Saints. I find in it the following sentences:- ‘The Select
Committee of the House of Commons on emigrant ships for 1854
summoned the Mormon agent and passenger-broker before it, and came
to the conclusion that no ships under the provisions of the
“Passengers Act” could be depended upon for comfort and security in
the same degree as those under his administration. The Mormon ship
is a Family under strong and accepted discipline, with every
provision for comfort, decorum and internal peace.’
CHAPTER XXIII – THE CITY OF THE ABSENT
Page 145
Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
When I think I deserve particularly well of myself, and have earned
the right to enjoy a little treat, I stroll from Covent-garden into
the City of London, after business-hours there, on a Saturday, or –
better yet – on a Sunday, and roam about its deserted nooks and
corners. It is necessary to the full enjoyment of these journeys
that they should be made in summer-time, for then the retired spots
that I love to haunt, are at their idlest and dullest. A gentle
fall of rain is not objectionable, and a warm mist sets off my
favourite retreats to decided advantage.
Among these, City Churchyards hold a high place. Such strange
churchyards hide in the City of London; churchyards sometimes so
entirely detached from churches, always so pressed upon by houses;
so small, so rank, so silent, so forgotten, except by the few
people who ever look down into them from their smoky windows. As I
stand peeping in through the iron gates and rails, I can peel the
rusty metal off, like bark from an old tree. The illegible
tombstones are all lop-sided, the grave-mounds lost their shape in
the rains of a hundred years ago, the Lombardy Poplar or Plane-Tree
that was once a drysalter’s daughter and several common-councilmen,
has withered like those worthies, and its departed leaves are dust
beneath it. Contagion of slow ruin overhangs the place. The
discoloured tiled roofs of the environing buildings stand so awry,
that they can hardly be proof against any stress of weather. Old
crazy stacks of chimneys seem to look down as they overhang,
dubiously calculating how far they will have to fall. In an angle
of the walls, what was once the tool-house of the grave-digger rots
away, encrusted with toadstools. Pipes and spouts for carrying off
the rain from the encompassing gables, broken or feloniously cut
for old lead long ago, now let the rain drip and splash as it list,
upon the weedy earth. Sometimes there is a rusty pump somewhere
near, and, as I look in at the rails and meditate, I hear it
working under an unknown hand with a creaking protest: as though
the departed in the churchyard urged, ‘Let us lie here in peace;
don’t suck us up and drink us!’
One of my best beloved churchyards, I call the churchyard of Saint
Ghastly Grim; touching what men in general call it, I have no
information. It lies at the heart of the City, and the Blackwall
Railway shrieks at it daily. It is a small small churchyard, with
a ferocious, strong, spiked iron gate, like a jail. This gate is
ornamented with skulls and cross-bones, larger than the life,
wrought in stone; but it likewise came into the mind of Saint
Ghastly Grim, that to stick iron spikes a-top of the stone skulls,
as though they were impaled, would be a pleasant device. Therefore
the skulls grin aloft horribly, thrust through and through with
iron spears. Hence, there is attraction of repulsion for me in
Saint Ghastly Grim, and, having often contemplated it in the
daylight and the dark, I once felt drawn towards it in a
thunderstorm at midnight. ‘Why not?’ I said, in self-excuse. ‘I
have been to see the Colosseum by the light of the moon; is it
worse to go to see Saint Ghastly Grim by the light of the
lightning?’ I repaired to the Saint in a hackney cab, and found
the skulls most effective, having the air of a public execution,
and seeming, as the lightning flashed, to wink and grin with the
pain of the spikes. Having no other person to whom to impart my