“_Familiar in their Mouths as HOUSEHOLD WORDS._”—SHAKESPEARE. HOUSEHOLD WORDS. A WEEKLY JOURNAL. CONDUCTED BY CHARLES DICKENS. N^{o.} 15.] SATURDAY, JULY 6, 1850. [PRICE 2_d._ THE OLD LADY IN THREADNEEDLE STREET. Perhaps there is no Old Lady who has attained to such great distinction in the world, as this highly respectable female. Even the Old Lady who lived on a hill, and who, if she’s not gone, lives there still; or that other Old Lady who lived in a shoe, and had so many children she didn’t know what to do—are unknown to fame, compared with the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street. In all parts of the civilised earth the imaginations of men, women, and children figure this tremendous Old Lady of Threadneedle Street in some rich shape or other. Throughout the length and breadth of England, old ladies dote upon her; young ladies smile upon her; old gentlemen make much of her, young gentlemen woo her; everybody courts the smiles, and dreads the coldness, of the powerful Old Lady in Threadneedle Street. Even prelates have been said to be fond of her; and Ministers of State to have been unable to resist her attractions. She is next to omnipotent in the three great events of human life. In spite of the old saw, far fewer marriages are made in Heaven, than with an eye to Threadneedle Street. To be born in the good graces of the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, is to be born to fortune: to die in her good books, is to leave a far better inheritance, as the world goes, than “the grinning honour that Sir Walter hath,” in Westminster Abbey. And there she is, for ever in Threadneedle Street, another name for wealth and thrift, threading her golden-eyed needle all the year round. This Old Lady, when she first set up, carried on business in Grocers’ Hall, Poultry; but in 1732 she quarrelled with her landlords about a renewal of her lease, and built a mansion of her own in Threadneedle Street. She reared her new abode on the site of the house and garden of a former director of her affairs, Sir John Houblon. This was a modest structure, somewhat dignified by having a statue of William the Third placed before it; but not the more imposing from being at the end of an arched court, densely surrounded with habitations, and abutting on the churchyard of St. Christopher le Stocks. But now, behold her, a prosperous gentlewoman in the hundred and fifty-seventh year of her age; “the oldest inhabitant” of Threadneedle Street! There never was such an insatiable Old Lady for business. She has gradually enlarged her premises, until she has spread them over four acres; confiscating to her own use not only the parish church of St. Christopher, but the greater part of the parish itself.