“The Old Bailey was famous as a kind of deadly Inn yard, from which pale travellers set out continually, in carts and coaches, on a violent passage to the other world, traversing some two miles and a half of public street and road, and shaming few good citizens, if any. So powerful is use, and so desirable to be good use in the beginning. It was famous, too, for the pillory, a wise old institution, that inflicted a punishment of which no one could foresee the extent; also for the whipping-post, another dear old institution, very humanising and softening to behold in action; also for extensive transactions in blood-money, another fragment of ancestral wisdom.”
Facing eastward from Newgate Street is the Holborn Viaduct, which has for many years superseded the old ascending and descending road of Holborn Hill.
The Saracen’s Head, the old coaching-house on Snow Hill, with which we have been familiar from the days of “Nicholas Nickleby,” as the headquarters of Mr. Squeers, has disappeared since 1868, having been pulled down long ago, with many other buildings of this neighbourhood, giving room to the great improvements which have taken place in this part of London. Hereabouts it stood, on a lower level, not far from St. Sepulchre’s Church—
“Just on that particular part of Snow Hill where omnibus horses going eastward seriously think of falling down on purpose, and horses in hackney cabriolets going westward not unfrequently fall by accident.”
The present Police Station, Snow Hill, stands on part of the site formerly occupied by this old hostelry.
This modern thoroughfare of Snow Hill commences at the first turning on the right, in which has been erected a commodious hotel of the same name (No. 10), where, by the aid of a little refreshment and a slight exercise of imagination, we may recall the departure of Nicholas for Dotheboy’s Hall, Greta Bridge, by the Yorkshire coach, with Mr. Squeers and the pupils; also the later arrival in London of Mr. and Mrs. Browdie, accompanied by the lovely Fanny as bridesmaid, and the first meeting of Nicholas with Frank Cheeryble, newly returned from Continental travel.
Snow Hill leads to the lower level of Farringdon Road, at a point immediately north of the Holborn Viaduct spanning the thoroughfare, in which, turning to the right, we walk onwards to the intersection of Clerkenwell Road (eight minutes’ work). On the right hand, across the railway, is Clerkenwell Green, referred to in “Oliver Twist” as
“That open square in Clerkenwell which is yet called by some strange perversion of terms The Green.”
It was near this place that little Oliver became enlightened as to the business of Charley Bates and the Artful Dodger. We read that the boys, traversing a narrow court in this neighbourhood, came out opposite a bookstall, where Mr. Brownlow was reading, abstracted from all other mundane considerations, so affording “a prime plant” for the operations of these light-fingered gentlemen. This court leads from the road opposite the Sessions House into Pear Tree Court, giving into the main road at some distance beyond, at which the scene above referred to was enacted.
Walking onwards by the King’s Cross Road we soon come to the point where Exmouth Street joins it from the east, facing the south-east angle of the House of Correction. Here we strike into the route taken by Oliver Twist when he first came from Barnet to London, under the escort of Mr. John Dawkins. The text of the story is as follows:—