Eastward again Furnival's Inn, where Pickwick was written, has fallen at the hands of the house-breaker.
The office of the old Monthly Magazine is no more, its very doorway and letter-box—"wherein was dropped stealthily one night" the precious manuscript of "Pickwick"—being now in the possession of an ardent Dickens collector, having been removed from its former site in Johnson's Court in Fleet Street at the time the former edifice was pulled down.
Across the river historic and sordid Marshalsea, where the elder Dickens was incarcerated for debt, has been dissipated in air; even its walls are not visible to-day, if they even exist, and a modern park—though it is mostly made up of flagstones—stands in its place as a moral, healthful, and politic force of the neighbourhood.
With the scenes and localities identified with the plots and characters of the novels the same cleaning up process has gone on, one or another shrine being from time to time gutted, pulled to pieces, or removed. On the other hand, doubtless much that existed in the fancy, or real thought, of the author still remains, as the door-knocker of No. 8 Craven Street, Strand, the conjectured original of which is described in the "Christmas Carol," which appeared to the luckless Scrooge as "not a knocker but Marley's face;" or the Spaniards Inn on Hampstead Heath described in the XLVI. Chapter of Pickwick, which stands to-day but little, if any, changed since that time.
For the literary life of the day which is reflected by the mere memory of the names of such of Dickens' contemporaries in art and letters, as Mark Lemon, W. H. Wills, Wilkie Collins, Cruikshank, "Phiz," Forster, Blanchard Jerrold, Maclise, Fox, Dyce, and Stanfield, one can only resort to a history of mid or early Victorian literature to realize the same to the full. Such is not the scheme of this book, but that London,—the city,—its surroundings, its lights and shadows, its topography, and its history, rather, is to be followed in a sequence of co-related events presented with as great a degree of cohesion and attractive arrangement as will be thought to be commensurate and pertinent to the subject. Formerly, when London was a "snug city," authors more readily confined their incomings and outgoings to a comparatively small area. To-day "the city" is a term only synonymous with a restricted region which gathers around the financial centre, while the cabalistic letters (meaning little or nothing to the stranger within the gates), E. C., safely comprehend a region which not only includes "the city," but extends as far westward as Temple Bar, and thus covers, if we except the lapping over into the streets leading from the Strand, practically the whole of the "Highway of Letters" of Doctor Johnson's time.
NO. 8 CRAVEN STREET, STRAND.
MR TULKINGHORN'S HOUSE.
A novelist to-day, and even so in Dickens' time, did not—nay could not—give birth to a character which could be truly said to represent the complex London type. The environment of the lower classes—the east end and the Boro'—is ever redolent of him, and he of it. The lower-middle or upper-lower class is best defined by that individual's predilection for the "good old Strand;" while as the scale rises through the petty states of Suburbia to the luxuries of Mayfair or Belgravia,—or to define one locality more precisely, Park Lane,—we have all the ingredients with which the novelist constructs his stories, be they of the nether world, or the "hupper suckles." Few have there been who have essayed both. And now the suburbs are breeding their own school of novelists. Possibly it is the residents of those communities who demand a special brand of fiction, as they do of coals, paraffine, and boot-polish.