Of the matter-of-fact realities of London, which, though still existent, have changed since Dickens' day, London Bridge is undergoing widening and rebuilding, which will somewhat change its general aspect, though its environment remains much the same.
Furnival's Inn, where Dickens lived, has disappeared, and Clifford's Inn has just been sold (1903) in the public auction mart, to be removed, with some hideous and unquiet modern office building doubtless destined to take its place.
New transportation schemes, almost without number, are announced. Electric trams, "tubes," and underground subways are being projected in every direction. These perhaps do not change the surface aspect of things very much, but they are working a marvellous change in the life of the times. The old underground "District" and "Metropolitan" Railways are being "electrified" by the magnanimity (sic) of American capital, and St. Paul's Cathedral has been supplied with a costly electric-light plant at the expense of an American multi-millionaire.
The American invasion of typewriters, roll-top desks, and book printing and binding machinery, are marking an era of change and progress in the production of the printed word, and Continental-made motors and automobiles are driving the humble cart-horse from the city streets in no small way.
It now only remains for the development of the project which is to supplant the ungainly though convenient omnibus with an up-to-date service of motor stages, when, in truth, London will have taken on very much of a new aspect.
One of the most recent disappearances is old Holywell Street, of unsavoury reputation, the whilom Booksellers' Row of Dickens' day, a "narrow, dirty lane" which ran parallel with the Strand from St. Clement's-Danes to St. Mary-le-Strand, and was occupied chiefly by vendors of books of doubtful morality. Wych Street, too, in company with Holywell Street, has gone the same way, in favour of the new thoroughfare which is to connect Holborn and the Strand, an enterprise which also has made way with the Clare Market between Lincoln's Inn Fields and the Strand, a locality well known to, and made use of by, Dickens in "The Old Curiosity Shop."
The identical building referred to therein may be in doubt; probably it is, in that Dickens himself repudiated or at least passed a qualifying observation upon the "waste paper store," which popular tradition has ever connected therewith. But one critic—be he expert or not—has connected it somewhat closely with the literary life of the day, as being formerly occupied by one Tessyman, a bookbinder, who was well acquainted with Dickens, Thackeray, and Cruikshank. The literary pilgrim will give up this most sentimental Dickens relique with something of the serious pang that one feels when his favourite idol is shattered, when the little overhanging corner building is finally demolished, as it soon will be, if "improvement" goes on at the pace of the last few years hereabouts.
THE (REPUTED) "OLD CURIOSITY SHOP."
A drawing of this revered building has been included in the present volume, as suggestive of its recorded literary associations.