Mr. and Mrs. Smallweed vegetated, with their grandchildren, “in a rather ill-favoured and ill-savoured neighbourhood, though one of its rising grounds bears the name of Mount Pleasant.” This beatific neighbourhood will be found north of Clerkenwell Road (approached by Laystall Street), in the neighbourhood of the Middlesex House of Correction.
George’s Shooting Gallery is memorable as the place where Gridley—“the man from Shropshire”—died; where also Poor Jo, clinging to the spars of the Lord’s Prayer, drifted out upon the unknown sea. It is described as “a great brick building, composed of bare walls, floors, roof-rafters, and skylights; on the front of which was painted ‘George’s Shooting Gallery.’” Its location is given as being up a court and a long whitewashed passage, in
“That curious region lying about the Haymarket and Leicester Square, which is a centre of attraction to indifferent foreign hotels and indifferent foreigners, racket courts, fighting men, swordsmen, foot-guards, old china, gambling-houses, exhibitions, and a large medley of shabbiness and shrinking out of sight.”
Mr. Bagnet and his “old girl” kept house and home on the Surrey side of the river; but no more precise indication of their whereabouts is given than is contained in the following reference:—
“By Blackfriars’ Bridge, and Blackfriars’ Road, Mr. George sedately marches to a street of little shops lying somewhere in that ganglion of roads from Kent and Surrey, and of streets from the bridges of London, centreing in the far-famed Elephant who has lost his castle.”
The Town House of Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock was situated in a dull aristocratic street in the western district of London,
“Where the two long rows of houses stare at each other with that severity, that half-a-dozen of its greatest mansions seem to have been slowly stared into stone, rather than originally built in that material. It is a street of such dismal grandeur, so determined not to condescend to liveliness, that the doors and windows hold a gloomy state of their own in black paint and dust, and the echoing mews behind have a dry and massive appearance, as if they were reserved to stable the stone chargers of noble statues.”
Harold Skimpole and family had their residence in the Polygon, near to the Euston Terminus (on the east side), in the centre of Clarendon Square, Somers Town. The house is described as being sadly in want of repair—
“Two or three of the area railings were gone; the water-butt was broken; the knocker was loose; the bell-handle had been pulled off a long time, to judge from the rusty state of the wire; and dirty footprints on the steps were the only signs of its being inhabited.”