The House of Mrs. Clennam was situated not far from the river, in the neighbourhood of Upper Thames Street. We read that Arthur Clennam, on his arrival in London,
“Crossed by Saint Paul’s and went down, at a long angle, almost to the water’s edge, through some of the crooked and descending streets which lie (and lay more crookedly and closely then) between the river and Cheapside . . . passing silent warehouses and wharves, and here and there a narrow alley leading to the river, where a wretched little bill, ‘Found Drowned,’ was weeping on the wet wall; he came at last to the house he sought. An old brick house, so dingy as to be all but black, standing by itself within a gateway.”
Mr. Tite Barnacle had his residence in Mews Street, Grosvenor Square—
“It was a hideous little street of dead wall, stables, and dunghills, with lofts over coach-houses inhabited by coachmen’s families, who had a passion for drying clothes, and decorating their window-sills with miniature turnpike-gates. The principal chimney-sweep of that fashionable quarter lived at the blind end of Mews Street. . . . Yet there were two or three small airless houses at the entrance end of Mews Street, which went at enormous rents on account of their being abject hangers-on to a fashionable situation; and whenever one of these fearful little coops was to be let (which seldom happened, for they were in great request), the house agent advertised it as a gentlemanly residence in the most aristocratic part of the town, inhabited solely by the élite of the beau monde.”
The Patriarchal Casby, with his daughter—the irrepressible Flora—and Mr. F.’s Aunt,
“Lived in a street in the Gray’s Inn Road, which had set off from that thoroughfare with the intention of running at one heat down into the valley, and up again to the top of Pentonville Hill; but which had run itself out of breath in twenty yards, and had stood still ever since. There is no such place in that part now; but it remained there for many years, looking with a baulked countenance at the wilderness patched with unfruitful gardens, and pimpled with eruptive summer-houses, that it had meant to run over in no time.”
TALE OF TWO CITIES.
In this Tale we read of the funeral of Cly, the Old Bailey Informer; the interment taking place in the burial-ground attached to the ancient church of St. Pancras in the Fields. This edifice still exists in Pancras Road (east side, opposite Goldington Crescent), which leads from King’s Cross, northward, to Kentish Town. There is a church of the same name to be found in the Euston Road—east of Upper Woburn Place, but this is altogether another and more modern structure than the one above referred to. A century since, at the time of the funeral described, the name of this locality was literally correct; the church being situated in the outlying fields of the suburban village of Pancras. We may here recollect the fishing expedition undertaken by Mr. Cruncher and his two companions, on the night following the funeral; when young Jerry quietly followed his “honoured parent,” and assured himself of the nature of his father’s secret avocation.
GREAT EXPECTATIONS.
Mr. Jaggers, the Old Bailey lawyer, had his private residence on the south side of Gerrard Street, Soho, where he lived in solitary state, with his eccentric housekeeper, the mother of Estella: “Rather a stately house of its kind, but dolefully in want of painting, and with dirty windows.”