This house was Charles Dickens’s last London residence; he rented it, Forster tells us, for the period of his London Readings at that time, in order to avoid the daily railway journey to London from Gad’s Hill, entertaining an especial dislike to that mode of travelling in the then serious state of his health.

At Hyde Park Place he wrote a considerable portion of the unfinished fragment of “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” and made the acquaintance, through his friend Sir John Millais, of the illustrator of that story, Mr. Luke Fildes, now the well-known Royal Academician, who cherishes the most pleasant recollections of the collaboration.

We learn that in 1867 and 1869 Dickens did not take a house in London, as was customary in these later years. In May of 1869 he stayed with his daughter and sister-in-law for two or three weeks at the St. James’s Hotel (now the Berkeley), at the corner of Berkeley Street, Piccadilly, having promised to be in London at the time of the arrival of a number of American friends; in order, too, that he might be near his London doctor for a while,[45] and be able to avail himself of invitations from innumerable familiar acquaintances.

In 1867, having a series of Readings in town and country alternately, he decided to dispense with unnecessary travelling between Gad’s Hill and London by sleeping in bachelor quarters at the office of his weekly journal, All the Year Round, which succeeded the earlier publication, Household Words, in 1859.

THE OFFICE OF “ALL THE YEAR ROUND,”
26 (FORMERLY 11) WELLINGTON STREET, STRAND. ([Page 78].)
In 1860 Dickens furnished rooms here, which were “Really a success. As comfortable, cheerful, and private as anything of the kind can possibly be” (letter to Miss Mamie Dickens).

The office of All the Year Round was then No. 11, Wellington Street, North Strand, and still exists as No. 26, Wellington Street, at the south corner of Tavistock Street, at its junction with Wellington Street. In 1872 the lessee of the property was unavailingly approached by emissaries from Chicago with the view of purchasing and transporting the building to the World’s Fair, as a memento of the novelist. For his own convenience Dickens furnished rooms here,[46] to be used as bedroom and sitting-room as occasion required, which must have reminded him of those early days when he lived in similar bachelor apartments at Furnival’s Inn. Happily for him, his creature comforts were ensured by an old and tried servant—a paragon—whom Dickens declared to be “the cleverest man of his kind in the world,” and able to do anything, “from excellent carpentry to excellent cooking.”

The office of Household Words was situated in Wellington Street, Strand, nearly opposite the portico of the Lyceum Theatre, a short distance from the Strand on the right-hand side of the way, and was rendered somewhat conspicuous by a large bow window. This building stood on the site of a very old tenement, with which there was bound up a very weird London legend, setting forth how the room on the first-floor front was the identical apartment which had served Hogarth as the scene of the final tableau in “The Harlot’s Progress.” The novelist used to tell his contributors that he had often, while sitting in his editorial sanctum, conjured up mental pictures of Kate Hackabout lying dead in her coffin, wept over by drunken beldames.

On September 17, 1903, the London County Council’s housebreakers took possession of the old office of Household Words (whence in 1850 Dickens launched the first number of that periodical), and the building has since been sacrificed in the general scheme for providing a new thoroughfare from the Strand to Holborn. Dickens used the front-room on the first floor—that with a large bow window—as his editorial sanctum, and on busy nights he slept on the premises instead of returning to Gad’s Hill. Latterly this room was used as an office by the manager of the Gaiety Theatre. The projection of the new Kingsway and Aldwych has resulted in the inevitable evanishment of many Dickensian landmarks, for a glance at the plans of these thoroughfares now in course of construction shows that they will cover an important section of “Dickens’s London,” such as Clare Market, the New Inn, Portugal Street, Drury Lane, Sardinia Street, Kingsgate Street, etc.

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