Wemmick’s Castle at Walworth is altogether a place of the past; Walworth being now one of the most populous and crowded of metropolitan districts. We read that in Pip’s time
“It appeared to be a collection of black lanes, ditches, and little gardens, and to present the aspect of a rather dull retirement. Wemmick’s house was a little wooden cottage in the midst of plots of garden, and the top of it was cut out and painted like a battery mounted with guns.”
Mr. Barley, alias Old Gruff-and-Glum, lived at Mill Pond Bank, by Chinks’s Basin and the Old Green Copper Rope-walk. Pip says the place was anything but easy to find. Losing himself among shipbuilders’ and shipbreakers’ yards, he continues the description of his search as follows:—
“After several times falling short of my destination, and as often overshooting it, I came unexpectedly round a corner, upon Mill Pond Bank. It was a fresh kind of place, all circumstances considered, where the wind from the river had room to turn itself round; and there were two or three trees in it, and there was the stump of a ruined windmill, and there was the Old Green Copper Rope-walk—whose long and narrow vista I could trace in the moonlight, along a series of wooden frames set in the ground, that looked like superannuated haymaking rakes, which had grown old and lost most of their teeth. Selecting from the few queer houses upon Mill Pond Bank, a house with a wooden front and three storeys of bow-window (not bay-window, which is another thing), I looked at the plate upon the door, and read there Mrs. Whimple . . . the name I wanted.”
OUR MUTUAL FRIEND.
The House of Gaffer Hexam, the humble home of Lizzie Hexam and her brother, was situated somewhere in the district of Limehouse, near the river. In a description given of the route by which Messrs. Lightwood and Wrayburn approached this locality, we read—
“Down by the Monument, and by the Tower, and by the Docks; down by Ratcliffe, and by Rotherhithe. . . . In and out among vessels that seemed to have got ashore, and houses that seemed to have got afloat—among bowsprits staring into windows, and windows staring into ships—the wheels rolled on, until they stopped at a dark corner, river-washed and otherwise not washed at all, where the boy alighted and opened the door.”
“The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters” was located in this same vicinity, overlooking the river. A waterside public-house, kept by Miss Abbey Patterson, who enforced a certain standard of respectability among her numerous clients, and conducted the house with a strict regard to discipline and punctuality—
“Externally, it was a narrow, lop-sided, wooden jumble of corpulent windows heaped one upon another, as you might heap as many toppling oranges, with a crazy wooden verandah impending over the water; indeed, the whole house, inclusive of the complaining flagstaff on the roof, impended over the water, but seemed to have got into the condition of a faint-hearted diver who has paused so long on the brink that he will never go in at all. . . . The back of the establishment, though the chief entrance, was there so contracted that it merely represented, in its connection with the front, the handle of a flat iron set upright on its broadest end. This handle stood at the bottom of a wilderness of court and alley; which wilderness pressed so hard and close upon the ‘Six Jolly Fellowship Porters,’ as to leave the hostelry not an inch of ground beyond its door.”
Rogue Riderhood and his daughter Pleasant traded at Limehouse Hole, in the same district as above, where they kept “a leaving shop” for sailors; advancing small sums of money on the portable property of seafaring customers. Mr. Riderhood did not stand well in the esteem of the neighbourhood, which “was rather shy in reference to the honour of cultivating” his acquaintance, his daughter being the more respectable and respected member of the firm.