BLEAK HOUSE.
Mr. Guppy mentioned his address as 87 Penton Place, Pentonville; but the London Directory does not now include the number specified. The residence of Mrs. Guppy, his mother, is stated as having been 302 Old Street Road; previous to the time when a house was taken (by mother and son) in Walcot Square, Lambeth, on the south side of the Thames, and Mr. Guppy started on his independent professional career.
Mr. Jarndyce once sojourned in London, “at a cheerful lodging near Oxford Street, over an upholsterer’s shop,” at which also Ada Clare and Esther Summerson were accommodated.
Mr. and Mrs. Smallweed vegetated, with their grandchildren, “in a rather ill-favoured and ill-savoured neighbourhood, though one of its rising grounds bears the name of Mount Pleasant.” This beatific neighbourhood will be found north of Clerkenwell Road (approached by Laystall Street), in the neighbourhood of the Middlesex House of Correction.
George’s Shooting Gallery is memorable as the place where Gridley—“the man from Shropshire”—died; where also Poor Jo, clinging to the spars of the Lord’s Prayer, drifted out upon the unknown sea. It is described as “a great brick building, composed of bare walls, floors, roof-rafters, and skylights; on the front of which was painted ‘George’s Shooting Gallery.’” Its location is given as being up a court and a long whitewashed passage, in
“That curious region lying about the Haymarket and Leicester Square, which is a centre of attraction to indifferent foreign hotels and indifferent foreigners, racket courts, fighting men, swordsmen, foot-guards, old china, gambling-houses, exhibitions, and a large medley of shabbiness and shrinking out of sight.”
Mr. Bagnet and his “old girl” kept house and home on the Surrey side of the river; but no more precise indication of their whereabouts is given than is contained in the following reference:—
“By Blackfriars’ Bridge, and Blackfriars’ Road, Mr. George sedately marches to a street of little shops lying somewhere in that ganglion of roads from Kent and Surrey, and of streets from the bridges of London, centreing in the far-famed Elephant who has lost his castle.”
The Town House of Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock was situated in a dull aristocratic street in the western district of London,
“Where the two long rows of houses stare at each other with that severity, that half-a-dozen of its greatest mansions seem to have been slowly stared into stone, rather than originally built in that material. It is a street of such dismal grandeur, so determined not to condescend to liveliness, that the doors and windows hold a gloomy state of their own in black paint and dust, and the echoing mews behind have a dry and massive appearance, as if they were reserved to stable the stone chargers of noble statues.”
Harold Skimpole and family had their residence in the Polygon, near to the Euston Terminus (on the east side), in the centre of Clarendon Square, Somers Town. The house is described as being sadly in want of repair—
“Two or three of the area railings were gone; the water-butt was broken; the knocker was loose; the bell-handle had been pulled off a long time, to judge from the rusty state of the wire; and dirty footprints on the steps were the only signs of its being inhabited.”
LITTLE DORRIT.
The House of Mrs. Clennam was situated not far from the river, in the neighbourhood of Upper Thames Street. We read that Arthur Clennam, on his arrival in 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.”