GREAT EXPECTATIONS.
Mr. Jaggers, the Old Bailey lawyer, had his private residence on the south side of Gerrard Street, Soho, where he lived in solitary state, with his eccentric housekeeper, the mother of Estella: “Rather a stately house of its kind, but dolefully in want of painting, and with dirty windows.”
Wemmick’s Castle at Walworth is altogether a place of the past; Walworth being now one of the most populous and crowded of metropolitan districts. We read that in Pip’s time
“It appeared to be a collection of black lanes, ditches, and little gardens, and to present the aspect of a rather dull retirement. Wemmick’s house was a little wooden cottage in the midst of plots of garden, and the top of it was cut out and painted like a battery mounted with guns.”
Mr. Barley, alias Old Gruff-and-Glum, lived at Mill Pond Bank, by Chinks’s Basin and the Old Green Copper Rope-walk. Pip says the place was anything but easy to find. Losing himself among shipbuilders’ and shipbreakers’ yards, he continues the description of his search as follows:—
“After several times falling short of my destination, and as often overshooting it, I came unexpectedly round a corner, upon Mill Pond Bank. It was a fresh kind of place, all circumstances considered, where the wind from the river had room to turn itself round; and there were two or three trees in it, and there was the stump of a ruined windmill, and there was the Old Green Copper Rope-walk—whose long and narrow vista I could trace in the moonlight, along a series of wooden frames set in the ground, that looked like superannuated haymaking rakes, which had grown old and lost most of their teeth. Selecting from the few queer houses upon Mill Pond Bank, a house with a wooden front and three storeys of bow-window (not bay-window, which is another thing), I looked at the plate upon the door, and read there Mrs. Whimple . . . the name I wanted.”