St. George’s Church, close at hand, will be remembered in connection with the above, as once affording refuge in its vestry for Little Dorrit, when the sexton accommodated her with a bed formed of the pew-cushions, the book of registers doing service as a pillow. She was afterwards married to Arthur Clennam in this church. Full particulars of the ceremony will be found in the last chapter of the tale. At a short distance from this point, down Blackman Street, on the right, is (No. 90) Lant Street. In Forster’s Biography it is narrated that Dickens, when a boy, lodged in this street what time his father was imprisoned in the Marshalsea. The house stood on part of the site now occupied by the Board School adjoining No. 46—
“A back attic was found for me at the house of an insolvent-court agent, who lived in Lant Street, in the Borough, where Bob Sawyer lodged many years afterwards. A bed and bedding were sent over for me, and made up on the floor. The little window had a pleasant prospect of a timber-yard; and when I took possession of my new abode, I thought it was a Paradise.”
This opinion of his boyhood seems to have been somewhat modified fifteen years later, when the “Pickwick Papers” were written, and Mr. Robert Sawyer had taken residence in the locality. We read—
“There is an air of repose about Lant Street, in the Borough, which sheds a gentle melancholy upon the soul. A house in Lant Street would not come within the denomination of a first-rate residence, in the strict acceptation of the term; but it is a most desirable spot, nevertheless. If a man wished to extract himself from the world, to remove himself from within the reach of temptation, to place himself beyond the possibility of any inducement to look out of the window, he should by all means go to Lant Street.”
Walking onwards from “this happy valley” past Suffolk Street, to the westward, turning off Borough Road, we may note on the north corner the site of the old King’s Bench Prison, in which Mr. Micawber was detained—in the top storey but one—pending the settlement of his pecuniary liabilities. Later on in the Copperfield history, Micawber appointed a meeting for David and Tom Traddles as follows:—
“Among other havens of domestic tranquillity and peace of mind, my feet will naturally tend towards the King’s Bench Prison. In stating that I shall be (D.V.) on the outside of the south wall of that place of incarceration on civil process, the day after to-morrow, at seven in the evening, precisely, my object in this epistolary communication is accomplished.”
See chapter 49 for particulars of the subsequent interview. This “dead wall” of the prison is also mentioned in the same book as the place where young David requested “the long-legged young man”—who had charge of his box for conveyance to the Dover coach-office—to stop for a minute while he (David) tied on the address. It will be remembered that poor David lost his box and his money on this occasion, when he started for Dover,
“Taking very little more out of the world, towards the retreat of his aunt, Miss Betsy, than he had brought into it on the night when his arrival gave her so much umbrage;”
the total sum of his remaining cash amounting to three half-pence.—See chapter 12.
The first reference of our author to King’s Bench Prison will be found in “Nicholas Nickleby” (chapter 46), on the occasion of the hero’s first visit to Madeline Bray, who resided with her father in one