Dickens, indeed, is so bound up with the old places of London that it may be said that he has lent a peculiar flavour and charm to all town peregrination. He certainly must be considered to have been the best interpreter of the City to us. He supplied the tragic and comic grotesque meaning of the old courts, shops, alleys, “all-alones,” “rents,” etc. “The reminiscences of his stories,” says a late visitor, “meet us at every turn, in the ancient churches, hemmed in on all sides by gigantic warehouses, in their melancholy deserted graveyards, with their ragged grass, their blackened trees, and neglected gravestones. In the odd boarding-houses and unaccountable inns that had buried themselves up strange courts, and lurked, half hidden, in unaccountable alleys, and presented themselves in quiet behind-the-age squares. In the spacious halls of opulent companies, which showed but an old-fashioned porch in a narrow quiet lane, but which presented to those who were permitted to enter their portals a superb range of apartments teeming, mayhap, with old furniture and valuable pictures, and doubtless giving on a quiet garden, worth no one knows what a square foot for building purposes, but preserved from the ravages of the builder, merely to gladden the eyes of the plump City sparrows, and of the master, the wardens, and the clerk of these most worshipful corporations. So too in the curious old banking-houses, in the mouldy old counting-houses where so much money was made; in the difficult-to-find but cosy chop-houses where you could get a chop or a steak--and such a chop or a steak!--hissing hot from the gridiron; in the methodical old clerks, the astonishing octogenarian housekeepers, the corpulent beadles in their splendid gaberdines, in the ticket porters, the bankers’ clerks chained to their pocket-books, the porters, the dockmen, the carters, the brokers. Down by the waterside, along Thames Street, through the narrow lanes and passages leading thereto, you continually saw some spot, some character or incident that recalled something in one of the stories you knew so well.”