At No. 1 Devonshire Terrace Charles Dickens lived from 1839 to 1851.
Here he finished "Barnaby Rudge" and "Dombey and Son," and wrote
"Martin Chuzzlewit," "Old Curiosity Shop," "David Copperfield," "The
Haunted Man," "The Christmas Carol," "The Cricket on the Hearth,"
"American Notes," and "The Battle of Life." Here he spent many happy
hours with Carlyle, Longfellow, Hood, Landseer, Macready and a host of
other good and famous men who visited him.
A tablet on the house No. 2 Blandford Street running out of Baker Street
to the east, tells that it was here that Michael Faraday the
distinguished chemist served his apprenticeship.
Hertford House in Manchester Square is the Gaunt House of "Vanity Fair"
and it was from the fourth Marquis of Hertford that Thackeray drew his
picture of Lord Steyne. The building now contains the Wallace Collection
of paintings, given to the nation by Lady Wallace some years ago.
During the last years of his life Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton lived in
Grosvenor Square in the house numbered 12. This is a three-storied
structure with a high iron fence, and before its door pillars on which
are flambeaux snuffers attest the age of the building. These
extinguishers were used by the footmen to put out the flambeaux that
were carried lighted on the backs of carriages at night. Writing of
these lights the poet Gay says:
Yet who the footman's arrogance can quell
Whose flambeau gilds the sashes of Pall-Mall,
When in long rank a train of torches flame,
To light the midnight visits of the dame.
Many men and many women prominent in the life of London have lived in
houses looking upon this Square during its two hundred years of
existence.
Mayfair, an aristocratic residential section of London, has Bond Street
and Park Lane on the east and west; with Piccadilly and Oxford Street on
the south and north. It is named for a fair held where Shepherd's Market
is now in each May until about the middle of the 18th century.
Through the Mayfair district stretches Curzon Street named for the third
Viscount Howe--George Augustus Curzon; noticeable for having no
thoroughfare for carriages at either end. To the west it ends in the
cul-de-sac Seamore Place; to the east continued as Bolton Row it is
halted against Devonshire Gardens.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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