The tourist will now soon arrive at (No. 42) Mincing Lane, leading to Great Tower Street. This short street is entirely occupied by wholesale merchants and brokers, and it will be remembered that Messrs. Chicksey, Veneering, and Stobbles, wholesale druggists, flourished in this locality in the days of the “Golden Dustman.” The fourth house on the left from Fenchurch Street, next to Dunster Court, has been indicated as the probable whereabouts of the firm. We may remember that R. Wilfer’s office was on the ground-floor, next the gateway.
Here, then, in this prosaic neighbourhood, John Rokesmith, following Bella Wilfer, came to the warehouse where Little Rumty was sitting at the open window at his tea, and much surprised that gentleman by a declaration of love for his daughter; what time “The Feast of the Three Hobgoblins” was so agreeably celebrated. This place is also associated with other pleasant episodes connected with the history of the Wilfer family, the details of which are fully furnished in the pages of “Our Mutual Friend.”
Proceeding through Mincing Lane, we turn to the right through Eastcheap, which leads westward to the top of Fish Street Hill. The tourist now proceeds southward, passing the Monument on the left. At a short distance beyond (No. 34) we arrive at King’s Head Court, “a small paved yard,” in which are certain city warehouses and a dairy. On the south side of the court, now occupied by the warehouses aforesaid, once stood the Commercial Boarding-House of Mrs. Todgers—an old-fashioned abode even in the days of Mr. Pecksniff—which has long since given place to other commercial considerations. In the 9th chapter of “Martin Chuzzlewit” full, true, and particular account is given of this establishment as it used to be. We may here call to remembrance the characters of Bailey junior, Mr. Jinkins, Augustus Moddle, and others in connection with the domestic economy of Mrs. Todgers and the several Pecksniffian associations of the place; notably, the festive occasion of that Sunday’s dinner when Cherry and Merry were first introduced to London society; the moral Mr. Pecksniff thereafter exhibiting alarming symptoms of a chronic complaint. (See chapter 9.) And we may indulge in a kindly reminiscence of good-hearted Mrs. Todgers herself, worried with the anxieties of “gravy” and the eccentricities of commercial gentlemen. “Perhaps the Good Samaritan was lean and lank, and found it hard to live.” We now come to London Bridge, the scene of Nancy’s interview with Mr. Brownlow and Rose Maylie (see “Oliver Twist”), which took place on the steps near St. Saviour’s Church, on the Surrey side of the river—
“These stairs are a part of the bridge; they consist of three flights. Just below the end of the second, going down, the stone wall on the left terminates in an ornamental pilaster, facing towards the Thames.”
And it will be remembered that Noah Claypole here ensconced himself as an unseen listener.
As we come to the Surrey side of the Thames, a passing thought may be given to Mrs. Rudge and her son Barnaby, who lived near at hand “in a by-street in Southwark, not far from London Bridge”; and we may recall the incident of Edward Chester being brought hither by Gabriel Varden, having been found wounded by a highwayman on the other side of the river. But it is altogether impossible to locate the house, the neighbourhood having so entirely changed during the present century. Onwards by the main thoroughfare of the Borough, we shall find, on the left-hand side of the way (No. 61), the (former) location of “The White Hart,” described in “Pickwick” as
“An old inn, which has preserved its external features unchanged, and which has escaped alike the rage for public improvement and the encroachments of private speculation. A great, rambling, queer old place, with galleries and passages and staircases, wide enough and antiquated enough to furnish materials for a hundred ghost stories.”
The old inn has been pulled down some years since; the original gateway only remains, leading to White Hart Yard. A tavern and luncheon-bar of modern erection now occupy one side of the old coach-yard in which Messrs. Pickwick, Wardle, and Perker made their first acquaintance with Mr. Samuel Weller, on that memorable occasion when Mr. Jingle had eloped from Dingley Dell with Miss Rachael Wardle, and had brought the lady to this establishment. Farther on, towards the end of the Borough, we arrive at Angel Place, a narrow passage near to St. George’s Church. It leads into Marshalsea Place, of which Dickens writes as follows in his preface to “Little Dorrit”:—
“Whoever goes into Marshalsea Place, turning out of Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey, will find his feet on the very paving-stones of the extinct Marshalsea jail; will see its narrow yard to the right, and to the left, very little altered if at all, except that the walls were lowered when the place got free; will look upon the rooms in which the debtors lived; and will stand among the crowding ghosts of many miserable years.”
This, then, was The Marshalsea Prison, in which, during Dickens’s youthful days, his father was imprisoned for debt; and the place is intimately associated with the story of Little Dorrit and her family. We must be all familiar with the Father of the Marshalsea, his brother Frederick, Maggie, and the several others of the dramatis personæ of that charming tale.