There was formerly a graveyard beside St. George's church in Hart Street but it has been made into a recreation ground. Munden the actor whom Charles Lamb wrote of was buried here. It was the spire of this church that Hogarth incorporated into his fearful picture of "Gin Lane." The statue on the steeple top is a representation of George I., and inspired the lines:
When Henry the Eighth left the Pope in the lurch,
The Protestants made him the head of the Church;
But George's good subjects, the Bloomsbury people,
Instead of the church, made him head of the steeple.
Great Russell Street on which the British Museum borders has been the home of many well-known men. John Philip Kemble the great actor lived here in the years after 1790 when Drury Lane came under his direction. His house was demolished when the west wing of the Museum was added.
Gower Street, monotonous in the regularity of its houses, is where, in the building numbered 110, Charles Darwin lived and where he wrote about "Coral Reefs." Peter de Wint the painter of English cornfields lived at No. 40 and Millais at No. 87.
When Sherlock Holmes first came to London by invitation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle he lived in one of the staid looking brick houses with a prim stoop in Montague Street opposite the British Museum. The house is mentioned in the "Musgrave Ritual."
To Bloomsbury Square in 1780 the Gordon rioters dragged the documents, paintings and books of Lord Mansfield and made a bonfire of them. The house, too, of the famous judge which faced the square was burned. It was a fashionable locality in those days, unlike to-day when for the most part the houses are used for business offices. The founder of the British Museum Sir Hans Sloane long lived in this square; and at No. 6 Isaac d'Israeli wrote his "Curiosities of Literature."
In broad Kingsway just a few steps south of High Holborn is the church of Trinity, contracted and ill kempt. There is nothing pleasant or romantic about its appearance and it is noteworthy only because of being on the site of the home in which in 1796 Mary Lamb while temporarily insane stabbed her mother to death.
Dingy Red Lion Street near by the square of the same name in the house numbered 9 William Morris started to make the furniture that was to leave its mark on all such work in future times. Rossetti and Burne-Jones lived at No. 15.
At 48 Doughty Street Charles Dickens lived and here he finished "Pickwick Papers" and "Oliver Twist," wrote "Nicholas Nickleby," and began to write "Barnaby Rudge."