Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870 -- Homes and haunts -- England -- London; Literary landmarks -- England -- 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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