OUR MUTUAL FRIEND.
The House of Gaffer Hexam, the humble home of Lizzie Hexam and her brother, was situated somewhere in the district of Limehouse, near the river. In a description given of the route by which Messrs. Lightwood and Wrayburn approached this locality, we read—
“Down by the Monument, and by the Tower, and by the Docks; down by Ratcliffe, and by Rotherhithe. . . . In and out among vessels that seemed to have got ashore, and houses that seemed to have got afloat—among bowsprits staring into windows, and windows staring into ships—the wheels rolled on, until they stopped at a dark corner, river-washed and otherwise not washed at all, where the boy alighted and opened the door.”
“The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters” was located in this same vicinity, overlooking the river. A waterside public-house, kept by Miss Abbey Patterson, who enforced a certain standard of respectability among her numerous clients, and conducted the house with a strict regard to discipline and punctuality—
“Externally, it was a narrow, lop-sided, wooden jumble of corpulent windows heaped one upon another, as you might heap as many toppling oranges, with a crazy wooden verandah impending over the water; indeed, the whole house, inclusive of the complaining flagstaff on the roof, impended over the water, but seemed to have got into the condition of a faint-hearted diver who has paused so long on the brink that he will never go in at all. . . . The back of the establishment, though the chief entrance, was there so contracted that it merely represented, in its connection with the front, the handle of a flat iron set upright on its broadest end. This handle stood at the bottom of a wilderness of court and alley; which wilderness pressed so hard and close upon the ‘Six Jolly Fellowship Porters,’ as to leave the hostelry not an inch of ground beyond its door.”
Rogue Riderhood and his daughter Pleasant traded at Limehouse Hole, in the same district as above, where they kept “a leaving shop” for sailors; advancing small sums of money on the portable property of seafaring customers. Mr. Riderhood did not stand well in the esteem of the neighbourhood, which “was rather shy in reference to the honour of cultivating” his acquaintance, his daughter being the more respectable and respected member of the firm.
Mr. Twemlow, “an innocent piece of dinner furniture,” often in request in certain West-end circles of society, lodged in Duke Street, St. James’s, “over a livery stable-yard.”
The Location of the Veneering Family is described as “a bran-new house, in a bran-new quarter,” designated by the appellation of “Stucconia;” while their intimate friends The Podsnaps flourished “in a shady angle adjoining Portman Square.”
Boffin’s Bower, the home in which we are first introduced to the Golden Dustman and his wife, was to be found “about a mile and a quarter up Maiden Lane, Battle Bridge,” in the close vicinity of the Mounds of Dust for which Mr. Harman was the contractor.
The Location of Mr. R. Wilfer and family was in the northern district of Holloway, beyond Battle Bridge, divided therefrom by “a tract of suburban Sahara, where tiles and bricks were burnt, bones were boiled, carpets were beat, rubbish was shot, dogs were fought, and dust was heaped by contractors.”
The Establishment of Mr. Venus was in Clerkenwell, among
“The poorer shops of small retail traders in commodities to eat and drink and keep folks warm, and of Italian frame-makers, and of barbers, and of brokers, and of dealers in dogs and singing-birds. From these, in a narrow and a dirty street devoted to such callings, Mr. Wegg selects one dark shop-window with a tallow candle dimly burning in it, surrounded by a muddle of objects vaguely resembling pieces of leather and dry stick, but among which nothing is resolvable into anything distinct, save the candle itself in its old tin candlestick, and two preserved frogs fighting a small-sword duel.”