[22]A writer in Hone’s “Year-Book,” 1826, says: “Somers Town is full of artists, as a reference to the Royal Academy Catalogue will evince. In Clarendon Square still lives, I believe, Scriven, the engraver, an artist of great ability and, in his day, of much consideration. In the same neighbourhood dwells the venerable Dr. Wilde, who may be justly termed the best engraver of his age for upwards of half a century.”
W. H. Wills (assistant editor on All the Year Round), in recalling Somers Town of this period, refers to its “aristocracy,” and to the Polygon as its “Court centre,” situated in the middle of Clarendon Square. “In and around it,” he says, “Art and Literature nestled in cosy coteries, with half-pay officers (including one Peninsular Colonel), city merchants, and stockbrokers.... The most eminent historical engravers of that day dated their works, ‘as the Act directs,’ from Somers Town.” Theodore Hook lived in Clarendon Square, and Peter Pindar, Sir Francis Burdett, with other notabilities, in close proximity thereto.
The houses which comprised the Polygon prior to 1890 were demolished by the Midland Railway Company in the following year, and the buildings now occupying the site were erected by the Company for habitation by persons of the labouring class who were displaced by the acquisition of the property.
[23]Another popular novelist, William Black, also lived in this house, and, it is believed, in the selfsame rooms.
[24]The office of the Morning Chronicle was at No. 332, Strand, opposite Somerset House, the building having been recently demolished for improvements in widening the thoroughfare.
[25]Reprinted as “Mr. Minns and his Cousin” in “Sketches by Boz.”
[26]A writer in Middlesex and Hertfordshire Notes and Queries, July, 1895, states that Dickens also occupied for some months a suite of rooms in Wood’s Hotel (Furnival’s Inn) on the first-floor, south-east corner of the main building.
[27]The date of Edmund Yates’s residence here was 1854 et seq. The rent of his house (he says) was £70 a year, “on a repairing lease” (which means an annual outlay of from £25 to £30 to keep the bricks and mortar and timbers together), and the accommodation consisted of a narrow dining-room, a little back bedroom, two big drawing-rooms, two good bedrooms, three attics, with kitchen and cellar in the basement. This description conveys an idea of the character and rental value of Dickens’s home, five doors distant.
[28]The property hereabouts is owned by the Doughty family, and belongs to the notorious Tichborne estate.
[29]I am indebted for many of these particulars to Mr. E. J. Line, author of an illustrated article entitled “The Thames Valley of Charles Dickens,” printed in the Richmond and Twickenham Times, December 24, 1903.