At the top of Wine Office Court is Gough Square and in a corner house
numbered 17 may be found a tablet telling that Dr. Samuel Johnson once
lived within. That was almost one hundred and fifty years ago but the
house is very little changed outwardly. Within it is wholly given up to
business. Of all the houses Johnson occupied in London this is the only
one still standing. Here the greater part of his dictionary was written
and here Mrs. Johnson died.
In Bolt Court the last years of Dr. Johnson's life were spent in the
house No. 8, long since demolished. Here he died in 1784.
Johnson's Court a blind alley off Fleet Street was not named for Dr.
Samuel Johnson although many persons believe so because Dr. Johnson
lived here for a time on the site where No. 7 is now. The old "Monthly
Magazine" had offices here in 1833, when Charles Dickens came and
through the oaken doorway with uncertain hand dropped his first
manuscript into the yawning opening of the letter box, that might or
might not bring back good news.
At the head of Crane Court which opens out of Fleet Street is the spot
selected by Sir Isaac Newton as "the middle of town and out of noise."
Newton was president of the Royal Society and that body occupied the
house from 1710 to 1762. The old house was burned in 1877 and a modern
structure erected.
Fetter Lane evidently had an ill start taking its name from its early
inhabitants the "Faitours" or beggars.
St. Dunstan's-in-the-West with its wondrous tower of fretwork is in
Fleet Street close by Chancery Lane and is a restoration of 1831.
In Fleet Street opposite the gateway to the Temple once stood the old
Cock Tavern which was swept away when Temple Bar was removed, and now
exists in modern form close by on the south side. A cock is still the
sign of the place, said to have been carved by Grinling Gibbons. It is
this tavern that Tennyson speaks of in his "Will Waterproof's Lyric":
Oh plump head waiter at The Cock
To which I most resort.
Samuel Pepys went often to the Cock Tavern, once with the elegant Mrs.
Knipp and has left the record that they ate a lobster, sang and made
merry until midnight--at which Mrs. Pepys was much annoyed.
Child's Bank close by the Temple Bar Griffin on the south side of Fleet
Street, is the oldest of England's banking houses dating from the time
of Charles I. when the first Francis Child, an apprentice to William
Wheeler the goldsmith, married his master's daughter and by thrift and
industry founded the fortunes of the great institution. The present bank
stands on the site of the old Devil Tavern that for two hundred years
was the haunt of men of letters. Here Ben Jonson had his social
headquarters gathering around him in the famous Apollo Room wits of all
degree.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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