Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller

little straw chair on the mystery of mortality until he gave it up

as a bad job.

You do not come upon these churchyards violently; there are shapes

of transition in the neighbourhood. An antiquated news shop, or

barber’s shop, apparently bereft of customers in the earlier days

of George the Third, would warn me to look out for one, if any

discoveries in this respect were left for me to make. A very quiet

court, in combination with an unaccountable dyer’s and scourer’s,

would prepare me for a churchyard. An exceedingly retiring publichouse,

with a bagatelle-board shadily visible in a sawdusty parlour

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Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller

shaped like an omnibus, and with a shelf of punch-bowls in the bar,

would apprise me that I stood near consecrated ground. A ‘Dairy,’

exhibiting in its modest window one very little milk-can and three

eggs, would suggest to me the certainty of finding the poultry hard

by, pecking at my forefathers. I first inferred the vicinity of

Saint Ghastly Grim, from a certain air of extra repose and gloom

pervading a vast stack of warehouses.

From the hush of these places, it is congenial to pass into the

hushed resorts of business. Down the lanes I like to see the carts

and waggons huddled together in repose, the cranes idle, and the

warehouses shut. Pausing in the alleys behind the closed Banks of

mighty Lombard-street, it gives one as good as a rich feeling to

think of the broad counters with a rim along the edge, made for

telling money out on, the scales for weighing precious metals, the

ponderous ledgers, and, above all, the bright copper shovels for

shovelling gold. When I draw money, it never seems so much money

as when it is shovelled at me out of a bright copper shovel. I

like to say, ‘In gold,’ and to see seven pounds musically pouring

out of the shovel, like seventy; the Bank appearing to remark to me

– I italicise APPEARING – ‘if you want more of this yellow earth,

we keep it in barrows at your service.’ To think of the banker’s

clerk with his deft finger turning the crisp edges of the Hundred-

Pound Notes he has taken in a fat roll out of a drawer, is again to

hear the rustling of that delicious south-cash wind. ‘How will you

have it?’ I once heard this usual question asked at a Bank Counter

of an elderly female, habited in mourning and steeped in

simplicity, who answered, open-eyed, crook-fingered, laughing with

expectation, ‘Anyhow!’ Calling these things to mind as I stroll

among the Banks, I wonder whether the other solitary Sunday man I

pass, has designs upon the Banks. For the interest and mystery of

the matter, I almost hope he may have, and that his confederate may

be at this moment taking impressions of the keys of the iron

closets in wax, and that a delightful robbery may be in course of

transaction. About College-hill, Mark-lane, and so on towards the

Tower, and Dockward, the deserted wine-merchants’ cellars are fine

subjects for consideration; but the deserted money-cellars of the

Bankers, and their plate-cellars, and their jewel-cellars, what

subterranean regions of the Wonderful Lamp are these! And again:

possibly some shoeless boy in rags, passed through this street

yesterday, for whom it is reserved to be a Banker in the fulness of

time, and to be surpassing rich. Such reverses have been, since

the days of Whittington; and were, long before. I want to know

whether the boy has any foreglittering of that glittering fortune

now, when he treads these stones, hungry. Much as I also want to

know whether the next man to be hanged at Newgate yonder, had any

suspicion upon him that he was moving steadily towards that fate,

when he talked so much about the last man who paid the same great

debt at the same small Debtors’ Door.

Where are all the people who on busy working-days pervade these

scenes? The locomotive banker’s clerk, who carries a black

portfolio chained to him by a chain of steel, where is he? Does he

go to bed with his chain on – to church with his chain on – or does