the Fields. This edifice still exists in Pancras Road (east side, opposite Goldington Crescent), which leads from King’s Cross, northward, to Kentish Town. There is a church of the same name to be found in the Euston Road—east of Upper Woburn Place, but this is altogether another and more modern structure than the one above referred to. A century since, at the time of the funeral described, the name of this locality was literally correct; the church being situated in the outlying fields of the suburban village of Pancras. We may here recollect the fishing expedition undertaken by Mr. Cruncher and his two companions, on the night following the funeral; when young Jerry quietly followed his “honoured parent,” and assured himself of the nature of his father’s secret avocation.

GREAT EXPECTATIONS.

Mr. Jaggers, the Old Bailey lawyer, had his private residence on the south side of Gerrard Street, Soho, where he lived in solitary state, with his eccentric housekeeper, the mother of Estella: “Rather a stately house of its kind, but dolefully in want of painting, and with dirty windows.”

Wemmick’s Castle at Walworth is altogether a place of the past; Walworth being now one of the most populous and crowded of metropolitan districts. We read that in Pip’s time

“It appeared to be a collection of black lanes, ditches, and little gardens, and to present the aspect of a rather dull retirement. Wemmick’s house was a little wooden cottage in the midst of plots of garden, and the top of it was cut out and painted like a battery mounted with guns.”

Mr. Barley, alias Old Gruff-and-Glum, lived at Mill Pond Bank, by Chinks’s Basin and the Old Green Copper Rope-walk. Pip says the place was anything but easy to find. Losing himself among shipbuilders’ and shipbreakers’ yards, he continues the description of his search as follows:—

“After several times falling short of my destination, and as often overshooting it, I came unexpectedly round a corner, upon Mill Pond Bank. It was a fresh kind of place, all circumstances considered, where the wind from the river had room to turn itself round; and there were two or three trees in it, and there was the stump of a ruined windmill, and there was the Old Green Copper Rope-walk—whose long and narrow vista I could trace in the moonlight, along a series of wooden frames set in the ground, that looked like superannuated haymaking rakes, which had grown old and lost most of their teeth. Selecting from the few queer houses upon Mill Pond Bank, a house with a wooden front and three storeys of bow-window (not bay-window, which is another thing), I looked at the plate upon the door, and read there Mrs. Whimple . . . the name I wanted.”

OUR MUTUAL FRIEND.

The House of Gaffer Hexam, the humble home of Lizzie Hexam and her brother, was situated somewhere in the district of Limehouse, near the river. In a description given of the route by which Messrs. Lightwood and Wrayburn approached this locality, we read—

“Down by the Monument, and by the Tower, and by the Docks; down by Ratcliffe, and by Rotherhithe. . . . In and out among vessels that seemed to have got ashore, and houses that seemed to have got afloat—among bowsprits staring into windows, and windows staring into ships—the wheels rolled on, until they stopped at a dark corner, river-washed and otherwise not washed at all, where the boy alighted and opened the door.”

“The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters” was located in this same vicinity, overlooking the river. A waterside public-house, kept by Miss Abbey Patterson, who enforced a certain standard of respectability among her numerous clients, and conducted the house with a strict regard to discipline and punctuality—

“Externally, it was a narrow, lop-sided, wooden jumble of corpulent windows heaped one upon another, as you might heap as many toppling oranges, with a crazy wooden verandah impending over the water; indeed, the whole house, inclusive of the complaining flagstaff on the roof, impended over the water, but seemed to have got into the condition of a faint-hearted diver who has paused so long on the brink that he will never go in at all. . . . The back of the establishment, though the chief entrance, was there so contracted that it merely represented, in its connection with the front, the handle of a flat iron set upright on its broadest end. This handle stood at the bottom of a wilderness of court and alley; which wilderness pressed so hard and close upon the ‘Six Jolly Fellowship Porters,’ as to leave the hostelry not an inch of ground beyond its door.”

Rogue Riderhood and his daughter Pleasant traded at Limehouse Hole, in the same district as above, where they kept “a leaving shop” for sailors; advancing small sums of money on the portable property of seafaring customers. Mr. Riderhood did not stand well in the esteem of the neighbourhood, which “was rather shy in reference to the honour of cultivating” his acquaintance, his daughter being the more respectable and respected member of the firm.

Mr. Twemlow, “an innocent piece of dinner furniture,” often in request in certain West-end circles of society, lodged in Duke Street, St. James’s, “over a livery stable-yard.”

The Location of the Veneering Family is described as “a bran-new house, in a bran-new quarter,” designated by the appellation of “Stucconia;” while their intimate friends The Podsnaps flourished “in a shady angle adjoining Portman Square.”

Boffin’s Bower, the home in which we are first introduced to the Golden Dustman and his wife, was to be found “about a mile and a quarter up Maiden Lane, Battle Bridge,” in the close vicinity of the Mounds of Dust for which Mr. Harman was the contractor.

The Location of Mr. R. Wilfer and family was in the northern district of Holloway, beyond Battle Bridge, divided therefrom by “a tract of suburban Sahara, where tiles and bricks were burnt, bones were boiled, carpets were beat, rubbish was shot, dogs were fought, and dust was heaped by contractors.”

The Establishment of Mr. Venus was in Clerkenwell, among

“The poorer shops of small retail traders in commodities to eat and drink and keep folks warm, and of Italian frame-makers, and of barbers, and of brokers, and of dealers in dogs and singing-birds. From these, in a narrow and a dirty street devoted to such callings, Mr. Wegg selects one dark shop-window with a tallow candle dimly burning in it, surrounded by a muddle of objects vaguely resembling pieces of leather and dry stick, but among which nothing is resolvable into anything distinct, save the candle itself in its old tin candlestick, and two preserved frogs fighting a small-sword duel.”

THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD.

In the first chapter of the tale we are introduced to “the meanest and closest of small rooms,” where, “through the ragged window-curtain, the light of early day steals in from a miserable court.” A man

“Lies dressed, across a large unseemly bed, upon a bedstead that has indeed given way under the weight upon it. Lying, also dressed, and also across the bed, not longwise, are a Chinaman, a Lascar, and a haggard woman. The two first are in a sleep or stupor; the last is blowing at a kind of pipe, to kindle it.”

This Opium Smokers’ Den had its location in an eastern district of London, probably the Shadwell neighbourhood of the London Docks, but no precise indication of its whereabouts is given in the tale. We read of John Jasper starting from his hotel in Falcon Square: “Eastward, and still eastward, through the stale streets, he takes his way, until he reaches his destination—a miserable court, specially miserable among many such.”

THE SOUTH KENSINGTON MUSEUM

is readily attainable from Charing Cross (or any other) station of the District Metropolitan Railway. Entrance in Cromwell Road, five minutes’ walk, on the north side, from South Kensington Station.

The Forster Collection—on the first floor—in this museum contains several of the earlier Letters written by Dickens to Forster, and the pen-and-ink sketch by Maclise, representing the “Apotheosis of ‘Grip,’” the celebrated Raven, who departed this life at No. 1 Devonshire Terrace, March 12th, 1841. There are also here exhibited The Manuscripts of the principal Works of Dickens, together with a Proof Copy of “David Copperfield,” showing the corrections of the Author. Most of these lie opened, each at its first page; and it is interesting to observe the careful interlineations and alterations with which the various original copies were amended. In the case of “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” the sorrowful memento of its final page is exposed to view, as being the last sheet written by the “vanished hand” of our much loved and faithful friend,

Charles Dickens Signature