Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century; London (England) -- Description and travel
As it could be, and was, I left the place with a heavy heart for a walk
all over the town. And first of Timpson’s up-street. When I departed
from Dullborough in the strawy arms of Timpson’s Blue-Eyed Maid,
Timpson’s was a moderate-sized coach-office (in fact, a little
coach-office), with an oval transparency in the window, which looked
beautiful by night, representing one of Timpson’s coaches in the act of
passing a milestone on the London road with great velocity, completely
full inside and out, and all the passengers dressed in the first style of
fashion, and enjoying themselves tremendously. I found no such place as
Timpson’s now—no such bricks and rafters, not to mention the name—no such
edifice on the teeming earth. Pickford had come and knocked Timpson’s
down. Pickford had not only knocked Timpson’s down, but had knocked two
or three houses down on each side of Timpson’s, and then had knocked the
whole into one great establishment with a pair of big gates, in and out
of which, his (Pickford’s) waggons are, in these days, always rattling,
with their drivers sitting up so high, that they look in at the
second-floor windows of the old-fashioned houses in the High-street as
they shake the town. I have not the honour of Pickford’s acquaintance,
but I felt that he had done me an injury, not to say committed an act of
boyslaughter, in running over my Childhood in this rough manner; and if
ever I meet Pickford driving one of his own monsters, and smoking a pipe
the while (which is the custom of his men), he shall know by the
expression of my eye, if it catches his, that there is something wrong
between us.
Moreover, I felt that Pickford had no right to come rushing into
Dullborough and deprive the town of a public picture. He is not Napoleon
Bonaparte. When he took down the transparent stage-coach, he ought to
have given the town a transparent van. With a gloomy conviction that
Pickford is wholly utilitarian and unimaginative, I proceeded on my way.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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